How Bernie Sanders Can Harness the Kind of Momentum Transforming British Politics

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[font size="1"]Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn's campaign helped launch a progressive movement in British politics. (Robert Stothard / Getty Images)[/font]


How Bernie Sanders Can Harness the Kind of Momentum Transforming British Politics
British activists could offer lessons for Americans who are feeling the Bern about how to transition from a political campaign to a long-term, mass movement.

BY Kate Aronoff


This article first appeared at Waging Nonviolence.

After a string of recent primary victories, Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign has a fair amount of momentum behind it. Still, many are asking what comes next, and how to carry the political revolution forward—whether he wins the Democratic nomination or not.

Lessons for Sanders might come from the movement that formed around another white-haired progressive challenger to the political establishment: British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Riding the wave of his country’s emergent social movements, Corbyn’s rise to the top of the party last summer marked a break with Tony Blair’s “New Labour” brand. It also christened a new generation of Labour Party activists, eager not just for a better candidate but a new kind of politics.

Formed just weeks after Corbyn’s election, the grassroots organization Momentum is channeling the energy of Corbyn’s campaign into “a mass movement for real transformative change.” Over a hundred local groups are now running campaigns at the local level and pushing for a more democratic Labour Party, holding a mix of rallies, town hall-style meetings and pop-up political education events.

To learn more about Momentum and what it might mean for the future of the Sanders campaign, I spoke with James Schneider, a national organizer with Momentum and a journalist who’s been involved with the group since its formation.

Where did Momentum come from? Why did it start?

In the simplest form, Momentum is the continuation of the Corbyn campaign. Over the course of three months last summer, the left of the Labour Party went from being tiny and much-maligned to a popular movement. Party membership doubled. It’s nothing in comparison to Sanders’s half-million volunteers, but by the end of the campaign we had 17,000 activists throughout the country. In the United Kingdom that’s massive. It was bigger than the three other campaigns combined, and it had a popular political energy that hadn’t been seen for some time. ...............(more)

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