Labour Party: membership slumps
Posted on Tuesday 12 June, 2007
Filed Under New Labour
This just in on Press Association:
Labour’s membership has slumped to a new low, with more than 20,000 disillusioned supporters deserting the party in the past 18 months, it emerged today.
Soon-to-be-published figures will show that the number of card-carrying party members fell from 198,000 to 182,000 during the course of 2006.
That trend continued in 2007, sliding to about 177,000 a month ago – well under half the 407,000 peak when Labour came to power 10 years ago.
But Labour insiders suggest the decline has slowed markedly and even bottomed out, with the party now picking up 1,000 members a week during its deputy leadership election.
Membership has crept back up to 180,000 in the last three weeks.
Two questions. First, how many of the new recruits joined specifically because they wanted to vote for John McDonnell? At least half, at a guess.
Two, the leadership contest is, of its nature, a temporary boost. How long are the new members going to stick around following the coronation?
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36 Responses to “Labour Party: membership slumps”
Does his face look bovverred?
The Sunday Times recently reported a survey (so take figures witha pinch of salt) that suggested that 9% of LP members wanted McDonnell as Leader. So that would mean the (not particularly) ‘hard’ Left in Labour would be about 16,000.
Within touching distance of the non Labour Left, I’d say. So why give this small bunch such importance?
A more recent survey reported that had increased to 18% purely on the back of a week’s exposure to the media. If you assume that there are plenty of left people in the party who have still never heard of him (which there are) that gives you a comfortable 40,000+ lefties in the LP still (I’d guess nearer 60,000).
If you can get a single left-wing party up to anywhere near that number then well done.
And I mean one party, not adding together all the squabbling factions who can barely share a room without fighting.
16,000 Labour members who would vote for McDonnell over Brown is not the same as 16,000 socialist activists in the Labour Party. For one thing, preferring someone standing on McDonnell’s rather mild platform to an outright Thatcherite does not make someone a socialist.
More importantly, being a Labour Party member, of any political stripe, never necessarily entailed a commitment to activism and does so now less than ever. Using this kind of fantasy number crunching to assess the number of socialist activists in the Labour Party is meaningless. The actual number of socialist or left activists in the Labour Party can be much more easily and accurately assessed by looking at the real numbers which the Labour left can gather on the ground in its organisations, at its events, and in wider campaigns and struggles.
It is certainly true that the Labour left once could muster tens of thousands of activists. Now it’s main open, public conferences organised by its last remaining institutuions (like the Campaign Group and the LRC) can gather a maximum of 300 or so people. Including everyone which the remaining entryist grouplets can scrape together. This is, of course, quite a lot less than the larger extra-Labour Party socialist groups can gather.
The attempt by the LRC, by far the most widely supported remaining element of the Labour left, to found a youth wing managed to pull together a little over a hundred people, not all of whom were particularly active. And again that included all of the various entryists. This is the kind of scale which the youth fronts of the mid-tier Trotskyist groups operate at, something like the Alliance for Workers Liberty’s Education Not for Sale or Workers Power’s Revolution. It would be regarded as a disaster by the SWP, the Socialist Party or the pre-split SSP.
The McDonnell campaign itself provides another illustration of the numbers of actual left activists still in the Labour Party. It represented the most unified and organised action by the combined Labour left in a long time. And it’s most notable feature was its small scale in terms of bodies on the ground as activists. Even taking into account all of the entryist groups, the retired revolutionaries, the people who rejoined to help out, the number of people who actively got involved in the campaign can be measured in the hundreds rather than the thousands.
In terms of wider campaigns, the anti-war movement was by far the largest campaign going in the last period and again one of its most notable features was the low profile of Labour left activists on the ground. The remaining Labour left MPs were on the platforms, but for the first time in a century the marches were practically devoid of Labour banners with a range of extra-Labour socialist groups individually having a higher profile than the entire Labour left. The local anti-war groups told a similar story, with Labour activists significantly outnumbered pretty much everywhere.
When I hear these arguments about the size of the Labour left, I am reminded of nothing so much as medieval scholastic debates about the numbers of angels in each choir of heaven. You are discussing the size of fictional regiments in non-existent armies. The parallel becomes all the more obvious when we consider that many of the socialists, particularly those on the revolutionary left, look towards Labour for primarily theological reasons – Lenin said that Labour was a capitalist workers party in 1920, so it must be one now, as it was in the beginning so shall it be in the end, world without end, amen.
