Mike Craig surveys the perfidy that helped undo the Corbyn leadership of the British Labour Party.

Everyone, except notably the mainstream Media, has been commenting profusely on the recently leaked report on The Labour Party's internal investigation, entitled The work of The Labour Party's Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014-2019.

Several Left-wing writers and bloggers have dissected the report and catalogued offending snippets of social media communications in order to show that there was an organised and concerted campaign to undermine Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Party. These highlighted excerpts do indeed prove that this was the case.

It appears that the report was commissioned by the current General Secretary, Jenny Formby, with the aim of pinning the blame for the failure to investigate antisemitism on her predecessor Iain McNicol, together with leading members of the Witch-finder General's office, AKA The Governance and Legal Unit.

The person(s) who leaked the report and those writers who have investigated it, listing the names of the culprits involved in this activity and the evidence against them, have done the Public a service.

Of course this is not how Corbyn's successor Keir Starmer sees it. No, for Starmer, the most pressing issue is to hunt down the whistle-blower. Starmer has form in criminalising those who act in the public interest. He was instrumental in the fast-tracking of the extradition of Julian Assange and in pressurising the Swedish authorities to take this route.

Starmer was part of the so-called 'Chicken coup' in 2016, and was among those MPs who resigned. He was not an innocent bystander while all of this underhand activity was going on, and as it has turned out recently, he had a lot to gain from it.

There is evidence in the leaked report that investigations into alleged incidents of antisemitism were deliberately archived rather than being dealt with. The aim being to show that the Corbyn Leadership didn't take the issue seriously, and that therefore Corbyn himself must be antisemitic. Although this tactic did have some effect, it didn't undermine the support for Corbyn among party members and the general public to the extent that the conspirators had hoped for. They needed another weapon to supplement this one, and that appeared when the General election was called in 2017.

The report shows that this clique worked against their own party during the election campaign. They would rather have had the Tories remain in power so long as this meant the end of the Corbyn leadership. This was a step too far!

This was no longer a battle between the Right and the Left in the Labour Party. The chicken coup from the previous year had now developed into a real coup d’etat.

The dictionary definition of a coup d’etat is 'the forcible removal of an existing government from power through violent means'.

Well let's look at that definition.

Was the Labour Party the government in power? No, but there is no doubt that the 2,700 votes by which it fell short in the general election were only a fraction of what it lost due to the negative campaign tactics of the conspirators. The LP would be in power today if there had been no conspiracy!

Was violence used in order to keep the said government from power? It is my understanding that If you know that your actions will cause loss of life, then you are deliberately committing an act of violence.

We don't need to look at the leaked report for evidence of this violence. Since 2010, 200,000 people have died due to cuts in public services, and a further 150,000 have died due to the welfare reform bill. The Corbyn manifesto contained plans to end the causes of these deaths. Those MPs, officials and staff of the Labour party involved in securing their own Party's defeat knew this to be the case. They are guilty of malice aforethought in the execution of their crime.

The plotters had a close shave in the 2017, and they needed to ensure that the results were more definitive the next time. Enter Sir Keir, leading the elephant of Brexit into the room just in time to save the day. Finally Corbyn threw the towel in after the 2019 election, an election, it must be remembered, would not have taken place if the previous one hadn't been sabotaged!

Of course no one could have predicted the current crisis, but I think it goes without saying that if the Corbyn government had been in power for the last two years, Britain would not now have the second highest death toll in the World from covid19.

Not a bloodless Coup by any stretch of the imagination!

Mike Craig is a member of Left Horizons.

Not So Bloodless Coup

Mike Craig surveys the perfidy that helped undo the Corbyn leadership of the British Labour Party.

Everyone, except notably the mainstream Media, has been commenting profusely on the recently leaked report on The Labour Party's internal investigation, entitled The work of The Labour Party's Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014-2019.

Several Left-wing writers and bloggers have dissected the report and catalogued offending snippets of social media communications in order to show that there was an organised and concerted campaign to undermine Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Party. These highlighted excerpts do indeed prove that this was the case.

