Anti-Semitism, Democracy and the Labour Party

Zionism is the real problem

Marc Wadsworth’s expulsion should be viewed in the context of the international situation, says Carla Roberts

Last week’s expulsion of Marc Wadsworth from the Labour Party is, as has been pointed out by motions and statements from numerous organisations, outrageous, contrary to natural justice, clearly politically motivated, counter to the recommendations of the Chakrabarti report and, as the Israeli journalist Jonathan Cook puts it, a sign that “we are living through a truly shameful period in Labour’s history”.

Clearly, it is not the veteran anti-racist campaigner who has brought the party into disrepute, but rather the rightwing of the Parliamentary Labour Party. In cahoots with much of the bourgeois media and the Tories who dominate the top positions in the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies, they have hit a new low with comrade Wadsworth’s expulsion.

They shed crocodile tears for the pro-Zionist Ruth Smeeth MP, who was so traumatised by Marc’s claim that she and other MPs were “working hand in hand” with newspapers like The Daily Telegraph that she just had to go to newspapers like The Daily Telegraph and accuse comrade Wadsworth of being an anti-Semite.

It is rather a perverse irony that Smeeth did her best to misuse some of the recommendations of the MacPherson report established after the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. The fact that the report even exists was in no small measure down to the Anti-Racist Alliance led by Marc Wadsworth (a recent BBC documentary showed him introducing Stephen’s parents to Nelson Mandela).

MacPherson recommended that when a victim or someone else perceivesan attack or hate incident as racially motivated, then the police must record it as such. Pro-Zionist organisations in and outside the Labour Party have been working hard to change this into something quite different. Last year, the Jewish Labour Movement, for example, tried to force through a rule change at Labour Party conference which wanted a “hate incident” to be “defined as something where the victim or anyone else think it was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on disability, race, religion, transgender identity or sexual orientation” (our emphasis).

Fortunately, the compromise formulation eventually adopted by the NEC (and subsequently by conference) enshrines the need for some kind of – you know – evidence: “… any incident which in their view might reasonably be seen to demonstrate hostility or prejudice based on disability, race, religion, transgender identity or sexual orientation”. The JLM also failed in its attempt to explicitly enshrine the disciplining of members for comments or actions made in “private”.1)http://labourpartymarxists.org.uk/humpty-dumpty-and-anti-semitism/

Comrade Wadsworth, incidentally, has been charged under the old rules, which did not deal specifically with racism or anti-Semitism and did not contain the above formulation. The rightwingers would perhaps have found it more difficult to expel him under the new rules, as anybody would be hard pressed to prove that Marc’s words “demonstrate[d] hostility or prejudice based on disability, race, religion, transgender identity or sexual orientation”. Grounds for an appeal here, it seems to us.

In any case, even before the April 26 judgment, comrade Wadsworth had, of course, already been ‘found guilty’ as an anti-Semite in his drawn out trial-by-media, which lasted a staggering 22 months. It was no great surprise then when, finally, he was expelled under the wonderful catch-all phrase of “bringing the party into disrepute”. Tony Greenstein was expelled under the same rule 2.1.8 – which will probably also be applied to try and boot out Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone and other ‘troublemakers’ over the next few weeks.

The comrades also had almost identical ‘judges’ in their kangaroo court before Labour’s national constitutional committee (NCC), which deals with any disciplinary cases that the national executive committee feels merit further investigation – and, in many cases, such a referral leads to expulsion.

We understand that the 11 members of the NCC are asked to volunteer for particular cases. As the NCC still has a rightwing majority (only two new members are elected per year), in effect the three-person panel at expulsion hearings is usually made up of two Blairites and one leftwinger. Maggie Cosin from the rightwing GMB has chaired all these recent hearings and is usually aided by Douglas Fairbairn from the equally rightwing Community union.

It is debatable how ‘leftwing’ NCC members like Momentum’s vice-chair, Emina Ibrahim, are: she sat on the panels that expelled comrade Greenstein and comrade Cyril Chilson (a former officer in the Israeli army). If she had any objections, she certainly did not raise them. What about the Kate Osborne who sat on comrade Wadsworth’s panel? She had been proposed for the NCC by her union, Unite and comrade Wadsworth reports: “She asked tough questions of the accusers and helpful ones of me.”

But what is stopping her from telling us how she voted? Considering the timely intervention of Unite general secretary Len McCluskey last week about the anti-Semitism “smear” campaign in the New Statesman, some kind of public statement from her would have been very useful in the left’s campaign to stop the witch-hunt in the party.

But there is only silence. The same goes for Jeremy Corbyn, unfortunately. Corbyn is not just silent – he really has become complicit. Why on earth he continues to try and appease his backbenchers, the pro-Zionist lobby and their friends in the bourgeois media is beyond us. It clearly is not working. He and his advisors must surely have realised by now that the witch-hunter’s appetite grows with the eating. They will continue with their campaign until he is gone – or has changed politically beyond all recognition.

Coming war

This whole campaign is, of course, only about Corbyn insofar as he cannot be trusted to run Britain in line with US foreign policy, not least in the Middle East. Despite his shameful complicity in the witch-hunting of his own supporters, for the establishment he remains a loose cannon. And, crucially, at least historically, he has been firmly on the side of the Palestinians. No amount of bending over backwards to the pro-Zionist lobby will make them forget that. Corbyn remains unreliable, despite everything.

It is no coincidence that the heightened campaign of the Zionist lobby occurs at a time when the war drums in the Middle East are beating ever louder. As Moshé Machover put it so eloquently in a letter in last week’s Weekly Worker, the

anti-Semitism hysteria … has much to do with the hyenas positioning themselves for the next major Middle East war … The likely pretext for western military action this time will not be simply ‘humanitarian intervention’, but coming to the aid of Israel in order to ‘prevent another holocaust’. Those who demur will be branded as ‘anti-Semites’.

Since last week the campaign for another major war has been stepped up even more. First we saw Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, claiming that there are “80,000 extremists from all over the Middle East who are members of Shia militias in Syria under Iranian control”, hiding away in a base “just over five miles from Damascus”, where they are preparing to launch their “ground invasion” of the Zionist state, designed to “break up Israel”.2)for example, www.express.co.uk/news/world/952532/WW3-warning-World-War-3-Israel-Iran-Syria-nuclear

The pictures that the Israeli government produced as ‘evidence’ are as ridiculous as the idea that – even if there were 80,000 ground troops waiting to pounce – the Iranians have any chanceof simply walking into Israel. As opposed to Iran, Israel actually does possess nuclear weapons and, thanks to a hefty annual cheque from the US government, their armed forces are highly trained and equipped with the latest tech. Iranian soldiers, on the other hand, have access to 1980s-style weaponry – if they are lucky.

A few days later, the world was treated to another one of Binyamin Netanyahu’s embarrassing low-tech slideshow presentations, in which he tried to prove “with half a ton of evidence” how the government of Iran lied in order to secure the 2015 nuclear deal in return for the lifting of some sanctions. This little charade was mainly for the benefit of Donald Trump, of course, who is firmly opposed to the deal, which has to be renewed by May 12.

If it does not get renewed, we are indeed one step closer to a military confrontation in the Middle East. But, contrary to what Netanyahu is trying to tell us, it is not Iran that is threatening to unleash “World War III”. It is in fact the governments of Israel, the US and Turkey who are preparing the ground to go to war against Syria. The ‘civil war’ there is drawing to an end and the side of Assad/Iran/Russia/Hezbollah seems to be emerging as the ‘winner’ (if such a phrase can be used, when one looks at the carnage in that devastated country).