I do wish people will stop lionising the (pretty nebulous) anti-war movement. I mean, I went on all the demos meself and got fairly involved, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think everyone involved in anti-war activism was a socialist. If you’re gonna get all purist about LP members, then the same questions should be posed of the (rather nebulously defined) anti-war movement.
I’m not lionising the anti-war movement nor am I suggesting that everyone involved in it was a socialist activist. Rather I am saying that it involved pretty much every left activist in Britain as well as many, many other people.
Of the left activists it was noticeable that, apart from the Labour left MPs on the platforms, the Labour left was lower profile than a whole range of extra-Labour Party groups. This was true on the marches, it was true in the local groups, it was true on the other activities. This is notable in the context of this discussion for two reasons.
Firstly, it illustrates very clearly that in terms of activist numbers the Labour left can muster many fewer people on the ground than the extra-Labour left. This fits precisely with what we would expect from looking at the numbers the Labour left could get to public conferences, or the numbers actively involved in the McDonnell campaign, or the numbers involved in the LRC youth, or the numbers involved in other wider campaigns.
Secondly, it is a marker of a significant change. Any previous national protest movement on anything like that kind of scale, and particularly any previous major anti-war movement, involved vastly higher numbers of Labour left activists. The marches would have been dominated by Labour Party banners, branch banners, LPYS banners, internal campaign banners and the like. Yet this anti-war movement, the biggest in history, saw none of that.
I was using the anti-war movement as one concrete example amongst many, to give some reality to this discussion – a discussion which had previously concentrated on counting the choirs of angels. I realise that it is more soothing to count the numbers of left activists in any field in this kind of imaginative way, but the cold hard reality has to take precedence if we want any kind of useful, honest assessment.
Talk of there being 16,000 socialist activists in the Labour Party (or 40,000!) is akin to talk of fairies at the bottom of the garden – comforting to children but based only on fantasy. Socialist activists who don’t attend major left events locally or nationally, who don’t get involved in campaigns large or small, who can’t be seen or heard, or smelt or touched are not of much assistance to us.
Is Mark P the Mark Fischer of the CPGB/Weekly Worker sectlet “fame”?
Last Labour Party poll gave McDonnell 18 per cent – so that’s about 18,000 lefts. Mark P utterly wrong but can’t post now at length as have childminding duties. My fellow Labour left partner has a meeting and then he’s coming back so I can go to my Branch…..
Mark P is definitly correct about the low profile of the Labour left in anti-war activity – particularly in the “heroic” period of the February 15th march and its build up.
(Of course a converse criticism could be made that the Stop the war coalition put insufficient emphasis on lobbying the PLP in the lead up to the vote – but this is easier to see with hindsight).
I am not sure why this is, and I noticed that a few left labour councillors first became associated with the anti-war movement after the bombs started falling.
This is in contrast to the first gulf war, when thr Labour Left made the running in many parts of the country.
Generally the thrust of Mark P’s argument is correct the number of active Labour left is probably in the few hundreds or a couple of thousand at most. There is however a larger number of card carrying members who are left wing but not active within the structures of the party. But to an increasing degree grassroots trade union activists are not memebrs of the party, and if they are members they are not active.
A more intersting question is what proportion of the 200000 workplace reps consider themselves to be socialists, or have a class conscious view of the world? And that 200000 is only the number in TUC affiliated unions.
The Labour Left can boast around 30 MPs, dozens of councillors, thousands of activists, and extremely significant influence within the trade unions. Through the party-union link, we have a base within the working class.
John McDonnell’s campaign was not only the most significant and high profile Labour left political campaign since the early 80s – it was the most significant and high profile left (full stop) political campaign since the early 80s. This is simply because the only left campaigns of any significance continue to occur within a party that has a mass working class electoral base and a direct link to the organised working class.
Even without a contest or a high profile or much media coverage – and despite the haemorraging of socialists from the party described above – John enjoys the support of a fifth of the party and over a quarter of affiliated trade unionists. In a contest, we could have expected this to have risen dramatically. Last week’s YouGov poll also revealed sweeping majorities for progressive policies in both party and affiliated unions.
All of this puts us at a huge advantage as compared to the swamp of squabbling petty-bourgeois mini-sects who spend most of their time arguing over issues of little or no interest to the working class (popular militia / abolition of the age of consent, anyone?)
