Tag Archives: Momentum

Momentum

Discussion papers from Momentum on the future of the organisation

These documents have unfortunately not been published openly or distributed to all Momentum members, so we reproduce them here.

Here is the “October newsletter for groups”, which has been sent to some members of some local Momentum groups, but not others.

 

 

“If you have any queries about the documents, please contact Momentum national organiser Emma Rees via emma.rees@peoplesmomentum.com.

1. Logistics for the NC

Date: Saturday 5th November
Time: 10.30am (for an 11am start) – 4.30pm
Location: BVSC, 138 Digbeth, Birmingham B5 6DR (fully accessible)
[Logistical details redacted]

2. Discussion papers

All regional networks should meet between now and 30th October. Organisers should inform emma.rees@peoplesmomentum.com (and CC bethfosterogg@gmail.com) of the details of the meeting, so they can ensure that delegates from all groups in the region are invited.

The regional network meeting may wish to:
a) Discuss the paper attached (agreed to be circulated by the Officers of the Steering Group)
b) Elect delegates to the National Committee (this is the choice of the region)
c) Submit any other motions or amendments. All motions must be sent to emma.rees@peoplesmomentum.com. If you have not received a confirmation of receipt email within 48 hours, please send again. The deadline for submitting motions is Monday 31st October.

Final papers will be circulated on Saturday 29th October.

https://goo.gl/rWk9Rw”

Here is the file in PDF format

Paper 1 –  Process for deciding Momentum’s new structures

Rather than attempting to decide Momentum’s structures at the National Committee, a body which is now technically running beyond its mandate and is not fully elected, the Steering Committee is proposing that Momentum’s permanent structures be debated at a national conference, and voted on either by delegates at that conference or by all members. This conference will take place in February (there is a separate paper on its composition). The proposals we need to generate to go to that conference are not just about structures – they are also about what Momentum stands for and how we conduct ourselves.

So there are 3 kinds of documents that can be submitted:

  • Momentum’s core politics and guiding principles – what we stand for
  • Momentum’s ethics and code of conduct – how we behave
  • Momentum’s democratic structures – how we make decisions

The process that the Steering Committee is proposing is designed to be as open as possible – proposals can come directly from members, unmediated by the National Committee or any other parts of Momentum’s ‘centre’.
Phase 1 Begins: November 12th

Drafts to be submitted to HQ for circulation: November 19th Comments must be received at HQ by: December 9th

Revised documents submitted: January 9th (dates assume an early Feb conference. A later conference should involve an extension of phase 1)

All members of Momentum will have the right to formulate and propose documents on the above areas. Members’ proposals attracting the support of 50 individual members will be circulated in a document (the “initial proposers”). All members and local groups will be able to submit comments or suggested amendments which will be considered by the initial proposers who may accept or reject them, and revise their documents prior to the next stage. They may also composite their documents with others In order to progress to Phase 2, proposals will then need the support of: 200 individual members of Momentum.
Phase 2

Documents circulated: week commencing January 9th Ends: One week before conference

This stage is an opportunity for local groups to discuss the final documents in advance of the conference and for people to declare their support, in order for favoured documents to get over the final hurdle. The numbers required to reach Phase 3 are: 1000 individual members; or 20 local groups; or 400 members and 10 local groups

Phase 3

The vote

The vote will take place between all proposals that make it to conference by Preferential Vote. The question of who gets to vote, and how conference is composed, is in section 2.

Questions which you should discuss:

1. Do you agree with the broad process outlined, and if not, what should be used?

2. Do you agree with the 3 categories of paper outlined above?

3. Do you agree with the numbers needed to reach each stage, or are they too high or low?

4. Do you agree with the dates and timescales outlined above?

5. Do you have any other comments or suggestions?

Paper 2 – Momentum’s conference

The National Committee has already resolved (at its last meeting in May) that Momentum will hold a democratic conference in February 2017 in order to settle the permanent structures of the organisation. The text of the motion passed at the National Committee is as follows:
“We need a widely representative Momentum conference in order to empower the membership, push forward the development of our policy and activities, and allow groups to coordinate, network and become part of a national Momentum culture. We therefore agree to convene a democratic conference [in February 2017], representing local groups directly.”

We currently do not have an agreed delegate entitlement for the conference, or a firm idea of who can vote at it, other than that it will “represent local groups directly”. The Steering Committee has commissioned a mapping exercise of Momentum’s local groups in order to determine the size of membership and health of local organisation, and to enable us to assist in supporting local activity. This process is underway, and will feed into the delegate On the Steering Committee, there are different opinions as to how the conference should be composed.

These include:
– Delegates from local groups (according to their size)

– A mixed delegate system: delegates from local groups (according to their size) and regional ‘top up’ lists elected by OMOV in order to represent people who live in areas not covered by local groups

– No delegate system – the conference should be live-streamed and all Momentum members should be allowed to vote online
Questions which you should discuss:

1. Should voting at conference be by delegates, or by an online ballot of Momentum members?

2. If voting is by delegates, how should the delegate entitlement be calculated, and is it reasonable that a national committee only created as a temporary body whose composition is not necessary representative should decide the delegate entitlement?

3. Apart from Momentum’s core documents (Politics, Ethics, Structure), what else should Momentum conference vote on, if anything?

4. What kinds of sessions should the conference include? What should the agenda look like?

5. Do you have any additional ideas and proposals for the composition of conference?

Momentum

Momentum or inertia?

As long as it is treated as the private property of its most timid elements, Momentum is doomed, argues Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists

Ever since Momentum was formed out of the email lists left behind by Jeremy Corbyn’s first leadership run, the question has hung over it as to what it is actually for.

For its enemies, its purpose has always been clear – to organise mobs of Corbynite thugs for purposes of intimidation of moderates and seizure of the commanding heights of the Labour Party; or else as the black rat whose fur hides a multitude of Trotskyist parasites, as they infest the party at a scale unmatched since the 1980s. Its methods are crude, its motives questionable. It is riddled with misogynists and anti-Semites. It has no legitimacy, nor is its fanaticism constrained by moral scruple.

This account of Momentum’s motivation is somewhat at variance with empirical reality, but that is always a secondary concern for the bourgeois media.

A more wide-ranging discussion was had on the left on this point when the group first coalesced, which polarised on the question of what should be Momentum’s attitude to Labour Party activity. Many – especially among those non-Labour lefts who hoped Momentum might become a vehicle for them to reach the Corbynistas without having to take out a Labour card – argued for Momentum to dedicate itself to ‘campaigning’, and look outwards: a prescription for movementism. At the opposite end, there was Labour Party Marxists: so far as I know, we were the only organised force to call for Momentum to focus on dislodging the right at all levels of the Labour Party and strengthening the left institutionally. Initial discussions ended, in substance, with a fudge on this point.

Fiasco

When we ask what Momentum is for today, a year and a bit after its birth, it is – alas – in an increasingly exasperated tone. What is it for? During the second leadership campaign, its members were directed to the phone banks, as full-blooded members of Jeremy’s campaign; Momentum itself kept a low profile (despite periodic stupid accusations from Citizen Smith’s Westminster Popular Front, quite as inevitable as death and taxes). As the right cleaned up at Labour conference, Momentum herded itself away at a no doubt cheerful extended fringe event elsewhere, making exactly zero impact and leaving a few of the more serious (Max Shanly was quoted a lot) isolated in their opposition to making a ‘peace offering’ to the right.

Finally, Momentum’s role in the Jackie Walker fiasco is well documented. Comrade Walker was booted out as vice chair, in a 7-3 vote, after she made comments that were later fraudulently misrepresented by various species of bad actor as anti-Semitic. On this point, we turn to the Morning Star – while we have had cause to ridicule that paper in recent weeks, the October 5 editorial on l’affaire Walker was really rather stirring stuff: “Removing Jackie Walker from her position as Momentum vice-chair … is an act of political cowardice and confusion,” it read.

Atypically, the Star was even in the mood to name names:

Vanquished challenger Owen Smith paraded his political ignorance during the election campaign by accusing the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty … of “left anti-Semitism” – an absurd formulation comparable with left racism or left Islamophobia. In reality, this supposed ex-party has well-attested pro-Zionist credentials. Meeting a witch-hunt halfway is unprincipled and doomed to failure.

