Tag Archives: Angela Eagle

Democracy and the Labour Party, The right, Witch-hunts and expulsions

No safe spaces for traitors

Gallery

Jeremy Corbyn not only faces the nonentity, Owen Smith, but a legal challenge in the high court. Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists says the left must toughen up.

Writing on the Labour leadership crisis is no easy feat for a weekly paper [this article was written for Weekly Worker, July 21 – Ed.], so full is the saga with twists and turns, so leavened is the story with unconfirmed, rapidly disproven and probably maliciously spread rumours, and – in reality – so desperate and chaotically conducted is the struggle on both sides.

Nevertheless, the overall shape of events is clear, and at the moment the picture is of a determined rearguard action by the right to minimise, by fair means and (mostly) foul, the chances of a second victory for Jeremy Corbyn.

Bureaucratic outrages

We begin with the quite astonishing vigour and almost endearing lack of shame with which the right attempted to stitch up the contest in its very mechanics. Readers will be aware of the broad outlines of the story: at the end of last week’s crunch meeting of the national executive committee, after Corbyn’s status on the ballot had been confirmed and one or two naive loyalists had left, the traitor bloc found itself with a narrow majority, and an item on the agenda before it called ‘any other business’.

There, they took ‘business’ submitted to the meeting a whole 30 minutes before its beginning (according to NEC soft left Ann Black), the outcome of which was the wholesale disenfranchisement of a quarter of the party membership, the suspension of all meetings of constituency and ward branches, an eightfold increase in the registered supporter’s fee, and the constriction of the period for registration for the latter to two days. All in all, an unusually productive meeting of the NEC … Since then, we have had the suspension of Brighton and Hove District Labour Party for (let us be honest about this) daring to replace a rightwing local executive with a leftwing one at its recent annual general meeting. Whatever will Iain ‘Mugabe’ McNicol think of next?

Again, what is striking about this is the sheer brazenness of the gerrymandering – so overt that it would shame 1950s Ulster Unionists or the Putin regime. Above all, it demonstrates that a substantial, dominant faction of the Labour Party apparatus has taken the side of the right in this whole farrago – something, of course, we already knew from the endless leaks of confidential data from the compliance unit to such friends of the labour movement as The Daily Telegraph and the Tory muckraker, Guido Fawkes.

Their opponents are: the bulk of the trade union bureaucracy, perhaps surprisingly (with the exception of the GMB, whose leadership is playing its usual scab role over Trident); and the hundreds of thousands of Labour members either attracted by Corbyn’s campaign and victory last year or sick to the back teeth of the contempt in which Blairites, Brownites and the like held the rank and file, as its numbers dwindled to historic lows, and – evidently – all the more so now those members are getting assertive.

Choosing a ‘leader’

The ‘anyone but Corbyn’ part of the coup has been proceeding with ruthless single-mindedness, in spite of the probably fatal setback of failing to keep the incumbent off the ballot – the latest legal challenge notwithstanding (see below). However, the ‘who exactly other than Corbyn’ part has been rather more tortuous. This is hardly surprising – it is, after all, a coup that has been launched on the principle of naked, apolitical careerism, the principle of opposition to principle.

Indeed, so far as the ridiculous Angela Eagle/Owen Smith business has been concerned, we have been here before, when both Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper pitched themselves as the only reasonable challenger to Corbyn last summer, but were unable to resolve their differences, since only their national insurance numbers actually differed. (We note, parenthetically, that Burnham has rather remarkably taken the high road and refused to join in the coup, although this may be merely to enhance his chances of being selected as Labour’s mayoral candidate in Greater Manchester.)

At least it is over now – Smith has the support of the Parliamentary Labour Party. His pitch was that he was the ‘soft left’, and that – being a relatively fresh face, having entered the Commons in 2010 – he would be better able to win over Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters (translation: he is not tainted by the Iraq debacle as obviously as Eagle). Enough of his co-conspirators in the PLP agreed for him to get 25 more PLP nominations than Angela Eagle (18 more overall, including MEPs). Indeed, the fact that nobody had heard of him until a couple of weeks ago is a distinct advantage – especially given that he is on record (as of 2006) as having supported, in vague terms, “the tradition of leftwing engagement to remove dictators”, while ducking the question of Iraq specifically (he voted for military action in Libya in 2011, however, which turned out just great); the carving off of parts of the NHS for the private sector; and PFI hospitals and academies.1 He was also, before formal involvement in politics, a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer.