Andy Newman is, ironically, living proof of the significance of struggles within the Labour party. I don’t think I’m doing Andy Newman’s political position an injustice by pointing out that he believes that the party is beyond reclaiming because the right’s structural changes are effectively irreversible – and that, although he is unsure of what alternative political strategy to follow, he is confident that it will not be within Labour.
And yet what happens when a Labour politician of even the most mild social-democratic colours – an ex-Blairite no less – runs for what is effectively a non-job – but raises a few issues of undeniable significance to class politics? Andy orientates almost instinctively back towards a struggle within the Labour party.
QED!
As for the low profile of the Labour left within the anti-war movement – I’d dispute that. Thousands of party members protested against it – they just weren’t waving party banners which is probably understandable given the circumstances.
Such was the strength of feeling within the party against the war that 139 Labour MPs voted against it. Most of these MPs had never rebelled in their lives – but they were, in large part, reflecting the pressure from within the party. In actual fact, once again, the struggle within the party was central to this issue – even if the SWP provided the necessary layers of bureaucracy for the antiwar movement.
SouthpawPunch
On my reckoning, the SWP has around 2,000 active members, tops. There’s about 400 in the SP and a few hundred in the rest of the sects put together. Let’s be kind and say 3,000.
Let’s even throw in close sympathisers, and double that figure. 6,000 lefties outside the Labour Party, maximum.
But then you have been researching far left membership figures, right? Are these estimates so wrong
John McDonnell’s campaign … was the most significant and high profile left (full stop) political campaign since the early 80s.
I’ve told you a million times about using hyperbole. In this case you’re overlookingat least three campaigns with a claim to greater significance than the McDonnell campaign – the big mobilisation against road-building and the CJA (1993-4), the poll tax revolt (1990-1) and the miners’ strike (1984-5).
And I don’t think Andy’s position demonstrates the significance of struggles within the Labour Party, so much as the visibility of campaigns within the Labour Party (those that are allowed to get out of the traps, that is). You take what you can get – it’s not as if there were much going on outside the party. (I don’t think Andy (or even Mr Punch) would claim that the non-Labour Left was in rude health.)
Sorry, I didn’t make myself clear. By left political campaign, I was referring to a left bid for political power of some sort rather than a specific struggle supported or even led by the left.
What I take from Andy’s position is that he is drawn to a struggle in an arena that makes possible such struggles because of its class nature (sorry about the dodgy wording!)
No Owen, I am not Mark Fisher of the CPGB/Weekly Worker. I did meet him once and he struck me as a fairly pleasant individual. His approach to politics is however rather closer to yours than to mine, in that his group’s distinguishing feature is its total inability to differentiate between its own cherished fantasies and cold, hard, reality. They too are rather prone to counting choirs of angels and mistaking that for an evaluation of existing forces.
I am overjoyed, by the way, to see that your utterly preposterous overestimation of the McDonnell campaign remains intact despite his crushingly predictable failure to get on the Labour leadership ballot paper. A month ago, when some of us with a closer proximity to planet Earth were suggesting that, given the weakness of the left in the PLP, it would be very difficult for him to get on the ballot, you were dismissive in the extreme of such views. As the nomination period grew closer you kindly took the time to explain to us all that McDonnell was in the race to win and that his campaign represented an earth shattering step forward for the working class.
Some amongst us would find our confidence in the massive government-terrifying significance of the campaign shaken a little by the fact that he was easily kept off the ballot, and by a considerable margin at that. Our confidence might be further shaken by the relatively small numbers of activists actually mobilised by the campaign. Not you however. Mere real events can’t shake your iron belief in your theory. I find the tenacity of the adherents of certain millenial Christian sects admirable in much the same way. No matter how many times the rapture fails to arrive as predicted, the elect manage to maintain their faith.
While such constancy in a world gone mad is in its own way impressive, it does make it a little difficult to take your assessments of the state of the Labour left particularly seriously. The McDonnell campaign managed to involve only a few hundred actual activists, including the remnants of the entryist groups. This is as we would expect from the sub-300 attendances at the open conferences of the only remaining Labour left institutions. It is as we would expect from the sub-100 attendance which the LRC youth managed to attract. It is as we would expect from the very low visibility of the Labour left in local and national campaigns and it is as we would expect from the anti-war movement where the Labour left provided less activists than a range of the extra-Labour Party groups managed.