It appears that the report was commissioned by the current General Secretary, Jenny Formby, with the aim of pinning the blame for the failure to investigate antisemitism on her predecessor Iain McNicol, together with leading members of the Witch-finder General's office, AKA The Governance and Legal Unit.

The person(s) who leaked the report and those writers who have investigated it, listing the names of the culprits involved in this activity and the evidence against them, have done the Public a service.

Of course this is not how Corbyn's successor Keir Starmer sees it. No, for Starmer, the most pressing issue is to hunt down the whistle-blower. Starmer has form in criminalising those who act in the public interest. He was instrumental in the fast-tracking of the extradition of Julian Assange and in pressurising the Swedish authorities to take this route.

Starmer was part of the so-called 'Chicken coup' in 2016, and was among those MPs who resigned. He was not an innocent bystander while all of this underhand activity was going on, and as it has turned out recently, he had a lot to gain from it.

There is evidence in the leaked report that investigations into alleged incidents of antisemitism were deliberately archived rather than being dealt with. The aim being to show that the Corbyn Leadership didn't take the issue seriously, and that therefore Corbyn himself must be antisemitic. Although this tactic did have some effect, it didn't undermine the support for Corbyn among party members and the general public to the extent that the conspirators had hoped for. They needed another weapon to supplement this one, and that appeared when the General election was called in 2017.

The report shows that this clique worked against their own party during the election campaign. They would rather have had the Tories remain in power so long as this meant the end of the Corbyn leadership. This was a step too far!

This was no longer a battle between the Right and the Left in the Labour Party. The chicken coup from the previous year had now developed into a real coup d’etat.

The dictionary definition of a coup d’etat is 'the forcible removal of an existing government from power through violent means'.

Well let's look at that definition.

Was the Labour Party the government in power? No, but there is no doubt that the 2,700 votes by which it fell short in the general election were only a fraction of what it lost due to the negative campaign tactics of the conspirators. The LP would be in power today if there had been no conspiracy!

Was violence used in order to keep the said government from power? It is my understanding that If you know that your actions will cause loss of life, then you are deliberately committing an act of violence.

We don't need to look at the leaked report for evidence of this violence. Since 2010, 200,000 people have died due to cuts in public services, and a further 150,000 have died due to the welfare reform bill. The Corbyn manifesto contained plans to end the causes of these deaths. Those MPs, officials and staff of the Labour party involved in securing their own Party's defeat knew this to be the case. They are guilty of malice aforethought in the execution of their crime.

The plotters had a close shave in the 2017, and they needed to ensure that the results were more definitive the next time. Enter Sir Keir, leading the elephant of Brexit into the room just in time to save the day. Finally Corbyn threw the towel in after the 2019 election, an election, it must be remembered, would not have taken place if the previous one hadn't been sabotaged!

Of course no one could have predicted the current crisis, but I think it goes without saying that if the Corbyn government had been in power for the last two years, Britain would not now have the second highest death toll in the World from covid19.

Not a bloodless Coup by any stretch of the imagination!

Mike Craig is a member of Left Horizons.

9 comments:

  1. Mike - thanks for doing this for us. Good to have you contributing here when it takes your fancy. BLP is on the road back to Blairite Perfidy

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  2. what is the point in a party making itself electable if in the course of getting elected it can change nothing? Every country will get a government but to get good governance a good opposition is needed. And if that means never getting into government but providing a service vital to good governance, so be it.

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  3. Yes, Starmer and his Blair-lites are quite happy with the way things are. Change is the last thing they want. Corbynism wasn't revolutionary, but it would have changed lives if its programme had been implemented. Labour was quite a good opposition for a few short years, but it wasn't able to move government policy much on the key issues. As you say there isn't much hope of changing anything while Sir Knight leads the opposition. We will have to build outside the Party as well as fighting our corner within it.