Zionism is a reality. It is right to oppose it using its proper name
Zionism is a reality. It is right to oppose it using its proper name

To stop such an outcome, a new war may well be ‘necessary’, from the point of view of the US, Israeli and Saudi governments. It is much more likely that Israeli troops are preparing for a significant incursion into Syria. The aim: to keep Syria permanently divided and, while they are at it, deal with Hezbollah in the Lebanon.

Another goal of the Israeli government is, of course, to continue to provoke the Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank. The March 31 slaughter of 18 unarmed civilians by hidden Israeli snipers is just a taster of what is to come – no doubt there will be more such actions – the goal of the Israeli government is to ethnically cleanse the whole of the West Bank.

No wonder that Zionists are so keen to try and outlaw comparisons between Nazis and the Israeli government. They are too close to the truth.

The anti-Semitism campaign in the Labour Party only makes sense if seen in this international context. When it turned out that Jeremy Corbyn could not simply be humiliated into giving up his post as party leader, the next stage of the campaign was launched: Operation Tame Corbyn. And this is going rather better than the chicken coup, unfortunately.

Britain is expected to take part in this latest campaign for war in the Middle East. If not by dropping bombs, then at least by providing political cover for this necessary war to “prevent another holocaust”. A Labour leader and potential prime minister who has been an outspoken supporter of the Palestinians is, in this context, untenable. Labour cannot be allowed to become an anti-war party.

Al Jazeera’s powerful documentary The lobby has proved beyond doubt that the Jewish Labour Movement – which is, outrageously, still an affiliate to the Labour Party – is not just “working hand in hand” with the Israeli Labor Party (which is bad enough), but also with the Israeli embassy and therefore the government of Israel. The JLM clearly should not be allowed to remain an affiliate of the Labour Party, and the MPs who remain members of this despicable organisation should be immediately deselected by the local party membership.

The ‘anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ campaign has already succeeded in imposing the idea of what a properJew is – one who does not criticise Israel, but supports the pro-Zionist, pro-Tory Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies. The proud tradition of socialist Jews opposing Zionism has been brushed aside and vilified. Jews are being presented as hegemonic supporters of Zionism. Momentum owner Jon Lansman has already stated that the word ‘Zionism’ should be abandoned, because “to the Jew in the street it might only mean the Jewish state of Israel, safe and secure – nothing more than that – not a separate ideology”.

How wrong can you be? From the start, modern Zionism as an ideology fought for the foundation of an exclusive colonial-settler state, which had to be based on the violent displacement of the native Arab population – that or their savage oppression. It is not the word ‘Zionism’ that is the problem – it is the reality of an ongoing colonial-settler project. By attempting to remove the right to criticise Zionism by name, Lansman is actually attempting to undermine the fight against systematic national oppression.

Clearly we cannot rely on Jeremy Corbyn and Jon Lansman to stand up to the pro-Israeli lobby. Socialists and supporters of the cause of the Palestinians in the Labour Party must now step up their campaign and increase the pressure on the Labour leadership to turn the organisation into a democratic, anti-war party.

References

Democracy and the Labour Party, Elections in the Labour Party, Inside the Labour Party

Wales: Blairite right clings on

William Phillips looks at the forthcoming leadership election in Welsh Labour

Jeremy Corbyn was the first Labour Party leader to be elected under the ‘one member, one vote’ system. Welsh Labour might well follow this lead. Its April 20-22 Llandudno conference agreed to review how it elects the Labour leader in Wales – something which became particularly urgent after Carwyn Jones dramatically announced his resignation in his final speech to conference. Elections are due in the autumn.

Under existing rules the leader is chosen through an electoral college system that gives equals votes to (1) members, (2) the unions and other affiliated organisations, and (3) MPs, MEPs and AMs. While Unison and the GMB are keen on retaining their union block votes, they have talked about reducing the vote wielded by the politicians or eliminating it in its entirety. Others, however, including Mark Drakeford – finance secretary in the Welsh government and a candidate to succeed Carwyn Jones – are campaigning for Omov.

Who emerges as the new leader will obviously depend on the election system. But some idea of the balance of forces can be gleaned from Llandudno.

It is unlikely any trend or group would have left conference fully satisfied. “A score draw,” some comrades I spoke to reckoned; “2-1 to the right, but with the second half still to come”, was the verdict of another leftwing delegate. A deep fault line runs between the rank and file, which is left-leaning, and most union bureaucrats, councillors, assembly members, etc, who are still dominated by the right. Whereas the rank and file identify with Corbyn, the officialdom is determined to distance itself from the UK leadership.

Superficially, the bare facts of the conference appear to support a sober assessment for the left. Its candidate for the new post of deputy leader in Wales was defeated. Two motions addressing the electoral college system that delivered this victory for the right were rejected by the standing orders committee (SOC) in the run-up to Llandudno, and energetic lobbying at the event itself by comrades from the Constituency Labour Parties and Welsh Labour Grassroots/Momentum could not reverse the SOC’s ruling.

In November of last year, the Welsh executive committee (WEC) adopted the electoral college for leader and deputy leader elections. The WEC’s contempt for the membership it purports to serve was illustrated by the high-handed way it ignored the pro-Omov submissions from 19 of the 27 CLPs which responded to the membership consultation that itactually initiated.

The anger this sparked on the left is all the more understandable when you look at the victory margin for the right’s candidate for deputy leader, Swansea East MP Carolyn Harris. The result was 51.5% for Harris and 48.5% for the left’s candidate, Julie Morgan. (Their current locations on the political spectrum are relative and highly mobile, it must be said.)

However, burrow deeper into the detail and the real story of the deputy leadership election emerges. In terms of the combined 16,819 votes cast, Morgan had beaten Harris by 9,110 votes to 7,709. Particularly significant was that in the members’ section Morgan won by 6,244 votes to 3,336 – a ratio of almost 2:1 (although on a disappointing turnout of 38.2%).

It was the weighted electoral college system that had swung it for Harris, to the anger and frustration of many. The sections for elected representatives and unions, etc have been so far the least affected by the changes that have come with Corbyn.

Leftwingers are naturally annoyed that their votes were swamped. One particular statistic that is being bitterly repeated by comrades is that the vote of one elected AM or MP is worth the vote of 400 ranks-and-file members.

Omov

There is no question that the campaign for Omov – pushed energetically by many CLPs and members in the branches – will have received a boost from this widely discredited election. The notion that our elected representatives should command such a disproportionately huge influence is clearly absurd. By definition, our MPs, MEPs and AMs are the most susceptible to the seductions of power. They are the people who we really need to keep an eye on.

Tactically, it may be correct to support Omov at this stage in the fight in Welsh Labour. It would certainly make short work of the current leadership of Welsh Labour and install a pro-Corbyn team. However, as a general principle we should be against plebiscites in the party – for electoral contests or otherwise. Comrades should remember that the move to Omov for the election of the party leader began with the likes of Neil Kinnock and John Smith, and culminated in Ed Miliband’s Collins review – it was a rightwing ploy to dilute the working class nature of our party. 1)https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1000/labour-unions-vote-to-be-distanced/

Comrades should bear in mind the farce that was John Lansman’s Momentum coup, cynically wrapped as it was in a veneer of ‘democracy from below’. In fact, this pseudo-inclusive manoeuvre crushed the embryonic democratic structures of the organisation and substituted online voting of the entire, atomised and easily steered membership. Omov in Lansman’s hands was the vehicle for a profoundly undemocratic plot against the interests of the membership – one that stymied Momentum’s potential to be an effective, dynamic left trend in the party.