Talk here of “thousands of activists” (you), “18,000″ (Susan), “16,000″ (Southpawpunch) or “40,000+” (Jeff) is utterly divorced from the real activist numbers which the Labour left has been able to mobilise over the last period. It is, as I have said, in the same fantasy realm as arguments over the numbers of angels in each choir of heaven. It may be of course that I am wrong. It may be that these invisible hordes are hiding under some rock in Keighley or Shrewsbury, each clutching their Labour Party membership cards and a red flag. But I require a little more proof of their existence than your fevered dreams.
What I take from Andy’s position is that he is drawn to a struggle in an arena that makes possible such struggles because of its class nature (sorry about the dodgy wording!)
The only thing that strikes me as really dodgy is the word ‘struggle’ – the McDonnell experience suggests that struggle within the Labour Party is not on the agenda.
I’m guessing that all these people quitting Labour have reached their own personal point at which they can endure it no longer. If they are leaving because they want council housing, an end to the war and PFI where are they going? You can count the numbers who have joined Respect and the CNWP without taking off your socks. Why are they not finding these alternatives seriously attractive? They are exactly who needs to be the core of a post Labour working class party.
Mark. Firstly, I have never claimed that I believed John would win the final election. I believed that, if he had got a place on the ballot paper, he would have polled a substantial share of the vote – somewhere around a third in the constituency and affiliate sections. I believe that polls of members and affiliated trade unionists have vindicated that.
Secondly – I don’t want to have pull rank here but given I’ve been stuck in Parliament for nearly two years now, I don’t need any lectures about the weakness of the parliamentary Labour left, thanks very much. Having gone through various attempted parliamentary rebellions and having to deal with some of these wankers on a daily basis, I’m fully aware of the weaknesses of the parliamentary Left. It is small, fragmented, marginalised and meek.
I’ll give you an example. During the debate over privatisation of the probation service, one rebellious MP was told that his career under a Brown government depended on voting for privatisation. He voted accordingly (albeit with tears in his eyes). Another leftish MP – who had led adjournment debates on the issue, signed the EDM against the policy, lobbied ministers and spoke forcefully in the actual debate – also voted for. He later said that the Whips had claimed that the Government was 5 short and a defeat on the eve of local elections would be a disaster for the party.
So yes, I know what utter tossers we’re dealing with.
However, being involved in the nominations stage, I was also in a position to know where we stood. The reasons for confidence in the campaign right near the end were as follows: 1) numerous vacillating MPs had declared their intention to nominate to ensure a contest; 2) a deal had been done; and 3) the Meacher situation was also resolved, with most of his MPs apparently expressing their willingness to transfer.
Unfortunately, after the Fabian Society debate, Brown’s feeling against a contest hardened and he put considerable pressure on those willing to nominate John. For some, it didn’t take much – just a phone call from the man himself. For others, it took a bit more than that.
Despite this situation, various MPs sat on the fence and didn’t nominate Brown to the end. The sad truth is that if we’d gone down with, say, 34 (i.e. 5 more MPs than we ended up with), we would have got on the ballot paper.
I appreciate that for many of those outside of the snakespit, a) it looked extremely unlikely that John would get on the ballot paper and b) they felty vindicated when he did not. However, it was closer than you think and not outside the bounds of possibility.
As had been said repeatedly, despite a contest, a high profile, or significant media coverage – and despite the fact that thousands have left the party – John was still polling over twice the total won by Benn/Heffer in 1988.
No-one is claiming that there is a huge, active Labour left movement. There isn’t. Indeed, there is no left mass movement in early 21st century Britain. This is the result of a successful ruling class offensive which has crippled the labour movement. The left of the labour movement remains atomised and fragmented. The John4Leader campaign made a significant contribution to regrouping, linking together activists right across the labour movement.
Yes, I know it just sounds like mantra, but the Labour party remains the main arena of struggle precisely because of its link with the organised working class. I don’t think that there is anything of significance politically outside the party – just a swamp of tiny irrelevant squabbling sects with no basis in the labour movement.
“The only thing that strikes me as really dodgy is the word ‘struggle’ – the McDonnell experience suggests that struggle within the Labour Party is not on the agenda.”
What really gets to me about this age-old lecture from the extra-Labour Left crew is that – to take an example – after the SSP get wiped out at the 2007 elections, they never go, “fucking hell, looks like struggle outside the Labour Party is not on the agenda.” Why is this?
