In March it was announced that there had been a drastic fall in Labour Party membership over the previous two months. This indicates disgust amongst the membership over Labour’s line on Gaza and its backing off from any meaningful action on the environment. The National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Labour Party revealed that there had been a loss of more than 23,000 members. Membership had stood at 390,000 in January but dropped to 366,604 in March. Of these, 11,700 were in arrears. This contrasts with the historic peak of a membership of 532,000 in 2019 with the Corbyn phenomenon.
The Labour leadership will be unconcerned about this. Any remaining members who had illusions on Labour being a socially progressive party are being shed, and with their departure the door has been decisively slammed on Corbynism. In June last year it was reported that membership has fallen by almost 170,000 since 2018 and by approximately 19,000 since the previous summer, despite tens of thousands of members joining the party over the last year.
This indicates the continued haemorrhaging of Corbyn supporters and an influx of those who support Starmer’s policies. Corbynism was a last ditch attempt to save the rotting corpse of Labour Party ‘radicalism’. Let us now bury that foul smelling cadaver and look towards revolutionary change and autonomous grass roots organisation in the workplaces, neighbourhoods and on the streets.
Photo:Rwendland, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons