Momentum: inside Labour’s revolutionary movement

This is my generation. The furious tweeters. The self-taught YouTube Marxists. The failed hipsters and freelancers. The last protesters trying to stop the cuts who stayed up all night cursing corporate tax avoidance and the Cayman Islands. The twenty to thirtysomethings who built Britain’s new left. I was never one of them. But I always knew them. And I kept drifting in and out of pubs and house shares with them.

“The trouble with our generation,” my then housemate James Schneider emailed me in October 2015 when he co-founded Momentum, “is we don’t have any power”.

Now, though, that power is building, and its spearhead is social media.

Aaron Bastani, 34, is at the upper end of my generation. Three years ago he was a PhD selling tomatoes in a London farmers’ market. “Two days a week. Saturday, Sunday, it was surprisingly good money.” Trying to build up a show on a community radio station into a thing. Sometimes, the managing editor of The Sun or the Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith would wander past his stall. Now Bastani is a thing, the ultra Corbynite Novara Media: 40,000 Twitter followers, 15,000 on YouTube, and a Facebook reach (according to Novara) of 4m during Jeremy Corbyn’s shock surge in the 2017 UK general election.

Novara is at the heart of a rose emoji world built on Facebook, led by Twitter, linked by WhatsApp and flipped by YouTube into getting out the vote. In real life, I find it is behind the gasworks off south London’s Old Kent Road.

In a makeshift studio, with books such as Debt and Direct Action lining the walls, Bastani, Michael Walker and Ash Sarkar go live. The tone: pirate radio. The medium: YouTube. “We’re back, bitch,” says Sarkar, 26, ghostwriter for the memoirs of Wiley and other grime stars and a lecturer in political theory. “We’re hustling for Corbyn,” she jokes.

First up: how popular Corbyn is. In a YouGov poll on the world’s most admired public figures, UK respondents have just ranked the Labour leader fifth in the male list. “Absolutely phenomenal,” says Bastani.

“If you have to give us in three words why people warm to Corbyn, what would those words be?” asks Sarkar.

“Ohhh . . . cheeky,” says Walker. “He’s warm.”

“Me? Consistent, values-driven,” says Bastani.

“I’ve got three words,” says Sarkar. “Werther’s Original grandad.”

Next topic: Syria. Is the Stop the War Coalition approach still working? What is “a left geopolitics”? Live-viewers are messaging in: “What we did in Mosul and Fallujah makes Douma look like a picnic.”

“100 per cent correct,” says Bastani.

This is now a go-to interview spot for the left: Corbyn, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, Chris Williamson and the Green party’s co-leader Caroline Lucas are all past guests of Novara.

The mellifluous James Butler is its co-founder. Adopted through the Catholic Children’s Society, the 31-year-old from south London worked in a series of night clubs before studying English at Oxford university. “I feel I come from a tradition of communism that got buried . . . like Rosa Luxemburg.”

But who’s listening to him? “Corbyn fans, Momentum activists and lefties in their bedrooms . . . This is a political project. Like a socialist night school. Just not dogmatic.”

This is how it started. “It feels odd now — before autumn 2010, politics at university felt dead.” Then it suddenly exploded. “Austerity set something off.”

That autumn felt different. I was then a year out of Oxford university. London was fizzing with activism: the student movement, the marches, sit-ins, columnists starting to go viral on Twitter, stunts by the protest movement UK Uncut trying to expose tax avoidance.

“I don’t think you get Corbynism without it,” says Butler. “I really don’t.”

This is how Novara Media began. Butler had dabbled in far-left protests when leftwing journalist Laurie Penny invited him to come to University College London, to meet, as she put it, “the leaders of the occupation”. This is where he was introduced to Bastani, a PhD student in a button-up shirt at Royal Holloway’s New Political Communic­ation Unit. They hit it off.

Bastani grew up in Bournemouth, with his mother’s surname, as Aaron Peters. A single parent, she was a cleaner, a sandwich maker, then a social worker — and, until her death in 2015, a Conservative voter. Only in 2014 did he take his father’s name.

Revolution is in the Bastani story. His father Mammad, a taxi driver who was born in Iran, “ended up in Britain a refugee” when his parents told him not to come home after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He was a refugee like his great-grandfather, an ethnic Azeri merchant installed in Moscow, who had fled the Bolsheviks to Iran. “I think he may even have fought with the Whites.”

“What I learnt when I came to London was what power looks like,” Bastani says. “Growing up in Bournemouth, you don’t really know what it looks like. But then at UCL you meet kids whose parents own aluminium mines in Ukraine.”

Bastani and Butler founded Novara Media in June 2011, initially as an hour-long show on the community radio station Resonance FM, based in south London. They named it Novara after the town in northern Italy in the 1973 film by Elio Petri, The Working Class Goes to Heaven. The idea was simple and sprawling at the same time: find the thinking for what’s happening.

“What we wanted to do was feed an intellectually undernourished movement,” says Butler. “The intellectual left wasn’t talking to the protest left. And the only left offering answers were these tiny, dogmatic, legacy parties.”