And furthermore, why is it do you think that the 200,000 people who have left the Labour party have not swelled the ranks of the extra-Labour Left?
Dave, the primary problem with your look at the extra-Labour socialist groups is that you are conflating activist numbers and membership. The two things are so distinct in the Labour Party as to bear relationship to each other. They are not as distinct in groups which see themselves as cadre organisations but they are still different enough to require care.
The bigger socialist groupings in Britain currently claim memberships along the following lines: SWP 4,000, Socialist Party 1,800, CPB 900, SSP 800, Solidarity 700. Then you have quite literally dozens of smaller groups ranging from the AWL’s 120 down to two men and a dog. Between them they probably claim a minimum of 800 and probably more. So we are looking at a combined membership claim of 9,000.
If we were to calculate these figures by the methods the Labour Party uses to arrive at it’s 177,000 then we would have to say that this 9,000 claim isn’t at all exaggerated. In fact, we’d have to greatly expand on this 9,000. But that isn’t really of interest to us in calculating actual numbers of activists on the ground.
In terms of actual numbers of hardcore activists the number is certainly well below 9,000. Let’s be cynical and halve the claim that would give us 4,500 activists. In fact, for the purposes of this argument lets be extremely cynical and divide it by three, which would give us a hardcore of 3,000 socialist activists in groups outside of the Labour Party (a figure which is considerably below my actual estimate). Then we would have to add the large number of independent socialist activists, many of them ex members of the socialist groups, many more of them ex members of the Labour Party, the kind of people you regularly encounter in anti-war groups or in council housing campaigns or the like. How many such people are there in total? I doubt if any of us knows but lets again be extremely strict and say 500. That gives us an absolute minimum of 3,500 hardcore socialist activists outside of the Labour Party.
Now apply the same kind of strict criteria to counting the numbers of actual socialist activists within the Labour Party. No reasonable way of looking at it that I can think of gets us to even a third of the extra-Labour Party total and most indications would leave us in three figures only.
In campaigns where we would expect both the Labour left activists and extra-Labour left activists to be, the latter always greatly outnumber the former. That was true in the anti-war movement, it’s true in local hospital campaigns, it’s true in council housing campaigns, you name the campaign in fact and it is likely to be true.
When it comes to holding public events, the Socialist Party gets about 1,000 to its annual conference, while the SWP gets a multiple of that. The LRC and Campaign Group meanwhile are closer to the kind of numbers which the AWL gets to its shin dig. The LRC youth, as pointed out previously, was on the same kind of scale as the youth fronts of the mid-tier Trotskyist groups rather than the bigger organisations.
There are no big component organisations left. Back when the Labour left had tens of thousands of activists, it included socialist groups with hundreds and even thousands of activists of their own, Militant being the most spectacular example. Now the revolutionary groups within the Labour left range from perhaps 50 activists (Socialist Appeal) to next to nothing (Socialist Action and Workers Action).
There simply is no evidence for the existence of thousands of socialist activists in the Labour Party. They aren’t detectable by any sense and as far as can be told can be found only through the exercise of faith. The most we can say is that we have some evidence that up to perhaps 20,000 of the people who Labour has on some membership list somewhere would prefer to vote for McDonnell’s mild programme than for continued Thatcherism.
There ARE thousands of socialists in the Labour Party.I would estimate a third of the Party. Activists? Maybe not. Those of us who choose to spend our lives at meetings , become councillors and so on are a pretty hard-core bunch.
But when push came to shove many thousands of non-active Labour Party members would and will get behind left candidates.
The recent YouGov poll quoted by others clearly saw a majority of Party members in support of measures such as were/are advocated by John McDonnell. The deputy leadership vote will see a lot of support for Jon Cruddas.Not someone I have a lot of time for but, nevertheless , regarded as “left” by those not at the coalface.
Frankly, I’m with Christine Shawcroft on this one.Those of you who choose to diss hard-working comrades, decent MPs, and the thousands of volunteers who have spent their lives dedicated to the labour movement can go and take a running jump. We’ll carry on as best we can in the Labour Party.
Owen, you say: What really gets to me about this age-old lecture from the extra-Labour Left crew is that – to take an example – after the SSP get wiped out at the 2007 elections, they never go, “fucking hell, looks like struggle outside the Labour Party is not on the agenda.” Why is this?
