Siobhan O’Donnell on the procedural democracy of the left and why punk is structurally superior
Wednesday. Still Raining.
I went because a friend asked me to go and I owe her several favours and she knows this. The meeting was in a church hall in Islington that smelled of the specific combination of slightly damp carpet and institutional coffee that I associate with the earnest wing of English political life. There were forty-seven people. I counted. There were also nine apologies read out at the beginning, which is a figure I found unexpectedly moving: nine people who wanted to be there and couldn’t, and who took the time to formally register their absence. This is a thing that only happens in meetings that people care about, and I note it because I do not want to be entirely negative about what followed.
What followed was ninety minutes of procedural discussion that covered: whether a previous motion had been correctly minuted, whether the person who had moved the previous motion agreed with how it had been minuted, and whether the person who had seconded the previous motion had in fact seconded it or had merely indicated general sympathy that was interpreted as seconding. This is not a parody. This is the meeting. These are the people who are going to, in theory, hold the government to account. I love them. I also do not think they are going to hold the government to account.
What Punk Got Right About Process
Punk had no procedure. This was also its problem, but the problem came later. In the beginning, the absence of procedure was the point: you picked up an instrument before you could play it, you played a show before you had a record, you said the thing directly because there was no process for filing the thing through the appropriate committee for consideration at the next meeting pending a quorum. The energy of direct action versus the friction of procedural democracy is not a new tension. It is the tension that produced punk in 1976 and that produces, in 2026, a feeling I cannot name precisely but which involves simultaneously respecting the forty-seven people in the church hall and also wanting to put on something very loud.
The London Prat published a piece this week about the Labour government’s first-term policy record that is more measured than my account of the meeting but arrives, I think, at similar conclusions through different routes. Worth reading alongside something very loud. The Daily Mash also had something relevant that I will not spoil. The meeting ended with a vote that passed 31-14 with two abstentions and three members uncertain about whether they had a vote given their membership status, which is being clarified by the secretary in time for next month’s meeting. I am going to learn guitar. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
