James Schneider

Last updated

James Schneider
James schneider 2021 1.jpg
Schneider on a Novara Media panel at The World Transformed 2021
Born
James Gerald Hylton Schneider

(1987-06-17) 17 June 1987 (age 36)
Westminster, London, England
Alma mater Trinity College, Oxford
Occupations
  • Political organiser
  • communications director
  • editor
  • writer
Organisation Momentum
Political party Labour

James Gerald Hylton Schneider (born 17 June 1987) [1] is an English political organiser and writer currently serving as Communications Director for Progressive International. He co-founded the left-wing grassroots movement Momentum. In October 2016, he was appointed public relations advisor to then leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, as Director of Strategic Communications. [2] [3]

Contents

In 2022, Schneider published Our Bloc: How We Win, laying out a strategy for the British left in the 2020s, both within Labour and beyond. [4] He is also an international chess player, representing Saint Vincent and the Grenadines at the 44th Chess Olympiad in Chennai, India in 2022. [5]

Early life

Schneider was born to Jewish parents in central London. [6] His father Brian was a financier and CEO of Soho-based property company OEM plc and was accused of the theft of £5 million from the company. [7] He died in 2004 at the age of 48, when James was a teenager. James' mother Tessa Lang is a property developer.

Schneider and his brother, Tim, were brought up in Primrose Hill in North London, with a vacation home in Glen Tanar, Scotland. [8]

Schneider attended the Dragon School in Oxford for preparatory school. Then, from 2000 to 2005, he boarded at Winchester College [1] in Hampshire as a member of Chawker's (Hawkins'). [1] He went on to study Theology at Trinity College, Oxford. During his time at Oxford, Schneider was president of the Oxford University Liberal Democrats. [9]

Career

Schneider joined Think Africa Press in 2010, a role he held until he became the senior correspondent at New African in 2014. He has described his work at Think Africa Press as formative, in which he began to look at local issues using ideas that were critical of capitalism and imperialism. [10] Schneider joined the Labour Party in May 2015 after Labour, under the leadership of Ed Miliband, failed to win government in the 2015 general election. [11] He was a key figure within the left-wing grassroots movement Momentum, which was formed in October 2015 as a support group for Jeremy Corbyn, who had been elected Labour leader the previous month. [12] The group also played a significant role in the 2016 campaign to re-elect Corbyn after a leadership challenge. Following their success in this campaign, Schneider was appointed as Director of Strategic Communications for the office of the Leader of the Opposition in October 2016. [13] [14]

Schneider has written articles for publications such as The Independent , the New Statesman , Novara Media, and LabourList . [15] He states that he has read Marxist sociologist Ralph Miliband (father of Ed) and "learned from his critiques", but states that the academic was "writing in a different moment of history". [10]

Personal life

Schneider was criticised after comments in which he expressed support for Conservative Party candidates and policies, including a post on the right-wing ConservativeHome website, urging a Conservative candidate to defeat a sitting Labour MP. Schneider says that his online comments do not reflect his current thinking, and that "People can and they do change their political views". [16]

Schneider describes himself as "culturally Jewish". [17] [9]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeremy Corbyn</span> UK Leader of the Opposition from 2015 to 2020 (born 1949)

Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is a British politician who served as Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020. On the political left of the Labour Party, Corbyn describes himself as a socialist. He has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Islington North since 1983. As of October 2020, Corbyn sits in the House of Commons as an independent, following the suspension of the whip.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clive Efford</span> British Labour politician

Clive Stanley Efford is a British Labour Party politician who has served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Eltham since 1997.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ivan Lewis</span> British Independent politician

Ivan Lewis is a British politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Bury South from 1997 to 2019, initially as a member of the Labour Party then as an independent from 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jon Trickett</span> British Labour politician

Jon Hedley Trickett is a British Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Hemsworth in West Yorkshire since a 1996 by-election. He was Shadow Lord President of the Council from 2016 to 2020 and served as Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office from 2011 to 2013 and 2017 to 2020. He was the Labour Party National Campaign Coordinator under Jeremy Corbyn from 2015 to 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ed Miliband</span> British politician (born 1969)

Edward Samuel Miliband is a British politician serving as Shadow Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero since 2021. He has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Doncaster North since 2005. Miliband was Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition between 2010 and 2015. Alongside his brother, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, he served in the Cabinet from 2007 to 2010 under Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ralph Miliband</span> British Marxist theorist (1924–1994)

Ralph Miliband was a British sociologist. He has been described as "one of the best known academic Marxists of his generation", in this manner being compared with E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson.

The Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA) is a centre-left group of elected members on the Labour Party's National Executive Committee, founded in 1998. They represent members from a broad spectrum of the Labour membership, ranging from the centre-left to those on the left-wing.

The British left can refer to multiple concepts. It is sometimes used as shorthand for groups aligned with the Labour Party. It can also refer to other individuals, groups and political parties that have sought egalitarian changes in the economic, political, and cultural institutions of the United Kingdom. There are various subgroups, split between reformist and revolutionary viewpoints. Liberals, progressives and social democrats believe that equality can be accommodated into existing capitalist structures, but they differ in their criticism of capitalism and on the extent of reform and the welfare state. Anarchists, communists, and socialists, among others on the far left, on the other hand argue for abolition of the capitalist system.

Seumas Patrick Charles Milne is a British journalist and political aide. He was appointed as the Labour Party's Executive Director of Strategy and Communications in October 2015 under Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, initially on leave from The Guardian. In January 2017, he left The Guardian in order to work for the party full-time. He left the role upon Corbyn's departure as leader in April 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alex Cunningham</span> British Labour politician

Alexander Cunningham is a British politician who has served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Stockton North since 2010. A member of the Labour Party, he has been Shadow Minister for Courts and Sentencing since 2020.