Moreover – despite our recent negative experience in Wales – it is in general an enormous strength of the Labour Party that it has the affiliation of important unions. It is pleasing that no comrades here seem to have had a ‘Christine Shawcroft moment’2)Specifically, her outburst on Facebook: “It is time to support disaffiliation of the unions from the Labour Party” – questioning Labour’s historic links with these vital working class institutions. In fact, as part of the democracy review that was won at the Llandudno conference (see below), we should include a commitment to a vigorous national campaign to affiliate all unions to Labour – a development that would go a huge way to making the party a genuine united front of the working class.

That would require rank-and-file initiative in the unions; hard campaigning work and persuasive arguments; and – crucially – a thorough-going democratisation of the unions from top to bottom.

Positive

Despite the results of this year’s conference, there were positive developments that could open up real opportunities for the left.

Firstly there is Mark Drakeford. He is, of this moment, the bookies’ favourite. Drakeford has a long history on the left in Wales and has been a consistent supporter of Corbyn.

Certainly, he could hardly be more inconsistent than the outgoing Blairite incumbent and supporter of Syrian air strikes, Carwyn Jones. The Jones ‘brand’ was undoubtedly tainted by his and his team’s handling of charges of inappropriate sexual conduct against Carl Sargeant, a Welsh government minister – resulting in the man’s suicide in November last year. But politically, Jones had already lost a great deal of authority, given the nature of the general election campaign that official Welsh Labour had foisted on the membership in June 2017.

This was clearly devised to dramatically distance the party in Wales from the leadership in London – Corbyn and McDonnell in particular. The Cardiff HQ drew up a different election platform, and pictures of Corbyn on official material were rarer than dragon’s eggs. Many rank-and-file members were angry at this sidelining of the leader and made their views known with some energy.

Other encouraging developments for the left came out of this year’s conference:

  • CLPs organised a useful fringe meeting on Omov, convened by the umbrella organisation, Cyfle (‘Opportunity’ in Welsh). By all accounts it was a lively meeting, with a combative resolution on display that the fight for the democratisation of our party would go on and intensify.
  • There was also some success for WLG/Momentum in elections to the SOC and even those lefts who were unsuccessful replicated the general pattern of support that was displayed in the deputy leadership contest. That is, the left won amongst the branch members; they lost out to the voting weight of the affiliate organisations.
  • WLG/Momentum-backed candidates won eight out of the 10 available CLP seats on the leadership.

I have already referenced the democracy review. The motion for this was moved by delegate Sue Hagerty and her call for the initial phase of the process to be completed this summer, ending with a special conference on the leadership election method in advance of the election itself, needs to be vigorously supported by the membership (especially because – while this proposal was very popular with delegates – worryingly, the final decision rests with the incoming Welsh executive).

The motion passed with very few dissenters and so comrades in Wales now have an opportunity to discuss this pivotal issue. Although the remit of the democracy review in Wales only covers issues specifically devolved to the WEC (which, happily, include the election format for leadership and deputy leadership elections), the logic of the discussion must take us far beyond these parameters and towards a permanent, democratic and militant organisation of the rank and file in Wales and beyond.

References

Democracy and the Labour Party, Trade unions

RMT union: Join us in battle!

The RMT is debating whether or not to affiliate. Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists says get back in

“You can take your distance from America,” Tony Blair told the Chilcot inquiry years ago, “but you might find it is a long way back.”

So, also, it seems, is the case with taking of distance from the Labour Party. Close to 15 years after being expelled from Labour, thanks in large part to Blair’s many crimes, the Rail, Maritime and Transport union is to decide whether or not to apply for re-affiliation. The crunch moment comes on May 30, at a special general meeting.

“For many years I myself wouldn’t have dreamed that I would ever be campaigning to rejoin Labour,” Steve Hedley tells us. “So what has changed? Well, in a word, Corbyn.” Hedley is not a nobody in the RMT – he is assistant general secretary, and a long-standing militant and official in the union. He has spent most of that time on the fringes of the far left, briefly joining the Socialist Party in England and Wales (and the article quoted above was published on the Socialist Appeal website). If he has changed his mind on the matter, no doubt many others have too.

In the beginning

The story of the RMT’s relationship with the Labour Party is a long one – indeed, it is about as long as any such story could possibly be. For it was a motion originating in a branch of the Amalgamated Union of Railway Servants, one of the RMT’s ancestors, that led the Trades Union Congress to kick-start the Labour Representation Committee in 1899. Within a couple of years, there were MPs in parliament answerable, in theory, to the labour movement; and, though independence from the Liberal whip was largely a theoretical matter for Labour’s first MPs, the break was nonetheless decisively important in the history of the British workers’ movement – and for that matter in the history of ‘bourgeois’ politics in this country as a whole.

For the next century, the AURS and its successor, the National Union of Railwaymen, were core affiliates to the Labour Party; no less loyal was the National Union of Seamen, the other component part of today’s union. Even 20 years ago, with Jimmy Knapp still in the general secretary’s seat of what was by then the RMT, a break with Labour would have been quite unimaginable.

Knapp presided over some significant industrial battles, but aided and abetted Neil Kinnock and John Smith, as they paved the way for Tony Blair. In 2001, in a move reflecting deep disappointment with the first Blair government in the RMT ranks, the top job was taken by Bob Crow, an avowed communist and militant organiser. Under his leadership, RMT members in Scotland used the union political fund to sponsor candidates of the Scottish Socialist Party, which was riding high at the time; this can only have been a calculated provocation, and the inevitable result – expulsion from the ranks of Labour’s affiliates – followed in 2004.

Since then, the RMT’s political fund has been put to highly eclectic uses. The SSP, of course, collapsed into irrelevance within three years, when it split over Tommy Sheridan’s attempts to sue the Murdoch empire over allegations about his sex life. It continues to exist, just about, today; it is merely a tail of the nationalists, and a well-docked tail at that. The RMT sponsors a smattering of MPs on an individual basis – mostly Labour, but also including leftish nationalists and Greens. It has also been a primary sponsor first of the now disbanded ‘No to the EU’ ‘Lexiteer’ slate in the 2009 and 2014 European elections, and the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition on an ongoing basis. Electoral returns for both have been generally awful – which is to say, below the pretty poor historic standard of far-left candidates in Britain’s hostile electoral system.

Though many on the far left greeted the RMT’s break with Labour – in the context of the invasion of Iraq, top-up fees and the rest – as a great step forward, it is clear, on the evidence of the last 15 years, that it was in fact a step backpolitically for the RMT and the labour movement as a whole. The most successful use of the RMT political fund in these years, apart from supporting some Labour MPs, has been boosting petty bourgeois candidates (a matter on which those who urged disaffiliation, like SPEW, are tellingly silent).

Transformed Labour?

On the RMT’s side, then, the opportunity is there to step back into the central terrain of British labour movement politics. But not only that. As Hedley tells us, there is a serious class struggle going on for the very future of the movement itself, and the place where the battle rages is the Labour Party. Merely by making that move, Britain’s most militant union would send a very clear message. The impact of the return could – almost– be worth the wasted years in the political desert.

We are told by another advocate of reaffiliation, however, that “RMT branches are divided, and the vote at the SGM is likely to be close.”1)Jeff Slee in Labour Briefing Indeed, all the signs are of a close contest. Hedley begins his article with a disclaimer – “I refuse to fall out with anyone over the debate in the RMT about reaffiliation to the Labour Party” – that suggests in itself that fur is likely to fly.