Of course, he now accepts he was wrong on most of these things – how could he not? Who would vote for some Blairite nonentity under these circumstances? In any case, we hope that voters in the coming election have the elementary intelligence to at least look the guy up on Wikipedia before

Of course, he now accepts he was wrong on most of these things – how could he not? Who would vote for some Blairite nonentity under these circumstances? In any case, we hope that voters in the coming election have the elementary intelligence to at least look the guy up on Wikipedia before they take his assurances of honest ‘soft leftism’ as good coin. He is a possibly reformed Blairite – but a traitor like the rest of them.

Help! I’m being oppressed

The other tactic being deployed is the multiplication of accusations of ‘bullying’ and ‘harassment’. The suspension of Brighton and Hove appears to be on the basis that the outgoing officials considered the manner and comprehensiveness of their defeat a form of harassment; the interdiction of CLP meetings and suchlike across the board is supposedly a preventative measure against the excessive rancour and bile-spitting of Jeremy’s rabid Red Guards.

There are two explanations for this offensive: the first is that we are dealing with a flood of crocodile tears, the assiduous cultivation of a spurious victimhood, cynically designed to delegitimise wholly justified anger at the traitorous actions of the PLP majority. The second is, well, just the opposite: these people are genuinely put out by feeling a little pressure, and simply cannot imagine what they have done to deserve it. Both seem to be true, one way or the other; we cannot imagine Angela Eagle (who is, according to her own account, a ‘tough’ sort) is really in fear of her life. On the other hand, there is NEC nonentity Johanna Baxter, whose account of the Big Day collapsed into peals of sobbing at the memory of potentially being denied a secret ballot for NEC decisions. She looks for all the world like somebody in the midst of a breakdown, which, of course, was not enough to stop the media exploiting her misery to paint Corbyn supporters as – in the words of the Mirror’s Carole Malone – “Lenin-style bully boys who’d send women to the gulag”.2

In reality, the ‘honest’ trauma of Baxter and (perhaps) other ‘short-beaked pigeons’ of the Blair generation is exactly the same as the fabricated fear of more serious politicians – in both cases, what is not accepted is accountability. Both Baxter and Eagle, and Smith, and Hilary Benn, are conspirators against the clearly expressed will of their party. They have seized, as factional property, the principal means of disciplinary procedure. The only means available to ordinary members to hold their MPs to account are the very ones decried as ‘intimidation’ by the MPs – open ballots, verbal censure, and above all deselection and trigger ballots (of which we expect there would have been a good few, if CLP meetings had not been suspended).

Making omelettes, breaking eggs

This is, unfortunately, an acute weak spot of the left, which has become in the main consumed by fatuous victimology over the past few years. This paper has argued repeatedly that ‘safe spaces’ and the interpretation of everything through the prism of preventing harassment is in fact a form of politics ultimately in service of the bureaucracy as a caste in society at large. The illusion that is possible to ‘do politics differently’, for a definition of the same that means we are all going to be terribly nice to each other or else, is one promoted heavily by the likes of Momentum, as with almost all leftwing political movements that present themselves as ‘new’.

In doing so, the leadership of the Corbyn movement has disarmed its rank and file, holding back on deselection, collapsing disgracefully over the fabricated ‘anti-Semitism’ scandal – need we go on? In truth, politics is war by peaceful means. Whatever else we may think of the traitors, they at least understand this: thus, their tactics are not constrained unduly by high-minded attention to moral principle, focusing merely on the effective application of force.

It had looked as though Corbyn would come out the other side of all this victorious. The plotters had lost the initiative, and had more or less been dragged, kicking and screaming, into an electoral contest, which the latest available data suggests they could lose by a demonstratively punishing margin. But now, of course, there is the previously half-expected legal challenge to the NEC decision to include Corbyn on the ballot. This has been brought by former Labour parliamentary candidate Michael Foster, who subsequently became a substantial donor to party funds, and both McNicol and Corbyn himself will be the defendants.

Of course, it is useful for the PLP right that this challenge has been mounted by someone not directly involved in the battle. If it was successful then they could claim that they would have preferred Corbyn to have been defeated in a democratic ballot … But what can you do? However, will it be successful? That is very dubious, to say the least.3 So, assuming the challenge fails and Corbyn does indeed win the leadership contest, what will the right do then? Will Corbyn suddenly enjoy the confidence of Eagle, Smith, Benn and co, who have all hated him since day zero? What are they planning to do if he is re-elected?

The official policy of the Corbyn office in this whole period has been, in paraphrase, that “we need to unite, at this time of all times, when the Tories are in turmoil” – and, now that the Tories are no longer very much in turmoil, to fight a general election in the short term against a government with no mandate. We doubt there is much else an old-fashioned party leader’s office can say at a time like this.

