Momentum building in Brighton as grassroots group goes mainstream

On the way down the hill towards the Labour conference on the Brighton seafront, delegates cannot miss Momentum’s message, spray-painted across the front of the Synergy Centre: “Join the party.”

The building is one of nine venues hosting the grassroots group’s festival The World Transformed. Once seen by many in Labour as a rival event, within 12 months, it has become part of the mainstream. Activists are here to celebrate, but also to be at the heart of the Labour party.

Speaking to a crowd of 300 people on Sunday afternoon, the Norwich South MP, Clive Lewis, said: “The World Transformed feels like home. This is where the action is at this conference, increasingly so.”

Lewis said the second festival marked a new phase for the group after Labour’s surprise result in the general election. “Momentum was the praetorian guard for Jeremy Corbyn, but he has kicked some ass, and he doesn’t need that same level of guard as he did a few months ago,” he said.

“Now it’s about reaching out, building a mass social movement, shape and reform the entire economy and social system.”

The number of high-profile speakers has increased in the festival’s second year. The former Labour leader Ed Miliband will host a pub quiz, and panel discussions include the shadow cabinet ministers John McDonnell and Diane Abbott, as well as MPs who are not natural Corbynites. One is Lisa Nandy, who ran Owen Smith’s leadership challenge to Corbyn last year.

Sasha Josette, one of the festival’s curators, said: “We’ve made socialism mainstream. That’s always what [it] has been about, bringing people in.”

There remains room for plenty of the esoteric sessions the festival put on last year in Liverpool, including a late-night session on acid Corbynism, viral video workshops, spoken word evenings and two late-night raves.

Events have been overflowing, with almost 1,000 people turning up to a 300-capacity venue on Sunday, and volunteers turning away large numbers and updating the festival app to give live capacity updates.

With 8,000 attendees expected over four days, TWT organisers seriously considered hiring the Brighton Dome, with a capacity of 3,000, before settling on adding additional venues.

Josette said the festival would always be about new and radical ideas. “What is really radical is having the space for those ideas. I don’t know if you get that over the road [at the main conference], because I’ve never been. And that says it all, really. What happened from Jeremy’s leadership campaign was that people started asking for and wanting this kind of space.”

Many of the sessions are about training activists for the next general election. Beth Foster-Ogg, 20, who runs Momentum’s training programme, said she had seen “a new respect” for the group after the role it played in the June election.

“In a lot of places where MPs or local CLPs [constituency Labour parties] wouldn’t naturally be aligned to Momentum, there were bridges built with local Momentum groups who helped bring a lot of people, a lot of training and extra capacity,” she said.

However, although a greater number of MPs are speaking at TWT, for many more, the suspicion of Momentum has not evaporated, with a major party review to come over the next 12 months that may include mandatory reselection of MPs.

Huda Elmi, 22, a member of Momentum’s ruling national coordinating group, said the organisation would make no apology for wanting to give local members more power in choosing MPs, even if it meant deselections. “It would be false advertising to say ‘Hey, join this mass movement, but oh sorry, you can’t get involved,” she said.

Emma Rees, a national organiser and one of Momentum’s most senior members of staff, said the group’s priority was electing “a transformative Labour government”, hinting that MPs not onboard with that agenda were an obstacle.

“For my entire lifetime, people have talked about politics being broken and all politicians being the same,” she said. “We have a huge opportunity to revitalise the way we do politics in this country. That is absolute[ly] integral to the Labour party being a transformative government.”

A key theme of the festival is Labour’s digital activism and one of the festival’s spaces, Platf9rm, is hosting a three-day “hackathon” for members to develop new digital campaigning tools

Momentum’s head of social media, Harry Hayball, said during the recent election, people had turned up to Momentum’s offices to offer help with video editing and ideas for social media campaigns.

“A huge organisation like the Labour party is very risk-averse, it’s complicated getting things signed off,” he said. “There’s room here for experimentation ... People just come along with an idea.”

The ascendency of Momentum as part of the Labour mainstream is all the more marked given the existential crisis the group underwent early this year, when the Momentum chair, Jon Lansman, forced through a constitutional change to ensure all Momentum members were also Labour members.

The move put the group at odds with prominent hard-left members, several of whom who had been expelled from Labour in the past.

Although none of Momentum’s leaders will explicitly acknowledge it, the change has meant the group’s younger faction, backed by Lansman, holds the reins on a national level, but local groups might still be under the control of older, Trotskyist activists who were part of Labour’s internal battles in the 1980s.

The festival has young and old attendees in almost equal measure. Outside, Socialist Worker sellers mix with teenage activists in Corbyn T-shirts.

Asked if Momentum’s Trotskyist faction had been marginalised, Rees said: “The kind of people you are talking about were always very, very small in number; in a previous governance structure, they had a disproportionately large voice.”

Foster-Ogg said the group is far more careful about who it allows to operate under its banner. “You can’t just start up a group and call yourself Momentum, it’s much more carefully done now,” she said.

“In the beginning, it was a massive burst, but now we have groups nearly everywhere; we have a strategy for setting up groups. You have to go through a verification process.”

Hayball said Momentum’s strategy online and offline was now far slicker. “It’s like a startup , it starts spontaneously and things progress through personal contact,” he said.

“But as things grow, then that ceases to be effective and you have to start to standardise things. That’s what Momentum has gone through over the past nine months.”