The line about left anti-Semitism being an “absurd formulation” is unfortunate – it is not so easy, alas, to excise Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Henry Hyndman from history. The thrust of the above statement is correct, however – and it has ruffled a few of the right feathers. Condemning “an unwarranted attack on Momentum”, which “failed to take seriously Jeremy Corbyn’s determination to rooting [sic] out the evil of anti-Semitism”, Momentum chair (in reality, proprietor) Jon Lansman replied the following Saturday in ridiculous but revealing terms. Walker’s comments were “ill-informed, ill-judged and offensive, though not anti-Semitic” (our emphasis). However, people would interpret them “in the context of earlier comments”, which have “made Jackie a focus of media attention especially on issues relating to anti-Semitism, which should have led Jackie to consider carefully whether to intervene in such discussions and to show great care if she did so”.

I invite readers to recall to mind the charge Lansman was trying to refute here – cowardice. Yet his explanation more or less states directly that, given some confected media calumny, the proper response for any Momentum member is craven silence (a stance copied by the Labour Representation Committee – it voted to condemn Momentum over the Walker affair – but then voted to keep its vote… secret). Certainly, if the media tells the right sort of lie about you, expect only backstabbing from the leadership. He invoked the anniversary of Cable Street, but Lansman’s piece would only be in the spirit of the famous battle if it had consisted entirely of the Jews of the East End conceding readily to the fascists that there really were rather too many Bolsheviks and traitors among them after all, and then throwing a few scapegoats out to their fate. What an insult.

Thus is the state of Momentum. It won’t turn a left-wing insurgency into votes at conference; it won’t allow any action minutely at variance with the attitude of the Labour leadership; the self-appointed leadership clique won’t even defend its own members against baseless slurs. So, indeed, what is Momentum for?

Whither the conference?

It is traditional on the left to correct a mistaken course at a conference – of members or delegates, as appropriate – although perhaps the appropriate nautical metaphor would be not course correction, but steadying a ship that is listing violently and in danger of following the Mary Rose into the drink. If there are disputes, or problems, sort them out democratically, before the whole membership, and beyond them the whole movement, inasmuch as the whole movement takes an interest. What’s not to love?

Well, evidently something, for we are still waiting. There are vague mutterings of a conference in February – we note that there have been mutterings before now, which have come to nought but further delays. The wrong conference, according to someone or other powerful enough to swing things, is a worse outcome than no conference at all.

This is plainly not a universal opinion. A document reaches us written by Jill Mountford of the AWL and Michael Chessum, who at this point may as well be a member of the same – the two voted alike, treacherously, when Walker’s case was before them.1)www.facebook.com/MomentumTeesside/posts/989609807852015 However ill-disposed we are to such elements, now of all times, there are reasons to welcome this document, for it is a proposed constitution (or at least the basis for one), to be debated at this February conference – which is definitely going to happen, honest.

It has good features and bad – on the plus side, conference is to be sovereign, the executive (or ‘steering committee’) is to be elected from among the leadership themselves (‘national committee’), and there are relatively few layers involved. On the other hand, the composition of the national committee as proposed is comically over-complicated; 25 members to be elected at conference, 25 in an atomised internet poll, two each for four “liberation campaigns” (we fear that comrade Chessum is hung up on his glory days as Great Helmsman of the University of London Union red base, and thus uses the NUS-ese for ‘caucus’), two more from a youth and students group, and two more for each affiliated union. Each of these groupings is to be individually gender-balanced. This ticks the usual tokenism boxes, with the (we’re sure) entirely unintentional side-effect of giving any small group 13 separate bites at the NC cherry, plus two for each trade union.

We will take such favours, of course; but we do not confuse them for real headway. There is a perfectly decent way to elect a leadership – at conference. Conference itself shall be sufficiently sovereign to decide the gender composition of the leadership, surely; or do Chessum and Mountford think that male chauvinism is best confronted not through open political combat, but by writing the correct numbers down in a constitution? Likewise, why do caucuses – ahem, sorry, “liberation campaigns” – need to be mandated in a constitution? Can people not – you know – just get on with it if they are so important? We are not waiting for a Marxists’ caucus to be formed from above to pursue our aims, and frankly we expect that, say, Jackie Walker – who insists against all reason that her misfortune is on account of her being black – will not wait either to pursue that particular line of argument.

This still leaves the issue of trade union affiliates. It is our opinion that there is little point in Momentum being a smaller copy of the Labour Party, with affiliates and all; far better to focus on developing a political line of attack and alternative to the right. Nonetheless, there are already trade union affiliates, and it would be pedantry to spend weeks recalibrating that relationship. If Momentum is to have an affiliate structure, however, why should we stop at unions? Why should there not be ‘socialist societies’ too? We wonder, with genuine curiosity, whether the AWL would be comfortable as an open affiliate. Labour Party Marxists, naturally, would welcome the opportunity.

Heads must roll

If there is any luck, the February conference will happen – or at least start to loom threateningly enough that Lansman and co will have to make serious excuses for it not happening – and a debate will be had, in the interim, about what shape Momentum ought to take.

Yet there are matters which are necessarily not covered in discussions of organisational structure; for we must in such discussions leave out the names of those who will fill the structure. Thus, if there is an opportunity for Momentum to democratically decide its leadership, it is a baseline requirement that Jon Lansman not be on it.

There is the obvious matter that he is one of seven current steering committee members who, by their betrayal of Jackie Walker, have placed themselves definitively outside the ranks of those able to lead anything: they are cowards – or else they are politically committed Zionists and thus apologists for heinous crimes. (Thus also – whatever the fate of their constitution – we look forward to the political exile of Chessum and Mountford.)

But look also at the reasoning, whereby he defends his conduct in relation to Walker – wielded like a cudgel is Jeremy Corbyn’s determination to root out anti-Semitism. When rank-and-file Corbynistas give rightwingers a piece of their mind, and get hauled up for ‘harassment’, the word comes down about obeying “Jeremy’s call for a kinder politics”, or whatever it happens to be; when the balance of power on the NEC is gift-wrapped by the leadership for the right, Lansman ensures that people are safely elsewhere. Corbyn vacillates and compromises, and so does John McDonnell; they are, after all, Labour lefts of the old school. It is part of who they are. Lansman’s role is to ensure that everyone else does as well. It is, after all, so terribly important to get the Tories out.

He has to go – along with the other six.

References

References
↑1 www.facebook.com/MomentumTeesside/posts/989609807852015
Democracy and the Labour Party, Labour structures and programme

Corbyn wins! Now – Launch the counter attack!

Comrades, this is a call to arms!

Every left comrade in the Labour Party and beyond will have responded to Jeremy Corbyn‘s victory with deep satisfaction. For the second time in just over a year, Corbyn has won the leadership – this time with an impressively increased majority on a much bigger turnout. Had all those been able to vote who wanted to vote, he would have won with a truly dramatic majority.

But if we now relax, think the storm has blown itself out and hope that “slate can be wiped clean”, as Corbyn put it in his victory speech, we are making a massive political error.

The right has already promised us that it will attack again. What form this takes will become clear soon – perhaps a parliamentary split and a bid to ransack the assets of the party; a fresh attempt to exhaust the party, and Corbyn personally, with another bruising leadership election; an escalation of the campaign of foul slanders against the socialists in the party, crude provocations designed to lose the party the next election, then lay the blame at Corbyn’s door.

Corbyn’s second victory gives us an unparalleled historic opportunity. The right promise us that they will continue this draining civil war. Our work from here on out has to be based on a strategic recognition that the right will never reconcile themselves to a Corbyn – or any left – leadership, let alone the growing influence of the radical, socialist and Marxist left. Alan Johnson has come out openly and announced that the neo-Blairites will fight a “a relentless rebellion” against Corbyn and the left.

It is therefore crucial that the left takes up arms, stops retreating or makes ill-conceived ‘peace’ overtures and tries to win this civil war! No more spin about olive branches and re-uniting. Our membership must be organised, educated and galvanised. Not just to vote Corbyn. Not just to defend Corbyn, but for the war in the wards, constituencies, committees and conferences.

In this article, James Marshall lays out the vital long-term strategic goals that can transform the political essence of the Labour Party.

