For those who might still be understandably tempted to send in their Labour Party membership card with a “please purge me” message; “it would be an honour to join Ken Loach” etc, comes a very compelling essay from Jeremy Gilbert — Why we shouldn’t leave the Labour Party.

Published in the December 2021 edition of Momentum’s newsletter, The Educator, Gilbert argues eloquently and at length that leaving Labour “would be a catastrophic mistake.” It is, he says, exactly what the party’s right-wing leadership want. Why hand them that victory?

We may want to quit in order to send a message of solidarity with Jeremy Corbyn (still without the Labour whip but not actually purged from the party like many others), or to object to the latest announcement regarding Labour’s opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. 

But in doing so, writes Gilbert, we are prioritising “the moral sentiments of one individual – the member who leaves the party – over their responsibility to a collective movement.”

Fight on the inside, not the outside he says. It’s an age-old dilemma.

Gilbert’s case is strong because, provided it doesn’t cost you your membership, Labour members could potentially swing the party back to its socialist roots and principles. Members have the power to vote for the party leader, and elect progressives, not only as members of parliament but also for positions on the national executive committee (NEC). 

“It simply stands to reason that the more of us who leave, the worse we will do in the next set of NEC elections, and the easier it will be for still further suspensions to be carried out,” Gilbert writes.

Here in the US, there are similarly disaffected Democrats who hoped to see socialism ushered in under a Bernie Sanders presidency. It didn’t happen, but there does not seem to have been a noticeable decline in party membership. Indeed, many argue that Sanders’s candidacy alone pushed the Democratic Party leftwards. 

Our most high-profile socialist Member of Congress, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, is at least not the subject of a witch hunt by her own party, even as she is sometimes opposed by its less progressive members. (How she is treated by the Republicans is, of course, a whole other disgraceful story).

While in theory, members of the Democratic Party, like Labour members, get to choose the party leader — in this case our candidate in the presidential election — by voting in the primaries, the system does not feel entirely uncorrupted. 

The Democratic National Committee clearly conspired against Sanders, twice, to ensure he was not the candidate when Hillary Clinton ran, and again when Joe Biden did. Biden looked out of the race, a befuddled also-ran, until, all of a sudden, he was the clear front-runner and then the candidate. The fix was in.

And Democratic voters can be fickle. In the notorious 2000 presidential election, more registered Democrats in Florida — over 200,000 of them — voted for Republican George W Bush than for maverick Green Party candidate and consumer advocate, Ralph Nader, who garnered 97,488 votes. 

Florida pretty much decided the presidential election (hanging chads and the eventual US Supreme Court decision notwithstanding). Yet Nader, a whipping boy for less progressive Democrats, much as Corbyn is for Right Labour, was blamed for the entire election outcome and Gore’s defeat.

After the debacle of 2000, did those of us on the left of the Democratic Party exit for the Green Party instead? Not really. Some clung on to the Nader blame game — which persists to this day — while others continued trying to make the Democratic Party better. That seemed to have worked when, in 2008, we elected the first black US president in Barack Obama who enjoyed two terms. But again, many early hopes were dashed. Obama was very far indeed from being a socialist.

And then came four years of hell. And January 6, 2021. So what did fair-minded Republican Party members — arguably a dwindling if not endangered species — do? In the month following the January 6 Capitol riot there were reports of a mass exodus from the Republican Party. But things were not as dramatic as they appeared. There were resignations, but it wasn’t a tidal wave.

So did this mean that “good” Republicans had decided to stay and fight from the inside, an approach that Gilbert could logically argue for? Or did those who left join the Democratic Party, arguably a better step? Is it only morally wrong to abandon an allegedly progressive party to its right-wing minders, or is it also the case that Republicans should stay put to prevent theirs turning into some sort of Putin-style totalitarian putsch party?

It’s a question that’s hard to answer. On January 6, at 8pm, Momentum will be hosting a participatory call with Jeremy Gilbert and others on TwitterSpaces to discuss this further, in an effort to “convince” people “to remain inside the Labour Party.” Whatever one’s inclination, this sounds like a conversation worth joining.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based just outside Washington, DC.