Hard left thugs are on the march. Corbynistas and Momentum activists are taking over the Labour party. It’s a move reminiscent of Putin, or Stalin, or possibly even Hitler. We should all be worried.

At least that’s what you’d believe if you listened to the breathless reporting over the last few months. Among others, my old home constituency of Sedgefield in County Durham has found itself the subject of reports in the Times and the Mail that the constituency Labour party has been targeted by hard-left Momentum thugs, with 11 out of the 12 seats on the executive committee changing hands at its annual meeting on 28 July. Normally an AGM in a safe north-east seat would be too humdrum and niche to even make the local news, but as Tony Blair’s old seat, Sedgefield holds a certain amount of symbolic importance. If even the home of Blair can be swept by the hard left, the moderates are really in trouble.

Momentum sustains a string of Labour selection defeats Read more

The thing is, there’s absolutely no evidence of any of the things that have been claimed. Momentum haven’t staged a takeover – nobody even knows about a Momentum group active in the constituency. The new CLP executive are, for the most part, long-standing party members from a broad range of the political spectrum, including some town councillors.

One source for the Mail and Times stories is John Burton, who was Tony Blair’s election agent and his representative in the constituency for many years, as well as being one of the “famous five” who originally got Blair selected as Sedgefield’s MP. His involvement gives legs to the Corbynites v Blairites narrative, but even other Famous Five alumni seem less than keen to get involved. Phil Wilson, who succeeded Blair as MP in 2007 and has held the seat for Labour ever since, did not wish to comment on the story at all. The old CLP chair, Paul Trippett, another Famous Five member who works as Wilson’s office manager, simply said he thought this was “a non-story”.

It was a struggle to find anyone who thought there was substance to this. Arun Chandran, a local town councillor who recently left Labour to stand as an independent, who describes himself as “to the right” of the party with a history of facing off against Militant in the 1980s, told me “if these people are hard left then I’m Santa Claus”.

The reasons underlying the changes seem to be much more prosaic and rooted in local issues

The reasons underlying the changes seem to be much more prosaic and rooted in local issues. John Clare, a long-standing party member and town and county councillor, told me “in the run-up to the 1997 election victory, the CLP was dynamic, united and full of activists. Lately, however, by any measure it had run out of steam, and I believe most people who turned up to vote for change primarily wanted to restore energy and activity into the CLP.”

One thing that was repeatedly mentioned is a now infamous letter that Wilson sent out in the run-up to last year’s general election, in which he said he was “for Labour, not for Corbyn”. Even party members who were themselves sceptical of Corbyn felt rather put out by this. One member said they thought the “use of Labour party money to attack the leader” was unacceptable. Others were more conciliatory, believing that Wilson simply “panicked” as a result of the low poll numbers. With the CLP and the MP’s office being effectively run by the same people, there was a sense that the narrow concentration of power led to a foolish decision which “embarrassed the Labour party”. This, rather than some nefarious Trotskyite agenda, is a much more plausible explanation for the shift in sentiment against the old guard.

Wilson himself may feel somewhat embattled by the way his national party is going, but while his feelings on Corbyn may put him at odds with some new members, few people seem to think he’s a bad MP as such. He was a strong advocate of getting the Hitachi Rail Europe manufacturing plant to the region, which opened in 2015. His voting record is solid on benefits and other issues many Corbyn supporters care about, and while he disagrees with the leadership’s stance on Europe, he’s no serial rebel. He has also recently called for a bill to introduce measures to make it easier to track absentee landlords to deal with the problems of abandoned and boarded-up properties.

Nobody I talked to was interested in deselecting Wilson, who, like many Labour MPs, increased his majority in the last election. Rather, the new committee is focused on increasing engagement and supporting the manifesto, something they seem to have actually done fairly well. John Clare told me “in any other situation, the [new] officers would be being greatly praised for their hard work and successes, and it is a tragedy that, instead, they have been pilloried in the media.”

Ignore the naysayers: the 2017 election youthquake wasn’t a myth | Liam Young Read more

So where did all this “hard left” nonsense come from? Internal arguments between members of local political parties happen all the time, and it’s a ridiculous stretch to take a change in leadership, no matter how acrimonious, and extrapolate out to imply a “hard left plot”. The idea that people in the north-east might need an email from outside activists to get irate about the Labour party is almost insulting – we can create our own factional disputes all by ourselves, thanks!

As with many other issues, it seems as if our irresponsible rightwing press has decided that the story exists and then conducted “reporting” only far enough to confirm what they want to say anyway. It’s as blatant and biased as advertisers who conduct surveys which surprisingly find out that their brand of hair conditioner or cheese sauce really is the best. “Momentum thugs” exist as a matter of faith, and the usual suspects in the press know that truth matters far less than repetition.

There is a case to be made that the Corbyn shakeup is permeating down to the lower levels of the Labour party, but very little evidence that this is a top-down plot. Frankly, anyone who’s held a political position for more than a decade should not be surprised when their time runs out, let alone those who have held posts for 30 years. Such a reckoning has been coming to local politics for a while, and this is by no means exclusive to Sedgefield, or Haringey, or any of the other local areas supposedly under attack by the “hard left”. Something is happening in local politics, and if all you write about is the sour grapes of losers blaming the communists, you’re going to miss what it is.

• Phil McDuff writes on economics and social policy