But in the here and now, we have five key tasks:

1. Take control of our representatives!

Fight for rule changes stipulating that all elected Labour representatives must be subject to mandatory reselection, as was the case between 1980 and 1989 (and is the case for councillors today). Reforming trigger ballots is not enough. (Although we can take full advantage of them while they exist to allow all local party units, including Labour Party branches and affiliated organisations, to determine whether the constituency holds a full, open selection contest for its next candidate, where other potential candidates can be nominated, or a sitting MP is reselected without such a contest.)

MPs must be brought under democratic control – from above by the National Executive Committee; from below by the Constituency Labour Parties. And let’s make the House of Commons an ‘unsafe’ space for the likes of the venal careerists who currently make up the bulk of PLP. All our reps should live on the average skilled worker’s wage – say £40,000 (plus legitimate expenses). The balance must be handed over to the party.

2. Abolish the hated compliance unit!

It operates in the murk, it violates natural justice, it routinely leaks to the capitalist media. Restore full membership rights to all those cynically suspended or expelled, the vast majority on the basis of ludicrous trumped up charges. Reach out to good socialists barred from membership, because, repelled by the Labour right’s politics, they once supported Green, Left Unity or Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition election candidates. If there is any evidence of genuine serious misconduct, such cases must be handled properly and transparently. The evidence must be presented without delay to the accused, who must be entitled to defend themselves in front of a jury of peers (ie, Labour Party members) within a set time frame.

3. Give Momentum its head!

This grassroots organisation needs an urgent injection of democracy, transparency, trust in the membership and the election of and right to recall all its own officials. End top down control-freakery. Maximise mobilisation by giving local branches the full membership lists. Momentum members can then transform themselves and others, become leaders locally and nationally, caucus and lay plans to beat the right.

4. Fight to win more trade union affiliates!

Vitally, within the existing affiliates, we must win many, many more members to enrol. There are well over four million who pay the political levy, but only just over 70,000 affiliated supporters voted in the 2015 leadership election. Joining Labour is easy. We ought to set our sights on a million affiliated supporters as a minimum.

5. Build and transform Labour!

Every constituency, ward and other basic units must be captured, revived and led by the left. The right has made them cold, bureaucratic and lifeless spaces. We have to convince the sea of new members, and returnees, to attend meetings and organise alongside us – Facebook, Twitter, social media forums are useful tools, but not the future of politics. At worst, they can be simply echo chambers. We must persuade Corbyn’s ‘virtual’ supporters to become full individual Labour Party members and to regularly attend ‘meat-space’ meetings with their comrades. With new leaderships at a local level, our ward and constituency organisations can be made into vibrant centres of organisation, education and action. We should fight for socialist principles and a new clause 4.

But this would be just the beginning, of course. In the longer term, the Labour has to be re-made from top to bottom in spirit of the vision that motivated its founders. It must be a united front of all working class organisations, encompassing the trade unions, the cooperative organisations and the socialist groups outside the party that were originally excluded in the 1920s as a signal to the ruling class that Labour would a safe pair of governmental hands for capitalism.

Momentum

For democracy in Momentum – Teesside Momentum

Momentum Teesside calls for Momentum to set the standards for democracy and transparency in the Labour Party.

At our meeting yesterday, we approved the following motion calling on Momentum nationally to put into practice the principles of democracy and transparency that it advocates for our party, the Labour Party:

(1) Momentum Teesside supports Momentum’s aim to “Transform Labour into a more open, member-led party, with socialist policies and collective will to implement them in government” and its stated commitment to “working for progressive political change through methods which are democratic, inclusive and participatory”.

(2) We are proud that Momentum Teesside activists have led the way in promoting these principles in local Constituency Labour Parties and branches, and have sought to organise events for Labour members to debate the vital issues facing our party where CLP leaderships have resisted these principles.

(3) We welcome the now well-developed database and communications capacity of Momentum – ie, mailing lists, social media and website.

(4) However, we note that agendas, documents and minutes for decision-making committees at national and regional level are still not published by the organisation nor distributed to members. We regret that Momentum members have sometimes learned about decisions made by the organisation, many weeks after they were taken, through media outlets that may be hostile to Momentum, without having been informed by the organisation itself.

(5) Momentum Teesside believes that the fight to democratise the Labour Party cannot be separated from the way in which Momentum organises its own activities. Momentum as an organisation should therefore practise what it preaches to the Labour Party in its own internal decision-making processes, which should be seen to be fully democratic, accountable and transparent. There must be a presumption of openness in a member-based democratic socialist organisation.

(6) We call upon Momentum to publish on its website agenda papers and minutes for all its decision-making bodies, as well as the names of their elected officers and committee members. We call upon Momentum to require that all regional decision-making bodies and local branches adopt the same good practice regarding publication, providing support and training where necessary to help achieve this.

————

Further details of motions and actions agreed at our 13 September meeting are available in the minutes published at https://goo.gl/ahETgv.

 

History, Transform the Labour Party, Witch-hunts and expulsions

End the bans and proscriptions

Once the Labour Party was characterised by tolerance and inclusion, all working class organisations were welcome – no longer. James Marshall of Labour Party Marxists explores the history.

We in the Labour Party are in the midst of a terrible purge. Four examples.

  •   Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union general secretary Ronnie Draper has been suspended from membership and thereby prevented from voting in the Labour leadership election. Why? An unidentified tweet.
  •   Tony Greenstein is likewise suspended. A well known Jewish anti-Zionist, he faces baseless charges of being an anti-Semite. His real crime is to oppose the state of Israel … and Labour’s pro-Zionist right wing.
  •   Then there is Jill Mountford, an executive member of Momentum. She has been expelled. Once again, why? Six years ago, in the May 2010 general election, the comrade stood for the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty against Harriet Harman. A protest against the acceptance of Con-Dem austerity politics, albeit based on a stupid dismissal of the Labour Party as virtually indistinguishable from the US Democrats. However, since then comrade Mountford vows she has supported only Labour candidates.
  •   Perhaps the most ridiculous disciplinary case is Catherine Starr’s. Having shared a video clip of Dave Grohl’s band she ecstatically wrote: “I fucking love the Foo Fighters”. The thought police nabbed her under the ban on “racist, abusive or foul language, abuse against women, homophobia or anti-Semitism at meetings, on social media or in any other context.”1 Yes, using the word “fucking” in any context, can, nowadays be deemed a breach of the Labour Party’s norms of behaviour.

Unsurprisingly then, there are thousands of Drapers, Greensteins, Mountfords and Starrs. And it is clear what general secretary Iain McNicol, the compliance unit and the Labour right are up to. Create a climate where almost any leftwing public statement, past action or use of unofficial English can be branded as unacceptable, as threatening, as violating the Blairite ‘safe spaces’ policy. Then bar, ban and banish the maximum number of Jeremy Corbyn supporters. Swing things in favour of Owen Smith. True, the right’s chances of success are remote. The odds against citizen Smith are far too great. Nonetheless, this is clearly what the purge is all about.

Meanwhile, despite his massive £2.1 million donation to the Liberal Democrats in June, Lord David Sainsbury, a minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, is, at least as things stand today, free to vote in the leadership election. Nor are former Tory or Ukip members suspended or expelled. That despite their undisputed past support for non-Labour candidates. And, of course, there are those MPs who have been throwing one lying accusation after another against the left. They are Nazi stormtroopers. They are anti-Semites. They are Trot infiltrators.

The same MPs have attempted to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership at every turn. Now, having failed with the anti-Semitism campaign, they are furiously using the capitalist media to spread rumours of an imminent split and getting hold of the Labour Party’s name, offices and assets through the courts. They have gone untouched. A crime in itself.

Unlike John McDonnell we do not complain of “double standards”. We in Labour Party Marxists forthrightly oppose the suspension and expulsion of socialists, leftwingers, working class partisans. All of them, without exception, ought to be immediately reinstated. Whatever our criticisms they are assets who should be valued. It is the treacherous right, the splitters, who deserve to be purged.

There is surely nothing uncontroversial about a Marxist making such a case. After all, the ongoing civil war in the Labour Party is a concentrated manifestation of the struggle of class against class. Labour’s much expanded base faces an onslaught by the pro-capitalist apparatus of Brewer’s Green bureaucrats, MPs, MEPs, councillors, etc. Under such circumstances we Marxists are obliged to actively take sides.

