The other day I was idly bantering about my home town, Bromsgrove, on Facebook. There’s a few of us that do that from time to time out of affection and nostalgia. Then someone posted a link about a seeming revolutionary cell at the heart of this Midlands Tory stronghold. It was the home page of Momentum Bromsgrove.

Momentum has been going for a few short weeks. And yet here was the home page for its presence in Bromsgrove. It is populated with clips of John McDonnell walking-talking. It has the usual YouTube and Gif humour mixed with political discussion. Pretty standard.

But then you see that it has 350 or so likes. It’s material is shared and liked with decent frequency. Then you realise that dozens of these pages have been set up. In short order, Momentum probably has a viral network of 25,000 people and perhaps even greater. But Facebook page ‘likes’ are meaningless right? Wrong. They are valuable data for future mobilisation.

Labour’s moderates are fighting to win chairs of backbench Labour committees (who knew they were a thing?). They are arranging discussion groups to explore the ‘common good’- just as they have been for a decade. Labour’s moderates do not suffer from a deficit of seminars. The moderates’ organisation is focused on intra-party structures from the NEC to conference arrangements.

They are organising for the twentieth century. Amazingly, it is now the left who are the modernisers – they are organising for the twenty-first century. The left is building a database of hundreds of thousands of people which will be deployed to protect Jeremy Corbyn and win the next leadership election too.

The left outwitted Labour’s moderates on every level during the leadership election. The gap is getting greater. Momentum is an understatement. You can forget the next ten years as a Labour moderate if their organisation is not brought into the twenty-first century. The Labour Party is now an open movement and no amount of deploying a solidaristic rule-book sanctioning disloyalty will change that.

The left’s strategy is to hold the Labour Party and wait for the moment when the Conservatives finally stumble. It might be in five, ten or fifty years. By then, the rhetoric will be softened, the policy agenda polished, and then power will be theirs. It’s actually a smart strategy. It probably won’t work but given how far out of the mainstream they are, it’s the only strategy that has a chance of success. Labour’s moderates will either have to capitulate or walk away. The revolution has begun – in Bromsgrove.

P.S. An irony of all this is that the left has 21st century organisation for a decidedly twentieth century politics. It remains to be seen whether the moderates can come up with a twenty-first century agenda. Let’s hope.