Remember Scarborough!.
| Author | Jones, Morgan |
Internal political cultures are notoriously hard to write about; otherwise deft histories struggle to capture their textures. H.M. Drucker summed up the problem neatly; as a member of the Labour Party, he was aware of internal cultures and ways of doing things that never made it into writing - 'I had heard tunes which I could not, as an academic, transcribe'. (1) Internal politics have their own internal logics, and are full of acronyms and arcane bodies and assumptions and connections that are often impossible for the layperson to comprehend. The Labour Party is a foreign country; we do things differently here, and our histories are our own.
In some ways, it is quite easy to describe what happened in Scarborough. In February 2016, Labour held a youth conference in a small seaside town in the north of England. At this conference, in a closely contested election, Jasmine Beckett, the candidate of the Labour right, narrowly beat James Elliott, the left's candidate, in the race for NEC Youth Rep. This result meant that Beckett became a full voting member of the party's governing body, the only position of genuine political significance in the party's youth wing. Aside from the NEC race, there were also several other elections. These included the ballot for chair of Labour Students (then a full time paid position), in which Kate Dearden, the right's candidate, beat Ollie Hill, the left's candidate; and for chair of Young Labour, which went to the left's Caroline Hill.
In reality, however, this list of results tells you very little about what happened at Scarborough, or what Scarborough has come to mean in the minds of a generation of young Labour activists.
Speaking from the party's right, former Labour Students elected officer Dominique, in discussing how Scarborough had been built up to be 'this terrible, awful weekend', commented: 'I feel that some events in Labour Party history weren't that terrible and weren't that awful. But this one actually was'. (Dominique is not her real name - all interviewees in this article are pseudonymised.)
This article, primarily drawn from interviews with attendees, is the first attempt at a history of that thoroughly uncomradely weekend and its afterlife. The people interviewed come from all sides of the party. For some, Scarborough was their first experience of the nastiness of student politics, and for others it very much wasn't. All have been active in Labour politics for some years now, with most having held some elected position in the youth wing or having been employed by the party or a trade union at one stage or another.
In advance
The election of Jeremy Corbyn in September 2015 had drawn a wave of fresh-faced activists into youth politics. By the time the Young Labour conference opened in Scarborough on 27 February 2016, a proto-Momentum slate had already swept the board at the Young Labour committee elections (held online with a One Member One Vote system). Susan, one of these victorious candidates, described the left as 'quite confident' about taking the bigger positions on offer at Scarborough. A full conference election with a delegate system is, however, a wholly different beast to the comparatively bloodless affair that is an online ballot; a mass of people who had previously only experienced the relatively comradely worlds of Young Labour groups and university Labour Clubs were about to be exposed to fully automated luxury factionalism for the first time. The NEC youth election was widely viewed as an early test of Corbynism itself; as Shannon, a Scarborough delegate and sometime university Labour Club chair, put it, 'I think we were very aware that we were playing out a smaller version of what was happening in the party'.
The story of Scarborough doesn't start in Scarborough itself, but in Oxford, where trouble had been brewing for some time. As Richard, at the time an active Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) member, recalls, in 'September or October [of 2015] the atmosphere within the Oxford University Labour Club had been growing increasingly fraught in a number of ways. One of these ways was an increasing sense among some parts of the club that there was a problem with anti-Semitism'.
What Richard termed the 'atmosphere of suspicion' finally boiled over in the first weeks of 2016, culminating in the resignation of then OULC co-chair Alex Chalmers. Chalmers's resignation came in the form of a much-circulated Facebook status in which he alleged widespread anti-Semitism in OULC. By all accounts, the growing toxicity meant that Chalmers was a reluctant holder of his office. Matters had come to a head at a vote on a motion about supporting an Israeli Apartheid Week; as Chalmers later wrote in the New Statesman, 'I am no stranger to bad-tempered meetings or sharp debate, but the sheer hatred people felt was visible in their eyes'; 'I was denounced as a Zionist stooge and while I was counting the votes, someone stood over me suggesting that my Zionist sympathies meant that I might try to rig the ballot'. (2)
As indicated by the ease with which this affair fell into the pages of the New Statesman, a unique function of Oxford student politics is its proximity to the media, including national newspapers. Chalmers's Facebook status fired the starting gun for an appreciably-sized press scandal, with reporting on OULC spreading from the Times and Telegraph to the Israeli press and the New York Times. (3)
With this beam of press attention turned on OULC, it emerged that James Elliott, an Oxford history student and sometime youth advisor on Jeremy Corbyn's leadership campaign, who had, Richard said, been 'prepping his NEC run for a very long time', had written a number of controversial articles. Richard recalls: 'An article was found, I think by the Times, that [Elliott] had written in the [Oxford Student] where he'd said "I don't like being called anti-Semitic, but it doesn't make me bleed" - I think that was the line' (The line was actually: 'I don't like being smeared as anti-Semitic, but I don't bleed from it either'). (4)
These...
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