Everyone seems to agree that our schools are full of brilliant teachers, support staff & heads, undermined by a lack of funding & a system that breeds inequality, between schools & pupils. There are reasons for that. The focus for trade unions & many educators is funding. I can understand that, but I feel we don’t talk enough about the structural dimensions of that inequality & how we got here.
The story doesn’t start with academisation, it starts with Local Management of Schools (LMS), introduced in 1990. That sped a process by which an imperfect, but previously comprehensive model was undermined by a drive toward school autonomy, free from the so-called constraints of local authority control.
The first steps towards actual academisation were taken by a New Labour government in 2000 (initially intended to replace poorly performing secondary schools). It was of a piece with Blair’s NHS reforms & based on a mantra that the market knew best. Spearheaded by Andrew Adonis, the idea was that through private sponsorship and increased autonomy, inner city schools in particular would see drastic improvements.
Academisation then took on a more radical direction under Michael Gove, in the Coalition Government elected in 2010 – with a huge expansion of the project, alongside the development of ‘free schools’. These leaps, in tandem with the gradual creep of the model, have ultimately led to a less equal, more marketised, more competitive education system, which has been at a tipping point for some time.
Academisation wasn’t the start of the story, but it is the major vehicle for the privatisation of our children’s education as we stand. It often doesn’t look like that from the outside, and many educators do not use the language of privatisation, but since the introduction of LMS over 35 years ago, that has been the trajectory. The Academy model is the bridge for an anti-democratic project that has been in process for many, many decades. Specifically, academisation has:
Allowed private organisations to take control over large parts of our education system.
➡️ Entrenched a marketised version of education provision, based on competition between schools for pupils, and therefore funding.
➡️ Given huge incentives for schools to exclude children with behavioural problems or disadvantages that affect their educational attainment.
➡️ Developed very strict & punitive behaviour rules, that staff are expected to enforce, but which have led to the exclusion of a large number of children with special educational needs.
➡️ Created a huge inequality between schools, with ‘sinker’ schools emerging to take excluded children not wanted by higher ranked schools in a geographical area.
➡️ Given more weight & power to Ofsted & the league table ranking of schools, driven by a competition for more pupil numbers & higher achieving students.
➡️ Created a centralised, top down education environment, with power & control held by central government.
➡️ All but extinguished any democratic oversight over school policies, curriculum & entrance criteria.
➡️ Radically reduced the voice of local communities in their schools.
➡️ Top sliced large parts of school budgets for higher management, often straddled between different schools within a Multi Academy Trust (MAT).
➡️ Encouraged a culture of high pay amongst senior management, and a bureaucracy headed by CEOs & other executives, whilst front line pay has been suppressed.
➡️ Encouraged a whole architecture of associated services around MATs, including cleaning services, school uniforms, food services & maintenance companies that are privatised & extract more & more profits from schools & parents, whilst employing staff on low pay.
➡️ Undermined collective bargaining for unions concerned with the pay & conditions of their members.
➡️ Undermined teacher professionalism, as academy trusts are able to employ unqualified teachers.
➡️ Not delivered better results. Whilst there was some evidence of improvement amongst early conversions to academy status, as more & more conversions have taken place, that has levelled off, and some evidence of an increasing gap between the higher achieving pupils & those on the lower end.
Very important point: this is by no means to say that every academy trust displays all of these elements. There are clearly loads of academies that do great work, provide fantastic educational environments & do superb work with parents & the community, not least because they are full of educators who are absolutely committed to the children’s interests & welfare. This isn’t about that, it is about the system – the trajectory of education policy & where we are heading.
What do we need to do:
➡️ Talk more about academies, and education in general, explaining to parents & communities what is happening to our education system & what is coming down the road.
➡️ Campaign, not just against ‘bad’ MATs, or for improvements within the academy system, but against the model itself – including Labour’s latest rebranding & expansion. That campaign must have a strong educational aspect, because many of these arguments have not been heard for a long time.
➡️ Talk about how marketisation works in education, producing inequality not just between schools, but between communities & children. There is ample evidence that it further disadvantages working class communities & their children.
➡️ Explain how an education system, which has democratic oversight, close engagement with its communities, based on co-operation rather than competition & which respects its professionals is both achievable & desirable for everyone (except the profiteers).
➡️ Link academisation to other forms of privatisation – e.g in the NHS, care services, public transport, water & energy & explain that the market is insatiable. In public services, once the market logic takes hold, it keeps going, it doesn’t stop.
➡️ Link academisation to broader campaigns about austerity, poverty, inequality, anti-racism & exclusion. It’s not hard to understand how privatisation & entrenched educational inequality fuels the rise of the far right, for instance – in creating very different opportunities for different localities & classes.
As a result, I’ve been contacted by various people who tell me the perception amongst senior people in the sector & in the labour movement is that the battle over academisation has been lost, that it is here to stay. Therefore, the terrain moves to winning battles for better terms & conditions within academy chains.
As someone who has been involved in the trade unions for over two decades & was trained as a trade union organiser, of course I understand the priority to defend & win battles for your members wherever they are, but I question this logic, in the medium-to-long term.
The fight against academisation is about the gradual privatisation of our children’s education. It’s similar to the fight against privatisation in the NHS, which was introduced via the internal market, outsourcing, PFI & eventually the hiving off of the most profitable parts of our health service to private companies.
Privatisation always starts with the introduction of competition, then the profit motive, via continued marketisation, then the centralisation of services, and so on. The market doesn’t ever stop, unless you have a strong counterweight to privatisation.
Clearly, in education, this creep of privatisation is affecting & will continue to affect the whole education system. Sometimes, it will appear benign, and will try to win over parents & communities, whilst simultaneously corroding the comprehensive model & principle (of which there is less & less awareness).
Marketisation in education particularly affects working class kids & those from deprived communities, because the competitive model rewards “high performance” and punishes those with greater needs (both individually & structurally). This has never been a good model for our children. It is why we got rid of grammar schools & introduced comprehensive schools, overseen by LEAs, in the first place.
It has never been a good model for workers either. Privatisation, alongside outsourcing & marketisation, brings with it the gradual erosion of pay, terms & conditions, as well as various sophisticated union-busting techniques. A privatised education system, even in its early forms, is predicated on a weakening of union power & worker voice.