A document outlining the terms offered by the Labour Party has been circulated among RMT branches with a covering letter from general secretary Mick Cash 2)Cash’s letter is available here. The document itself is marked “private and confidential”, but seems to have been inadvertently published on the RMT website for a brief period and, at time of writing, was still in Google’s cache. Drawn from the response of the Labour Party to the RMT’s advances, it reads – admittedly to an outsider – like a document written by an advocate of reaffiliation who takes great pains to reassure opponents that their fears are unfounded.

So who are these opponents? We find many grumbles in the comments beneath comrade Hedley’s forthright Facebook posts, but a more systematic argument comes – where else? – from our comrades in SPEW. An article in their RMT members’ bulletin puts their case. “Socialist Party members of the RMT welcome the fact that a dialogue with the Labour Party has begun,” the comrades tell us:

A transformed Labour Party, with full democratic rights and due weight in its structures for trade unions – the collective voices of workers – would take forward the objectives of the RMT, as defined in our rule book: to “improve the conditions and protect the interests of its members” and “to work for the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”.

So far, so good. However, “are the terms of affiliation currently on offer – losing our political independence and handing £240,000 a year to a largely unreconstructed party machine (if we affiliate our full membership) – really the best way to pursue the RMT’s objectives at this moment?” Phrasing the question in that way, naturally, presumes an answer in the negative. The article continues:

There is nothing on what the party will do to stop Labour-controlled authorities implementing driver-only operation (DOO) and sacking guards on Merseyrail and Rail North, massive funding cuts in Transport for London, or privatisation plans for the Welsh railways. The RMT has AGM policy supporting local councils setting no-cuts budgets by using their reserves and borrowing powers. Yet rightwing Labour-led councils continue to slash jobs and local services and nothing is said about it.

There follows a fairly accurate description of the bureaucratic obstacles to Labour Party democracy, and so on, and the conclusions write themselves: “once the cheque is handed over, it’s no longer our money”; worries about the “(extremely limited) opportunities and (still considerable) overheads that affiliation would bring”.

We should start by pointing out that what the SPEW comrades are engaged in here is the spread of what public relations professionals call “fear, uncertainty and doubt”, or FUD. Note that the RMT would “lose its political independence”, apparently: the confidential document, to which the SPEW article refers, explicitly repudiates this, except in the case of standing candidates against Labour. And indeed there is nothing in the Labour Party rules that excludes (say) campaigning for immediate rail renationalisation simply because Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell are too timid to call for it themselves.

If we are to identify standing candidates against Labour as the blocker issue, however, then the high-minded openness to reaffiliation affected by the SPEW article is revealed as a sham, for there is exactly zero point in even a politically healthy federal party of the labour movement accepting affiliates who stand against it in elections. It seems that we founder on the great socialist principle of SPEW being permitted to do whatever the hell it likes.

There is something more troubling yet, however, about the SPEW approach to this question, which is its petty bourgeois character. We mean this in the narrowest possiblesense – SPEW behaves exactly like a provincial estate agent, obsessed with getting the better of some petty transaction. £240,000 doesn’t buy enough influence in the Labour Party.

Sectionalism

In a more expansive sense, the petty bourgeois attitude expresses itself, in the trade union movement, as sectionalism– the pursuit of the narrow aims of the union over and above those of the movement as a whole. It is thus highly regrettable that SPEW constantly encourages such sectionalism – what does the RMTget for its money? – above the general interest, which is hardly ideal from the point of view of an organisation that considers itself Trotskyist.

The best exemplar of this is the apparent expectation that an acceptable set of terms for affiliation should contain policy on driver-only operation. The proper way to settle such questions is not in market-stall haggling between the Labour Party bureaucracy and its RMT counterparts, but at conference. (Things are more commonly settled in the now smoke-free rooms of backstage stitch-ups, of course.) Say that there was Labour Party policy to nationalise the insurance industry and, as part of negotiations to get an insurance clerks’ union on board, that policy was struck off. I, and hopefully SPEW, would be less than pleased. Yet it seems to think that the RMT should expect just that sort of behaviour.

Can it really be the case that purported Trotskyists – who aspire to be the most conscious vanguard of the labour movement – should promote sectionalism as a matter of principle? Probably not. The truth is that these sad little contortions are designed for internal consumption; the lukewarm participation of the RMT in Tusc is all that keeps it afloat and, once it is gone, the last 25 years of SPEW strategy are basically buried.

But for the moment SPEW is committed to Tusc. The April 25 edition of The Socialist urged readers to “Vote Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition” in the May 3 local elections in England – without exception, it seems: the front-page article makes no mention of voting for any Labour candidates in the vast majority of seats, where Tusc is not contesting. After all, “Today Blairite councils around the country are implementing huge cuts to public services. That is why the Socialist Party is standing, as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, against some of the worst Blairite cutters at local level.”

Yet, in the same article, we read this:

As we have repeatedly warned, making concessions to the pro-capitalist wing of the Labour Party, and attempting to conciliate with them, will only give them more power to try and defeat Corbyn. Not one inch should be conceded to them. Instead urgent measures are needed to completely transform the Labour Party into a mass socialist, working class party, with a revitalised trade union movement involved at its core through democratic, representative structures.

So how are those “urgent measures” to be won? How about winning the unions to fight for them within Labour itself? Oh no – that would be a waste of money.

Yet, as SPEW’s perspective of creating a Labour Party mark two is progressively invalidated by events, so SPEW comrades are voting with their feet and condemning themselves to a life of ‘poor value for money’ in the Labour Party – those left behind are more and more the irreconcilable and the delusional. The silver lining is that – in precisely the far-sighted spirit of the Communist manifesto– SPEW tends to find it amenable to take its political lead from the RMT, so perhaps a well-advised decision on May 30 will bring Peter Taaffe’s merry men and women finally to the same conclusion.

As already noted, however, a good outcome is far from guaranteed. If it is a close vote against reaffiliation, that will hardly cover SPEW in glory – and we shall say no more than that. To RMT members, we commend the larger view of politics, and hope that those of us wanting to truly transform Labour, rather than wait passively for it to be transformed for us, are soon to be joined by the battered British labour movement’s most militant contingent.

References

References
↑1 Jeff Slee in Labour Briefing
↑2 Cash’s letter is available here. The document itself is marked “private and confidential”, but seems to have been inadvertently published on the RMT website for a brief period and, at time of writing, was still in Google’s cache.
Anti-Semitism, Democracy and the Labour Party

Call time on Corbyn fanboyism

Capitulation will never be good enough for the right – so the Labour left has no interest in compromise, argues Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists

Another week, another great torrent of spurious anti-Semitism allegations.

We would go through a few of them, but, really, why bother? There is nothing new here – just the same fetid concoction of lies, innuendo and smears, lightly seasoned (if that) with actual examples of anti-Semitism invariably culled from a few cranks on the internet. By equally valid means could the Labour Party be just as fairly accused of being a Russian mafia front, a giant paedophile ring, or – alas! – an instrument of world Jewry’s conspiracy against the white race.

We are more interested – which is to say, quite exasperated – by the refusal to fight back against such smears by wide sections of the left, including the Labour leadership and its outriders in Momentum and the like.

Even when the left fights back, it seems to capitulate. Take a piece from Jacobin by Daniel Finn, deputy editor of the New Left Review. It is vastly preferable to Richard Seymour’s spineless intervention, and is on the face of it precisely what we are after – a denunciation of the witch-hunt, an exposure of the defamers and their dishonest methods. Yet, for all that, comrade Finn is bizarrely keen to insist that there is a problem, even if it is not so crippling as all that. “There is no evidence that anti-Semitic views are more prevalent in Labour than in other parties,” he writes (emphasis added). “If the party has even a single member with anti-Semitic views, that’s a problem. Only a fool would claim that Labour has managed to eliminate every last trace of bigotry from its ranks”; and so on.

