Momentum only helped friendly candidates

The argument

Momentum has been blamed for many of Labour's shortcomings in the 2019 election, including the radical manifesto and its insistence on Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. This argument holds that nowhere did the organisation fail the party more than in its election strategy — the allocation of the people and effort it could actually deploy. An activist organisation's contribution to a campaign is its capacity to put volunteers where they change results: canvassing, phone banks, leaflets, turnout operations on the day. That capacity is finite, which makes its distribution a strategic decision rather than an administrative one. Momentum limited its support to those aligned with its left-wing ideology and to those running in a narrow set of marginal seats, and was stingy and selfish in distributing its resources. Both halves of that restriction cost seats. The ideological filter withheld help from Labour candidates who were defending or contesting winnable constituencies but did not belong to the organisation's faction — candidates whose victories would have counted for the party exactly as much as anyone else's. The narrow definition of which marginals qualified compounded the error, because no campaign can reliably identify in advance which seats will prove close, and 2019 produced results in places few had listed as battlegrounds. The consequence was that Labour fought the election with a significant part of its activist strength deployed according to internal loyalty rather than electoral need. Volunteers who might have been working in seats the party went on to lose were instead concentrated where the organisation preferred to spend them. On this argument the failure was strategic rather than doctrinal: whatever the merits of the manifesto or the leadership, the resources available were misallocated. Because Momentum only helped friendly candidates, it cost the Labour Party seats in 2019.

Context

In the 2019 election campaign, Momentum operated as a party within a party. It only campaigned for the candidates aligned with its ideology or Labour candidates in marginal seats. This left many candidates with small majorities highly vulnerable.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Without Momentum the result would have been far worse. Labour lost the working-class vote. Citizens in the North were unimpressed with Corbyn’s leadership and found little reassurance in a party so willing to dismiss the results of the 2016 referendum. Momentum was one of the few elements in the Labour Party that still connected with working-class voters. Their endorsement of policies that appealed to the working-class voters of the North prevented a total collapse of the Labour vote. Additionally, Momentum enjoyed success in its social media strategy, generating a buzz around Jeremy Corbyn online, and was able to mobilise the nation’s youth to get boots on the ground knocking on doors. Without Momentum, Labour would have had dramatically less success mobilising volunteers and breaking through the noise on social media platforms, harming their election campaign even further.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] It was because of Momentum that Labour had the resources it did. Without them, candidates everwhere would have been struggling to get boots on the ground and recruit online and offline volunteers.