To save education, we need to understand – as I’m sure many teachers do – that the vultures are circling again, only this time, in order to see what profits they can squeeze out of the education system. It can be harder for parents & communities to see this big picture, but that is a key component of any campaign to defeat privatisation.
Just like the NHS, this isn’t something that is on the horizon, in the distant future, but is happening now. And just like the NHS, we have to raise awareness & talk about the reversal of privatisation, not just funding & what we can do to mitigate the worst effects.
Of course, that is a longer, more difficult road, but unless we want to pass onto the next generation & the generation after that, a cannibalised education system which fails all but a privileged layer of kids & treats them as commodities, I don’t think we can ignore these battles.
There is a lot of talk about campaigns to reduce child poverty & of course, that is a laudable aim. Who can argue with it? But, if we are to be realistic & focused on addressing the structural causes of generational poverty & inequality, we need to more than that.
In the realm of education, and particularly for working class kids, that means making sure that in ten, fifteen, twenty years time, they are not faced with an even more marketised & privatised system, where schools, town, cities & regions battle it out for scarce resources, while Multi Academy Trusts sweep up the profits that can me squeezed out of education to funnel into excessive executive pay, associated service companies (and eventually, shareholders).
Collaboration, not competition, should be the basis for our children’s education, as it was envisaged by those who challenged the grammar school model & introduced comprehensive education in this country. It’s also the basis of the most successful education models on Europe & the world.
The truth is, aside from declining funding, we’ve been living through a disaster in educational policy & practice for decades, starting with Local Management of Schools (LMS) in 1990, sped up by academisation (originated by Blairite Andrew Adonis in 2000), through forced academisation & growing Multi Academy Trusts.
If we really care about child poverty, working class pupils & their communities, we can’t sit back & allow privatisation-by-stealth via academisation – for the profit motive to become the key driver in education. This isn’t a prospect, it is happening now.
Labour have just announced that they want all schools to become academies, or part of academy trusts. Yet it is remarkably quiet, on the left, in our campaigns & in our trade union movement. I’m not sure why.
The Academy model replicates & models the market. So, we’ve seen the closure of so-called ‘financially unviable’ local schools, the creation of ‘sinker schools’, centralisation & ‘specialisation’ that excludes pupils & forces them to travel large distances, mass exclusions, excessive discipline, the targeting of cohorts of high performing students at the expense of local communities, increasing costs associated with anything from uniforms to extra curricular activities & the massaging of results. The list goes on & it’s all at the cost of a genuinely comprehensive, inclusive system.
Of course, Labour’s policy is dressed up in localism & oversight from local authorities, but it’s another clear step in the marketisation & privatisation of our education. I’m hearing the echoes of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘There is No Alternative’. But nothing could be more disastrous for our children & our society as a whole than allowing this experiment to continue.
It’s time to stand up & be counted & advocate & campaign for a new, comprehensive model, based on democratic, local participation & an accountable, co-operative model of education, instead of burying our heads & letting this catastrophe unfold.
Since my kids left school (relatively unscathed – and somehow miraculously avoiding any academies), I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the future of education. I recognise that I need to do more reading, but there are some more instinctive principles that have hardened. And some fundamental issues that have bothered me – academisation being right at the top of that list.
I’m also concerned that we don’t seem to talk about it enough on the left, or in the labour movement – even within the teaching unions. When I say that, I don’t mean talking about about the effects of academisation (e.g low pay, school closures, top down, authoritarian management), which are important to highlight, clearly, but instead a systematic critique of the model, how academisation operates & what it is doing to our children’s education.
Many years ago, there was a vibrant campaign – an ‘Anti-Academies Alliance’ – which did some of this job. It was part of the ecosystem of the left and had labour movement backing, but in recent years, it has faded as the structural issue has taken a back seat to child poverty, austerity in the classroom, stagnating pay, workload etc (again, all important issues, but not the structural one that is dictating where education is going).
The comprehensive education system, developed by the Labour Party over many decades, but introduced in the mid 1960’s, was designed to overcome the hierarchical grammar school model & give every working class kid an equality of education – and opportunity.
Controlled & organised by Local Education Authorities (LEAs), it didn’t always work out like that, partly because socio-economic factors got in the way & a lot of the hierarchy remained (Ken Loach’s film ‘Kes’ is brilliant on this). But it was, in principle, a good thing & something to be proud of. The problem wasn’t the aspiration to create a comprehensive system, but the way it was administered – and how the LEA model dealt with inequality. It could & should have been developed & democratised, and schools should have been integrated into their communities etc, but it ended up being managed top down, like many public services.
We could have chosen to reform that system, to adapt it for a different sort of world, with equality as the motivator. But we didn’t. Instead, like the NHS, housing, public utilities & public services, the market was gradually introduced to our schools. Just like any free market ideology, in education, the idea was that the ‘cream would rise to the top’ – and working class kids could be prepared to do the new service industry jobs (a mirror of the grammar school system).
The first time I recognised that move was with the introduction of ‘local management of schools’ in the dying days of the Thatcher administration (I was at Sixth Form), but it was clearly part of the Tories agenda for education throughout the 1980s. The ‘genius’ of LMS was that no one could really argue with more autonomy & many heads, of course, welcomed it. What wasn’t recognised enough was where it would lead.
It was actually the second New Labour government that introduced full blown academisation (as ‘city academies in the early 2000s). It was the brainchild of Andrew Adonis, advisor to Blair (now a Lord, of course). Just like PFI, New Labour saw it as a way of plugging the funding gap & introducing an ‘internal market’ as in the NHS. That was meant to put a downward pressure on costs.
Over the last 3-4 decades, both Tory & Labour governments have bought into the idea that competition is good in education, by which they mean it outsources services & creates a market, the success of which is judged by an inspection regime & league tables, with hardly any acknowledgment of socio-economic factors. In fact, what happens is the schools in the more economically advantaged areas benefit & those with tougher, more challenging catchments sink.
Academisation is not about the quality of education, although the PR around it may tell you so. It’s about typical Thatcherite dogma – that underachievement must be punished to encourage better performance. Yet Blair’s Labour offered no alternative. This isn’t even a social democratic principle. In many other countries, including Scandinavian countries which are acknowledged to have the most equal & successful education systems, schools aren’t punished for underperforming, but resourced & supported better to deal with demographic & geographical disadvantage. Imagine that.