Yet it is plain that it presents a fantasy, at best of rhetorical value (‘they started it’) and the principal dynamic is towards a split, and thus an ugly battle over every inch of political territory from Cornwall to the Outer Hebrides. Unity between the PLP as it exists and the membership it holds in such hatred and contempt is, at this point, impossible. There is merely victory, if we are bold, or defeat, if we allow ourselves to be disarmed.

Notes
1. www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/owen-smith-iraq-war-working-2338066.
2. Daily Mirror July 16.
3. See ‘Don’t rely on the courts’ Weekly Worker July 14 2016.

The right

Time to counterattack

Gallery

The Labour plotters are well organised, but weaker than they look. Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists urges that we take the fight to them

[This article first appeared in Weekly Worker on Thursday July 7 – when Angela Eagle was dithering, hoping to launch her coup attempt with Jeremy Corbyn excluded. Now the Labour leader election is on, and the July 12 NEC meeting has, thankfully, put  Corbyn on the ballot paper. Expect a dirty campaign. Will the courts be asked to reverse that decision? If Corbyn wins, expect the PLP rightwing majority to split from the party. Good riddance. We urge all socialists to join Labour, and fight, fight and fight again to democratise the party and transform it into a permanent united front of all sections of the working class.]

Christopher Clark’s extraordinary account of the background to World War I, The sleepwalkers, begins with the story of the violent overthrow of the Serbian king Alexandar in 1903:

Shortly after two o’clock on the morning of June 11 1903, 28 officers of the Serbian army approached the main entrance of the royal palace in Belgrade. After an exchange of fire, the sentries standing guard before the building were arrested and disarmed … Finding the king’s apartments barred by a pair of heavy oaken doors, the conspirators blew them open with a carton of dynamite. The charge was so strong that the doors were torn from their hinges and thrown across the antechamber inside, killing the royal adjutant behind them …

The [royal] couple were cut down in a hail of shots at point-blank range … An orgy of gratuitous violence followed. The corpses were stabbed with swords, torn with a bayonet, partially disembowelled and hacked with an axe, until they were mutilated beyond recognition.1

We bring this to readers’ attention not only to commend the book, which is an illuminating popular introduction to its subject, but to point out some of the essential features of a successful coup. One has to act swiftly and decisively, leaving no room for doubt. The outcome must be spectacular. Superior numbers must be ensured wherever the spilling of blood is likely. And, while coups are often foretold long in advance, it is a good idea to retain the element of surprise.

It is against the 1903 efforts of Dragutin Dimitrijević and his comrades that we must measure the more recent, peaceful coup attempts in British politics. For illustrative purposes, we include Michael Gove’s undoing of Boris Johnson’s prime ministerial ambitions; sure, Boris is formally no lower in the world than he was last Wednesday, but he was the Tory heir apparent for, at a conservative estimate, the whole period between last year’s general election and last week. In a few short hours, Gove put paid to that with a truly bewildering and highly effective piece of political chicanery, which has rather left the parliamentary Conservative Party looking like a monstrous conga-line of backstabbers. Who’s next?

Our real focus, of course, is the sustained assault on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. It at least has some of the features of a successful coup. For a start, the plotters are very well organised. Our minds are cast back to June 26; after Hilary Benn more or less demanded his own sacking, things took on a remarkable rhythm, almost turgid in its regularity; an hour would pass, and another junior shadow minister would resign. Each, individually, had weighed up their options and with an agonising cry of conscience, decided to resign exactly an hour after the previous one. A suspicious mind would suggest that they planned it that way.

The shadow cabinet crisis gave way to the vote of no confidence, which went more or less to plan, and since then the pressure on Corbyn to resign has been intense. The most significant element of this part of the offensive has been the aggressive dissemination of straightforward lies in the press – Corbyn is striking a deal with this person or that; John McDonnell is about to throw him to the wolves … When the outlandish scenarios outlined failed to come to pass, the lie is not admitted – the whole thing is written up as “Jeremy changed his mind at the last minute – doesn’t he know it is not leader-like to dither?”

The whole thing is almost reminiscent of the FBI’s Cointelpro tactics. Indeed, according to a relatively fresh-faced Corbynite news website, The Canary, the whole thing has been engineered by a couple of PR firms on behalf of the Fabian Society. This, on the whole, strikes us as a little too neat, but only inasmuch as the individuals cited can have only the most tenuous connection to Fabianism; we are dealing fundamentally with a well-organised clique.2

This is a detail, of course. The thing about conspiracies is that – contra 9/11 ‘truthers’ and the like – they are blindingly bloody obvious after about five minutes. Thus, the anti-Corbyn conspirators had to act fast, and so they did for about a day and a half.

