From People And Nature Some thoughts on the election from Liverpool Riverside. A guest post by John Graham Davies written not long after the devastating defeat for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour in the UK General Election. 

Listening to Radio 4 on Tuesday morning was a lesson in the gloating ruthlessness of our ruling class. We had just heard a clip of Jeremy Corbyn giving a dignified, measured assessment of his, and our, calamitous loss in the election. Corbyn explained why it was necessary for him to stay on for a short transitional period.

Cut to the studio: a cackling young BBC journalist, with an accent which sounded like it came out of one our more expensive public schools, armed with the obligatory fragment of Latin. 

Jeremy Corbyn addressing a crowd outside St George’s Hall, Liverpool, in 2016

“What’s the opposite of mea culpa? Ha ha ha! Not much self-criticism there, is there? Bit of a non mea culpa if you ask me.”

This braying buffoon, like so many of the other highly paid liars at the BBC, lives in so much of a bubble that he seems unaware of how much in contempt most of the British public now hold him. Him and his beloved BBC, that pompous foghorn of the state.

A right-wing Labour member of parliament was sharing the studio and made no attempt to silence the attack, or challenge it.

We all know that the knives are out for Jeremy Corbyn, but they are also aimed at our movement as a whole, and her silence was a reminder of that.

This election result, according to those who hold the wellbeing of our class most dearly to heart – well paid journos; former Labour politicians now earning nice salaries fronting radio shows; Tory politicians who sportingly feel it is “so vital” for our “democracy” to have a “proper opposition”; Labour MPs who have spent the past three years slandering the party that generates their generous salary and pension arrangements – all demand (for the good health of the Labour Party of course!) that this result must mark the definitive defeat of Corbynism as a movement.

If we mean by Corbynism something that was attempting to build a broad socialist coalition going beyond Westminster elections, then I don’t think it has necessarily failed – yet.

But I think we have to be honest. Last Thursday was a catastrophic defeat and we know what will follow in its wake: spiralling worries about money, how to feed our children, mental health problems.

All these – bad already – will get worse. We will see more homeless people on the streets, and some of us, particularly elderly and disabled people, will die younger as a result of cuts and our health service being given away to the sniggering spivs of the City and Wall Street.

It will be harder for our unions to rebuild and fight back. Racism, violence and the far right will grow.

There are things that we can do to try and counter all this, but this is what the victory of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) over Corbyn last Thursday means.

For that is what the election was.

The victory was not only Johnson’s. It also belongs to those on the right of the party (i.e. most of the PLP) who have worked night and day for the past three years to undermine Corbyn and the ideas of the movement which made Corbyn’s leadership possible.

We don’t forget the shocked and disappointed face of Stephen Kinnock at the exit poll announcement in 2017. He was smiling smugly on Question Time the day after this election. A defeat for Corbyn was vital for these careerist leeches, and they worked might and main for it. The bulk of them remain.

Before I move on to Brexit, it’s important to briefly mention the context, the Labour Party context, which has fuelled much of the scatter gun anger felt by many working class communities.

Others have written about the effect that Labour cuts have had. The fact that these originated in Tory government funding cuts to Labour councils was of no comfort to those seeing their services shredded. For many, Labour’s claim to be “for the many” must have rung hollow.

The fact that some of this righteous anger took the form for support for Brexit, and in many cases a little Englander mentality closely related to racism, should be no surprise.

One of the first acts of the Blair government, when it first took office in 1997, was to capitulate in the face of an assault by the media on “asylum seekers” and “economic migrants”. Fifteen years down the line, some Labour MPs were still talking about creating “hostile environments”. This was all manure for the far right and racism.

Coming out of that context, Brexit was a big factor. But, for me, neither the Brexit issue nor its effect on the election result are as straightforward as some comrades claim.

It was a difficult issue to deal with, given the twin demands of on the one hand our movement’s much vaunted (though seldom realised) tradition of internationalism and anti-racism, and on the other of recognising the hatred felt towards the institutions of the EU by those working class communities decimated by Thatcher, and then left to rot, clutching their lottery tickets in hope, by Blairism and, by extension in their eyes, the EU.