Academisation is privatisation by stealth. It destroys the comprehensive ideal which, as I explained above, was flawed under LEAs – but was at least one way of aiming for some kind of equality in provision. Now – under academisation, forced or voluntary – we have the dominance of the market, ‘sink or swim’ competition, centralisation & the development of huge Multi Academy Trusts (MATs), sinker schools, mass exclusions, the closure of smaller, local schools, the erasure of less ‘popular’ subjects, union busting, casualisation, rip off uniforms, PFI buildings, maintenance & food contracts that go to companies linked to MATs, so-called superheads & executives on ridiculous pay packets & super-rich (often religious) benefactors with far too much power. So, a disaster for school education in itself & working class kids & their communities.
But the fact that Labour introduced it, defended it & expanded it has led to parts of the labour movement turning a blind eye. If we really care about working class communities & working class kid’s education, that has to end & we need to start campaigning against the whole model, not just highlight bad practice & it’s negative ‘effects’.
I worry that on the left & within the labour movement, the battle over academisation is seen as lost. We cannot afford to think like that. One of the reasons I get so animated about academisation is that it’s exactly the sort of emblematic, fundamental issue that goes under the radar, because the work isn’t being done. It’s also exactly the sort of issue that is an opportunity to win over working class communities, with a bit of bravery.
I’m afraid that it’s symbolic of large parts of the left that we are not talking enough about academisation. It’s easier to say that schools, hospitals, public services are in crisis & need more funding, rather than looking at the root, systemic causes of the cancer that is eating away at them. That is: privatisation, marketisation, outsourcing, commercialisation, and a lack of accountability & democracy.
We need to do the work, the painstaking, detailed, explanatory work. We need to get parents & communities on board (not always easy, when they are often being bought off). We have that opportunity, but only if we start looking at the structures & how we build support for alternatives. And only if we are brave in our politics.
Something that I don’t think a lot of people get – and it’s why the row over the Employment Rights Bill matters:
There’s a lot of head-scratching about the support for Reform in working class communities & even within the trade union movement.
We all know that one of the key grievances in those communities is low pay, poor terms & conditions & insecure work. Now, a lot of those people blame migrants for that, which is both illogical & ironic. Because those same issues affect both poorly paid workers in ‘left behind’ communities (villages & towns in the North, North West & the Midlands for example) and migrants who come to this country & end up in insecure, casualised work.
The issue is not migration, the issue is a bastard form of Thatcherite capitalism that has long ago abandoned any pretence of looking after the workers of this country. So, many of the people enticed by Reform’s racist agenda are working two or three jobs, or are being forced into bogus self-employment, contract / agency work, zero hours contracts & casualised employment.
These jobs are ballooning, and what’s most worrying, they are chiefly non-unionised & unregulated. There has been a lot of talk about tackling this crisis over the years & ‘organising the unorganised’ but it is hard, precisely because bosses in these sectors will employ union busting and other aggressive tactics to scare off any union presence, or anyone who talks about workers rights. Often, these are workplaces are ruled by fear.
So when the business lobby is chipping away at the Employment Rights Bill – to take out a single status for workers, or water down the zero hours ban, or challenge comprehensive protections against unfair dismissal, they are doing it for a very specific purpose: to keep a large proportion of the working population insecure, vulnerable and afraid. It is that brutal.
So, the watering down on all of those aspects (which has happened by stealth, over the last 5 years), has a direct effect on the most insecure, the lowest paid & the least powerful. Migrants, yep, but also those traditional working class communities that Reform & the far right are targeting. It plays directly into their hands, as they encourage people to look back, with nostalgia, at the days when a job was secure, even if not well paid, and there seemed to be some order in their working lives.
To allow this ruthless business lobby to extract concessions so easily plays directly into this crisis & deepens it. The Employment Rights Bill was one piece of legislation that, alongside a load of community work & organising within the trade union movement, could have started to turn the tanker. But this Labour government, without principles or guts, has chucked those people – the cleaners, home helps, Amazon workers, care workers, hospitality staff etc – under the bus, alongside all the Deliveroo riders, Uber drivers, takeaway workers & all the rest. It’s a massive own goal, borne of awful, sub-Blairite politics.
In its journey from Labour’s 2019 Manifesto to its current iteration, the Employment Rights Bill has been watered down in many ways, including:
Employment Rights lost its seat at the Cabinet table & became absorbed into the Business & Trade Department, meaning that no-one with the requisite power is driving the agenda or even opposing dilution.
The comprehensive plan for a roll out of sectoral collective bargaining became a pilot in one sector (social care), subject to consultations, with no guarantees. Consequently, there has been little progress.
The proposed single status for workers, which would have brought millions of workers into more regularised rights & brought to an end scams such as bogus self-employment has been kicked into the long grass, leaving gig workers beyond the scope of the legislation.
Caveats have been introduced to ‘fire and rehire’ legislation, giving rogue businesses potential opt outs & councils exemptions if they are facing “financial difficulties.”
Similar caveats have been added to previously watertight legislation on zero hours contracts (e.g for agency, seasonal & temporary workers).
Day one rights have been weakened, especially the right not to be “unfairly dismissed”, with the cut off now being six months. Where the abandonment of single status will affect most gig workers, this will catch many more casualised & insecure workers.
As well as the above, there are a range of issues that have dropped off the agenda, such as the wider repeal of anti-trade union legislation, including right to strike legislation & bans on solidarity action, genuine rights to access for trade unions & a powerful enforcement & sanctions regime.
So, when we talk about ‘delivering’ on the Employment Rights Bill, we shouldn’t pretend that it is the package of rights that was envisaged by its authors or the movement that backed it. That pretence is hugely damaging, precisely because it glosses over what we’ve already lost & ill prepares the movement for battles ahead.
The truth is, it’s already a hugely weakened piece of legislation, and the business lobby aren’t done yet.
Irrespective of whether the party currently known as ‘Your Party’ becomes a serious political vehicle in this country, I think this is a good time to think about what kind of organisations we want & need going forward. And particularly, what kind of culture we need on the left.
