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
Democracy and the Labour Party, Witch-hunts and expulsions

The taming of Corbyn

While some on the Labour right still hope to force Corbyn to resign, writes Carla Roberts of Labour Party Marxists, others are aiming to change the man and his politics

If you do not already hate Facebook for selling your data to rightwing companies who manipulate elections and blackmail politicians, for keeping copies of all your messages and phone conversations or just for generally stealing your time and life energy, last week should have given you plenty of reason to start doing so.

Not only has Jeremy Corbyn been ‘outed’ as having been a member of a third Facebook group in which some people posted shite (although he never posted anything there himself): but Luciana Berger MP, parliamentary chair of the pro-Zionist Jewish Labour Movement, was said to have dug up a six-year-old, now infamous ‘mural comment’ he did make on another Facebook group. In reality, of course, she did no such thing: somebody else pointed it out to her. One of those, we are guessing, who have been reporting, smearing, outing and witch-hunting Corbyn supporters as anti-Semitic for the last two and a half years.

Now, finally, they got the man himself. Of course, he did not “defend an anti-Semitic mural”, as the bourgeois media have fumed. He asked why it was being removed: “Why? You are in good company. Rockerfeller [sic] destroyed Diego Viera’s [sic] mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.”

One can argue over the artistic value of the rather crude depiction, angry-student-style, of bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of oppressed black people. And one can certainly argue about how obviously anti-Semitic the dodgy painting is; many on the left are engaged in this rather futile debate. But blogger Jonathan Cook reminds us of the bigger picture:

Interestingly, the issue of Corbyn’s support for the mural – or at least the artist – originally flared in late 2015, when the Jewish Chronicle unearthed his Facebook post. Two things were noticeably different about the coverage then.

First, on that occasion, no one apart from the Jewish Chronicle appeared to show much interest in the issue. Its ‘scoop’ was not followed up by the rest of the media. What is now supposedly a major scandal – one that raises questions about Corbyn’s fitness to be Labour leader – was a non-issue two years ago, when it first became known.

Second, the Jewish Chronicle, usually so ready to get exercised at the smallest possible sign of anti-Semitism, wasn’t entirely convinced back in 2015 that the mural was anti-Semitic. In fact, it suggested only that the mural might have “anti-Semitic undertones” – and attributed even that claim to Corbyn’s critics.

Both points are fascinating. They show how dramatically the narrative around anti-Semitism has changed in the last two and a half years; how successful the right has been in portraying the Labour Party as being awash with anti-Semites. Now the gutter press, along with The Guardian, have become such experts on the matter that they are certain the mural was “obviously anti-Semitic”. This shift also includes the views of a certain Jeremy Corbyn (see below).

What is indeed “obvious” is the fact that this latest faux outrage was clearly orchestrated – building up ammunition for an upping of the witch-hunts of Corbyn supporters. He had already been hammered for his ‘unpatriotic’ response to the ‘Russian agent’ crisis – surely everyone supports another cold war with Russia?

Crucially, local elections are taking place in less than six weeks time, on May 3. The hope of the right is that we will not see a repeat of the surprisingly good result for Labour that we witnessed in the 2017 snap general election, which brought Corbyn some reprieve. The right in the party is clearly prepared to risk a bad election result in order to put pressure on him.

None of this is surprising. Only the most naive will believe the nonsense about the new-found ‘unity’ behind Corbyn in the Labour Party. The right will continue to fight the genuine left, the socialists and the Marxists in the Labour Party to the bitter end. They could split, but the first-past-the-post British electoral system punishes such attempts. The disastrous failure of the Social Democratic Party serves Labour’s right as a reminder of that.

March 26 demo

web-Zionist-hundreds-of-people-protest-outsWeb-ide-parliament-against-antisemitism-in-the-labour-partyThe March 26 demonstration in Parliament Square has to be firmly seen in this context. It had nothing to do with any mural, Facebook group or anti-Semitism. Trying to get rid of Corbyn has so far proved futile. As long as the man remains popular among Labour members, they just cannot get shot of him. Having weathered a storm of attacks at the beginning of his leadership with admirable aplomb, he is also unlikely to resign.