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  4. Mike - I think we reach a point within institutions where we concludethat there is nothing to be carved from rotten wood. Somewhere along the journey there has to be a turning point at which we must not fail to turn. I am with Mick Hall on this.

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  5. Well as I said to Mick, I'll stay until I'm expelled (and that is bound to happen sooner than later), or until some realistic alternative come along which I might be able to help to build.

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  6. Mike

    The Executive Summary of this report also made these admissions according to Professor Alan Johnson who has also received and read the report:

    (1) Antisemitism in the Party was real and widespread.

    (2) Much of it took the form of anti-Israel hatread and demonisation, that is antisemitic forms of antizionism

    (3) The party's failure to tackle the problem was so comprehensive that it amounted to institutionalised antisemitism.

    https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/leaked-labour-antisemitism-report-shows-the-community-was-right-all-along

    I do not intend to talk at length about the report in this post as my thoughts are more suitable for an article. But what is truly remarkable is that the author of this report (probably Jenny Fornby the Party General Secretary) comes from the pro-Corbyn wing of the Party and admits what the Jewish Labour Movement and Jewish interest groups has been saying all alone. No mention of antisemitism being weaponised in order to smear and undermine Jeremy Corbyn.

    But now the tack being taken by Corbynites is to push the blame onto the former Gen Sec Ian McNicholl and others It may well be true that Lord McNicholl amd the officials in place at the time sat on disciplinary cases at the time and that the procdedures for dealing with complaints was not fit for purpose.

    But the same was true and more so with Corbynite applointees to the Leader's office such as Seumas Milne, Karie Murphy ans Andrdew Murray. As was shown in John Ware's Panorama documentary last summer, the Leader's Office consistently interfered in disciplinary cases, putting ideological concerns before proper party administration and driving junior staffers to the point of suicide.

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    Replies
    1. "1) Antisemitism in the Party was real and widespread."

      Pish. End of.

      Delete
  7. Barry,
    I knew it wouldn't be long before you would come and jump on this. Points one and two in your reply show that there simply is no point in me engaging you on this subject.

    The evidence to back up the points I have made in my article is all there in the report. A clique comprising MPs, officials and paid staff in the Party worked to ensure its defeat in the 2017 GE. Tens of Thousands of people have died in the UK since 2017 due to Tory policies. These plotters share some of the responsibility for that.

    Nowhere in my article do I deny that there was antisemitism in the Party, yet you head straight for that subject in your reply.

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  8. Mike

    The point is that you (and I) have quoted from a document that was not submitted to the EHRC on the advice of Labour Party lawyers and was then leaked to media sources in entirely unredacted form endangering the employment and personal security of the named staff and whisteblowers some of whom have been on the receiving end of the Corbynite Twitter troll army and, most alarming of all, whose identities have been published on neo-Nazi websites.

    Because this report was meant to be a submission to the EHRC investigation into insitutionalised racism/antisemitism in the Labour Party, the section that you, Mike reference, cannot be seen in isolation from the wider issue of the culture of antismemitism that grew in the party under Corbyn's leadership. The allegations that you reference are, to me, part of the Corbynites' strategy of getting their retaliation in first before a probable guilty verdict by the EHRC. After all, John McDonnell has stated that if Labour is found to have been institutionally antisemitic then "so be it".

    Yes, this clique may well have worked against Corbyn's leadership in GE 2017 but their efforts were singuarly unsuccessful as Labour then defied the polls to deprive the Tories of an overall majority (but not unfortunately of office through DUP support). One of the reasons why Labour fell short of an overall majority was the loss of formerly safe seats behind the "red wall" in the North and Midlands such as Mansfield; this had been prefigured by the loss of Copeland, seat held since 1935, in an earlier by-election in 2017. And of course the loss of trust in and support for Labour which leadership candidate Lisa Nandy had been warning a about for over a decade reached its apogee in the wipe-out of Labour in many of its heartlands in GE 19 (on top of its near-extinction in Scotland).


    ReplyDelete