Over the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of talk about the political direction of a new party – the perspectives, policies and democratic structures needed. Nothing wrong with that, and I’ve taken part in some of those debates myself. But something that is hardly ever mentioned, but just as important, is the culture that we develop alongside those formal structures.
What do I mean when I say ‘culture’? It can mean many things, but in this case I really mean the way we do our politics, the way we organise, and above all, the way we treat each other. This last bit in particular is often neglected by the battle-scarred members of the left, and people who spend a lot of their time online.
With Your Party’s painful birth, what will have been noticeable to people over the last few weeks is that some of the bad culture we see online disappears when we meet together. We’ve heard about how uplifting some of the regional launches & assemblies have been. Most of that optimism has been less about the process, and more about people meeting together & talking.
It’s broader than ‘Your Party’, but with all of this going on, I’ve been thinking about what the basics of our culture should be. How should we treat each other?
We should create organisations where it’s normal to listen to each other, and learn from each other, as a priority, rather than having fixed ideas that we just need to tell everyone else. This is not an argument against having strong opinions, just about the way we relate to each other.
We should expect to have to explain our points of view, not assume that there are totemic beliefs that everyone has already subscribed to. If there were, we’d already have mass leftwing organisations able to take power. We need to have a culture of discussion and explanation, to ready us for building outside of our bubbles and in communities.
We should create a culture where people feel comfortable to express themselves, no matter what their political experience is. We need a healthy culture of debate. Part of this is allowing people to make mistakes, within a learning process. We should also recognise that no matter how fixed our own views are, or how experienced we are, our own political ideas can be challenged & even changed by interaction too. Unless we allow for this, we will always have a closed, inward culture incapable of growth.
We should build structures that help create a culture of equality across our organisations, so everyone feels a sense of ownership and value. That means creating organisations where there are no special privileges because of your position, be that an MP, a trade union leader or an ‘intellectual’, but it also means promoting the voices of those who are often not heard (including working class voices).
We should create a culture that orients itself to communities, and particularly those communities that have been excluded by the political process. So, when we think about our meetings, events, platforms & organisational structures, we should be really honest about who is not there, and then think about the cultures that might have created that absence and how we change that (not always easy).
For me, these are some of the basics we need to agree as a left in order to fulfill what would be a historic mission: to create a space to the left of a degenerated Labour Party, not just in the short term, to win this or that election, or this or that social media battle – but in a long term, sustainable sense. For me, it is important to consider & discuss all this, whether it directly relates to Your Party or not, because it’s about how our movement will look like 5, 10, 20 years from now.
A few years ago, I wrote a piece about the difference between organisers & factionalists. This was 2017, before the General Election, and I very much had the Momentum project in my mind, and the way the Corbyn left approached the dual task of winning battles in the Labour Party & growing the movement outside.
I would probably change one or two things if I wrote it again now, but I do think the distinction is important if we’re going to successfully build projects, parties & movements. You can tell the approach I favour, but my purpose right then was to lay it out, so we could have a discussion. This was the explanation I gave at the time:
“So, what is the purpose of pointing out these distinctions? Well, it’s a matter of square pegs in round holes. If you have a factionalist in the position of an organiser, you have a problem. They simply can’t do that job. So much so, that they are likely to ruin the organising project through their factionalist practice. Similarly, if you place an organiser in a factionalist’s place, you are likely to get a fudge – because they won’t understand the necessity to build closely. But there are two definite projects here. If we, as a left, mistake the two things, if we fail to see the distinction, we are in big trouble – and unlikely to be able to move beyond the present confusion and chaos. We must be strategic and clever: stop trying to force square pegs into round holes.”
I think a lot of the issues we’re seeing in ‘Your Party’ would be helped by an understanding of organising approaches as opposed to factional approaches. Building a party is an organising job.
This is what I wrote:
Square pegs and round holes, organisers and factionalists; why the Corbyn left has two projects on its hands.
Ten things you need to be a good organiser:
Organising is an entirely different concept to factionalising: it’s a much more risk-based enterprise. Organising is outward facing, ambitious and democratic by nature. With organising, you don’t necessarily know the outcome – and you may have to adapt your strategy as you go along. True organising welcomes that uncertainty as the building block of creativity.
You have to like people: 👉 The starting point for any good organiser is that you like people. You want to be amongst people. You enjoy conversation, debate and challenge. This is the lifeblood of the movement and shouldn’t be seen as a threat.
In turn, you have to be liked by other people: 👉 It’s important that you are liked and trusted by your fellow activists. That relationship must be developed over time by a consistent approach and a constant engagement with people, whether you agree with them or not. Simple likeability is a key strength in organising.
You need to give power away: 👉 A good organiser will not suck up power, but seek to give it away. That means looking for succession plans, delegating properly and setting up structures that will eventually ‘do you out of a job’. That is a sad fact of life for an effective organiser: the better you do your job, the more likely you are to be redundant.
You need to work inclusively: 👉 It sounds a bit woolly, but in order to build organisation, you need to work inclusively. This means being open about your decision-making process, bringing more people into that process and making sure that barriers are broken down for easy participation across the board – even if that makes the job of organising temporarily more difficult.
You need to be able to listen: 👉 Trade union organisers are taught that in conversations with potential activists or members, they should be talking 30% of the time, and listening 70% of the time. It might make you feel important to be dominating a conversation, but it’s ultimately self-defeating, because those doing the ‘listening’ are slowly switching off.
You must believe in collectives: 👉 ‘There’s no I in team’ is a bit of a cliché, but in terms of movement building, it’s absolutely bang on. The work should be collectively organised, but the rewards doled out collectively too. It’s important to keep an eye on this constantly, and safeguard against empire building, because there will be the temptation for one organiser or more to think ‘I deserve more than this’ and break the collective ethos. Once this has happened, it’s hard to go back.
You need to trust people: 👉 One of the key principles of democratic organising is a deep trust in people. Without being naïve, it’s crucial for good movement building that organisers trust their fellow activists and seek to bring them into positions of real power. This is how we build.
You need to have good people skills: 👉 It’s an absolute rule that a good organiser must have good people skills. This can be at the micro level – i.e being able to support people personally in difficult circumstances; but also at a macro level – in being able to command the support of collectives because you have proved yourself to be trustworthy and supportive.
