It’s a Labour division that has reached peak bitterness since the bloodbath that was the local elections, but of course it’s been rumbling since 2015. I don’t mean the differences between the Corbyn faction and the centrists within the party (those count too, but are constantly aired), nor between the realists and the purists of the commentariat, but at the level of the local party meeting.

The term “members” is used in the media as shorthand for unwavering Corbyn supporters, understandably, given that they will persist in voting for him. Yet even the size of his mandate – never forget the size of his mandate! – doesn’t erase the existence of the solid core of local party members, 30% or so, who don’t agree with him.

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For brevity, let’s call the factions Blairites and Corbynistas, even though that will irritate the hell out of both, as will a lot of what follows. Interview a new member, perhaps someone who’s also joined Momentum, and they are outraged by the way they’re characterised: of course they’re not Trots; of course they’re not hardliners; they just want to do politics differently. Interview a long-time member and they are baffled by the suspicion in which they are held by the new, their mildest remark about electability taken as an endorsement of the invasion of Iraq. “Which actual policies of Corbyn’s do you disagree with?” Corbynistas ask Blairites. “Who else in the country do you think you’re taking with you?” the Blairites return.

It’s not for me to adjudicate in this battle: I’m too close to the family to play marriage guidance counsellor. But I believe that if we don’t stop calling Blair a war criminal we’ll never be able to take any pride in the achievements of his time in office; I also supported Corbyn’s leadership bid in 2015, as an essential stage in the conversation the party needed to have with itself.

Yet I have been puzzling for nearly two years whether this is all the same battle. And it should be easiest to resolve at a local level – be it in a town hall or around a dinner table, in some unloved civic space or in a grim church hall. Nobody’s career is riding on their clinging on to a position. Nobody has to worry about media hyenas poring over their past pronouncements for inconsistencies or mistakes. In theory, nobody’s pride, nobody’s life’s work, is at stake: if a compromise could be reached anywhere, it should be at a local level.

The territory of what Labour voters ought to agree on is incredibly fertile. Perhaps if constituency parties could grope their way towards a common agenda – and really it could be anything, from affordable housing to renewable energy – they could role-model their new determination to the party’s upper echelons. OK, maybe that is too utopian. Yet the underlying principle – that well-intentioned, engaged people, who want the best for their community and share broad ideas about the equality and pluralism that should lie at the heart of any functioning society, ought to be able to find enough concord to move forward – never seemed to me outlandish.

What you do instead is have actions: ask people not will you join us, but will you help us?

I never found the answer because I was asking the wrong question. It should never have been, how do we make these meetings more harmonious? Rather, what could we do instead of these meetings?

“Local organising” is one of those processes I always assume is better understood in American politics because they say it so confidently. Then I question the assumption – they say everything confidently, including “healthcare” – and file the idea back under “things that sound more impressive than they are”.

However, I recently interviewed Claire Sandberg, who was central to Bernie Sanders’ campaign (and instrumental in the anti-fracking movement), and she said something of such dazzling insight that I had to rethink. “Never have groups,” she imparted. “It creates a tyranny of the annoying.”

The person who ends up at the head of a group is always the person you’d want least to do with, if you met them from scratch. A new person walking into the group is instantly alienated, not just by the jargon that naturally accrues in a group but also by the inherent annoyingness of the people who have shuffled themselves to the top of it. Consequently, a group doesn’t just fail at movement-building, it actively quells it.

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Furthermore, never have a meeting whose action is another meeting. I always understood that, on a human level. As George Orwell said, the problem with socialism is that it takes a lot of evenings. But I never understood at a systems level what was wrong with a meeting: that it just feeds the creation of groups.

What you do instead is have actions: ask people not will you join us, but will you help us? Have one meeting (the Sanders people won’t even call them meetings, they call them “barnstorms”. This is too much for my delicate constitution, and I’m sticking with meeting), ask who will help, figure out what they can do – run a phone bank, organise a team of canvassers, run a fundraising pub quiz – and finish it, having generated as many actions as you can.

This isn’t necessarily the fix for the next election: it’s not remotely guaranteed to fix the internal divisions of the Labour party. But to extrapolate from the tyranny of the annoying, it’s possible that the kind of people who love meetings are exactly the people who hate compromise. Perhaps you cannot discuss your way to common ground; but differences can be erased in the concrete pursuit of a shared purpose.