No offence

Things get weirder still when we get to the Chakrabarti report. Finn does a reasonable job of exposing the cynicism with which it is denounced as a “whitewash”, but then goes on to say:

Chakrabarti’s report contained some very sensible recommendations about language: she urged left activists to “use the term ‘Zionist’ advisedly, carefully and never euphemistically or as part of personal abuse” and to “resist the use of Hitler, Nazi and holocaust metaphors, distortions and comparisons in debates about Israel/Palestine in particular”.

He then cites the Ken Livingstone affair as an example of how not to do things.

A famous saying, attributed to Edmund Burke, has it that for evil to triumph all that is necessary is for good people to do nothing. Yet we know that there are numerous kinds of inaction, and here we are faced by a very contemporary one. So we might rephrase the pseudo-Burke aphorism: all that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to silence themselves for fear of offending the evil-doers. The backsliding of Jeremy Corbyn and his clique is well documented in this paper, as is the timidity of Owen Jones on the question; and in last week’s edition the indefatigable Tony Greenstein dealt at length with the increasingly rudderless Richard Seymour’s platitudinous meanderings on the subject.

For what else are we to do with leftwingers who hem and haw about using the word ‘Zionist’ because it gives offence, or the admonition of our Jacobin writer that comparisons with the Nazis are out? If we were to take this offence-taking at its word, we should perhaps greet it as good news, for it would mean that Zionists – by taking fright at the use of their movement’s historic, self-chosen name – were ashamed of it. Perhaps they are finally learning! Perhaps when he described himself and the disgraced advertising mogul, Martin Sorrell, in their student days as “slightly leftwing Zionists” in the New Yorker recently, Simon Schama was launching at his younger self a vigorous piece of self-criticism.

Alas, we doubt it. What is going on is, in fact, far more mundane. When an anti-Zionist uses the word ‘Zionist’, they are by definition describing an enemy. Zionists, being possessed like all other humans with the capacity to resolve ambiguities in language, know that to the speaker the word ‘Zionist’ has negative connotations. There are only two ways to avoid using ‘Zionist’ as an insult. One is to use different words to express your criticism – but that merely shifts the problem, since no doubt being accused of ‘blood-and-soil nationalist colonialism’ is just as offensive as ‘Zionist’ when it comes down to it. The other is to not attack Zionism at all – either because one is a Zionist, or even indifferent to the question; or because one is intent on disarming oneself.

As for Nazi comparisons, what of them? If we can’t use Nazism, can we use apartheid, or the conquistadors, as points of reference? We merely end up asking our enemies for permission to criticise them. (Nobody asked any of us if it was all right to accuse us of anti-Semitism.) It is also worth noting that the Palestinian solidarity movement is not the only place where the comparison occurs to people: we commend to comrade Finn a fascinating and disturbing piece from Ha’aretz some years ago on the odd tendency for the Israeli security services themselves to throw out such comparisons: for example, a group of Israel Defence Forces soldiers, stationed in Ramallah during the first intifada, who nicknamed themselves the “Mengele squad”, out of some combination of nihilistic hatred and repressed guilt.

Our own petard

The question arises as to why our side is so paralysed. There is no shortage of anger about these scandalous smears; the rank-and-file of the Labour Party seems, at least since its explosion in size during and after Corbyn’s election, to be overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian. The Zionists and also opportunistically pro-Zionist rightwingers are loud, and they are nasty, and they have the media on their side, but they are numerically tiny. Yet they have a habit of outmanoeuvring our much more numerous troops, who – surely – have the potential to be far more militant than appears currently to be the case.

The explanation, so far as we can see, has two essential aspects to it. The first is that the left, including its socialist (and even revolutionary) components, has over time adopted an essentially liberal approach to overcoming oppression. In countries where Maoism was the prime beneficiary from the student movement of the 1960s, a policy of ‘alliances’ with organisations of the specially oppressed that gave the political lead to those organisations was a straightforward matter, authorised by popular frontism. In countries like Britain where Trotskyism did better, the ostensible approach was to turn discontent on the women’s, black, etc questions into militant action, in order to win leadership for the Marxists on those questions, but in reality that had the same result, where the Marxists ended up as ‘the best fighters’ (if they were lucky) on behalf of politics substantially set by the ‘self-organised’ oppressed.

As state policy turned from artificially propping up patriarchal family relations and white predominance in politics and economic life, however, the centripetal force of common struggle was overpowered by the centrifugal force of sectionalism. It became far more readily possible for oppressed groups to achieve some marginal advantage or another comfortably within the system. Whatever attraction revolutionary politics once had for people whose whole horizon was the women’s question, or the black question, was eroded. The left did not notice this change, however, and continued to trail increasingly anti-left forms of identity politics.

The result is that purely liberal identity politics has nearly uncontested ‘mindshare’ among the wider progressive and left milieus. And purely liberal identity politics has no answer to the problem of someone announcing that, as a Jew, they are very offended that leftwingers keep on going on about the crimes of Israel; to deny that this offence is legitimate is impossible without breaking with liberalism here, but by tailing liberalism we put people on our side in the impossible position of having to break with it as atomised individuals. They cannot, and do not.

From top down

Which leads us to the second problem, which is the problem of leadership.

There is a certain old-mannish tendency for grizzled left curmudgeons to complain about the state of the people who make up the hundreds of thousands who joined the Labour Party in its recent, fascinatingly turbulent period of life. The newcomers are young; they think everything is about the internet; they’re obsessed with celebrity, and just want their selfie with Jeremy; they don’t stand up straight; they should get off my lawn.

This tendency is to be rejected, as it curses us to complacency, but above all because the fact that we have a new generation at all, and have gotten some of the old generations back, is an extraordinary blessing, which we do not get often, least of all in the mostly bleak three decades to the present date.

Yet there is always a grain of truth to these things. In this case, it can hardly be denied that the political level of Corbynite Labour activists is very low, and does not seem to have risen at all in the last couple of years. No chinks have appeared in the armour of identity politics. No slogans have emerged as a stiffer alternative to ‘For the many, not the few’. Strikingly, there seems to have been no noticeable growth in the organised far left at all – not those parts of it energetically tailing Corbyn, not those taking a sectarian stand against it, nor any of the other approaches that have been tried. We starve amid plenty.

The truth is that everything depends on leadership. For somebody coming into the movement at this moment, there is a very clear candidate for the leadership – Corbyn. There is secondarily Momentum, which has made a few odd moves recently, but still enjoys the prestige inadvertently donated to it by the scurrilous attacks of the rightwing press. Both these loci of leadership tell people, first of all, to submit themselves to all the defects our grumpy old men list out above – Bonapartist hero-worship and so on. This is not some sort of cultural decline, but the result of people making the correct decision to get involved in the mass movement, and taking advice from the leaders of that movement as to what they ought to do. Those leaders are, precisely, grizzled leftwingers; they are ‘our kind of people’. It is us who are responsible for misleading those masses that a historical accident has thrown into motion, and who are trying to direct that motion.

The strategy of the movement’s leadership is to avoid as strenuously as possible conflict over issues which it does not plan to fight an election on, which in practice means issues that divide the Labour left from the centre. In practice, this means the single issue of austerity. So much the worse for the Palestinians; for the policy on Israel and fake anti-Semitism accusations is simply to give ground, again and again, to no noticeable effect. Why bother denouncing such allegations if even Ken Livingstone gets thrown to the wolves?