You should be able to identify good leaders: 👉 Movement building and organising is all about developing structures, but importantly this is about people, not bureaucracy. A decent organiser will have a good instinct, be a good judge of character and be able to identify people they can rely on. Once they’ve identified them, a good organiser will also hand over power and responsibility, safe in the knowledge that they’ve spotted a good leader.
You must see the big picture: 👉 An organiser will not become too bogged down in the detail of personal antagonisms or sectarian conflicts. They will keep their eye on the big prize – which is building the coalition that will deliver victories. Anything that gets in the way of that isn’t worth sweating the small stuff on.
Ten things you need to be a good factionalist:
Factionalism isn’t necessarily organising’s poor relation, though it’s inevitably seen as the ‘dark arts’ in comparison. It’s just a very different thing. It tends to be hidden, taking place below the surface, and by definition, not so focused on ‘democracy’. Its results may be “grassroots” but it’s not primarily concerned with big movements, but small wins, incrementally winning the war.
You must have authority: 👉 A factionalist must have ultimate authority over the group. This can be won by charisma or by instilling a system of favours and fear. Either way, people must respect your authority.
People should be willing to do as you say: 👉 You don’t want to get bogged down in debate as a rule. The group that you’ve constructed should accept the tasks that you’ve decided as priorities and get on with them. Anything else is wasted time.
You need to keep power close, and confined to a small group: 👉 Because of your mode of operation, it’s necessary to keep your group small and close. You can’t afford to be ‘done over’ so it’s best to confine the power you dole out to a small group. The larger the unit, the more danger there is of betrayal.
You need to work exclusively: 👉 Operating a faction is all about developing a close group, keeping them loyal and close. Conversely, this involves identifying your enemies and excluding them through several methods – whatever it takes. In most cases, the ends can used to justify the means.
You need to be able to give orders to a team: 👉 As a faction leader, you need a team, that is without doubt. But there should be a strict hierarchy to the team. A factionalist can’t be doing with a ‘flatarchy’. Ultimately, the leader must be able to hand out orders, without too much dissent. That’s how factions get things done.
You must develop a loyal band: 👉 Ideally, the power that a factionalist wields shouldn’t be imposed, but should be generated by the loyalty that they inspire. Conflict within the group should be minimised and loyalty can and should be generated by favours and patronage. Get the followers to do your work.
You should never trust people beyond a small circle: 👉 Trust is a major issue for a proper factionalist. It’s given out very sparingly and with an awful lot of caution. Once someone has proven themselves to be trusted, then they are part of the ‘inner circle’ and we are rolling, but until then, keep a watching brief – with everyone.
You must be single-minded: 👉 The organisation is everything. Created in a tight, disciplined way, it can be used to gain influence in ways unimaginable in a more democratic operation. A good factionalist needs to keep their eye on the prize, which isn’t a principled politics, but influence. Sometimes, that equates to manoeuvres which people will wail about, but the focus is always on power.
You need to know your friends: 👉 To run a faction, you can forget about ‘mass politics’. That’s a fantasy: this is about a select band of friends, people who would go over the top for you. It’s important to know your friends and keep them close, even if that means forgoing a bigger, more chaotic movement.
You must keep an eye on the detail: 👉 With factionalising, the devil is in the detail. It’s about close, small level organising – punching above your weight by understanding the micro politics. If you don’t understand this, there is a chance you will lose your focus and become an organiser.
Momentum was, in my eyes, one of the big, missed opportunities of the Corbyn project, yet it’s hardly discussed in the major narratives of the movement. It’s like it’s been buried. I think that is a mistake, partly because there are some vital lessons to learn by analysing what went wrong.
At the end of an incredible, grassroots campaign to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party in September 2015, almost everyone was agreed that what was needed was a structure outside of the stifling confines of the Labour Party, one that could channel the enthusiasm and radicalism of that summer campaign and build support for the political project. What wasn’t agreed, however, was form it should take, what its key purpose was, or how it should be built.
Before it even had a name, battle lines were being drawn over those issues – between key players. At one point, it was even suggested that two organisations should be set up: one, a ‘Labour Momentum,’ concerned with winning the political battle within the Labour Party; and two, a ‘People’s Momentum,’ dedicated to building campaigning power in communities.
In 2025, Momentum is a shell of its former self, firstly drained of its membership by long-running internal factional battles, and later by the exodus of much of the party left under Keir Starmer’s leadership. It now seems to be limping on, indefinitely, waiting for the political winds to change, but without much conviction that they will. I suppose the question is, could anything have been done different to avoid this demise? What were the mistakes the organisation made, and how did they impact on the wider Corbyn project?
Ten Momentum failures
Below, I’ve identified ten key mistakes made by Momentum. These examples are obviously not exhaustive, but they seem to me to be some of the major reasons why Momentum failed to really shift the political culture of the left and, ultimately, the country:
1. From the start, it couldn’t decide what it was. As mentioned above, there was always a tension between an internally-focused factional organisation, that could win positions within local, regional and national Labour Party structures, and an outward-facing, campaigning organisation that could bring together communities to fight for changes – e.g. against hospital closures, gentrification or academisation. There was a fudge, and the organisation often fell between two stools, without being very successful at either. As time went on, the campaigning elements faded, as the organisation went into defence mode.
2. It became an increasingly centralised organisation. After a short honeymoon period, where branches grew organically in many parts of the country, a combination of a lack of support for a grassroots democracy, structures that would support members involvement, and the consolidation of a bureaucratic approach based in London eroded enthusiasm and engagement locally.Within months of the organisation being founded, there was a power struggle over local group autonomy and the extent of regional democratic structures, which almost ended in Momentum being dissolved by its ‘founder,’ Jon Lansman.
3. It encouraged a clique around the ‘leadership’ of the organisation. Although it may not have been the original intention, it wasn’t long before there developed a clique around Momentum’s inner sanctum. This was fuelled by some of the early power struggles between Lansman, the people doing the work of building Momentum in the early days (of which I was one), and an alternative, organic leadership outside of the centre. Many of the early battles over democracy, accountability and representation were lost, and this placed a group, with a great deal of crossover with the Leaders Office, in charge. There were opportunities to reverse this process as Momentum developed, but instead the circle got smaller and smaller. Despite what seemed like a possible re-set post the 2019 General Election, the organisation seemed to be unable to break out of this prison.
