Hi all,
Labour Left Internationalists needs your supporting nomination to get its candidates into the contest and onto the ballot paper in Momentum’s National Coordinating Group elections.
Nominations have to be submitted via a personalised weblink (emailed to you) before 23:59 on Wednesday 22 June.
Candidates’ details appear on the website, and you get a chance to click to nominate them, only once their “self-nomination” has been vetted and approved by the Momentum office staff. That’s happening only on Tuesday afternoon 21 June, so time is short.
Voting will be 28 June to 6 July.
• What political basis is LLI standing on?
In a sentence – “We’re standing in the Momentum National Coordinating Group (NCG) to advocate a Momentum which mobilises, visibly and regularly, to support class and social struggles – strikes like the rail strikes and long-running food couriers’ dispute, protests like against the Police Bill.”
• Where on the Momentum website do I nominate?
You can’t go straight there. You’ll get an email from Team Momentum, subject line “OPEN: Nominations for NCG election”, with a personalised link for you to make nominations.
• What if I can’t find that email?
Search your email inbox, and look in spam. If you still can’t find it, maybe your Momentum membership has lapsed, maybe there’s a glitch in Momentum’s system, maybe you never got round to joining Momentum.
Go to
https://my.peoplesmomentum.com/
to check your membership. You need to remember the e-address you signed up with. You can get a password reminder if you have forgotten your password. You don’t need to remember your Momentum membership number.
If you’re still stuck, go to
https://join.peoplesmomentum.com/
and rejoin or join. You can name your own level of financial contributions, so this isn’t expensive.
• Should I put in my nominations now, or wait until Wednesday?
You can re-use the personalised nominating link you’re sent as many times as you like.
The LLI candidates’ self-nominations have been posted up as available for supporting nominations, in London and Eastern anyway.
If you used the personalised link on Monday, you can go back again now to change your nominations.
The leadership factions, Momentum Organisers and Your Momentum, had plenty of time to prepare, so will easily get their quotas of 20. By nominating LLI candidates you can widen the debate in the election.
Don’t leave it so late that if you forget on Wednesday, or have IT difficulties then, it’s too late to mend that.
• Where do I find Momentum’s info about the NCG elections?
• Why is this important?
Momentum’s activity has dwindled over the last couple of years, as has indeed the activity of the whole Labour left. But there are still about 20,000 people out there getting the Momentum emails, even if they don’t have functioning Momentum local group meetings to attend.
LLI did quite well in that “electorate” in both the policy primaries this year and the democratic-reform ballot. There is an audience for LLI’s ideas. This NCG election is by STV, so our chances are better than were those of Momentum Internationalists in 2020.
Many, not just on the left or in the unions’ rank and file, but among union leaders and in the Labour centre and soft-right too, are visibly dissatisfied with Starmer. They are quiet now. At some point, and we don’t know when, they will start to kick back.
Sustaining and building a profile and a presence for LLI in these difficult times is important to prepare for that, just as we would have done much better in the Corbyn years if we had been able to sustain a stronger class-struggle internationalist left, operating at rank-and-file level, in the difficult years before 2015.
• Why is this all such a rush?
Evidently the two big factions in the top layers of Momentum – Your Momentum (YM, what was Forward Momentum in 2020) and Momentum Organisers (MO, what was Momentum Renewal then) knew in advance about this NCG elections, and had their operations planned. We didn’t have that inside knowledge.
The rules about supporting nominations were published only on Friday 17 June.
Please use your social-media networks to spread this call for nominations, including to Momentum members who won’t agree 100% with LLI but do want a broader contest of ideas in this NCG election.
• Is LLI saying there’s no difference between those two factions?
No. It’s an STV election. We advocate transferring to Your Momentum, and voting Your Momentum in regions where LLI has no candidates. But if you want an election with some open contest of ideas, wider than the rather code worded exchanges between YM and MO, put in your nomination to get LLI on the ballot.
Thanks,
Labour Left Internationalists