Hence we are in the middle of phase two of operation anti-Corbyn: tame him to become a reliable manager of British capitalism and pliable ally of the US when it comes to the politics of the Middle East.

As an aside, we note in this context that Donald Trump’s newly appointed security advisor, John Bolton, has proposed a ‘three-state solution’ for the Middle East, where Gaza would be given to Egypt, and the West Bank to Jordan. It is a mad plan, but not so mad that somebody like Trump would not go for it under the right conditions – especially as it would solve the problem of Jerusalem: “The contentious issue of Jerusalem’s status as the purported capital of ‘Palestine’ would disappear, since Amman would obviously be the seat of government for an enlarged Jordan.” Problem solved!

Both the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) and the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), which called the demo, are, of course, far from the ‘independent community organisations’ that they have been portrayed as. The BoD’s president is Jonathan Arkush, a member of the Conservative Party. The chair of the JLC is Jonathan Goldstein, a director of M&C Saatchi – an advertising agency network owned by Maurice Saatchi, former chair of the Conservative Party.

A dozen or so of Tory MPs attended the demo, including Eric Pickles, as did a number from the Democratic Unionist Party, including loyalist hardliner Ian Paisley junior, who was posing happily for selfies with Norman Tebbit. They were joined by quite an assortment of nasties: we spotted David Collier, one of the people behind the vile and racist blog, GnasherJew; and Emma Feltham and Jonathan Hoffman, both from the no less vile Labour Against Anti-Semitism.

Among the Labour traitors at the demo were pretty much all the usual suspects, including MPs Chukka Umunna (who was literally rubbing shoulders with Tory cabinet member Sajid Javid), Luciana Berger, John Mann, Stella Creasy, Liz Kendall, John Woodcock, Chris Elmore and Wes Streeting. The latter promised in his speech to “drain the cesspit of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party” and has announced on Twitter – somewhat ironically – that his campaign will also target supporters of Labour Against the Witchhunt.

We did not spot Harriet Harman at the protest, but she tweeted: “Standing with Board of Deputies of British Jews and Jewish Leadership Council. Anti-Semitism represents everything that @UKLabour is against.” The demo was also supported by BAME Labour (run by Keith Vaz MP).

However, former Labour MP Chris Mullin took a different view in his comments on Twitter:

I am not a Corbynista, but I can see what’s going on here … Alleged anti-Semitism [is] yet another stick with which to beat Corbyn – along with Corbyn, “friend of the IRA, Hezbollah, Hamas, Czech spy, Soviet spy …” You name it. Whatever next?

Mullin gave us some possible answers to that question in his fascinating novel A very British coup, which imagines the tools the British state might employ in order to get rid of a leftwing prime minister. In short, it will stop at nothing. Monday’s demonstration was only a little taster – much, much more is to come. The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism has already called for a demonstration “against anti-Semitism under Jeremy Corbyn” in London on April 8.

Not surprisingly, with that kind of crowd, frequent calls for Corbyn’s resignation from the speakers were interjected with shouts of him being a racist and worse. Speaker after speaker said former London mayor Ken Livingstone had “no place in the Labour Party” and placards were held aloft, bearing the slogan, “Labour for the many, not the Jews”, amid chants of “Enough is enough”. They shouted “Shame on you” at the counterdemonstrators – organised with eight hours notice by Jewish Voice for Labour and supported by Labour Party Marxists, Labour Against the Witchhunt, the Jewish Socialists Group and Free Speech on Israel. Former Socialist Workers Party leader Lindsey German, now of Counterfire, was among those addressing them. Her former comrades, who usually jump on anything that moves, were absent, however: The SWP probably still have their knickers in a twist, having allied themselves with hardcore Zionists in their front campaign Stand up to Racism.

Corbyn and IHRA

Most conspicuous by its absence (and general silence) was, however, Momentum. This is an organisation that has been set up explicitly to defend and support Jeremy Corbyn – yet it does nothing in the middle of the latest attack against him. The dozen or so employees at Momentum HQ have not even managed a single Facebook post or tweet since March 20 (apart from sharing a couple of posts put out by Corbyn’s office).

