Politics explained: How Momentum grew up, from Corbyn fan club to policy powerhouse

A four-day working week, a zero-carbon economy by 2030 and the abolition of immigration detention centres: that’s the radical programme being advocated by Momentum, the Labour pressure group.

The organisation was set up by Jon Lansman, who ran Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign in 2015, as a way of sustaining and harnessing the energy (and email list) generated by that election.

Lansman, who cut his teeth 34 years earlier in Tony Benn’s deputy leadership campaign in 1981, had learned from a lifetime of internal opposition to New Labour. And many of those lessons were learned from New Labour.

There are obvious parallels between Momentum and Progress, an organisation set up by Peter Mandelson in 1996 to support Tony Blair’s leadership in the Labour Party. Momentum is larger than Progress ever was, with 40,000 members, reflecting the huge surge in Labour membership attracted by Corbyn’s leadership.

But now, as Momentum, along with Corbyn’s leadership, enters a more mature phase, it is following the Progress model of expanding from factional organisation into the think tank business.

Both Momentum and Progress operate as (rival) party factions, organising canvassing, political education, the selection of candidates, and votes at Labour’s annual conference. Momentum’s slate of candidates for the party’s national executive has won a clean sweep every year, and its smartphone app for advising delegates how to vote at Labour conferences has generally ensured that the leadership gets its way.

As with Progress, Momentum is full of talented young people gaining their first experience of working in politics – many of them will be the MPs and ministers of the future.

One of the other ways in which Progress was useful to Tony Blair was that it floated policy ideas. It was at arm’s length from the leader, so gave Blair the freedom to test ideas without committing to them.

Now Momentum is doing the same thing for Corbyn. As we reported last week, the group has come up with a set of eye-catching policies that help give the leader’s supporters something to campaign for in the long run-up to this September’s party conference.

Each of the headline ideas is something Corbyn might hesitate about putting in a manifesto. The success of the Labour manifesto in 2017 in pulling together policies that could simultaneously be sold as mainstream social-democratic, radical and popular was one of the surprises of that election.

Next time, Labour is going to need new symbolic policies to build on that success. But such policies ought to be tested before being adopted as party policy. A four-day working week, for example, might be tough to defend in an election campaign: it sounds rather like the French Socialist Party’s 35-hour week, introduced in 2000, which had little effect on actual working hours.

There are dissident voices in Momentum about this new departure, and about the “NGOification” of the national structure, which take it away from grassroots organising. The organisation hasn’t quite recovered from its awkward attempts last year to try to be helpful to Corbyn over Brexit, by “consulting” its members on what the party’s policy should be. It turned out that 53 per cent of the 6,570 members who took part wanted Labour to commit to a new referendum – not just as “an option” – if there was no general election.

But this latest foray into non-Brexit policy-making suggests that there is life in the Corbyn movement’s beating heart yet.