This simply isn’t true. Several comrades are recognising that building an electoral opposition to new labour in the present period is not on the cards; and the electoral melt down of the SSP has been debated very seriously.
The events of May 2007 have shown two things. i) that there is no foreseeable prospect of an electoral breakthrough for left of labour organisations on any significant scale; ii) that the Labour left have been utterly marginalised within the party, and there is no foreseeable prospect of them making serious gains within the party.
So neither those of us inside or outside the Labour Party are in a very strong position to persuade the other camp to change their minds. But neither is either camp dead.
Instead of bickering about who is less dead- let us take a step back and see what we have got.
On the plus side, the mcD campaign has pulled together a number of activists, who have a bit more spring in their step and want to do things; and the trade unions – despite their alliegance to the Labour Party – are not buying the Brown/Blair agenda. What is more, despite the appalling behaviour of both the SP and SWP in the Socialist Alliance, the hard left outside the labour Party have held together a solid layer of cadre – who could be an asset if they would just stop thinking they are the leadership . There ar also small signs of recovery in the trade union movement, with some unions, for example the RMT, FBU, PCS and possibly the GMB aligning themselves as unions that are more prepared to fight.
There are also a number of single issue campaigns, like Defend Council Housing, Stop the War Coalition, and others where the left have worked very well together.
It is not impossible for common projects to flourish in these circumstances.
And Owen: What I take from Andy’s position is that he is drawn to a struggle in an arena that makes possible such struggles because of its class nature (sorry about the dodgy wording!)
I don’t understand what position is being associated with me here. ;o)
I could tell Mark P wasn’t Mark Fischer from the CPGB. My experience is that he is more acquainted with the scientific aspect of scientific socialism than this writer.
For science you need figures. 9% or 18% of 180,000. Things like that. His initial comment is a shame because most everything else is right such as his demolition of a supposed Labour left of 30 MPs – what, people like Diane Abbott-Portillo?! Or
the one with the double-barrelled name who lives in the Teletubbies house?
But he’s also wrong in saying that a few non Labour Lefts look to Labour because of Lenin. They’re not familiar with 1920s communist arguments whatsoever – they do it from weakness both organisational and political.
Indeed, of a supposed 16,000 or 40,000 ready to vote for McDonnell, how many of them would have been as Left as him (probably more than you think, I reported on my site about how his platform was no more Left than Meacher’s).
I didn’t claim for a moment that figure was that useful, it was just an indicator – and it would be good to compare that to what percentage voted for Benn in 1981 – as just an indication.
I was going to go and say that I can’t let Owen (homeboy of mine that he is, wrong end of town I presume) get away with rubbish like “John McDonnell’s campaign was not only the most significant and high profile Labour left political campaign since the early 80s” .
I see, from reading more, that others have got there first but still let’s compare how feeble was the McDonnell campaign against the support for the miners, against the Poll Tax, the campaigns against both Gulf Wars, CND (x2) and more. Owen really is living in a box if he thinks going round the country talking to a few aging Tribunites in pub back rooms was ‘big’ in any sense. Kind of smaller than that minature pub on Chestergate with a 4 foot long bar and doubtless long gone.
I’ve reached a bit of a brick wall with my research on Left party figures. I can’t get any reliable info from SWP members. I’ve tried emailing a few prominent SWP bloggers as well but don’t even get a response. Any SWPer who would like to help by passing on membership numbers – please contact me. Absolute confidentiality assured.
I have had several SP comrades contact me with the same info about their numbers (Thanks) so I think I can be confident in saying the SP is a fair bit bigger than Dave estimates. I think all the other numbers you guess are low as well and I wonder how many are left in the SSP and Solidarity (again, comrades, info most gratefully received).
I’d be interested to know what you base your figures on, Mark P? The SP figures I have had from 4 sources are all identical and lower than that.
The thing that interested me today, when I opened my FT, was an article saying that strikes in Britain soared last year. The article had a great graphic – a chart of days lost since the 1890s that summed up the history of militancy in this country.
Dave also noticed the story and posted on it. There is very little as fundamental to how we progress and go forward as there is in those figures.
7 have commented on that story on Dave’s blog. 23 on this story.
It does just show you the irreformable reformism of all the Labourites on this site. I likewise hope that they are the ones to take a ‘running jump’, as the councillor writes above, but over a cliff.
I likewise hope that they are the ones to take a ‘running jump’, as the councillor writes above, but over a cliff.
