Momentum’s video team at work in Finsbury Park
THE headquarters of a famous grassroots campaign group supporting Labour at next month’s general election has found a temporary home in Finsbury Park sandwiched between a solicitor’s firm and a tech company.
There are around 40 staff members at the makeshift offices of Momentum in Fonthill Road where they make the viral videos shared on social media pages and co-ordinate volunteers to canvass for Labour.
When I come to visit on Monday afternoon, Paul Nicholson, the deputy head of video, is staring at a Facebook counter which tells him how many times his edited video of Nicky Morgan has been shared.
The clip shows the Conservative MP arguing on ITV that there would be 50,000 more nurses in 10 years, despite the figure including 19,000 nurses who are already employed by the NHS.
Momentum have edited the video to include the text, ’TORY MP CAR CRASH INTERVIEW’, and subtitles but it doesn’t include any extra sounds or images.
When the clip hits 2,000 shares within the first hour there is a small murmur of appreciation in the room and Mr Nicholson says: “That’s a sign of a good video.”
He said his team do not edit videos to “make someone look stupid on purpose”.
There are around 15 people in the video team alone with some translating clips into Welsh encouraging voter registration and others coming up with the next viral campaign.
This week, the team produced seven videos for Facebook on Tuesday alone.
Mr Nicholson explained that Momentum now have dozens of volunteers from all over the country sending them tips through Slack – an instant messaging platform – when a Conservative MP performs particularly badly in an interview.
The National Coordinator for Momentum, Laura Parker, said that they had been “planning for longer” ahead of December 12 general election compared to the one in 2017.
She said: “Last time no one knew there was going to be an election. Last time we were told there wouldn’t be an election but I think this time it’s been apparent for quite a long time and Boris Johnson’s government was not sustainable because he was defeated so many times.”
Momentum originated in 2015 after Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn became party leader with the aim of helping maintain the new look head of the party. They managed to raise £255,000 from 10,000 donations in six days last month through crowdfunding.
Ms Parker explained that they have now “scaled up” with a tripling of the work force in “just a few weeks” with employees managing a team of volunteers who are in turn managing more volunteers.
She said that people had “come to respect Momentum as an organisation” in the past couple of years after the 2017 election which saw Theresa May surrender her Commons majority.
“There was a lot of media hype in the first couple of years of Momentum’s existence which I think was largely because of political opposition to the project that Jeremy and John McDonnell [the shadow chancellor] were supporting but a large part of that fell away in 2017 because we made such a decisive impact at that election,” she said.
When asked if Momentum would support another Labour leader in the same way in the future, Ms Parker said: “Genuinely, right now what we’re thinking about is this election.”
