By Bryn Griffiths

The English left are currently in a battle for survival. Our Welsh, Irish and Scottish counterparts have different and more complex stories to tell but in the current phase of the battle in the English Labour Party, survival is the name of the game.

In North Essex, as has happened elsewhere, local Labour Parties have shed a worrying proportion of those that flooded into the Party to support Jeremy Corbyn.  The big question is what do we do, in this difficult moment, to avoid a self-imposed worsening of the situation brought about by the fragmentation of our own side?

In North Essex, Momentum supporters have got together with other Labour lefts, those that have left the Party, a local group called Creating Change and other local activists to create North Essex Transformed.   The World Transformed (TWT) movement started as a festival of politics, arts, and music in 2016 inspired by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, and has since become the biggest political education organisation in the UK. It brings together grassroots activists, left-wing politicians, academics and artists, as well as people new to politics, to engage in discussions, debates, and cultural activities, to build relationships and strategize for the struggle ahead.

In 2018, Derby Transformed organised the very first local TWT event. Today North Essex Transformed is one of over 20 local groups who have established themselves to organise local and regional events in their own communities.

In March 2023 our new North Essex Transformed group organised a Songs of Resistance launch event.  The Songs of Resistance invited local folk singers to join us and discovered some talented singers in the local Labour Party and Labour Students.  For once the left organised an event which had the feel of a celebration rather than a wake.  At the event we celebrated and sang about great struggles of the past but we did not wallow in our history. Central to the event were contributions by a local Black Lives Matter activist alongside active strikers from the NHS, the postal service, the university, and college sectors. The event donated £100 to striking health workers.

The event, dare I say it, was actually a great deal of fun and you can get a taste of what it was like here   From the very start we sought to bring people together across political boundaries. Our aim is a new inclusive style of politics that, while including the Labour Left, goes way beyond it.  The consensus locally is that we have made an excellent start at bringing people together in the post-Corbyn post-COVID world.

Next up we are turning our attention to King Charles’s Coronation on 6th May 2023. You can find out more and get tickets here for our Festival of the Common People.

In the mainstream media on coronation day there will be a celebration of a particular kind of English history. A history of the powerful, the kings and queens: their history will be one of the few to the exclusion of the many. To offer an alternative to their ‘official history’ of royals, aristocrats and generals, North Essex Transformed will gather in one of Colchester’s finest pubs for a festival of the common people.  Our English history will be a history from below in the tradition of such greats as EP Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Raphael Samuel, Christopher Hill and Dorothy Thompson.

Banner by local radical artist Clare Marsh at the launch of North Essex Transformed on 3rd March 2023 as a part of an exhibition of her work.

The history from below/ common people/ people’s history approach will allow us to develop our history as opposed to their history which King Charles will be celebrating with all his bling. It takes us onto the territory of local Colchester boy John Ball and the Peasants’ Revolt  and the English Revolution including the Levellers and the Diggers. We will explore the struggle for universal suffrage and democratic rights.

In my opinion, it is crucial that we maintain our membership of the Labour Party. I am the Chair of Colchester Labour, but to offer only a diet of Labour Party meetings for left activity would be an unappetising prospect! As well as having a firm foot in the Labour Party, we must also have one outside the Party as well. The Festival of the Common People shows that there is nothing to stop Party members breathing the political oxygen outside the Party and speaking with our own voice again on the big matters of the day. Comrades, you do not have to give the Labour right exactly what they want and rip up your party card to talk about socialism again!

Back in the late 1980s, the left organised a series of huge Socialist Conferences in the late Tony Benn’s constituency of Chesterfield. Just like today with the World Transformed, we came together with one foot in the Labour party and one outside.  In the late 1980s we called this approach the ‘twin track approach’: one track in the Labour Party and one outside, both equally important, and both entirely complementary.  We must not cede the Labour Party to the right but neither must we lose the confidence to articulate our socialist politics.

After the Coronation, we plan to see if we can build even broader alliances as part of the celebrations of the 75^th anniversary of the National Health Service. We are well-placed to campaign in defence of the NHS as Will Quince our local member of parliament is the Health Minister. 

To defend the NHS we must also have a vision of what a Labour Government should do to save the NHS and we will draw upon the expertise of organisations such as the Socialist Health Association and NHS Workers Say No. To defend the NHS, we will be needing that old ‘twin track approach.’  Outside the Labour Party we must support all the workers taking strike action and within the Party we must challenge Wes Streeting every inch of the way when he clashes with Labour’s own Socialist Health Association.

It is tough in the Labour Party just now but with our Momentum foot firmly in the Labour Party and our other foot in North Essex Transformed seeking broader alliances, I am confident we can do a lot to avoid any further unnecessary fragmentation.  If Starmer delivers a Labour Government we will face new opportunities for the left so what we do today to conserve and prepare our forces could be a decisive factor in the struggles ahead. 

If in your local area you feel the need to pull the left together again, perhaps a local World Transformed group could be just the kind of coalition-building exercise you are looking for? Our near neighbours in Norwich have established a Transformed group: why don’t you join us?

Festival of the Common People

Saturday  6th May, 14:00 – 18:00, New Inn, Chapel Street South Colchester CO2 7AX. Tickets here.

Bryn Griffiths is on the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy Executive; he is the Chair of Colchester Labour Party and an activist in both North Essex Momentum and North Essex Transformed but the views he expresses are his own personal views and nobody other than Bryn has any responsibility for any of the words above.  Bryn is active on social media and you can follow him here https://linktr.ee/brynhgriffiths

Top image: Colchester, Source: From geograph.org.uk. Author: David Hawgood, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.