Wow, that’s nice. I hope you feel better after saying that, Mr. Lefter than Thou.
I’ll feel better when it happens, Mr Guy from Crossroads with the Green Bobble Hat.
Mark P:
As the nomination period grew closer you kindly took the time to explain to us all that McDonnell was in the race to win and that his campaign represented an earth shattering step forward for the working class.
Owen:
I have never claimed that I believed John would win the final election.
That’s not actually what Mark said, is it?
Owen, 24th January:
this whole campaign is based on working towards victory. If all socialists in Britain joined the Labour party, and the broad lefts successfully mobilised the trade union vote, then yes, victory would not be as far-fetched as you might imagine.
Owen, 13th March:
In 76, the leader of the Labour party was elected by a few MPs. Today – despite over a decade of Blairism – the labour movement will directly elect the leader. Hundreds of thousands of trade unionists and Labour party members will elect the Prime Minister. It’s almost revolutionary when you think about it!
And here’s my response, later the same day:
Hundreds of thousands of trade unionists and Labour party members will elect the candidate who has already been anointed to succeed the Dear Leader. If there were any danger that the procedure would lead to another outcome, the procedure would be changed. … I believe that the Labour Party machinery has been taken over from above – and drastically remodelled – by a clique called New Labour. I believe that one of the distinguishing characteristics of these people is that they’re serious about power. And I don’t believe that they’ve put in place mechanisms realistically capable of removing them.
In the light of events, my only disagreement with what I wrote then is that I wasn’t pessimistic enough (I never thought John was going to be kept off the ballot paper, & was thinking seriously about joining the party to vote for him).
This is why I don’t think there’s room for anything worthy of the name ‘struggle’ within the Labour Party. The fact that there’s now a debate within the party, covering the range from Blairite to soft-left-ex-Blairite, is an achievement in itself; and – as I said before – it’s a sight more interesting & potentially useful than anything the non-Labour Left can offer at the moment. But struggle it ain’t. And the McDonnell experience suggests anything that could rise to the level of struggle won’t be allowed to happen.
I have no idea where Mark P gets a “claimed” membership of 4000 for the SWP. Claimed by whom?
Not since the late 1970s have actual membership figures been published even internaly to my recall, and when there were about 3500 members in 1978 the SWP was clearly much bigger than it is now.
Up until the late 1980s the SWP leadership would have had a good idea of membership, as everyone had to reapply for membership every january, but this hasn’t happened for some years. I doubt he SWP even knows itself – especialy as there are (from my experience) lots of people who leave but never cancel their standing orders.
Anyone who has ever been an SWP branch secretary or treasurer will know that you get sent lists of members supposedely in your branch from the centre, 75% of whom do not consider themselves members, often names you have never heard of – many of whom had no idea they had ever “joined”.
Based upon attendances at national events, reports in the paper, and some eductated guess work, I would say the number of people who consider themselves to be SWP members may be between 1500 to 2000, of which possibly most are politicaly active in one way or another, but only half are active through the party structures.
Paid sales of Socialist worker probably tend towards 2000, again i don’t have any firm information, but based upon the current profile and activity, and extrapolating from how many I know we sold when I was a paper organiser.
“Up until the late 1980s the SWP leadership would have had a good idea of membership, as everyone had to reapply for membership every january, but this hasn’t happened for some years.”
Didn’t the SWP engage in this practice up until the late 1990s?
I just seem to remember from reading some documents issued by the International Socialist Group – the short lived external SWP faction from the mid-nineties – that the leadership of the SWP were known to use the January re-application process as a means to deregister those members who they thought were being politically awkward.
Sorry, I was rather tired when I last posted, so rather irascable.
Maybe I can amend by getting it more on track. In an era of declining street political activity will Labour’s declining membership effect it a lot? As long as it has the money will direct mail, call centres and the like carry out what it neeeds doing? Are reds dinosaurs in that the street doesn’t matter like it did – if it’s not on myspace or someone’s ipod it doesn’t exist – and if so, should or could we think smarter about how we can best leverage our resources through texts and the like?
It would also be interesting to compare Labour’s membership performance now to how many individual members when first in government in the 1920s – and how many members do some of the succesful European social democrta members have?
Southpawpunch:
I think we have a rather different definition of “scientific”. I don’t think that the complex calculations used by medieval scholastic philosophers to determine the numbers of angels which could dance on the head of a pin were scientific, no matter how many mathematical figures they involved. I think that trying to work out the number of socialist activists in the Labour Party by starting from the number of paper members who might in a one off vote prefer mild old Labour reformism to Thatcherism in a one off leadership vote is similarly preposterous.