What then should we make of Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain? He grovellingly wrote to Iain McNicol to assure him that the CPB “does not engage in entryism”.1)My emphasis – see https://andrewgodsell.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/labour-suspension-appeal-process More than that, comrade Griffiths parades his spinelessness:

According to reports in The Guardian and other media outlets … Labour Party staff have produced a research paper [that] links the Communist Party to ‘entryism’ in the Labour Party. In particular, that research paper cites a report made to our party’s executive committee [that] on June 25 declared that “defending the socialist leadership of the Labour Party at all costs” should be a priority for communists. Nowhere in that executive committee report … do we propose that our members join or register with the Labour Party. “At all costs” is a rhetorical flourish that cannot, obviously, be taken literally!

So the CPB should not be taken at its word. It will not defend the Corbyn leadership “at all costs”. And, prostrating himself still further before the witch-finder general, Griffiths continues:

Should you or your staff have any evidence that Communist Party members have joined the Labour Party without renouncing their CP membership, or engaged in any similar subterfuge, please inform me, so that action can be taken against them for bringing our party into disrepute.2)https://21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com/2016/07/12/communist-infiltration-of-labour

Let us be clear about what is being said here: in the middle of a brutal civil war, with the Labour left facing a concerted witch-hunt, the CPB’s Robert Griffiths wants to be seen as standing shoulder to shoulder with Iain McNicol. He even offers to help McNicol out in hunting down any CPB member who has decided to become a registered Labour Party supporter. To my personal knowledge there are more than a few of them. Anyway, not to leave a shadow of doubt, Griffiths signs off “With comradely regards”. A giveaway as to where his true loyalties really lie.

Following Tom Watson’s dodgy dossier, alleging that “far-left infiltrators are taking over the Labour Party”, Griffiths issued a follow-up statement. Again this excuse for a communist leader reassures McNicol that membership of his CPB is “incompatible with membership of the Labour Party by decision of both party leaderships”.3)Morning Star August 12 2016

Origins

How exactly Griffiths’ organisation arrived at its ban on Labour Party members joining the CPB and the ban on CPB members joining the Labour Party need not concern us here. Presumably its roots lie in the constitutionalism embraced by the ‘official’ CPGB with its turn to the cross-class politics of the popular front. This was sanctioned by the 5th Congress of the Communist International in 1935 under Stalin’s direct instructions.

Yet the CPB claims to be the unbroken continuation of the ‘official’ CPGB, going back to its foundation in 1920. Nonetheless, as we shall show, it is clear that that a fundamental break occurred. No less importantly, the same can be said of the Labour Party.

From its origins our Labour Party was a federal party. A united front of all working class organisations with, yes, especially at first, decidedly limited objectives.

JH Holmes, delegate of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, moved this truly historic resolution at the 1899 TUC:

That this Congress, having regard to its decisions in former years, and with a view to securing better representation of the interests of Labour in the House of Commons, hereby instructs the Parliamentary Committee to invite the cooperation of all cooperative, socialistic, trade unions and other working class organisations to jointly cooperate on lines mutually agreed upon, in convening a special congress of representatives from such above-named organisations as may be willing to take part to devise ways and means of securing the return of an increased number of Labour members in the next parliament.4)BC Roberts The Trade Union Congress 1868-1921 London 1958, p166

His resolution was opposed by the miners’ union on the basis of impracticability, but found support from the dockers, the railway servants and shop assistants unions. After a long debate the resolution was narrowly carried by 546,000 to 434,000 votes.

The TUC’s parliamentary committee oversaw the founding conference of the Labour Representation Committee in February 1900. The 129 delegates, representing 500,000 members, finally agreed to establish a distinct Labour Party in parliament, with its own whips, policies, finances, etc.

An executive committee was also elected. It would prepare lists of candidates, administer funds and convene an annual conference. Beside representatives of affiliated trade unions, the newly formed NEC would also include the socialist societies: the Fabians, the Independent Labour Party and the Social Democratic Federation. In fact, they were allocated five out of the 12 NEC seats (one Fabian, and two each from the ILP and SDF). Given the small size of these socialist societies compared with the trade unions, it is obvious that they were treated with extreme generosity. Presumably their “advanced” views were highly regarded.5)BC Roberts The Trade Union Congress 1868-1921 London 1958, p167

True, for the likes of Keir Hardie the formation of the Labour Party marked something of a tactical retreat. He had long sought some kind of a socialist party. However, to secure an alliance with the trade unions he and other ILPers were prepared to formally limit the Labour Party to nothing more than furthering working class interests by getting “men sympathetic with the aims and demands of the labour movement” into the House of Commons.6)Quoted in R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1960, p17

The delegates of the SDF proposed that the newly established Labour Party commit itself to the “class war and having as its ultimate object the socialisation of the means of production and exchange” – a formulation rejected by a large majority. In the main the trade unions were still Liberal politically. Unfortunately, as a result of this vote, the next annual conference of the SDF voted by 54 to 14 to withdraw from the Labour Party. Many SDF leaders came to bitterly “regret the decision”.7)M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p97

It should be recalled that neither Marx nor Engels had much time for the SDF nor its autocratic leader, Henry Hyndman. The SDF often took a badly conceived sectarian approach. Instead of linking up with the trade unions, it would typically stand aloof. Eg, faced with the great industrial unrest of 1910-14, Hyndman rhetorically asked: “Can anything be imagined more foolish, more harmful, more – in the widest sense of the word – unsocial than a strike?”8)M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p230 Of course, it is quite possible to actively support trade unions in their struggles over wages, conditions, etc, and to patiently and steadfastly advocate radical democracy and international socialism. Indeed without doing just that there can be no hope for a mass socialist party here in Britain.

However, the SDF is too often casually dismissed by historians. Eg, Henry Pelling describes it as “a rather weedy growth in the political garden”.9)H Pelling Origins of the Labour Party Oxford 1976, p172 True, its Marxism was typically lifeless, dogmatic and with Hyndman mixed with more than a tinge of anti-Semitism. Thus for him the Boer war was instigated by “Jew financial cliques and their hangers on”.10)M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p159 Yet the SDF was “the first modern socialist organisation of national importance” in Britain.11)M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p8 Karl Marx disliked it, Fredrick Engels despaired of it, William Morris, John Burns, Tom Mann and Edward Aveling left it. But the SDF survived. There were various breakaways. However, they either disappeared like the Socialist League, remained impotent sects like the Socialist Party of Great Britain, or could manage little more than establishing a regional influence, as with the Socialist Labour Party on Clydeside. Meanwhile the SDF continued as the “major representative” of what passed for Marxism in this country till 1911, when it merged with a range of local socialist societies to become the British Socialist Party.12)M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p8

Not that sectarianism was entirely vanquished. The first conference of the BSP voted, by an overwhelming majority, to “seek direct and independent affiliation” to the Second International.13)M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p248 In other words, not through the Labour Party-dominated British section of the Second International.

However, despite that, the BSP began to overcome its Labour-phobia. Leading figures such as Henry Hyndman, J Hunter Watts and Dan Irving eventually came out in favour of affiliation. So too did Zelda Kahan for the left. Withdrawal from the Labour Party, she argued, had been a mistake. Outside the Labour Party the BSP was seen as hostile, as fault-finding, as antagonistic. Inside, the BSP would get a wider hearing and win over the “best” rank-and-file forces.14)M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p255

Affiliation was agreed, albeit by a relatively narrow majority. Efforts then began to put this into effect. The formal application for affiliation was submitted in June 1914. And in 1916 – things having been considerably delayed by the outbreak of World War I – the BSP gained affiliation to the Labour Party. Note, the BSP also in effect expelled the pro-war right wing led by Hyndman.

Labour debates

Interestingly, the International Socialist Bureau – the Brussels-based permanent executive of the Second International – meeting in October 1908, had agreed to Labour Party affiliation … and thus, given its numbers, ensured its domination of the British section. For our present purposes the exchanges between the dozen or so national party representatives gathered in Brussels are well worth revisiting.