Momentum owner Jon Lansman has published one singe tweet on the subject, in which he writes: “We need a serious proactive programme of education and training about anti-Semitism within @UKLabour but we should also recognise the seriousness of the determination to stamp it out by @JeremyCorbyn.”

Is this lack of public support payback for Corbyn not backing him for the post of Labour general secretary, as some have speculated? But his closest supporters in the Parliamentary Labour Party – Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Chris Williamson – have remained silent on the issue too. So the real answer is unfortunately more simple: Corbyn has, quite simply, folded on the question.

He has not only accepted the false narrative of the right – that the Labour Party indeed has a serious problem with anti-Semitism that needs to be “stamped out”. He has now gone a rather dramatic step further. In the crucial paragraph of his March 26 letter to the Jewish Leadership Council and Board of Deputies, published just before their demo, he writes:

Newer forms of anti-Semitism have been woven into criticism of Israeli governments. Criticism of Israel, particularly in relation to the continuing dispossession of the Palestinian people, cannot be avoided. Nevertheless, comparing Israel or the actions of Israeli governments to the Nazis, attributing criticisms of Israel to Jewish characteristics or to Jewish people in general and using abusive phraseology about supporters of Israel such as ‘Zio’ all constitute aspects of contemporary anti-Semitism.

Firstly, we note Corbyn’s strange phrase that criticism of Israel “cannot be avoided”. That sounds very apologetic. I wish I could avoid it, but … No, criticism of the actions of the state of Israel is, in fact, essential for any socialist with a democratic bone in their body.

The rest of the paragraph is clearly inspired by the controversial ‘Working definition of anti-Semitism’, published by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The definition itself, adopted by the Labour Party at last year’s conference, is not the problem. But now Corbyn also seems to have accepted the disputed list of examples that shows what the definition is really about: conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism and support for the rights of the Palestinian people.

For example, Corbyn’s assertion that the mere use of the word ‘Zio’ constitutes anti-Semitism, is, frankly, absurd. ‘Zio’ is simply a – yes, highly critical – abbreviation of the word ‘Zionist’. Zionism is not a religion or a nationality: it is an ideology. You are not born a Zionist – you choose to believe in the right of Israel to oppress another people. And if you do, hell, you deserve to be criticised.

According to Corbyn, it is now also anti-Semitic to compare “Israel or the actions of Israeli governments to the Nazis”. We wonder if he has read a newspaper recently. The heroics of Britain in World War II (with a tiny bit of help from the Soviet Union and the US) are utterly ingrained in British culture. Comparing anything and anybody nasty to the Nazis is a short-hand for ‘bad’. Just last week, Labour MP Ian Austin called for the England football team to pull out of the World Cup, because “Putin is going to use it in the way Hitler used the 1936 Olympics.” Boris Johnson replied: “Yes, I think the comparison with 1936 is certainly right.” Bombastic PR from both of them, obviously. But clearly, it is a common feature in British politics.

So should only Israel be immune from comparisons to the Nazis? They are said to be offensive to Jews, who were victims of the holocaust. What about the Roma? After all, hundreds of thousands of Roma people were killed by the Nazis. Or do only those countries currently involved in systematically oppressing another people get this special status? It is nonsense and Corbyn knows it. His son, Tommy, has posted a comment on his Facebook page, pointedly asking, “Why is it that I can criticise my own or any other government, but criticism of the Israeli state is immediately branded anti-Semitic?” Yep, ask your dad about that one.

We also fear that the formulation could be used to discipline Labour Party members who commit the crime of pointing out that in the 1930s the Zionist movement cooperated with leading Nazis in the attempt to persuade German Jews to migrate to Palestine. This is historic fact. But it is an unpleasant one that the Israeli government and its Zionist supporters in Britain do not want to be reminded of. Ken Livingstone has been suspended for two years now after pointing it out. After Labour’s national executive committee made noises that Livingstone might soon regain his full membership, the right seized on the case and demanded his permanent exclusion.