It was around then that I first heard of Bastani from other activists I knew from UK Uncut, the anti-austerity protest network. They called him “the bodybuilder” (“I was addicted,” he says) and sniggered at a picture of him in The Daily Mail stripped topless at a protest march. At one protest he got carried away. In March 2011 he was filmed ramming a wheelie bin into the door of a bank, before waving others inside. “The door to the bank opened and we were like . . . Oh God!”

He was given a suspended sentence and community service. “I worked for Mind charity and then I was sweeping leaves. It was totally mindless work.” But Bastani and Butler kept going at Novara. Nobody was being paid. Beyond the studio, the movement was fizzling out. Those it had radicalised were not.

“My sense,” says Butler, “is there is an arc of people who come out of those protests. Then you have a kind of wilderness-year period looking for a political home. Corbynism is what swept up a lot of this energy.”

Novara Media was in the right place at the right time. In July 2015 it invited Corbyn for an interview on the day he became the bookies’ favourite in the race to be leader of the Labour party.

“So, you’re the favourite now,” said Bastani as Corbyn walked in. This was the breakthrough: the interview hitting 60,000 views that week. Since then, Bastani has been a Twitter shock trooper for Corbyn, viciously ridiculing “centrist dads” and just about anyone questioning the true path.

On Twitter Bastani accused two dozen Labour MPs of trying “to scupper” Labour’s chances in the local elections on the day they had accused Corbyn of condoning anti-Semitism in the party.

“I only recently realised the scale of anti-Semitism on the left,” he now tells me. As he streams, he is in a good mood. Just that week he had accepted a job at IPPR, the centre-left think-tank once seen as the home of New Labour. But a week after our interview the offer was withdrawn after MPs and trustees intervened. One of the reasons cited was he was too aggressive on Twitter.

As the show wraps up, my eyes fix on a poster above the videographer.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

Because nothing is too good for the working class

“Fully Automated Luxury Communism” is not just a poster. This is the title of Bastani’s upcoming book. “The ironic meme quality is intentional,” he says.

But the idea is serious. Instead of opposing automation, Bastani believes the left should extend it as far as possible, while nationalising the algorithms and the machines to fund a post-work and post-profit society.

“With things like Facebook and Uber, we are seeing a move towards oligopoly, but imminent within these is the possibility of a new kind of society.”

The street lamps have started to glow outside as Bastani locks up.

“This is like the road map for the leader that comes after Corbyn.”

I meet the voice of Momentum in a café in Haringey, north London. Beth Foster-Ogg is 21 and, for me, the lower edge of my generation.

The UCL undergraduate is the voice of Momentum in “about 20” of its viral videos. More than 230,000 Labour supporters have listened to her calling them to canvass in videos.

“I think anger is a great emotion” she says. “It makes you want to do things.”

Foster-Ogg is the training organiser for Momentum. Her job is to criss-cross the country holding sessions to make Labour activists “Momentum-effective”. Like me, she joined the Labour party aged 16. Unlike me, she went canvassing for Ed Miliband in the 2015 general elections. What I remember most from that election was being punched in the head by supporters of George Galloway in Bradford. “Get out you f***ng Jew,” they had shouted.

Foster-Ogg was stunned when Miliband lost. “Everyone was in tears.” But canvassing had felt transactional. “It felt weird. All you asked them was, ‘Have you voted in the past? How are you planning on voting? Goodbye. Thank you.’ ”

If you were in your twenties in London that summer and more or less on the left, maybe you had the same arguments as I did. Why did you vote Green? That Blairite Liz Kendall for leader, so you’re pro-austerity? Jeremy Corbyn, are you joking? I dropped out, and flew to Israel.

When a friend emailed me to ask if I wanted to join something called Momentum, I said no. Sometime under Miliband my Labour membership had lapsed. I did not renew it.

Around then Foster-Ogg saw the page “Jeremy Corbyn for Labour leader” pop up on Facebook. “I was like, ‘He looks nice’. He was the only one really saying No.” Six months later she walked into Momentum as one of its first volunteers.

This was her gap year. She spent it creating and contacting Momentum Facebook groups. “We wanted them to just go for it!” This brought its own problems. “You see, they all run their own Facebook groups. And sometimes they do go rogue. But you have to trust them.”

Rallies, events, Daily Mail stings — the gap year was a rollercoaster. She was 19 and running projects for Momentum’s May 2016 local elections campaign. “It was all really ad hoc,” she says. A whirlwind of events, rallies, YouTube videos, meetings and surprise friendships.

I think anger is a great emotion. It makes you want to do things

Just before the June 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, she went with a friend to Cuba for a five-week holiday before starting university. “Two days after the vote, I went to get the internet as I wanted to see what everyone was saying, and I turned my phone on and got like a thousand notifications coming through from a WhatsApp Group about Jeremy.” The anti-Corbyn coup had started.

Resignations were flooding in. “And I was like, ‘What is going on?’ ” Right away she called Adam Klug, Momentum’s national organiser, who told her there was to be a leadership campaign — “I think you should come back.” That call put her in the core team behind Corbyn’s second leadership win.