According to the rules of the Second International, there could only be two types of affiliate organisations. Firstly, socialist parties “which recognise the class struggle”. Secondly, working class organisations “whose standpoint is that of the class struggle” (ie, trade unions).15)VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p233

During these times the Labour Party positively avoided calling itself socialist. Nor, as we have seen, did it expressly recognise the principle of the class struggle. However, despite that, the Labour Party was admitted to the August 1907 Stuttgart congress of the International. My guess would be that it had observer status. Why was it admitted? Lenin characterised the Labour Party as an “organisation of a mixed type”, standing between the two types defined in the rules. In other words, the Labour Party was part political party, part a political expression of the trade unions. Crucially, the Labour Party marked the break from Liberalism of the vitally important working class in Britain. That could only but be welcomed.

At the October 1908 meeting of the ISB, Bruce Glasier of the ILP demanded the direct recognition of the Labour Party as an affiliate. He praised the Labour Party, its growth, its parliamentary group, its organic bonds with the trade unions, etc. Objectively, he said, this signified the movement of the working class in Britain towards socialism. Meanwhile, as a typical opportunist, Glasier lambasted doctrinaire principles, formulas and catechisms.

Karl Kautsky, the Second International’s leading theoretician, replied. Kautsky emphatically dissociated himself from Glasier’s obvious contempt for principles, but wholly supported the affiliation of the Labour Party, as a party waging the class struggle in practice. He moved the following resolution:

Whereas by previous resolutions of the international congresses all organisations adopting the standpoint of the proletarian class struggle and recognising the necessity for political action have been accepted for membership, the International Bureau declares that the British Labour Party is admitted to International Socialist congresses, because, while not expressly accepting the proletarian class struggle, in practice the Labour Party conducts this struggle, and adopts its standpoint, inasmuch as the party is organised independently of the bourgeois parties.

Kautsky was backed up by the Austrians, Édouard Vaillant of the French section, and, as the voting showed, the majority of the socialist parties and groups in the smaller European countries. Opposition came first from Henry Hyndman, representing the SDF. He wanted to maintain the status quo. Until the Labour Party expressly recognised the principle of the class struggle and the aim of socialism it should not be an affiliate. He found support from Angele Roussel (the second French delegate and a follower of Jules Guesde), Ilya Rubanovich of Russia’s Socialist Revolutionary Party and Roumen Avramov, delegate of the revolutionary wing of the Bulgarian social democrats.

Lenin spoke on behalf of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He agreed with the first part of Kautsky’s resolution. Lenin argued that it was impossible to turn down the Labour Party: ie, what he called “the parliamentary representation of the trade unions”.16)VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p234 After all, the ISB admitted trade unions, including those which had allowed themselves to be represented by bourgeois parliamentarians. But, said Lenin, “the second part of Kautsky’s resolution is wrong, because in practice the Labour Party is not a party really independent of the Liberals, and does not pursue a fully independent class policy”. Lenin therefore proposed an amendment that the end of the resolution, beginning with the word “because”, should read as follows: “because it [the Labour Party] represents the first step on the part of the really proletarian organisations of Britain towards a conscious class policy and towards a socialist workers’ party”.17)VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, pp234-35

However, Kautsky refused to accept the amendment. In his reply, he argued that the International Socialist Bureau could not adopt decisions based on “expectations”.

But the main struggle was between the supporters and the opponents of Kautsky’s resolution as a whole. When it was about to be voted on, Victor Adler, the Austro-Marxist, proposed that the resolution be divided into two parts. This was done and both parts were carried by the ISB: the first with three against and one abstention, and the second with four against and one abstention. Thus Kautsky’s resolution became the agreed position. Rubanovich, the Socialist Revolutionary, abstained on both votes. Lenin also reports what Adler – who spoke after him but before Kautsky’s second speech – said: “Lenin’s proposal is tempting, but it cannot make us forget that the Labour Party is now outside the bourgeois parties. It is not for us to judge how it did this. We recognise the fact of progress.”18)VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p235

The ISB dispute over the Labour Party continued in the socialist press. Fending off charges of “heresy” from leftist critics, Kautsky elaborated his ideas in a 1909 Neue Zeitarticle, ‘Sects or class parties’. Basically he argued that, unlike Germany and other mainland European countries, a mass workers’ party in Britain is impossible without linking up with the trade unions. Unless that happened, there could be nothing but sects and small circles.19)www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/07/unions.htm

In the Labour Leader, the ILP’s paper, Bruce Glasier rejoiced that the ISB not only recognised the Labour Party (which was true), but also “vindicated the policy of the ILP” (which was not true). Another ILPer, giving his impression of the Brussels meeting of the ISB, complained about the absence of the “ideal and ethical aspect of socialism”. Instead we “had … the barren and uninspiring dogma of the class war”.20)Quoted in VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p238

As for Hyndman, writing in the SDF’s Justice, he expressed his anger at the ISB majority. They are “whittlers-away of principle to suit the convenience of trimmers”. “I have not the slightest doubt,” writes Hyndman, “that if the British Labour Party had been told plainly that they either had to accept socialist principles … or keep away altogether, they would very quickly have decided to bring themselves into line with the International Socialist Party.”21)Quoted in VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977ibid p239

Lenin too joined the fray. He still considered Kautsky to be wrong. By stating in his resolution that the Labour Party “does not expressly accept the proletarian class struggle”, Kautsky voiced a certain “expectation”, a certain “judgement” as to what the policy of the Labour Party is now and what that policy should be. But Kautsky expressed this indirectly, and in such a way that it amounted to an assertion which, first, is incorrect in substance, and secondly, provides a basis for opportunists in the ILP to misrepresent his ideas.

By separating in parliament (but not in terms of its whole policy) from the two bourgeois parties, the Labour Party is “taking the first step towards socialism and towards a class policy of the proletarian mass organisations”. This, Lenin optimistically stated, is not an “expectation, but a fact”. A “fact” which compelled the ISB to admit the Labour Party into the International. Putting things this way, Lenin thought, “would make hundreds of thousands of British workers, who undoubtedly respect the decisions of the International, but have not yet become full socialists, ponder once again over the question why they are regarded as having taken only the first step, and what the next steps along this road should be”.

Lenin had no intention of laying down details about those “next steps”. But they were necessary, as Kautsky acknowledged in his resolution, albeit only indirectly. However, the use of an indirect formulation made it appear that the International was “certifying that the Labour Party was in practice waging a consistent class struggle, as if it was sufficient for a workers’ organisation to form a separate labour group in parliament in order in its entire conduct to become independent of the bourgeoisie!”22)Quoted in VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977pp235-36

The International, Lenin concluded, would undoubtedly have acted wrongly had it not expressed its complete support for the vital first step forward taken by the mass of workers in forming the Labour Party. But it does not in the least follow from this that the Labour Party “can already be recognised as a party in practice independent of the bourgeoisie, as a party waging the class struggle, as a socialist party, etc”.

Bolshevism

The October revolution in Russia found unanimous and unstinting support in the BSP. A number of its émigré comrades returned home and took up important roles in the Soviet government. Bolshevik publications were soon being translated into English: eg, Lenin’s State and revolution. Money too flowed in.

The Leeds conference of the BSP in 1918 enthusiastically declared its solidarity with the Bolsheviks and a wish to emulate their methods and achievements. And under the influence of the Bolsheviks the BSP adopted a much more active, much more agitational role in the Labour Party and the trade unions. In the words of Fred Shaw, instead of standing aloof from the “existing organisations” of the working class, we should “win them for Marxism”.23)Quoted in M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p281

Needless to say, the BSP constituted the main body that went towards the historic formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain over July 31-August 1 1920. Given BSP affiliation, and the fact that in 1918 the Labour Party introduced individual membership, there can be no doubt that the bulk of CPGBers were card-carrying members of the Labour Party. Dual membership being the norm, as it was in the Fabians and ILP.

However, instead of simply informing Arthur Henderson, the Labour Party’s secretary, that the BSP had changed its name, the CPGB, following Lenin’s advice, applied for affiliation. Lenin thought the CPGB was in a win-win situation. If affiliation was accepted, this would open up the Labour Party rank and file to communist influence. If affiliation was not accepted, this would expose the Labour leaders for what they really were: namely “reactionaries of the worst kind”.

With 20:20 foresight it would probably have been better for the CPGB to have presented itself merely as the continuation of the BSP. After all, gaining a divorce is far harder than turning down a would-be suitor. Needless to say, upholding its commitment to British imperialism and thereby fearing association with the Bolshevik revolution, the Labour apparatus, along with the trade union bureaucracy, determined that the CPGB application had to be rejected.