The abiding lesson of this fiasco, then, is a simple one: the time for Corbynite fanboyism is very much over.

 

Anti-Semitism, Democracy and the Labour Party

Victimisers pose as victims

David Shearer of Labour Party Marxists reports on the lobby in support of Marc Wadsworth

Just a day after Jeremy Corbyn met with leaders of rightwing Zionist groups to reassure them that he was taking claims of anti-Semitism within Labour “very seriously”, Marc Wadsworth’s disciplinary hearing took place in Church House (just round the corner from Westminster Abbey).

Comrade Wadsworth has been suspended from the Labour Party for almost two years, after criticising Ruth Smeeth MP at the launch of the Chakrabarti report in June 2016. What he actually said was that Smeeth was working “hand in hand” with a journalist from The Daily Telegraph. After a considerable time lapse Smeeth theatrically stormed out of the Chakrabarti launch, later claiming that she had been “verbally attacked” by a “Jeremy Corbyn supporter … who used traditional anti-Semitic slurs to attack me for being part of a ‘media conspiracy’”. Uh? Comrade Wadsworth states that he did not even know Smeeth was Jewish.

web-Marc-wadesworthDespite the fact that his words can be clearly heard on social media – thanks to those who recorded the question-and -answer session – the charges against him were not dropped. Yet no honest person could seriously interpret what he said as anti-Semitic. It therefore says a lot about the current climate that such a remark can be weaponised in this cynical way. True, just as with Ken Livingstone, amongst others, the charge of anti-Semitism against comrade Wadsworth was eventually replaced with the catch-all of “bringing the party into disrepute” and it was on the basis of this charge that the hearing took place on April 25 (as we go to press, the two-day-hearing is still ongoing).

Naturally, the proceedings were lobbied by Labour members outraged at such blatant nonsense. They included comrades from Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour Party Marxists, Momentum and Grassroots Black Left. The headline of the Evening Standard referred to them as a “far-left mob”, although that does not appear in the online version. Its report was typical of many, concentrating on the rightwing Labour MPs who bravely accompanied Smeeth to shield her from that “far-left mob”:

Dozens of Labour MPs staged a symbolic show of discontent against Labour’s failure to crack down on anti-Semitism by marching alongside Jewish MP Ruth Smeeth when she went to give evidence at an expulsion hearing against activist Marc Wadsworth, who is accused of abusing her.

Jess Phillips MP is quoted as saying: “We are making sure she isn’t walking into a protest on her own.” As for her fellow rightwinger Wes Streeting, he claimed that the mere presence of a lobby was “intimidating”.

web-Marc-Wadsworth-1Elsewhere Streeting has stated: “That it was necessary to accompany her through a protest is an appalling state of affairs.” Necessary? As The Guardian puts it, “MPs said they had decided to support Smeeth because she had initially been told by the party she would be responsible for her own security walking to the hearing.” In Streeting’s words, “Victims of abuse giving evidence shouldn’t have to walk through a protest to do so.” He went on to slam “people who claim to be Labour supporters and supporters of Jeremy Corbyn who think it’s appropriate to protest against a Jewish MP.” For that reason, “I hope [Wadsworth will] be kicked out of the Labour Party.”

Yes, he really did say that. Smeeth is a “victim of abuse” because she was accused merely of working “hand in hand” with a rightwing journalist. And we should not be allowed to protest against such an obviously unjust procedure – for the record, it was the procedure and the whole campaign of smears that provoked the protest: comrades had gathered to express solidarity with comrade Wadsworth, not hurl “abuse” at “a Jewish MP”!

But this is all part of the ongoing drive to both undermine the Corbyn leadership and equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The latter point is illustrated by the demands made by the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies when they met Corbyn on April 24.

As well as insisting that Labour should “expedite the long-standing cases involving Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker” (ie, expel them on equally fabricated charges of ‘anti-Semitism’), and that “there should be transparent oversight of their disciplinary process” (ie, with groups like the JLC and Board of Deputies making sure things go the ‘right’ way), the Zionists insist that Labour must “adopt the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism with all its examples and clauses”.

Labour has, of course, accepted the IHRA definition itself, but certainly not those “examples and clauses”, which collectively have the effect of dubbing opposition to Israel and Zionism anti-Semitic. But, thankfully, Corbyn refused to comply. According to the joint JLC-Board of Deputies statement, the meeting had been a “disappointing missed opportunity” to deal with “the problem of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party”. Corbyn had “failed to agree to any of the concrete actions we asked for”, which apparently represented the “minimum level of action the community expected”. Nevertheless, the two groups will continue to “do our utmost to work with all those within Labour who want to help make it a safe and equal space for all of its members”.

Such statements really do point to the success of the smear campaign. With the help of Corbyn’s soft pedalling and apparent acceptance that Labour really does have a problem with anti-Semitism, the rightwing media has seen to it that the falsehoods are widely regarded as indisputably true.

But, thankfully, not by everybody. Writing in the New Statesman Unite general secretary Len McCluskey says: “You would have to go back a long way to find such a sustained smearing by MPs of their own leader and their own party as we are seeing now.” However, he promises that the “promiscuous critics” who “wish to hold Corbyn to account can expect to be held to account themselves”.

Automatic reselection should be the first step. Only then can MPs be held to account by Labour members l

 

Momentum

Momentum NCG elections: no vote

A call from Labour Party Marxists

Momentum’s National Coordinating Group (NCG) has agreed a statement on anti-Semitism, which, while not available on its website, seems to be very much in keeping with Jon Lansman’s comments on the issue. This does not come as much of a surprise. He is, after all, the owner of Momentum. So we read in The Guardian that the statement condemns “anti-Jewish bias”, which is apparently “more widespread in the Labour Party than many of us had understood even a few months ago”. Obviously, this had nothing to do at all with the increased attacks by the right on the party on this issue.

We read that Lansman is working with “external groups” on developing anti-Semitism awareness training for Labour members. Judging by his uncritical description of the March 26 anti-Corbyn rally, ‘Enough is Enough’, on Radio 4 as an “anti-racist rally” and a “demonstration on anti-Semitism”, 1)Today Radio 4, April 3 (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09xcsdb we fear that he has not just the pro-Zionist Jewish Labour Movement in mind (which would be bad enough), but might well be in touch with some even more ‘mainstream’ forces like the Board of Deputies or the Jewish Leadership Council.

This sad story underlines why we will not be advocating a vote in the forthcoming NCG elections. Firstly, it is an entirely useless body, designed by Lansman and imposed on the organisation with the constitution he wrote in the wake of his coup of January 10, 2017 in which he abolished all democratic national and regional structures in the organisation. It is there to rubber-stamp whatever Lansman wants it to do.

Secondly, most of the candidates are utterly useless. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is putting forward some of their members and supporters, including three who have been on the NCC for the last 12 months. There is a chance that Sahaya James and Rida Vaquas actually support Lansman’s NCG statement – after all, they are supporters of the social-imperialist organisation that portrays pretty much the entire left as anti-Semitic, with AWL leaders actually describing themselves as “Zionists”.

 

References

References
↑1 Today Radio 4, April 3 (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09xcsdb
Anti-Semitism, Democracy and the Labour Party

Wrong type of Jew

The right has succeeded in ridding ‘anti-Semitism’ of any coherent meaning, says Carla Roberts of Labour Party Marxists

“An anti-Semite used to be somebody who does not like Jews. Now it is somebody who Jews do not like.” This little saying – slightly simplistic, like all catchy ones – has been doing the rounds recently on social media and it is easy to see why. Clearly, we are currently witnessing what must be one of the biggest and most successful smear campaigns against a leader of the Labour Party in the history of the British media.