So it was a difficult issue and how it played out in parliament did us no favours. But it was certainly a big factor in the election result.

But so was the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Or should I say, so was the portrayal of the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

In the canvassing that I did, it was clear that a sizeable number of voters had doubts about Corbyn. These doubts were often vague. Yes, some voiced ludicrous claims about the abolition of the army (once), allowing the rest of the world in (if only it were true!), meetings with the IRA, and, of course, antisemitism. But when asked for details about these fears, they collapsed quite quickly into an inarticulate sense of unease.

Voters were unsure or hostile, but often found it difficult to express the exact nature of their opposition to Corbyn. There was a general sense that he was dodgy, weak, and probably a racist.

The effect of the media lies and smears has been for a thin layer of disapproving dust, disapproving of Corbyn in person, to settle on a lot of people. This shouldn’t surprise us, and the media campaign should not on its own have been enough to have turned a significant section of the electorate against Corbyn.

The problem was that the campaign wasn’t properly challenged – for two reasons.

Firstly, a large and very vocal section of the PLP was noisily reinforcing the smears, or in many instances instigating them. Our own MP in Riverside, Louise Ellman, had carte blanche to lie about Corbyn and about local pro-Corbyn members. For three years she had open access to every TV channel and newspaper column in the country to spread this filth. She was energetically supported in this, both locally by a small group of Liverpool councillors, and nationally by a network of MPs, Dame Margaret Hodge being only the most prominent amongst many.

As a side note, Ellman’s fantasies about antisemitism reached their comic nadir when she claimed on national radio to be able to sense that Jeremy Corbyn had anti-Semitic thoughts, even though Jeremy didn’t himself know he was having them. Twenty years ago there was a psychic called Doris Stokes who used to earn a good living at the London Palladium peddling this kind of thing. If Ellman can add the laying-on of hands to her repertoire, she might get a call from the late Doris’s agent.

The hostile, unremittingly false media campaign was out of our control. But right-wing Labour MPs shouldn’t have been. MPs like Ellman and Hodge should have been de-selected or expelled two years ago.

Unfortunately there was opposition to this course of action from most of the leadership around Corbyn, and by some on the left. Certainly, in our Constituency Labour Party (CLP), there was far too great an appetite from its leadership to hide behind “advice” from anti-Corbyn regional officials, and carry on a kind of “peaceful co-existence”. This “advice” was then marketed as “instructions” to the membership, preventing free discussion about the need to have Open Selection, or to discuss the slanders aimed at the most prominent and staunch pro-Corbyn members (e.g. Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Tony Greenstein, Chris Williamson).

So the failure to deal with those in the PLP hell bent on destroying Corbyn’s leadership was a serious mistake in my view, and permitted the character assassination to continue unabated for three years. We should have protected him and our fellow comrades better.

The second factor which allowed this paper-thin veneer of disapproval to settle on Corbyn – for some of our electorate at least – was the failure to robustly challenge the various witch hunts, most centrally the fake antisemitism campaign. We should have been clearer and, in Chris Williamson’s words, less apologetic.

Antisemitism is the oldest and – for the numbers killed, and the chilling industrial efficiency of the Holocaust, among other reasons – the foulest of the various racisms in our racist country. And antisemitism still exists throughout our society.

But it is at its most ideological in our ruling class and within the far right. As recently as the noughties, a Tory front bencher characterised the problems of the Tory Party as being centred on Michael Howard, Oliver Letwin and Charles Saatchi because … “could they know how Englishmen felt?”. This isn’t a slip in language, an ambiguous mural, a re-tweet of an obscure anti-Semitic meme or a harmless joke about Jewishness. It’s conscious, ideological racism.

The Labour Party has no reason to be defensive about its record fighting antisemitism. Had it not been for the labour movement in general, with the Labour Party at its heart, antisemitism would not have been challenged at Cable Street. This fight against Oswald Mosley was carried out against the wishes of the Jewish Board of Deputies, but with the support of vast numbers of Labour Party members, many of them Jewish. And we have no reason to be apologetic or defensive about antisemitism now.