Daniel Pearce Jackson Hodges is a British newspaper columnist. Since March 2016, he has written a weekly column for The Mail on Sunday. Prior to this, he was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and in 2013 was described by James Forsyth in The Spectator as David Cameron's "new favourite columnist".

The 2015 Labour Party leadership election was triggered by the resignation of Ed Miliband as Leader of the Labour Party on 8 May 2015, following the party's defeat at the 2015 general election. Harriet Harman, the Deputy Leader, became Acting Leader but announced that she would stand down following the leadership election. It was won by Jeremy Corbyn in the first round. Coterminous with the leadership election, in the 2015 Labour Party deputy leadership election, Tom Watson was elected to succeed Harman as deputy leader.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clive Lewis (politician)</span> British Labour politician (born 1971)

Clive Anthony Lewis is a British Labour politician who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Norwich South since the 2015 general election. Lewis was a candidate for Leader of the Labour Party in the 2020 leadership election. He is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group parliamentary caucus.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Member of Parliament for Islington North, stood as a candidate in the 2015 British Labour Party leadership election, in a successful campaign that made him the leader of the Labour Party.

Momentum is a British left-wing political organisation which has been described as a grassroots movement supportive of the Labour Party; since January 2017, all Momentum members must be members of the party. It was founded in 2015 by Jon Lansman, Adam Klug, Emma Rees and James Schneider after Jeremy Corbyn's successful campaign to become Labour Party leader and it was reported to have between 20,000 and 30,000 members in 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jon Lansman</span> British political activist (born 1957)

Jonathan Lansman is a British political activist. He is best known for having worked on Jeremy Corbyn's successful 2015 campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party and subsequently founded the pro-Corbyn organisation Momentum. He is a member of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee. Lansman has worked for both Tony Benn and Michael Meacher, and was a prominent supporter of Benn in the early 1980s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Labour Party leadership of Jeremy Corbyn</span> Jeremy Corbyns tenure as Leader of the Labour Party

The Labour Party leadership of Jeremy Corbyn began when Jeremy Corbyn was elected as Leader of the UK Labour Party in September 2015, following the resignation of Ed Miliband after Labour's defeat at the 2015 general election. Disillusioned by a lack of a left-wing voice in the 2015 leadership contest, Corbyn stood on an anti-austerity platform. Of the candidates who stood, Corbyn received the fewest parliamentary nominations. Many who nominated him said they had done so not to support his candidacy, but to widen the debate by including a socialist voice. However, Corbyn soon became the frontrunner and was elected with a landslide of 59%.

There have been instances of antisemitism within the Labour Party of the United Kingdom (UK) since its establishment. Notable occurrences include canards about "Jewish finance" during the Boer War and antisemitic remarks from leading Labour politician Ernest Bevin. In the 2000s, controversies arose over comments made by Labour politicians regarding an alleged "Jewish lobby", a comparison by London Labour politician Ken Livingstone of a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard, and a 2005 Labour attack on Jewish Conservative Party politician Michael Howard.

Peter Rupert William Willsman is a British political activist who was a member of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee and the secretary of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Winchester College: A Register. Edited by P.S.W.K. McClure and R.P. Stevens, on behalf of the Wardens and Fellows of Winchester College. 7th edition, 2014. pp. 905 (Common Time 2000 list heading) & 913 (entry for James Schneider). Published by Winchester College, Hampshire.
  2. ↑ "This is how Jeremy Corbyn's team believes he can still become UK prime minister".
  3. ↑ "The fight of his life: on the road with Jeremy Corbyn". The Guardian. 2 June 2017.
  4. ↑ McTernan, John (7 September 2022). "Our Bloc: How We Win by James Schneider review – can the left triumph without Labour?". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 September 2022.
  5. ↑ "SVG Chess team holding their own at Olympiad". Searchlight. 5 August 2022. Retrieved 20 November 2022.
  6. ↑ "Momentum: inside Labour's revolutionary movement". Financial Times. Retrieved 27 March 2019.(subscription required)
  7. ↑ "OEM shareholder face cash call | London Evening Standard". Standard.co.uk. 30 July 2004. Retrieved 28 March 2018.
  8. ↑ Charlotte Edwardes (12 March 2019). "Will champagne socialists soon be all Labour has left?". The Tatler . Retrieved 5 August 2021.
  9. 1 2 Gilligan, Andrew (13 December 2015). "James Schneider: face of Momentum activists - with education and childhood home 'paid for by fraud'". The Sunday Telegraph. Retrieved 3 September 2017.
  10. 1 2 "Maintaining Momentum". jacobinmag.com.
  11. ↑ Bennett, Owen (20 October 2015). "Momentum Is Not A 'Shadowy' Group With A 'Hit List' Of Labour MPs, Says Leading Organiser". HuffPost UK.
  12. ↑ "Maintaining Momentum". Jacobin. October 2016.
  13. ↑ "Jeremy Corbyn set to get extra media help - but not from Paul Mason". Total Politics. 14 October 2016.
  14. ↑ Long, Camilla (23 April 2017). "Corbyn's posh boys can't crush 'the elite'". The Times. Retrieved 3 September 2017.(subscription required)
  15. ↑ "Writers". www.newstatesman.com. Retrieved 2 September 2018.
  16. ↑ Jim Waterson (6 August 2016). "Co-Founder Of Corbyn's Momentum Distances Himself From Pro-Tory Comments". BuzzFeed News. Retrieved 5 August 2021.
  17. ↑ "The Jewish Labour Gurus Striving to Turn Jeremy Corbyns Reputation Around". Haaretz newspaper. 20 September 2016. Retrieved 21 March 2018.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.