Of course, anti-Semitism exists in society. It would be foolish to claim otherwise. And, of course, this will find reflection in the Labour Party – especially as we have seen more than 300,000 people join the organisation in the last two and a half years. Many of them are rather inexperienced politically and there will be some who do not necessarily recognise an anti-Semitic trope when they see one – or even write one.

But, rather than fostering open discussion and debate, which is surely the best way to educate people, the Labour Party is now engulfed in a culture of fear, persecution and self-censorship. As should be clear to most commentators with a brain between their ears, the rightwingers inside and outside the Labour Party who are pushing this campaign have very little interest in fighting anti-Semitism or any other kind of oppression. Their campaign is aimed at a certain Jeremy Corbyn.

Owen Jones, however – on the wrong side politically, as has become his habit over the last two years – ticks off “those Labour elements – they know who they are – who believe anti-Semitism is a useful device to undermine the left: your net contribution is to undermine the struggle against anti-Semitism, nothing else.”1)The Guardian April 4 2018) quite the opposite is true, Owen. The right has succeeded in ridding anti-Semitism of any coherent meaning.

Take comrades like Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone and Tony Greenstein, who were suspended on charges of anti-Semitism (in comrade Greenstein’s case, he was eventually expelled), when clearly nothing they did or said expressed in any way “hostility or prejudice against Jews”. Glyn Secker, secretary of Jewish Voice for Labour, was temporarily suspended from the Labour Party for anti-Semitism for merely belonging to a group on Facebook where somebody said something that somebody else felt was anti-Semitic.

Now we have the latest ‘scandal’: Jeremy Corbyn shared a passover seder with a group of Jews … but unfortunately, he picked the wrong type of Jews. Jewdas is a semi-anarchistic organisation based mainly in Corbyn’s constituency of Islington. It describes itself as “radical voices for the alternative diaspora” and likes to employ satire: in 2006, it organised a party entitled ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Hackney’ – obviously a pun on the fraudulent anti-Semitic document, ‘The protocols of the elders of Zion’.The police did not quite get the joke: four people who distributed leaflets for the event were arrested and held under section 19 of the Public Order Act.

They are, if you will, modern orthodox Jews, who have no desire to live in Israel and therefore strongly criticise it (apparently it is a “steaming pile of sewage which needs to be properly disposed of”). Apparently, at the seder, somebody held up a beetroot and shouted, “Fuck capitalism”.((Daily MailApril 4 2018 What’s not to like? Corbyn’s attendance at this event reminds us why so many people continue to like him.

Those outraged by Corbyn’s decision to pick the wrong Jews fail to mention that Corbyn cannot yet sit down for a nice cup of tea with the concerned citizens of the Board of Deputies and Jewish Leadership Council, who organised the cynical March 26 rally, ‘Enough is enough’. The BoD has given him a long list of conditions he will have to meet first, including expelling Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker from the Labour Party. Corbyn has just rejected any preconditions, many of which he actually cannot meet, in any case – expulsions, for example, are decided on by the party’s National Constitutional Committee.

Cynical

Unfortunately, however, Corbyn and his allies have clearly made the decision not to challenge the entirely cynical narrative, according to which the Labour Party is “engulfed by”, “overrun by” or “awash with” anti-Semites. The first mistake Corbyn made was to commission Shami Chakrabarti to produce a report on the issue in April 2016. He thought the allegations would go away. No such luck. The report was seen as an admission of guilt, despite the fact that its first sentence states: “The Labour Party is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism.” Corbyn showed his adversaries that he is pliable on the issue and so they have kept piling on the pressure.

Of course, in the early stages of Labour’s civil war, we saw other types of attacks on Corbyn and his supporters on the left. Remember Tom Watson’s embarrassing ‘Reds under the bed’ dossier? Or the 11,000 complaints and allegations made in the first 12 months of Corbyn’s leadership, “as a result of complaints sent in to the party by other members with an axe to grind”, when “well-resourced rightwing hit squads scented a golden opportunity and began trawling through known Corbynistas’ Facebook and Twitter accounts”, as Christine Shawcroft reported.

We are sorry to break this to Owen Jones, but at this initial stage of the anti-Corbyn campaign most of the allegations were not about anti-Semitism, but about using rude words (remember Catherine Starr, who was suspended for writing on Facebook: “I fucking love the Foo Fighters”?) or for members having supported other organisations – for example, at election time: Corbyn’s senior policy advisor, Andrew Fisher, was temporarily suspended for having tweeted his support for a Class War member, who was standing against rightwinger Emily Benn in the 2015 general election. Some 52% of those 11,000 complaints resulted in no action being taken, which still leaves a staggering 5,280 cases where some action was taken. Of course, at that time witch-hunter general Iain McNicol was in charge of the compliance unit and the National Executive Committee had a clear rightwing majority.

Instead of standing up to this culture, Corbyn turned a blind eye. And so, the rightwing snitches kept on snooping. It soon turned out that allegations of anti-Semitism were by far the best weapon in this struggle. Considering how important it has been to contemporary British culture to present World War II as a crusade against the Nazis (and not a fight over the spoils of imperialism), the charge of anti-Semitism is, of course, a highly emotive one.

It also fits in beautifully with the agenda of the pro-Israel lobby. The campaign against Corbyn has, most recently, pushed coverage of the murder of 17 unarmed Arab demonstrators in Gaza, who were taken out by Israeli snipers, to the back pages. Clearly, one aim of the campaign is to stop any criticism of the actions of the state of Israel. And, unless Corbyn signs up to this pledge like previous Labour leaders have done, he will be attacked, attacked and attacked again.

Anti-Semitism is also a charge that is clearly very flexible. Ken Livingstone has been suspended for over two years now for daring to state that the Zionist movement collaborated with the Nazi government. But the Ha’avara agreement of 1933 between the Zionist movement and the Nazis – which broke the non-Zionist, Jewish-led call for an economic boycott – is an historic fact. Credit to Livingstone, who has refused numerous demands to apologise for the comments (even though it might have got him back into the party).

Corbyn should have defended his fellow leftwinger. But, when he just stood by, the right wing saw this as an open door and proceeded to suspend Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Tony Greenstein and many more. The case against Greenstein shows though what most of these allegations are: nonsense. Despite an investigation lasting over 18 months, the compliance unit could not prove that comrade Greenstein had actually said or written anything anti-Semitic. And so he was expelled for being “abusive” (ie, rude) to people on social media – those ‘offences’ happening after his actual suspension.

But, of course, the appetite of the witch-hunters grows with the eating. Corbyn will never be able to get rid of enough socialists or enough principles. We are not sure if he or his advisors really thought that his ‘letter of apology’ to the Tories running the British Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council would stop the smears against him. His second letter will certainly have helped make it worse. In it, he gives the witch-hunters more grounds to keep on fingering people: he describes as examples of “aspects of contemporary anti-Semitism” the use of the word ‘Zio’ and “comparing Israel or the actions of the state of Israel to the Nazis”. That could easily get a few more hundred people suspended.

Shawcroft

We also saw Corbyn collapsing over the ‘scandal’ around Christine Shawcroft. She had sent an email to Sam Matthews of the compliance unit, in which she called for the suspension of one Alan Bull to be overturned. Bull, a council candidate in Peterborough, has the rather infantile habit of posting ‘shocking’ articles on Facebook without any comment. Two years ago, he thought it would be fun to see how his 5,000 Facebook friends would react to an article entitled ‘International Red Cross report confirms that the Holocaust of 6m Jews is a hoax’.