Allowing ourselves to be driven onto the defensive had a negative effect in two ways.

Firstly, for those who were inclined to be taken in by the fake claims, our defensiveness and unending apologies made it look suspicious – as if we had indeed been up to something.

Secondly, for those who saw the smears for what they were, a political campaign to destabilise the Corbyn movement, our repeated apologies were a puzzle, demoralising, or worse. For these people, Corbyn’s repeated self-flagellation in the face of a fake campaign appeared strange. I have heard numerous people say so. For some, it took the shine off his well-earned reputation for plain speaking and probity. For others it appeared weak.

Since the election result, the witch-hunters have renewed their campaign with confidence. They have to be challenged robustly and directly.

The result of this prevarication and compromise was that some in the leadership ended up actually participating in the witch hunt. Much has been written about Momentum’s degeneration, both in terms of its democracy and its participation in the witch hunt. This was eventually echoed in the CLPs.

From being initially staunch opponents (at least vocally) of the witch hunt, some leading left members in our CLP ended up supporting it, or urging silence in the face of the suspensions. Solidarity with those suspended locally became weaker. And this was only an echo of what was going on in the national leadership circle.

As far as I understand, Chris Williamson’s expulsion was discussed by John McDonnell and his advisors – and McDonnell maintained a deafening silence when Williamson was suspended. At around the same time, McDonnell appeared in a cosy interview with Alistair Campbell, the snake oil salesman who sold us the mass murder in Iraq. During this chat, McDonnell chummily told Campbell that he’d happily have Campbell back in the party.

So in the same week we had two things: the strongest voice in parliament defending Corbyn being thrown to the wolves, and cosy overtures being made to a notorious Blairite liar.

I found this change in McDonnell quite shocking, and, if I’m perfectly honest, demoralising.

I felt the same shock listening to comrades locally who were quite happy to watch as a succession of innocent comrades were thrown under the bus on spurious charges, and who seemed indifferent to the fact that local right-wing councillors were behind this, routinely running to the hostile press, slandering local members, creating stress, health problems and family conflict.

Loss of solidarity at the top was followed by the same thing in our CLP.

Demoralisation and drift away from the Party has been evident on social media for two years, but has speeded up in the last nine months. Those who have left were among the most politically conscious and experienced Corbyn supporters. Momentum membership has plummeted. There has been an initiative by some ex-Momentum members, and others concerned about the absence of a democratic grass roots movement, to set up a national Left Alliance. This may still go somewhere.

But the Party was seriously weakened at the grass roots before this election was called. You could see it at the various rallies, which whilst still outshining the Tories by a country mile, did not have the size or fervour of 2017.

So, where do we go from here? Is the Labour Party the vehicle we need to bring about radical, fundamental social change? Is it up to the task? Can it even play a part in a wider movement?

I’m asking that question because this article is aimed at those party members who do not want a return to the free-market, capital-friendly Labour Party of the past, which is being presented to us as inevitable.

If you can’t face that, there are two alternatives, it seems to me: 

We stay inside the Party, and make sure we get as good a leader as we can, continuing, as far as is possible, in the spirit of the Corbyn movement’s ideas. This will involve an urgent and determined fight to democratise the Party: open meetings, no limits on discussion, rotation of CLP officers.
We join with others, those socialists who remained outside, in a broad, democratic, grassroots movement.

I think we should do both. I don’t suggest this though without misgivings.

A close political friend told me four years ago that he wouldn’t be joining because the Labour Party was corrupt, pro-imperialist, and was incapable of change. Fuelling illusions in its capacity to do so would only bring about disappointment and alienation from politics for a large number of people. That comment has popped into my head a good deal recently.

I have to say that my own experience of the party is that its machinery has not changed much since a lot of us joined in 2015. The party’s bureaucracy remains out of democratic control, and its disciplinary processes are opaque and corrupt. Despite some limited improvements, attempts to change these things have essentially failed.