After all, Corbyn had already proven with this entirely unnecessary public “apology” over ‘Muralgate’ that he is indeed prepared to give even more ground on the issue of false and exaggerated allegations of anti-Semitism. So why not kick him while he’s down?

After the March 26 demo, Jonathan Arkush, director of the Board of Deputies – and a Tory, remember – has let it be known that before “Jewish community leaders” can “sit down” with Jeremy Corbyn to discuss the matter, a list of “their demands” needs to be met: “Ken Livingstone really cannot remain. His views are shameful and disreputable. He will have to go.” The Guardian speculates in the same article that

demands for the expulsion of Jackie Walker, a former vice-chair of Momentum, were also expected. Walker has been suspended after being filmed saying there was no definition of anti-Semitism ‘that she could work with’ [she actually meant ‘in that meeting’].

Arkush also said he would like

action to be taken against those who minimise reports of anti-Semitism, including Unite general secretary Len McCluskey, who suggested it was “mood music” to undermine the leadership; and Labour MP Chris Williamson, who claimed the Labour right was “weaponising” anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, judging by Corbyn’s own grovelling apologies, we are far from certain that he will not jump to the tune of the right and at least urge that the NEC permanently expel Livingstone and Walker. That would truly be a scandal and has to be opposed by all socialists.

We are not surprised that somebody like Keir Starmer uses the opportunity to stick the knife in – he is a Blairite at heart, after all. Ditto Chuka Umunna, who complains to the British media about the “shameful” way Corbyn has behaved. More problematic and telling are the comments by shadow business secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey, a Corbyn ally. She has echoed the comments of Jon Lansman, promising “education” and “a zero-tolerance approach” on the question of anti-Semitism, stating that it was “devastating to realise that the Jewish community had lost faith in our approach to anti-Semitism”. Nonsense, of course – there is no homogenous “Jewish community”, as should have been clear from the two mobilisations on March 26 and the success of groups like Jewish Voice for Labour.

We hear that the shadow cabinet “informally” agreed on March 26 – in Corbyn’s absence – that the recommendations from Shami Chakrabarti’s report should be implemented in full, which apparently “will require a significant overhaul of party machinery, including appointing a general counsel, and an in-house team of lawyers to ensure procedure is followed properly”.

It goes without saying that we are all in favour of disciplinary cases being handled much more quickly and efficiently, to avoid good comrades being unable to get involved in party work for years, while they are  suspended. But we fear that, in the current climate, this call may not necessarily be the good news it appears. It could be used to institutionalise the witch-hunt against leftwingers and pro-Palestine campaigners.

In this context, we note with great concern in the same Guardian article the reported demand “to establish specific accounts on social media platforms that would identify and call out supporters using anti-Semitic language”.

So instead of the Zionists from Labour Against Anti-Semitism and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism reporting people to the compliance unit, it should be the Labour Party itself hunting down its own members! Monitor them to make sure they behave like good children.

This is a slippery slope into a very undemocratic culture of thought crime and (self-)censorship. This is exactly the opposite of the kind of open and democratic working class culture we need.

We also wonder if this suggestion for a social media police force has anything to do with the fact that Jon Lansman (or those running his Facebook account) has suddenly been sending ‘friend requests’ to hundreds of leftwingers, having previously been very cautious about accepting the ‘friend requests’ from others. Once you are friends with somebody, you can see not just their posts and comments, but also the postings of their friends …

The main problem with dancing to the tune of the right is the simple fact that appeasement does not work. Once he delivers the scalps of Livingstone and Walker, Corbyn will be faced with demands for more of the same. John Mann MP claims in the Daily Mail that the Labour Party bureaucrats are currently dealing with “more than 200 claims of hatred”, with “shocking anti-Jewish sentiment” – though not a single example is provided.

The right in and outside the Labour Party must be very pleased with how successful the weaponising of anti-Semitism has proven to be. There is now very little to stop them from demanding that Jeremy Corbyn next looks again at some of his other political principles – be it the renewal of Trident, increasing the defence budget, supporting military action for ‘humanitarian’ reasons, etc, etc.

 

Refound Labour as a permanent united front of the working class

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