The “first step towards socialism and towards a class policy” was thereby thrown into reverse. Instead of being a united front of the organised working class, the leadership of the Labour Party began to cohere a tightly controlled, thoroughly respectable, explicitly anti-Marxist Labour Party.

Henderson replied to the CPGB application for affiliation by saying that he did not consider that the principles of the communists accorded with those of the Labour Party. To which the CPGB responded by asking whether the Labour Party proposed to “exclude from its ranks” all those who were committed to the “political, social and economic emancipation of the working class”. Did Henderson want to “impose acceptance of parliamentary constitutionalism as an article of faith on its affiliated societies”?24)Quoted in R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1960, p87 The latter bluntly replied that there was an “insuperable difference” between the two parties.

A good many Labour Party activists rejected Henderson’s characterisation of the CPGB as, in effect, mad, bad and dangerous to know. Nonetheless, the Labour apparatus never experienced any difficulty in mustering large majorities against CPGB affiliation. Eg, in June 1921 there was a 4,115,000 to 224,000 conference vote rejecting the CPGB.

Not that the CPGB limped on as an isolated sect. Affiliation might have been rejected, but there was still dual membership. In 1922, two CPGB members won parliamentary seats as Labour candidates: JT Walton Newbold (Motherwell and Wishaw) and Shapurji Saklatvala (Battersea North).

Subsequently, Labour’s national executive committee was forced to temporarily drop its attempt to prevent CPGB members from being elected as annual conference delegates. The June 26-29 1923 London conference had 36 CPGB members as delegates, “as against six at Edinburgh”, the previous year.25)JT Murphy, ‘The Labour Party conference’ Communist Review August 1923, Vol 4, No4: www.marxists.org/archive/murphy-jt/1923/08/labour_conf.htm Incidentally, the 1923 conference once again rejected CPGB affiliation, this time by 2,880,000 to 366,000 votes.

Nonetheless, the general election in December 1923 saw Walton Newbold (Motherwell) and Willie Gallacher (Dundee) standing as CPGB candidates. Fellow CPGBers Ellen Wilkinson (Ashton-under-Lyne), Shapurji Saklatvala (Battersea North), M Philips Price (Gloucester), William Paul (Manchester Rusholme) and Joe Vaughan (Bethnal Green SW) were official Labour candidates, while Alec Geddes (Greenock) and Aitkin Ferguson (Glasgow Kelvingrove) were unofficial Labour candidates, there being no official Labour candidate in either constituency. Despite a not inconsiderable increase in the communist vote, none were elected.26)J Klugmann History of the Communist Party of Great Britain Vol 1, London 1968, pp361-62

A ban on CPGB members standing as Labour Party candidates swiftly followed. Yet, although Labour Party organisations were instructed not to support CPGB candidates, this was met with defiance, not the connivance nowadays personified by Robert Griffiths. In the run-up to the October 1924 general election, Battersea North Labour Party overwhelmingly endorsed Shapurji Saklatvala; Joe Vaughan was unanimously endorsed by Bethnal Green SW Constituency Labour Party and William Paul similarly by the Rusholme CLP executive committee. And Saklatvala was once again elected as an MP.

The 1924 Labour Party conference decision against CPGB members continuing with dual membership was reaffirmed in 1925. And, going further, trade unions were “asked not to nominate communists as delegates to Labour organisations”.27)N Branson History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927-1941 London 1985, p5 Yet despite these assaults on the Labour Party’s founding principles, at the end of 1926 the CPGB could report that 1,544 of its 7,900 members were still individual members of the Labour Party.

Following the defeat of the 1926 General Strike, the Labour apparatus and trade union bureaucracy wanted the movement to draw the lesson that the only way to make gains would be through increased collaboration with the capitalist boss class – Mondism. As a concomitant there was a renewed drive to intimidate, to marginalise, to drive out the communists.

The struggle proved particularly sharp in London. In the capital city around half of the CPGBs members were active in their CLPs. And despite claiming that it was the communists who were “splitting the movement”, the bureaucracy strove to do just that. Battersea CLP was disaffiliated because it dared to back Saklatvala and refused to exclude CPGB members. Similar measures were taken against Bethnal Green CLP, where the communist ex-mayor, Joe Vaughan, was held in particularly high regard.

The left in the Labour Party fought back. The National Left Wing Movement was formed in December 1925. Its stated aim was not only to fight the bans on communists, it also sought to hold together disaffiliated CLPs.

The NLWM insisted it had no thought of superceding the Labour Party, but, instead, it sought to advance rank-and-file aspirations. In this the NLWM was considerably boosted by the newly established Sunday Worker. Despite being initiated, funded and edited by the CPGB, the Sunday Workerserved as the authoritative voice of the NLWM. At its height it achieved a circulation of 100,000. The NLWM’s 1925 founding conference had nearly 100 Labour Party organisations sending delegates.

Yet the right’s campaign of disaffiliations and expulsions remorselessly proceeded. The NLWM therefore found itself considerably weakened in terms of official Labour Party structures. Hence at the NLWM’s second annual conference in 1927 there were delegates from only 54 local Labour Parties and other Labour groups (representing a total of 150,000 individual party members). It should be added that militant union leaders, such as the miners’ AJ Cook, also supported the conference.

With the counterrevolution within the revolution in the Soviet Union, the CPGB was in many ways reduced to a slave of Stalin’s foreign policy. The CPGB’s attitude towards the Labour Party correspondingly changed. Leaders such as Harry Pollitt and Rajani Palme Dutt denounced the Labour Party as nothing but “a third capitalist party” (shades of Peter Taaffe and the Socialist Party in England and Wales).

As an integral part of this self-inflicted madness, in 1929 the Sunday Worker was closed and the NLWM wound up. In effect the CPGB returned to its SDF roots. Ralph Miliband regretfully comments that the CPGB’s so-called new line “brought it to the nadir of its influence”.28)R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1960, p153 Sectarianism could only but spur on the right’s witch-hunt. In 1930 the Labour Party apparatus produced its first ‘proscribed list’. Members of proscribed organisations became ineligible for individual membership of the Labour Party and CLPs were instructed not to affiliate to proscribed organisations. Needless to say, most of those organisation were closely associated with the CPGB.

However, what began with action directed against the CPGB-led National Unemployed Workers’ Movement and the National Minority Movement has now morphed into the catch-all ban on “racist, abusive or foul language, abuse against women, homophobia or anti-Semitism at meetings, on social media or in any other context”. Nowadays the Labour Party apparatus can, at a whim, expel or suspend anyone.

Surely, beginning with the Liverpool conference, it is time to put an end to the bans and proscriptions. We certainly have within our power the possibility of once again establishing the Labour Party as the united front of all working class organisations in Britain.

References

References
↑1 My emphasis – see https://andrewgodsell.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/labour-suspension-appeal-process
↑2 https://21centurymanifesto.wordpress.com/2016/07/12/communist-infiltration-of-labour
↑3 Morning Star August 12 2016
↑4 BC Roberts The Trade Union Congress 1868-1921 London 1958, p166
↑5 BC Roberts The Trade Union Congress 1868-1921 London 1958, p167
↑6 Quoted in R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1960, p17
↑7 M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p97
↑8 M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p230
↑9 H Pelling Origins of the Labour Party Oxford 1976, p172
↑10 M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p159
↑11 M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p8
↑12 M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p8
↑13 M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p248
↑14 M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p255
↑15 VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p233
↑16 VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p234
↑17 VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, pp234-35
↑18 VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p235
↑19 www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/07/unions.htm
↑20 Quoted in VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p238
↑21 Quoted in VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977ibid p239
↑22 Quoted in VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977pp235-36
↑23 Quoted in M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keel 1994, p281
↑24 Quoted in R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1960, p87
↑25 JT Murphy, ‘The Labour Party conference’ Communist Review August 1923, Vol 4, No4: www.marxists.org/archive/murphy-jt/1923/08/labour_conf.htm
↑26 J Klugmann History of the Communist Party of Great Britain Vol 1, London 1968, pp361-62
↑27 N Branson History of the Communist Party of Great Britain 1927-1941 London 1985, p5
↑28 R Miliband Parliamentary socialism London 1960, p153
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.