4. It insisted on a Labour Party card as a precondition of membership. Whether people could join Momentum as non-party members was an early disagreement in the organisation, and those who argued for strict rules on this won out, meaning that Momentum was stunted as a campaigning community organisation, because quite clearly many people who didn’t have a tradition of formal political activism were unlikely to join an organisation that required party membership. This policy was pushed very heavily by the MPs involved, who were concerned about potential proscription & disciplinary action unless the membership was firmly within the party orbit.
5. It failed to defend its member base. Labour Party membership didn’t protect Momentum members from attacks or smears, though – quite the opposite. And when the attacks came, particularly over the alleged antisemitism in Corbynite ranks, there was at best a weak defence of the Momentum membership base. There were high profile cases, of course, like Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Chris Williamson, and Ken Livingstone, but as significant is the countless grassroots activists who went pretty much undefended by the organisation set up – at least in part – to give support and structure to that very grassroots base. Of course, Lansman infamously took to the press to declare antisemitism “widespread” in Corbyn’s Labour. Nothing could have given the witch-hunting right of the party more succour.
6. It failed to build its member base. Various Momentum numbers were quoted in the year after its foundation: 42,000 in 2018, between 20,000 and 30,000 in 2021 and approximately 10,000 in 2024. It was never quite clear what the organisation was claiming as membership – whether it was paid up members or a wider group that gave it’s support in one way or another, but what this story tells is one of steady decline. There seemed little ambition to break out of this cycle, or critical analysis of why it was happening. Momentum focused more and more on online messaging. This felt very much like it was compensation for the failure to build.
7. It failed to establish roots in working class communities. Most, if not all, of the active Momentum centres were in places with the highest concentration of Corbyn supporters post-2015. That was to be expected, but what was never really confronted was that these tended to be either metropolitan areas, or predominantly middle-class towns. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule – but there was very little sustained presence for either the Corbyn campaigns or Momentum in northern working-class communities. When we look at the way the Red Wall seats fell in 2019, beyond the obvious issue of Brexit, there was also a clear lack of left presence, activity, and campaigning in those communities.
8. It didn’t do political education very well. For all it’s early claims to be changing the face of British politics, Momentum failed to practice what it preached. There was a huge opportunity to create spaces for debate, discussion and education, both within the Labour Party, and in communities. Instead, there emerged a one-track approach to policy, and discussion about socialist values, which failed to create a culture of openness and learning, and felt stifling towards the end of Corbyn’s reign as leader. This is, in part, is why Momentum failed to grow, because a serious atmosphere of debate and education was dismissed in favour of correct ‘lines’ from a centralised operation.
9. It failed to develop a real, living grassroots democracy. One of the consequences of Momentum’s narrowing horizons from 2017/2018 onwards was that there was less and less democratic participation in the organisation. Increasingly, the organisation became more top-down and less bottom-up. Regional meetings became rarer, as did national conferences, and where they did take place, they were more akin to rallies than democratic, decision-making meetings. Gradually, Momentum members felt less and less part of the strategic direction of the organisation, and felt less ownership – hence the disillusion that set in.
10. It became wedded to electoralism. Because Momentum never settled the debate between community organising and ‘defending’ the political project in Parliament, it drifted towards the easier of the two options, which was to focus on providing a door knocking army for MPs election campaigns, and the survival of Corbynism as an electoral force. When Brexit became the dominant issue from 2017 onwards, Momentum found that the way it was set up left it vulnerable to political defeat as well as electoral defeat. In the lead up to 2019 – and beyond – a deep demoralisation set in amongst its activists. No planning seems to have been made for this, and the abandonment of the ‘big’ outward facing project meant that it was set up to fail.
What are the lessons to learn from all this? Sitting on the cusp of a fresh political project to create a new left party in the UK, it’s worth reflecting on the Momentum experience. I’ve focused on what went wrong. Of course, there was a lot that was right too – and in essence, it should have been transformative, grassroots, lively, independent, dynamic:
It could have built a mass organisation, alongside the Corbyn project in Parliament, to defend it, of course – but independent enough to leverage that project too.
It could have been a bridge for non-party members to campaign alongside party members, creating alliances and campaigns that would withstand electoral defeat.
It could have done the hard work of breaking into working class areas and finding organic leaders amongst those communities.
But it failed to realise that potential, mainly because of a closed organising method and a lack of understanding in how to build.
These aren’t just lessons for ‘Your Party’. Clearly, there is a great deal of crossover in membership between Momentum and the new party as it develops, but there are broader lessons for the whole left about the way we do our politics.
Where we can learn from the experience of the last decade is that while the political opportunity is there, and the enthusiasm is palpable, it means very little if the structures that go alongside are not (a) open and inclusive, (b) democratic in their everyday application, and (c) ambitious in their aim to include those who’ve previously been excluded from the political process. Whatever the electoral maths, membership numbers or party loyalty, it’s doubtful we’ll achieve any fundamental change without those elements. It’s a much harder road, clearly – because listening and learning takes time, democracy is often messy and winning hearts and minds is tough, but if we want to really change our societies, rather than going around in circles, we don’t really have a choice.
Reform is, in part, a product of the failures of Labourism. Perhaps more profoundly, it is also a symbol of the final death rattle of the Keynesian welfare settlement of 1945, in the face of global corporate and financial capitalism and the rise of a population demanding self-government, rather than paternalism.
There is a line that can be drawn from the inability of the Labour Party to represent the interests of the working class in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash, through Brexit and more recently, Reform’s victories in the local council elections of May 2025. However, despite the understandable focus on a decade of austerity, overseen by Coalition and Tory administrations, it’s not a crisis from which the left can absolve itself. These failures of representation and engagement extend much further back. Whilst the Corbyn project of 2015-19 tried to address some of this and began – at least in its participatory language and policy – to go beyond the paternalist social democratic state of 1945, it too failed to occupy the political space created by Labourism’s decline.