However, we do have some things in our favour. Half a million voices – while they remain – can make a lot of noise. Two or three hundred thousand people, a lot of them young and previously unengaged with politics, have experienced a very intense political education: the importance of trade unions, of fighting social injustice, learning about the Palestinian struggle. This knowledge and experience won’t go away.

The question is, will that knowledge now become active, part of an ongoing struggle, or will it turn to disappointment and disillusion. And if we do continue to try to change the course of this massive, undemocratic tanker that is the Labour Party, do we do it by trying to accommodate those on the right whose careers and material interests are bound up with a political ideology alien to ours?

In my view, the right wing of the Labour Party is a representative of capital within the workers’ movement. It acts as an agency of capital. Without defeating it, there can be no democratic socialist movement. It is acting now, ruthlessly, to try to extinguish our movement and our hopes. We need to confront it, without compromise, and re-build our trade unions and grass roots organisation. Our leaders can’t do this, we have to.

The Radio 4 programme I mentioned at the beginning of this article continued with the same journalists speculating on the next Labour leader. As if to reinforce how detached they are, one of these hired mouthpieces opined that the right-wing Labour MP Jess Phillips was a real, viable contender.

He continued, “those fanatical Corbynistas from 2015, they’ll all have disappeared in a week or so!”

Let’s prove them wrong.

■ More election comments on People & Nature: Nightmare on Downing Street (Gabriel Levy, 16 December), and After the election: standing up to the global rise of nationalism (Martin Beveridge, 17 December).

⏭ Keep up with People And Nature.

Confronting The Agents Of Capital ➤ A Corbynista’s Dilemma

From People And Nature Some thoughts on the election from Liverpool Riverside. A guest post by John Graham Davies written not long after the devastating defeat for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour in the UK General Election. 

Listening to Radio 4 on Tuesday morning was a lesson in the gloating ruthlessness of our ruling class. We had just heard a clip of Jeremy Corbyn giving a dignified, measured assessment of his, and our, calamitous loss in the election. Corbyn explained why it was necessary for him to stay on for a short transitional period.

Cut to the studio: a cackling young BBC journalist, with an accent which sounded like it came out of one our more expensive public schools, armed with the obligatory fragment of Latin. 

Jeremy Corbyn addressing a crowd outside St George’s Hall, Liverpool, in 2016

“What’s the opposite of mea culpa? Ha ha ha! Not much self-criticism there, is there? Bit of a non mea culpa if you ask me.”

This braying buffoon, like so many of the other highly paid liars at the BBC, lives in so much of a bubble that he seems unaware of how much in contempt most of the British public now hold him. Him and his beloved BBC, that pompous foghorn of the state.

A right-wing Labour member of parliament was sharing the studio and made no attempt to silence the attack, or challenge it.

We all know that the knives are out for Jeremy Corbyn, but they are also aimed at our movement as a whole, and her silence was a reminder of that.

This election result, according to those who hold the wellbeing of our class most dearly to heart – well paid journos; former Labour politicians now earning nice salaries fronting radio shows; Tory politicians who sportingly feel it is “so vital” for our “democracy” to have a “proper opposition”; Labour MPs who have spent the past three years slandering the party that generates their generous salary and pension arrangements – all demand (for the good health of the Labour Party of course!) that this result must mark the definitive defeat of Corbynism as a movement.

If we mean by Corbynism something that was attempting to build a broad socialist coalition going beyond Westminster elections, then I don’t think it has necessarily failed – yet.

But I think we have to be honest. Last Thursday was a catastrophic defeat and we know what will follow in its wake: spiralling worries about money, how to feed our children, mental health problems.

All these – bad already – will get worse. We will see more homeless people on the streets, and some of us, particularly elderly and disabled people, will die younger as a result of cuts and our health service being given away to the sniggering spivs of the City and Wall Street.

It will be harder for our unions to rebuild and fight back. Racism, violence and the far right will grow.