Anti-Semitism

Anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism

Gallery

Submission by Labour Party Marxists to the Shami Chakrabarti inquiry into anti-Semitism and other forms of racism in the Labour Party.

There is a well organised, well financed, utterly cynical, anti-left witch-hunt going on. Supporters of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and Socialist Appeal have been targeted. But it is the synthetic hysteria generated over ‘anti-Semitism’ that has claimed by far the most victims. Obviously, this is part of the attempt to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. However, there is a bigger picture.

Read the Israeli press. It is clear that there is the coming together of two distinct offensives. The first has been going on long before anyone thought of Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party. For those coordinating pro-Israel, pro-Zionist propaganda, a few cracks had started to appear in the edifice. This is noticeable mainly, but not only, in the United States – which is, of course, the main arena for the pro-Zionists – but here in Britain too. There has been a shift in public opinion regarding Israeli policy and the conflict in the Middle East and the legitimacy of Israel as a colonising-settler state.

Take, for example, the ongoing primary campaign for US president. Its most encouraging feature is that, of all the serious candidates, the one who is attracting the most support amongst the broad left – especially among young people, including and especially among young Jewish people – and who happens to be Jewish, is the only one who refused an invitation to address the main pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac).

Besides running as a socialist and gaining huge support, Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who has talked about the rights of the Palestinian people. He has not gone as far as we would like, but in the US context his success has been a potential game-changer. Opinion polls show he has gained support both amongst Muslims and Jews, especially the young.

The campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions has played a crucial role. When the BDS campaign was in its infancy there was some discussion about whether it could actually overthrow the Zionist regime – just as some people thought a boycott of South Africa could overthrow apartheid. Of course, direct analogies between South Africa and Israel are misleading, because they represent two different modes of colonisation. That said, while sanctions might help to produce favourable subjective conditions, those who think they are going to overthrow any such regime that way are clearly deluding themselves.

The BDS campaign has though mobilised public opinion. Its advantage is that in CLPs, trade unions and professional organisations, in colleges and universities, there are people campaigning for BDS and this has provoked a very useful debate about the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What is particularly notable among the BDS activists is the overrepresentation of young Jewish people.

That is very worrying for the Zionists. And if you read the Israeli press it is clear that there is a determination to take measures to halt the erosion of the legitimacy of the Zionist state and the move to brand anti-Zionism as the “new anti-Semitism”. This was happening well before there was even a hint that Jeremy Corbyn could become Labour leader. Of course, his overwhelming victory has added to Zionist worries. For the first time ever a leader of the main opposition party in Britain is on record as championing the Palestinian people.

And so the Zionists and all their allies decided to target Corbyn. Accidentally or not, the current Israeli ambassador to London is a certain Mark Regev, who has in the past justified genocide. Regev is hardly a normal diplomat – he is a propagandist by trade. The campaign of branding people anti-Semites has merged with the efforts of those who have no particular pro-Israel sentiments, but are looking for ways to attack the Labour left.

So there is now a coalition between, on the one side, people worried about the rise in support for the Palestinian cause and those determined to discredit Corbyn and the Labour left for that reason; and, on the other, people like the vile blogger, Guido Fawkes, whose real name is Paul Staines – a rightwinger who would do anything to discredit Corbyn and the Labour left. He is using anti-Semitism smears for opportunistic reasons, not because he really cares one way or the other about Israel/Palestine.

Four examples

So what have they come up with in regard to the accusations of anti-Semitism? A few essentially trivial examples and some non-examples. Most of what has been publicised in the press fall into the latter category. Let us deal with four examples – all have been widely publicised in the media.

First Naz Shah, one of the 2015 generation of new Labour MPs. Some years ago she shared a graphic of Israel superimposed on the United States. This was accompanied with the ironic strap that the Israel-Palestine conflict would be resolved if Israel could be relocated somewhere in the US deep mid-west. This image originated in the United States and was, obviously, a satirical comment on Washington’s unstinting support for Israel – Norman Finkelstein, the well-known Jewish, anti-Zionist professor, prominently featured it on his website. And yet the image was supposed to reveal some kind of anti-Semitism. Anybody who thinks that this was anything but a piece of satire should have their head examined.

Obviously nobody was seriously suggesting that Israel should be physically relocated. But, despite that, it was claimed that the implication was that the entire Israeli population are to be ‘transported’ to the US, just as the Jews had been transported to Auschwitz. So the image must be anti-Semitic. In fact this is the sort of joke that is very popular in Israel, as well as in the US, because it says a lot about the relationship between the imperial sponsor and its client state.

Then there is Tony Greenstein, a member of the Jewish Socialists Group and the Labour Party, and an inveterate anti-Zionist blogger. One of the charges against him is that he wrote an article titled ‘Israeli policy is to wait for the remaining holocaust survivors to die’. This was deemed a terrible accusation by the Labour Party’s opaque Compliance Unit and presumably clear evidence of anti-Semitism. It is, of course, a terrible accusation, but exactly the same charge is made in Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper. It ran a piece, ‘Israel is waiting for its holocaust survivors to die’. It is undoubtedly true that the Israeli state is parsimonious in the extreme when it comes to providing benefits to holocaust survivors. Thousands live in dire poverty, forced to choose between heat and food. Israel has, of course, received billions of euros in reparations from the German state. But it has preferred to spend the money on the holocaust industry – memorials, propaganda and well-paid sinecures – rather than on holocaust survivors.

Next there is an example – not from the Labour Party, but from the left more generally – of the president of the National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia, who co-authored an article five years ago saying that Birmingham University is “something of a Zionist outpost”. If we said, rightly or wrongly, that University College London is ‘something of a ‘leftist outpost’, so what? Of course, if you believe that ‘Zionist’ is a synonym for ‘Jewish’, then perhaps that does not sound good. But that is a Zionist conflation and there is no indication that this is what Malia Bouattia meant – her whole history contradicts such an assumption.

Finally Ken Livingstone. Speaking in defence of Naz Shah, on BBC London’s Vanessa Feltz show, he said that Hitler “supported Zionism until he went mad”. This is certainly inaccurate and Livingstone would have been well advised to have done a little more basic research. However, the point he was making is essentially correct.

Of course, he got the date wrong. Hitler was not in power in 1932. But, yes, when the Nazis did come to power, in 1933, they pursued a policy which, with this or that proviso, “supported Zionism.”

Drop talk of Zionism?

How should the left react under such circumstances? Jon Lansman, chair of Momentum, urges us to drop the “counterproductive slogan” of Zionism. Criticising this or that concrete action by the Israeli government is perfectly legitimate – but not Zionism. Comrade Lansman says we should not alienate those who might otherwise agree with us on austerity, combating inequality, etc.

Dropping all mention of Zionism just does not work. Even the Zionists accept that Israeli policy on this, that or the other can be criticised. Eg, Israel’s continuing occupation and colonisation of the West Bank. But why does Israel persist with this policy? It has been condemned by Barack Obama and John Kerry. The same goes for David Cameron. The settlements are illegal, constitute an obstacle to peace, etc. So why does Israel do it? How can you explain it?

It can only be explained by the fact that expansion and colonisation are integral to Zionism. Understand that and you understand that there is nothing strange about what Israel is doing. It is not as if expansion and colonisation were a policy confined to the current government of Binyamin Netanyahu. It has been carried out by all Israeli governments since 1967 and it took place within the former borders – the so-called ‘green line’ – before 1967. There has been an ongoing policy of Zionist colonisation from the very beginning.

You cannot explain why Israel is continuing with a policy that is not winning it any friends without mentioning Zionism. On the contrary, far from dropping all mention of Zionism and retreating in the face of the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign, we should go onto the offensive and be aggressive: Zionism must be fearlessly attacked.

And we can also attack Zionism precisely because of its collusion and collaboration with anti-Semitism, including up to a point with Nazi Germany. We should not respond to the witch-hunt by refusing to defend Ken Livingstone and confining ourselves to anodyne platitudes: “We stand against racism, including anti-Semitism” (Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Owen Jones, Liz Davies, etc). In effect this is to accept that anti-Semitism is actually a problem on the left. While, of course, we oppose all manifestations of anti-Semitism, the fact is that today those on the left who propagate a version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion carry no weight and are without any intellectual foundation. They are oddities who exist on the fringes of the fringe.

