It must be tough being Tom Watson, the Labour Party deputy leader, who waddles about disliked by the rank and file – although he at least has the support of parliamentarians, not to mention the media.
For after Watson spoke of a ‘secret plan’ between the left-wing grassroots group Momentum and Unite, Britain’s largest trade union – adding that any affiliation between the two would ‘destroy the Labour Party as an electoral force’, while accusing Momentum of ‘entryism’ – Watson was swiftly backed by partial write-ups and anonymous sources courtesy of the BBC and Guardian.
The dispute pits Tom Watson and the Parliamentary Labour Party against Momentum, Unite, Unite’s general secretary Len McCluskey, and by association Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn continues to be supported by McCluskey and much of Unite, while his campaign for the Labour leadership back in 2015 provided Momentum with its raison d’être.
While Corbyn’s position for the time being seems secure, McCluskey is facing a battle for re-election. And though he once shared a flat with Tom Watson, the pair have fallen out and find themselves on opposite sides of the Labour spectrum. Watson and the media seem implicitly to be siding with Gerard Coyne, McCluskey’s challenger, and the stakes are high, with Unite remaining the Labour Party’s biggest financial backer.
Both the BBC and Guardian have characterised Momentum as a Machiavellian organisation, ‘a party within a party’ which attempts to orchestrate the abuse and eventual removal of disliked Labour MPs. And on a day of claim and counterclaim, the outlets emphasised that Watson had been ‘cheered to the rafters’ as the Parliamentary Labour Party gathered for an ‘explosive’ meeting.
Watson made his claim of a ‘secret plan’ after Jon Lansman, the founder of Momentum, was recorded telling a branch meeting in Richmond, London, ‘Assuming that Len McCluskey wins the general secretaryship, which I think he will, Unite will affiliate to Momentum and will fully participate in Momentum’. After the PLP gathering, Corbyn and Watson attempted to defuse the situation with a joint call for party unity, although Labour MPs continued to accuse Corbyn’s allies of briefing against the deputy.
Attempting to characterise the dispute while damning the state of Labour, the BBC resorted to a couple of anonymous ‘senior peers’, reporting:
‘One senior peer, who is veteran of earlier internal battles, said it was ‘like 1985 all over again’, while another senior peer said it was ‘much worse than that.’
One wonders whether the BBC could not have conjured a third peer, enough to declare the situation worse still, but meanwhile the broadcasting corporation’s assistant political editor stressed that the ‘infighting’ was potentially ‘catastrophic’, especially after the recent Copeland by-election loss.
To be fair Momentum were hardly any better, as hyperbole and scaremongering thoughtlessly flew. Christine Shawcroft, a member of Momentum who sits on the party’s National Executive Council, called Watson ‘rather right-wing’, suggesting that he wanted to return to a ‘command and control’ system for running the party based on an old ‘Blairite model’. And after wantonly tossing off three herself, she rejected any suggestion that Momentum was ‘hard-left’ or ‘entryist’, describing the terms as ‘silly labels’.
McCluskey responded to Watson’s picture of entryist destruction by accusing Watson and the Labour Party’s ‘authoritarian’ right of behaving as though they were in a ‘low-budget remake of The Godfather‘. He and Lansman denied any collusion or any exchange of funds, but Coyne still denounced the recording as a ‘shocking revelation which reveals a secret hard-left plot’. And after everybody had accused everybody of attempting to stab each other in the back, everyone involved ended up looking like morons.