It follows that, in working to defeat Reform as a left, we have to address those failures and really interrogate them in order to build a more powerful challenge, which can effectively question the pernicious but popular narratives which have taken root in our communities. In order to do that, however, we have to realise what we’re dealing with. Reform is a complex beast. Both it’s representatives and supporters cannot be homogenised into one political bloc, and it will take a thorough but nuanced strategy to defeat them.
We cannot deny that Reform is now a major political force, and – in the context of the politically and intellectually weak and self-destructive Starmer government – likely to grow from here. On Friday, the 2nd of May 2025, England woke up to 677 more Reform UK councillors than it had the previous day. That amounted to 41% of all seats up for election – in contrast, Labour won 6% of all seats. More importantly, Reform UK had taken control of 10 councils across England. This was described as a political earthquake. It was the first time that Reform (or the Brexit Party, as it was previously known) had taken control of any local councils.
Most significantly, they had taken overall control of ten councils, including former Labour stronghold County Durham, as well as Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Doncaster, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, North Northamptonshire, and West Northamptonshire. In other places – like Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire – they became the largest party but will try to govern as minority administrations. In other areas still, they have been blocked only by other parties and independent councillors forming coalitions. But the overall picture is of a sea change, which has since been mirrored in a series of by-elections and in national polling. And there is undoubtedly more to come.
In Durham, watching this unfold, there was, without doubt, a sense of shock. Less so at the result, than at the sheer magnitude of the landslide Reform UK had managed to achieve. In the weeks leading up to the vote, a limited campaign to ‘Stop Reform’ (led by local anti-racists and other activists) had picked up a huge sense of hostility towards the traditional parties, Labour in particular, in the towns and villages that dotted County Durham, but no one was quite prepared for the extent of Reform’s victory. Reform went from having no seats to 65 out of a total of 98. It felt like we were in the eye of the storm, in particular, because controversialist and hard right poster boy Darren Grimes hadbeen elected as one of 65 new Reform councillors.
County Durham Labour lost 38 seats in total, with just 4 remaining. To put that in perspective, in the 2013 local elections, Labour had won 94 seats. So, in 12 years, the longstanding ruling party in County Durham had lost 90 local seats. While Reform’s margin of victory in 2025 might have been shocking, the seeds of it has been laid many years previous, in County Durham and in many of the local councils where it formed a majority. In many ways, it was the slow burn of Labour Party decline, widespread disillusionment with all the main parties and local politics in general (the Teaching Assistant dispute in Durham being a perfect example of Labour’s disengagement), combined with the ‘hot’ issue of immigration that saw Reform capitalise and fill the void.
As socialists, we have to think critically about what Reform is and how we got here. It’s not straightforward. Reform’squickly constructed base is variegated. It’s made up of working-class voters who’ve long since abandoned Labour, and many who had simply stopped voting, or never voted. It also has a strong correlation with the Brexit vote, as we’ve seen in the so-called Red Wall constituencies, but it also includes upwardly mobile and middle-class voters, in new housing estates, whose concerns are to ‘protect’ what they’ve got. Although the focus has been on the Northern, working class, ‘Red Wall,’ the Reform leadership has skilfully tapped into a grievance culture that straddles class and geographical boundaries.
The response of the left to the rise of Reform has been disjointed. That is understandable. We have been used to more clearly defined boundaries: a small but aggressive, racist far right and a wing of the Tory Party given to xenophobic scapegoating and dog-whistles. But things have changed. There has been a popularisation of anti-immigrant rhetoric, and a blurring of the lines between the hardened racists and the quieter, ingrained xenophobes. Reform is, in a sense, a culmination of that shift. To label them nazis and fascistsdoesn’t do justice to the complexity of the moment we’re in and how it relates to the failures of the left and gaps in our engagement, particularly in working class communities.
The driving force behind Reform has been a toxic cocktail of ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric, climate change denial, an anti-establishment, faux-democratic populism, an aggressive anti-immigration sentiment, racism – in particular, Islamophobia – homophobia and transphobia, opposition to trade unionism, especially in the public sector, militaristic jingoism, and hardened nationalism.
Reform have been dogmatic in sticking to these themes, giving no quarter and seemingly confident that they’ve caught the public mood. In Durham, before they’d even had their first full council meeting, they had removed the Pride Flag outside County Hall, declaring that only national and local, county flags would be allowed in the future. Grimes, now Deputy Leader, defended the decision by saying the party was not anti-gay but was “anti-tokenism”. They also immediately renamed several key departments to remove references to climate change and equality and inclusion.
In addition, the leadership of Reform in County Durham wasted no time in proudly confirming their anti-environmental credentials, scrapping the Net Zero pledge (the previous administration had pledged to achieve net-zero emissions by 2045). Significantly, Reform posited an alternative ‘care emergency’ declaration, which they said, would recognise the “critical and escalating crisis” in children’s social care – pitting SEND provision against environmental breakdown.
This is symbolic of what we’ve seen from Reform for a number of years. Post-Brexit, they have manoeuvredthemselves into spaces that are not about policies, treaties, or regulations, but about winning hearts and minds. In a sense, it’s a hegemonic strategy, aimed at changing the way people see the world. But in addition, it taps into narratives that have deeper roots.
We sometimes forget, but Thatcher and those around her spent a similar amount of effort creating the ideological buttress for her dogmatic economic doctrines – early in her tenure talking extensively of the family, moral codes, law and order, Section 28 – as well as the individualism encapsulated in her famous statement in 1987: “there is no such thing as society”. Reform have taken off from where Thatcher’s new right project left off and turned the dial up to ten, with the racism and xenophobia that bit more vicious, the homophobia / transphobia more brazen, the flag waving nationalism that bit more aggressive.
However, in the context of neoliberalism’s decline, Farage and Reform have been politically astute enough to understand that dogmatic adherence to Thatcherite economic free market rules will not work. So, while they have mirrored the ideological elements outlined above (showing remarkablesimilarities to the Authoritarian Populism of the early to mid-1980’s), they have left neoliberal shibboleths behind. Reform has, ironically, been able to capitalise on the polarisation created by the economic crisis post-2008 and painted themselves as the saviours of the UK’s working population, with a mix of messages on pay, taxes and services, that defy ideological bracketing, particularly focused on working people being ‘left behind’.