Given that the Labour Party tolerates, even promotes, the so-called Jewish Labour Movement, things must be put in their proper perspective. Rebranded in 2004, JLM is the successor organisation of Poale Zion, a nationalist organisation which affiliated to the Labour Party in 1920. JLM is, in fact, not open to all Jewish members of the Labour Party. It only accepts Zionists.

Amongst its key aims is to promote the “centrality of Israel in Jewish life”. It defines Zionism not as a colonial-settler project, but the “national liberation movement of the Jewish people”. Despite this travesty, it is still an official Labour Party affiliate (it is also affiliated to the World Labour Zionist Organisation and the World Zionist Organisation).

For our part, we agree with the Labour movement conference on Palestine in 1984 (Jeremy Corbyn was amongst the sponsors). It denounced Zionism and called for a campaign for the “disaffiliation of Poale Zion from the Labour Party.”
That Baroness Royall proposes to put JLM in charge of policing ‘anti-Semitic’ attitudes in the Labour Party must be rejected outright. The fact of the matter is that JLM, Labour Friends of Israel and fraternal relations with the Israeli Labor Party are a real problem. They are certainly not part of the solution.

Connection

We should take the side of the Board of Deputies of British Jews – not the current one, but the Board of Deputies of 100 years ago! It put out some very pertinent statements about Zionism and its connection with anti-Semitism. When the negotiations on the 1917 Balfour Declaration were taking place, a prominent member of the Board of Deputies, Lucien Wolf, wrote:

I understand … that the Zionists do not merely propose to form and establish a Jewish nationality in Palestine, but that they claim all the Jews as forming at the present moment a separate and dispossessed nationality, for which it is necessary to find an organic political centre, because they are and must always be aliens in the lands in which they now dwell, and, more especially, because it is “an absolute self-delusion” to believe that any Jew can be at once “English by nationality and Jewish by faith”.

I have spent most of my life in combating these very doctrines, when presented to me in the form of anti-Semitism, and I can only regard them as the more dangerous when they come to me in the guise of Zionism. They constitute a capitulation to our enemies, which has absolutely no justification in history, ethnology or the facts of everyday life, and if they were admitted by the Jewish people as a whole, the result would only be that the terrible situation of our co-religionists in Russia and Romania would become the common lot of Jewry throughout the world.1

About the same time, Alexander Montefiore, president of the Board of Deputies, and Claude, his brother, who was president of the closely associated Anglo-Jewish Association, wrote a letter to The Times. They stated that the “establishment of a Jewish nationality in Palestine, founded on the theory of Jewish homelessness, must have the effect throughout the world of stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands and of undermining their hard-won positions as citizens and nationals of those lands”.2

They pointed out that the theories of political Zionism undermined the religious basis of Jewry, to which the only alternative would be “a secular Jewish nationality, recruited on some loose and obscure principle of race and of ethnographic peculiarity”.

They went on:

But this would not be Jewish in any spiritual sense, and its establishment in Palestine would be a denial of all the ideals and hopes by which the survival of Jewish life in that country commends itself to the Jewish conscience and Jewish sympathy. On these grounds the Conjoint Committee of the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association deprecates earnestly the national proposals of the Zionists.

The second part in the Zionist programme which has aroused the misgivings of the Conjoint Committee is the proposal to invest the Jewish settlers [in Palestine] with certain special rights in excess of those enjoyed by the rest of the population …

In all the countries in which Jews live the principle of equal rights for all religious denominations is vital to them. Were they to set an example in Palestine of disregarding this principle, they would convict themselves of having appealed to it for purely selfish motives. In the countries in which they are still struggling for equal rights they would find themselves hopelessly compromised … The proposal is the more inadmissible because the Jews are and probably long will remain a minority of the population of Palestine, and might involve them in the bitterest feuds with their neighbours of other races and religions, which would severely retard their progress and find deplorable echoes throughout the orient.3

This turned out to be highly prophetic.

Nazi collaboration

Let us turn now to the Zionist-Nazi connection. In fact it sounds more shocking than it is, because we are talking about the early days of the Nazi regime. Today the holocaust is taught in schools, so people may know that the policy of extermination of Jews actually started officially in January 1942, when a Nazi conference was convened in Wannsee under the chairmanship of Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich was second in command to Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS.

The minutes of this conference are actually online and in them a change in policy towards the Jews, ratified by the Führer, was declared. Although it is phrased euphemistically, it is clear that what was being talked about was both deportation to the east and extermination.

This change occurred following the attack on the Soviet Union, when the Nazis felt they had to find different ways of dealing with the ‘Jewish problem’. Until that time the official policy was for the exclusion of the Jews from political and civic life, for separation and for emigration. Quite naturally the Zionist leadership thought this set of policies was similar to those of other anti-Semitic regimes – which it was – and the Zionist approach was not peculiar to the Nazi regime. The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, had pointed out that anti-Semitic regimes would be allies, because they wanted to get rid of the Jews, while the Zionists wanted to rid them of the Jews. That was the common interest.

In 1934 the German rabbi, Joachim Prinz, published a book entitled Wir Juden (We, the Jews), in which he welcomed the Nazi regime. That regime wanted to separate Jews from non-Jews and prevent assimilation – as did the Zionists.
So the Zionists made overtures to the Nazi regime. How did the Nazis respond? Here are two relevant quotations. The first is from the introduction to the Nuremberg laws, the racist legislation introduced in Nazi Germany in 1935. This extract was still present in the 1939 edition, from which we shall quote:

If the Jews had a state of their own, in which the bulk of their people were at home, the Jewish question could already be considered solved today … The ardent Zionists of all people have objected least of all to the basic ideas of the Nuremberg laws, because they know that these laws are the only correct solution for the Jewish people too …4

Heydrich himself wrote the following in an article for the SS house journal Das Schwarze Korps in September 1935:

National socialism has no intention of attacking the Jewish people in any way. On the contrary, the recognition of Jewry as a racial community based on blood, and not as a religious one, leads the German government to guarantee the racial separateness of this community without any limitations. The government finds itself in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry itself, so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry throughout the world and the rejection of all assimilationist ideas. On this basis, Germany undertakes measures that will surely play a significant role in the future in the handling of the Jewish problem around the world.5

In other words, a friendly mention of Zionism, indicating an area of basic agreement it shared with Nazism.

Of course, looking back at all this, it seems all the more sinister, since we know that the story ended with the gas chambers a few years later. This overlap is an indictment of Zionism, but the actual collaboration between the two was not such an exceptional thing, when you accept that the Zionists were faced with the reality of an anti-Semitic regime.

Incidentally, half of what Ken Livingstone said is not that far from the caricature peddled by Netanyahu last year in his speech to delegates attending the 37th World Zionist Organisation’s congress in Jerusalem. According to Netanyahu, “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews” until he met the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, in 1941. Netanyahu claimed that “Al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here’.”

Of course, the allegation that the idea of extermination originated with the grand mufti has been rejected with contempt by serious historians, but Netanyahu was at least correct in saying that emigration, not extermination, was indeed Nazi policy until the winter of 1941-42.

To repeat: we must go on the counterattack against the current slurs. It is correct to expose Zionism as a movement based on both settler-colonisation and collusion with anti-Semitism. We do not apologise for saying this. If you throw the sharks bloodied meat, they will only come back for more. At the moment the left is apologising far too much, in the hope that the right will let up.

They will not stop until they succeed in their aim of deposing Jeremy Corbyn and returning the Labour Party to slavishly supporting US policy in the Middle East.

Notes
1. Reproduced in B Destani (ed) The Zionist movement and the foundation of Israel 1839-1972 Cambridge 2004, Vol 1, p727.
2. The Times May 24 1917.
3. See www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message55570/pg1.
4. See M Machover and M Offenberg Zionism and its scarecrows London 1978, p38, which directly quotes Die Nurnberger Gesetze. See also F Nicosia The Third Reich and the Palestine question London 1985, p53; and FR Nicosia Zionism and anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany Cambridge 2008, p108.The latter cites a 1935 article by Bernhard Lohsener in the Nazi journal Reichsverwaltungsblatt.
5. Das Schwarze Korps September 26 1935.

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