That said, I think we actually agree on the low numbers of actual socialist activists in the Labour Party. It is unlikely to be above high three figures and may be lower, based on the evidence of local and national campaigns, attendance at Labour left events, active involvement in the McDonnell campaign and so on.
Andy:
I was getting a claimed membership of 4,000 for the SWP by roughly averaging the leaked figures from SWP conference a couple of years back. After some internal complaints the leadership gave figures to conference for the first time in many years, but confusingly they gave two figures one of about 3,400 and one somewhere around 4,500. The difference was supposedly to do with current registration of something, although I suspect that the higher figure was simply bunged in to avoid frightening the horses. So I took 4,000 as the claimed figure – but remember I divided the claimed figures by three to get an extremely cynical figure for actual activist numbers!
Someone asked me about the SP figure I gave. The Socialist Party made public reference to its size in at least two relatively recent documents. The one I can find at the moment claimed 1,500 members, another more recent claim in a book which isn’t online was I thought 1,800 but that was purely from memory. Given that I can’t find that book I can’t be sure that I have remembered correctly and it may also have been 1,500 or something like it. It doesn’t make much difference for the purposes of this discussion either way.
Socialist Party members incidentally get very detailed breakdowns of membership, recruitment, losses, paper sales, magazine sales, finances raised and the like at their annual conferences so it doesn’t surprise me that Southpawpunch was able to get membership numbers from its activists. SWP members aren’t being more secretive, they just don’t know in the first place.
You are right Mark, I remember it came up now when Molyneux stood for the CC.
I think both figures of 3400 and 4500 are very optimistic.
the SWP suffer a slot from Full timer bullshit, with organisers passing inflated figures up the line, and in an Emperor’s new clothes way, no one wants to be sceptical. We were stuck for years with the claim of 10000 members because some up and coming person lied to Cliff, and then no one cared deny it.
Darren – I never knew registration be used for excluding someone, but it may have happened at a branch level, anyone so excluded could appeal to the Control Commission (it is now called something else), which from my observation was actually quite independent minded.
The SWP did continue with reregistration, but what changed is that they used to default to only those who reregistered being members, whereas they later defauted to counting as a member everyone who didn’t refuse to reregister. So the people who didn’t reregeister but had no real connection with the party any more were then counted as members.
The best statistics I can come up with are as follows:
SP – 400 members
SWP – 400 members
CPB – 400 members
AWL – 100 members
CPGB – 25 members
Not very good figures.
However, in 1912 Lenin said that genuine Bolsheviks could be carried by two carriages – that is – 8 members
Alan,
Where on earth did you get those figures from?
All are massive underestimates.
Andy wrote:
“Darren – I never knew registration be used for excluding someone, but it may have happened at a branch level, anyone so excluded could appeal to the Control Commission (it is now called something else), which from my observation was actually quite independent minded.”
I understand that it happened to a longstanding SWP member in the Derbyshire area who had come a cropper with the central leadership.
Sadly, now being in the States I don’t have the document to hand but the short-lived fraction/faction whatever, International Socialist Group, produced an interesting document on the matter. I probably bought the document at their stall outside the Marxism event some point in the mind to late nineties.
I’d be surprised if any of their documents or pamphlets are online, which is shame ‘cos I seem to remember that they were sharply critical of the supposed independence of the SWP’s Control Commission.
Maybe some of the other anoraks reading this thread still have the ISG pamphlets close to hand.
I am pretty sure you can get the ISG critiques of the SWP on the web , I have seen them somewhere but you can google it yourself if interested.
Within the general paradigm of the SWP, the control commission has had a reasonably sensible view of a lot of disciplinary issues. Obviously that is within a general context of organisational loyalty.
i say this with some confidence because woefully bad SWP full timer Hxxxn Sxxxxxr tried to have me disciplined some many years ago, and was not backed up by the centre. (for telling a joke about pork scratchings, that a mildly facially disfigured comrade overheard and thought (totaly and utterlly wrongly) I was refering to him)
I don’t see why anyone would be excluded from the SWP during card re-issue, when it is quite commonplace to be expelled at any time of the year for political reasons, or on trumped up and improbably pretexts (ask Mike Pearn!)