“I rang my mum and said, ‘You need to book me a plane ticket home for tomorrow.’ ” Foster-Ogg couldn’t book one on her phone as there wasn’t enough power for the internet.

I took the train from London King’s Cross to Edinburgh, where I was to meet Momentum’s star Scottish member of Labour’s National Executive Committee. As I sat on the floor of the overbooked train, I thought about what we had in common: the youth movement of Reform Judaism. Rhea Wolfson, 27, is from Glasgow. I’m 30, from west London. We were both raised in a progressive Jewish world, made to feel like the opposition by the orthodox and by Israel. I met her at the Edinburgh Leith office of the GMB trade union. She is not at the vanguard or the rear; she is Momentum’s march through the institutions.

In 2015, I watched Corbyn’s campaign unfold on Facebook from Tel Aviv. There, I was with the feminist activists arrested for praying like men at the Wailing Wall, and with the peaceniks in Breaking the Silence getting Israeli soldiers to speak out. But things about Corbyn made me uncomfortable. How did Wolfson fit the two worlds together?

“When Jeremy started running for leader,” she says, “I felt it’s not a case of there being the Jewish anti-occupation movement and the non-Jewish Palestine solidarity movement and never the twain shall meet.” But when his leadership campaign started, Wolfson could hardly join; she was caring for her sick father. She had left London and returned to Glasgow.

On breaks from caring for her father, Wolfson would run a phone bank for Corbyn in her room and tweet him her support. “The fact that I could jump into the whole Facebook world was a real escape in what could have been a very dark time.”

Her father died on November 4 2015. “The funeral was very Jewish, it was very quick and we buried him the next day. ” She moved fast. Three weeks later she started working for the GMB. Five months later, in May 2016, she was running for Labour’s NEC.

Former London mayor Ken Livingstone had been suspended for insisting Hitler was “supporting Zionism before he went mad”, and the Corbyn slate was looking for “someone Scottish and someone young”. Wolfson, as Scottish Labour’s women’s officer, caught the attention of Momentum.

“The first time I spoke to Jon Lansman [Momentum’s chair], he called me and warned me this would be hard.” People would ask questions, people would be personal, and everything surrounding Ken Livingstone would make it worse. “[Lansman] talked about how he’s Jewish and how he gets challenged around the Shabbat dinner table for his politics. Are you going to be OK with this?”

“I went, ‘Yeah, this is important. I’m gonna do it.’ And I do it.”

“One of the funny things about Momentum is it’s just so Jewish.”

Not only Lansman — who once told me in a bar that he rejigged his Passover Seder service to include Rosa Parks — but also Wolfson’s two points of contact in London, national organisers James Schneider and Adam Klug, were too. It felt like home.

“But now I had to win.” And for a seat on the NEC, Wolfson needed about 80,000 votes. “Double what the average MP needs.” The team was tiny: one campaign manager in London, a graphics maker at university. So she set up a Facebook page. “And a Twibbon.”

That’s when the first thing went wrong. “Somehow, I became known to Stormfront,” an anti-Semitic website based in the US. Her Twitter was bombarded with Auschwitz pictures and calls that she was “ready for the oven”.

Wolfson sought the Labour nomination for her home constituency. But it didn’t go as planned. “They told me to go out of the room. Then, I’m told, the former Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy stands up and goes, ‘This is a very Jewish constituency, she’s part of Momentum, so she’s part of the problem, anti-Semitism and Ken Livingstone, so we can’t possibly support her.’ And so they don’t.”

It stung. But Wolfson was not giving up so easily. Days before the deadline, she moved her home address to her boyfriend’s family home in the West Lothian town of Livingston, west of Edinburgh. “So, I went to his mum, we get along well, don’t we?” The local party endorsed her unanimously.

She was back in the race. The social media revolutionaries were in overdrive. “Momentum is a meme factory. Some activists that I know, some that I don’t, are making memes, memes of me, memes that I’ve risen from the dead.”

One of the funny things about Momentum is it’s just so Jewish

Her Twitter boomed from a couple of hundred to more than 10,000. In just four months, cloud Corbyn had turned an obscure activist into a star.

As I pack to leave, I tell her that a few weeks ago my 19-year-old brother walked out of Labour because he felt that nothing serious was being done about anti-Semitism in the party.

“It’s not good enough,” she says of Corbyn’s response. “This is a problem on the left. But I get fed up with old men yelling at me on Twitter about what to think about anti-Semitism.”

Wolfson was elected to the NEC in August 2016 with 85,687 votes. In June 2017 she stood as Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Livingston, losing to the Scottish National party by 3,878 votes. “I don’t just want to be in parliament — I want to be in a Labour government.”

On the night train back down to London, I opened my phone. There was Novara streaming out the “centrist dads”, there was Foster-Ogg virally chasing votes in the local elections on Facebook. Between the clatter of the rail and the lights of passing trains, I caught myself thinking: this is here to stay.

Ben Judah is the author of ‘This is London’

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This article has been amended since original publication to clarify that in YouGov’s 2018 poll on the world’s most admired public figures, UK respondents ranked Jeremy Corbyn fifth in the male list