And then … nothing.

Stale tactics

Angela Eagle, who seems to have registered the domain, angela4leader.org, two days before she supposedly lost confidence in the man she seeks to defenestrate, has become suddenly very coy. She was ready to stand – and then she wasn’t; something about Corbyn imminently standing down (one of the aforementioned pieces of made-up nonsense). She is now, magnanimously, giving Jeremy yet “more time” to do the right thing.

Yet it is looking less and less likely by the day. The plotters’ tactics have become stale. They have become so because Corbyn is confident that he will win any leadership election; and (presumably) no ‘private polling’ on the part of the plotters tells them any different. The one thing they cannot do, ironically, is actually challenge him. No doubt his standing is weaker now than it has been in recent history; but so is that of the plotters, suffering from the fact that blatant and deliberate sabotage is not a good look among those with even a homeopathic dose of party loyalty.

Things are worse even than that for the traitors. They are on two strict timetables. The first and more significant is that of Labour’s conferences. At the 2016 annual conference in September, the left will seek to ‘clarify’ the currently ambiguous rules over whether an incumbent leader is automatically on the ballot if challenged. There is a very good chance of success. There is also the small matter of the Chilcot inquiry: we cannot imagine the likes of Benn and Eagle, who voted for the disastrous imperialist adventure, are having a good time of it at the moment. (Alex Salmond of the Scottish National Party has proposed this as the main issue.)

The latest rumblings are that there are formal ‘peace talks’ going on; yet the small print is quite clear. There will be no immediate resignation. While Corbyn’s Parliamentary Labour Party enemies declare that broad support in the wider membership is not enough to save him, it is quite clear that the lack of broad support they enjoy in the wider party is enough to leave them in this embarrassing position. It is as if Dimitrijević and his cohorts had paused outside the royal bedchamber, on the brink of their victory, suddenly overcome by doubt – and stayed there for three weeks. I write at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the reader, which is to say, at some remove of time into the past. You may already be coming to terms with Corbyn’s grudging resignation. If you are, there is nothing to blame for it except his own personal weakness. If he is defeated, then defeat has been snatched from the jaws of victory.

Because, even if some phoney ‘deal’ is agreed that Corbyn will resign before such and such a date, those he seeks to placate will never be stronger than they are now. For by the time Corbyn is supposed to stand down – whenever that is – there will be one or more Labour Party conferences, at which there is the possibility that the position of the left within the party can become strengthened.

At this point, it is necessary to point out that this advantage is hardly likely to just drop into our laps. The left must first understand that it has a stronger position than the relentless barrage of fabricated media hype attests, and then grasp the opportunity to exploit that position. As usual, neither of these relatively simple tasks is the gimme it ought to be.

What would pressing the advantage look like? Let us imagine, as we said before, the Serbian regicides frozen in fear at the threshold of success. What would actually have become of them? Perhaps not the spectacular disembowelling they, in reality, put upon the king; but it would not have been pretty. That is the most important lesson for all plotters of coups – make sure you win, because, if you do not, a sensible ruler will not leave you the opportunity for a do-over in a year or two.

A sensible ruler; but here we are. Maoists, in the old days, used to talk of ‘two-line struggle’, and there is something similar going on in the Labour Party today: there is the line of conciliation, of peace talks, of ‘uniting against the Tories’ and what have you, and there is the line of war, of giving no quarter to the traitors, of deselection and expulsion for all who have participated in this brazen and cynical attempt to overthrow the democracy of the party. Regular readers will be unsurprised to find Labour Party Marxists in the latter camp, and Corbyn himself in the former.

The important question is where Momentum will fall, and beyond it the Labour left at large. The Momentum line so far seems to be Corbynite in the narrow sense: for abandoning these senseless ‘squabbles’ and getting on with fighting the main enemy; but reports from meetings of the Labour left are encouraging, in that they suggest that there is at least some constituency for more radical measures. The idea that unity is possible between principled socialists and pro-imperialist, pro-capitalist careerists like Hilary Benn and Angela Eagle is risible. Only the capitulation of the socialists, or the defeat of the right, will solve the dilemma.

Notes
1. C Clark The sleepwalkers London 2012, pp3-4.
2. www.thecanary.co/2016/06/28/truth-behind-labour-coup-really-began-manufactured-exclusive.