The screenshot sent to the Labour Party compliance unit – which it helpfully forwarded to all national newspapers – had been doctored, says Bull:

The more accurate and considerably less shocking subheading of this title was excluded by the screenshotter for maximum impact. As were all of the 46 comments, including a short exchange I had with a Jewish friend, who commented: “Can I ask the intent of this article? Are you denying the holocaust?” To which I replied, “Not at all – just posting for discussion and debate, as usual. Best wishes, Alan.”

The man is clearly rather childish and has posted other problematic material. But it almost does not matter if he holds deep-seated anti-Semitic views or not. Thanks to the media jumping on the story with relish, he will from now on be known as ‘Alan, the anti-Semite’.

Christine Shawcroft stuck her neck out for Bull, but had to peddle back when the bourgeois media picked up on her email, which was probably leaked by Sam Matthews – ‘head of disputes’ and willing henchman of Iain McNicol. First, she resigned as chair of the disputes panel and then from the NEC itself, claiming officially that she had not seen that the article was accompanied by a picture of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Why on earth would that matter? It’s bullshit. Now we know it was Jeremy Corbyn himself who asked comrade Shawcroft to resign from both positions.

That was politically inept, to put it mildly. It means Eddie Izzard has taken her seat, which rather dramatically changes the balance of forces on the NEC. It is again almost evenly split between the pro- and anti-Corbyn forces. And, needless to say, sacrificing her will not stop the onslaught. We are told to prepare for a comment by the chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis who, according to The Daily Telegraph, has “grave concerns” about Jeremy Corbyn’s conduct.2)Daily Telegraph, April 4 2018 As do we, but we presume they differ somewhat from Mirvis’s.

Lansman

Momentum owner Jon Lansman has been on a rather embarrassing media offensive, presumably in order to support Corbyn. But he also ended up giving the right more ammunition. For example, he went one step further than Corbyn: not content with demanding that ‘Zio’ should be banned, he stated that people should also stop using the full word, ‘Zionism’, because “to the Jew in the street it might only mean the Jewish state of Israel, safe and secure, nothing more than that, not a separate ideology.” Instead, we should “attack Netanyahu, nothing wrong with that.” 3)Today programme,Radio 4, April 3 2018 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09xcsdb

No, Jon. we should attack ‘Zionism’, in the same way as we should attack any chauvinist, reactionary ideology. From the start modern Zionism fought for the foundation of an exclusive colonial-settler state, which had to be based on the violent displacement of the native Arab population, that or their savage oppression. It is not the word ‘Zionism’ that is the problem – it is the reality of an ongoing colonial-settler project. By attempting to remove the right to criticise Zionism by name, Lansman is actually attempting to undermine the fight against systematic national oppression.

Lansman stated: “… what Ken Livingstone said, whether it was anti-Semitic or not, caused a great deal of offence to many Jewish people” and was therefore wrong. He also called for Labour Party members – including Corbyn – to undergo “training” to be able recognise such “unconscious bias against Jews”. It sounds to us like this kind of “training” could involve some serious rewriting of history: if there is a chance something might be perceived as offensive by some Jewish people, you are not allowed to say it. And let’s abolish all critical thought while we’re at it, shall we, Jon?

Some leftwingers claim that Lansman has been stabbing Corbyn in the back, perhaps out of revenge for not helping him become general secretary. Regular Weekly Worker author Tony Greenstein writes that Lansman should be removed as leader of Momentum, because, “if it accepts the false anti-Semitism narrative, then it is accepting the legitimacy of a campaign whose only purpose is to get rid of Corbyn”.

He is right, of course. But the fish rots from the head. Corbyn is singing from the same hymnsheet as Lansman on this one, unfortunately. Rather than fighting false accusations, he tries to sneak around them. It is not working. And, as if to prove the point, the vile Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has now rather ironically demanded Jon Lansman’s scalp, too: his comment of “unconscious bias” was belittling the problem! But the whole campaign has become absurd and almost entirely removed from any rational reason.

Still, this will not be the end of the witch-hunt against Corbyn or his allies. It has been way too successful. And, despite what the Daily Mail’s political commentator, Peter Oborne, claims, the ‘moderates’ will not do us the favour and split from the Labour Party.4)Mail on SundayApril 1 2018 After Labour’s successful result in the 2017 snap election, they are painfully aware of the fact that joining with the Liberal Democrats to form a “centrist party” will not easily present them with hundreds of parliamentary seats.

No, for rightwing careerists the best bet is to stay in the Labour Party. They have already successfully convinced Corbyn and Lansman to give up the fight for mandatory reselection of parliamentary candidates, so there is no imminent danger of losing their seats. They will keep attacking him, they will keep demanding he drops this principle or expels that person – until either he calls it a day or is tamed enough to become a reliable manager of British capitalism. They have made good progress already. Wait until we see concerted demands on prime minister Corbyn to increase the defence budget, renew Trident (with actual nuclear warheads).

All the more important that the left stands up and criticises Corbyn’s suicidal attitude to the witch-hunt. We defend Corbyn when he is attacked by the right, of course. But our support for him has to become far more critical. Labour Against the Witchhunt, for example, has published an open letter to Corbyn “and the left on the NEC”. As we go to press, it has been signed by almost 5,000 people, in less than 60 hours. The letter makes some entirely supportable points, but is rather soft politically.

Nevertheless, even this gentle criticism was too much for some groups on the left – like, unfortunately, Jewish Voice for Labour. The comrades have done great work – for example, by demonstrating that there is no such thing as a politically homogenous ‘Jewish community’. But they seem to think that by criticising Corbyn in public, we give the right ammunition to further attack him. Quite the opposite, comrades. If we are serious about transforming the Labour Party, this cannot be done by staying silent about Corbyn’s dangerous current trajectory.

References

References
↑1 The Guardian April 4 2018) quite the opposite is true, Owen. The right has succeeded in ridding anti-Semitism of any coherent meaning.

Take comrades like Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone and Tony Greenstein, who were suspended on charges of anti-Semitism (in comrade Greenstein’s case, he was eventually expelled), when clearly nothing they did or said expressed in any way “hostility or prejudice against Jews”. Glyn Secker, secretary of Jewish Voice for Labour, was temporarily suspended from the Labour Party for anti-Semitism for merely belonging to a group on Facebook where somebody said something that somebody else felt was anti-Semitic.

Now we have the latest ‘scandal’: Jeremy Corbyn shared a passover seder with a group of Jews … but unfortunately, he picked the wrong type of Jews. Jewdas is a semi-anarchistic organisation based mainly in Corbyn’s constituency of Islington. It describes itself as “radical voices for the alternative diaspora” and likes to employ satire: in 2006, it organised a party entitled ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Hackney’ – obviously a pun on the fraudulent anti-Semitic document, ‘The protocols of the elders of Zion’.The police did not quite get the joke: four people who distributed leaflets for the event were arrested and held under section 19 of the Public Order Act.

They are, if you will, modern orthodox Jews, who have no desire to live in Israel and therefore strongly criticise it (apparently it is a “steaming pile of sewage which needs to be properly disposed of”). Apparently, at the seder, somebody held up a beetroot and shouted, “Fuck capitalism”.((Daily MailApril 4 2018

↑2 Daily Telegraph, April 4 2018
↑3 Today programme,Radio 4, April 3 2018 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09xcsdb
↑4 Mail on SundayApril 1 2018

Refound Labour as a permanent united front of the working class

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