Expelling Neal Lawson is a decapitation strategy
Director and co-founder of Compass, Neal Lawson, faces expulsion from the Labour Party.
For tweeting a comment about Green-LibDem co-operation two years ago, Neal Lawson is apparently accused of a ‘prohibited act’.
There is a minority grouping in the party that defends every expulsion and cheers on each time an individual is blocked from seeking selection as a Labour candidate. For this group, Lawson is claimed to be guilty of advocating a vote against Labour in local elections - although his tweet self-evidently did no such thing. Rather, in pointing to LibDem-Green co-operation, Lawson was obviously implying that Labour should adopt the same approach. You do not have to agree with this perspective to see that expelling a person for advocating it is a contravention of basic norms of democratic discussion.
Neal Lawson has been a driving force of the Compass strand within the party for many years. He worked with senior New Labour figures such as Gordon Brown before pursuing his politics through Compass. Compass has advocated an open, pluralist, decentralising, social democratic strand of Labour politics. Broadly soft left, for some time Compass stood as one of the counterpoints to the right of the party in Progress and Labour First.
In their pursuit of expelling such a longstanding Labour figure as Neal Lawson, the advocates of machine politics have put themselves under renewed scrutiny.
The highly respected journalist Steve Richards has described those who expel the likes of Neal Lawson as ‘swaggering extremists.’ The Guardian’s chief leader writer Randeep Ramesh called it an absurdist farce.
Compass campaigns on the politics of building ‘progressive alliances’ between parties, including at elections. Many have differences with that strategy. But the question is not the merits or otherwise of the politics of Compass, but their right to be part of Labour’s internal dialogue. The progressive alliance strand within Labour represents a wholly legitimate contribution to political discourse.
Neal Lawson’s actual crime is not the spurious pretext of the wording of an old tweet. Bigger misdemeanours are involved.
In the first place, in arguing for electoral alliances with other anti-Tory parties, Lawson and Compass are in opposition to the dominant strategy of putting the main emphasis on moving rightwards. In particular, the Lawson-Compass position openly challenges Labour not to take socially progressive voters for granted. This challenges the leadership’s overriding orthodoxy.
In the second place, Neal Lawson’s pluralism has meant he and Compass have vigorously opposed the rise of machine-politics in the Labour Party, in which candidates with wide support are administratively blocked from even standing. Lawson has repeatedly used his platform in the media to defend Labour members’ ability to choose candidates from a politically diverse pool.
Trying to take out Neal Lawson is a decapitation strategy – removing a leading voice of a current that takes a different view to that of the leadership.
Going after Neal Lawson on the stated grounds of a tweet about co-operation between parties has huge ramifications. Many Labour members and supporters back tactical voting. Many back proportional representation and want to construct coalitions to keep the Tories out of power. Where do they stand now?
In January, Lawson warned that ‘withdrawing into a corner and defining anyone who fails to support you as an enemy just narrows the scope of your own vision and capacity to act.’ By trying to expel him, the machine has vividly proved his point.
Lawson’s expulsion should unite democrats and pluralists in opposition to it.
As I have previously argued, each arbitrary and unfair exclusion advances the machine-politics of command and control. Pushing back naturally advances a more pluralist position based on the labour movement’s democratic norms.
There is now a clear case for closer co-operation and the coming together of all democratic forces in the party and the labour movement, or some form of wide coalition, to agree a framework precisely to push back.
The advocates of Labour’s machine politics are creating the circumstances for a majority to coalesce against them - should people be willing to take that up.