This is, of course, natural left territory. The Corbyn project as a whole, including local instances such as Jamie Driscoll’s successful campaign to become North of Tyne Mayor, made some inroads into the policy arena, and cohering the left around those common goals, but lacked something of Reform’s ability to tap into the popular psyche.
How did Reform undercut the left so effectively? It’s obviously complex, but I think any understanding of that would need to start with the way Farage and co have been able to tap into that Thatcherite individualism, amongst working class communities in particular, but more broadly too. Where the left should have challenged the mantra of ‘no society’, it was unable to do so beyond a theoretical commitment to the welfare state, public services, the NHS, comprehensive education, all the things that were disappearing, not just under Tory governments, but New Labour too.
Add to that mix, Reform’s ability to exploit the anger and a developing grievance culture spanning Covid denial, 5G, immigration, child grooming gangs, ‘cultural Marxism’, sharia law, gender identity, anti-social behaviour and you have fertile soil for an entrenched right-wing hegemony in many communities. It was not all of Reform’s making, clearly, but it provided a platform for them which was skilfully built. What is important to understand is that this was growing long before the left, and certainly the Labour Party woke up to it, and by then it was difficult to combat.
As a result, the bases of Corbynism remained mostly within traditional, progressive political communities. Linked to a Labourism that was past it’s sell-by-date and unable to adapt to a much more polarised world, the left often missed itstarget. This was reflected in the spread of Corbynite activity in the North East, which struggled to make an impact in broadly working-class areas. A similar pattern can be traced in many other parts of the UK. All electoral analysis shows that over decades, Labour’s base has become more middle class, whilst haemorrhaging support amongst the working class.
Corbynism hinted at an escape from this Labourist ‘prison,’but as a coalition of interests, politics, and factions, it was never able to decisively break from Labourism, either in policy or political practice. Whilst there were shoots of participatory practice, for instance in the community organising initiative, or in Momentum’s early incarnations, they soon succumbed to electoralism.
Momentum was a case in point. It could have been a vehicle for the development of a different kind of participatory, democratic practice – facing outwards towards social movements and community organisations (for example, opposing gentrification, building local climate coalitions to challenge extractive corporations, or joining with tenants to campaign against exploitative landlordism). Instead, it became a vehicle to ‘win’ Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) and other factional battles in the Labour Party. It was an opportunity lost, because of a failure of imagination – and the drag of a determined attachment to electoralism and Labourism which stemmed from the Parliamentary Party.
On a more general level, there were signs that any left remaining foothold in communities was being lost. There was a failure to break the right-wing media stranglehold over the ‘common sense’ ideas that took hold in communities – which percolated through informal social media channels(particularly Facebook community groups), so it didn’t appear that politicians or even the media were setting the agenda, but people’s friends, neighbours and family. In many communities, both online and in ‘real life’, the left has simply disappeared from view.
There have, of course, been attempts to address that, via community organising, tenants’ associations and campaigns against privatisation and austerity, but it has been fragmented and often without the accompanying narrative that might shift people’s perceptions. It is possible to do that, but it is a long struggle – we’d have to go back to the ‘no society’ mantra andask what happened to the collectivism and solidarity in former industrial communities.
In this context, there are some serious questions to ask ourselves. Why has the left not been able to capitalise on the economic and political crisis thus far? How is it that we are left with Gramsci’s ‘monsters’, now being elected in our Town and County Halls – and why is it that we’ve not been able to challenge the popular narratives that have circulated, taken root and eventually led to that electoral breakthrough?
The starting point for a fightback has to be to understand what we are faced with. Whilst we cannot simply label the Reform phenomena as fascism, or even Thatcherism pure and simple, we have to also guard against the opposite, which is to see Reform supporters as a reserve army for our political projects, as if there could be a simple route from Reform to left-wing politics, purely because they share our grievances about the economic system. We have to be careful about that ‘flip,’ as it seriously underestimates the size of the task.
A number of extensive YouGov polls have tried to understand what Reform voters believe, and they make sobering reading. In 2024, an in-depth analysis of responses found that 86% of Reform voters thought that “migrants coming to the United Kingdom across the English Channel should all be immediately removed from the United Kingdom and prevented from ever returning”. 78% of them felt that “multiculturalism has made the UK worse”. Beyond anti-immigrant sentiment, 85% believe that court sentences are not harsh enough, and 77% think the death penalty should be allowed. Just one in three (35%) believe in human-causedclimate change – half as many as the wider public (71%).
The above is just a snapshot, obviously, but indicates that there is an ingrained new common sense that won’t simply be shifted by the left publishing a manifesto or two, or raising banners at labour movement festivals, however unifying that may feel. What is required, and has been required for some time, is the hard work of creating space in communities for left voices to be heard and then winning hearts and minds for a very different agenda than the toxic one propagated by Reform and their fellow travellers. It may be that a new, left party is able to learn from the mistakes of the past and prioritise this engagement, and there is certainly hope in the way that various parts of the left are now talking.
In Durham, outside Reform’s second full council meeting on the 16th of July, a large crowd of around 300 gathered. It was the largest seen in Durham for some time. It was diverse, including climate change activists, Palestine campaigners, anti-racist organisations, trade unions and LGBTQ activists.The weekend before, it was heartening to see the Durham Miners Association bravely take Reform head on, making the theme of this year’s Miners’ Gala ‘We’re Still Here,’ with Durham Pride activists heading up the procession, and a large Palestinian presence, including Ambassador Husam Zomlot on the platform.
There are seeds of hope, without doubt, but statements and protests must be followed by a serious commitment to engagement and work in those communities that have been swayed by Reform’s simple, divisive formulas. Anti-racist work must be grassroots and activist-led and must go beyond shouting slogans. Above all, we have to win communities, whether Reform or not, to alternatives that reject the mangled, grasping Thatcherite ideology which punches down on the marginalised, and the toxic individualism that has infected our communities for too long.
There is a different tradition, of co-operation, solidarity,and anti-racism which we understand and celebrate in the labour movement but has been buried in the communities targeted by Reform. Uncovering that alternative andgiving it practical relevance, will take time and hard work, clearly. It will involve both conflict and understanding, and some movement in the habits of the left. That’s our challenge.
The World Turned Upside Down 