There are things that we can do to try and counter all this, but this is what the victory of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) over Corbyn last Thursday means.

For that is what the election was.

The victory was not only Johnson’s. It also belongs to those on the right of the party (i.e. most of the PLP) who have worked night and day for the past three years to undermine Corbyn and the ideas of the movement which made Corbyn’s leadership possible.

We don’t forget the shocked and disappointed face of Stephen Kinnock at the exit poll announcement in 2017. He was smiling smugly on Question Time the day after this election. A defeat for Corbyn was vital for these careerist leeches, and they worked might and main for it. The bulk of them remain.

Before I move on to Brexit, it’s important to briefly mention the context, the Labour Party context, which has fuelled much of the scatter gun anger felt by many working class communities.

Others have written about the effect that Labour cuts have had. The fact that these originated in Tory government funding cuts to Labour councils was of no comfort to those seeing their services shredded. For many, Labour’s claim to be “for the many” must have rung hollow.

The fact that some of this righteous anger took the form for support for Brexit, and in many cases a little Englander mentality closely related to racism, should be no surprise.

One of the first acts of the Blair government, when it first took office in 1997, was to capitulate in the face of an assault by the media on “asylum seekers” and “economic migrants”. Fifteen years down the line, some Labour MPs were still talking about creating “hostile environments”. This was all manure for the far right and racism.

Coming out of that context, Brexit was a big factor. But, for me, neither the Brexit issue nor its effect on the election result are as straightforward as some comrades claim.

It was a difficult issue to deal with, given the twin demands of on the one hand our movement’s much vaunted (though seldom realised) tradition of internationalism and anti-racism, and on the other of recognising the hatred felt towards the institutions of the EU by those working class communities decimated by Thatcher, and then left to rot, clutching their lottery tickets in hope, by Blairism and, by extension in their eyes, the EU.

So it was a difficult issue and how it played out in parliament did us no favours. But it was certainly a big factor in the election result.

But so was the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Or should I say, so was the portrayal of the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

In the canvassing that I did, it was clear that a sizeable number of voters had doubts about Corbyn. These doubts were often vague. Yes, some voiced ludicrous claims about the abolition of the army (once), allowing the rest of the world in (if only it were true!), meetings with the IRA, and, of course, antisemitism. But when asked for details about these fears, they collapsed quite quickly into an inarticulate sense of unease.

Voters were unsure or hostile, but often found it difficult to express the exact nature of their opposition to Corbyn. There was a general sense that he was dodgy, weak, and probably a racist.

The effect of the media lies and smears has been for a thin layer of disapproving dust, disapproving of Corbyn in person, to settle on a lot of people. This shouldn’t surprise us, and the media campaign should not on its own have been enough to have turned a significant section of the electorate against Corbyn.

The problem was that the campaign wasn’t properly challenged – for two reasons.

Firstly, a large and very vocal section of the PLP was noisily reinforcing the smears, or in many instances instigating them. Our own MP in Riverside, Louise Ellman, had carte blanche to lie about Corbyn and about local pro-Corbyn members. For three years she had open access to every TV channel and newspaper column in the country to spread this filth. She was energetically supported in this, both locally by a small group of Liverpool councillors, and nationally by a network of MPs, Dame Margaret Hodge being only the most prominent amongst many.

As a side note, Ellman’s fantasies about antisemitism reached their comic nadir when she claimed on national radio to be able to sense that Jeremy Corbyn had anti-Semitic thoughts, even though Jeremy didn’t himself know he was having them. Twenty years ago there was a psychic called Doris Stokes who used to earn a good living at the London Palladium peddling this kind of thing. If Ellman can add the laying-on of hands to her repertoire, she might get a call from the late Doris’s agent.

The hostile, unremittingly false media campaign was out of our control. But right-wing Labour MPs shouldn’t have been. MPs like Ellman and Hodge should have been de-selected or expelled two years ago.

Unfortunately there was opposition to this course of action from most of the leadership around Corbyn, and by some on the left. Certainly, in our Constituency Labour Party (CLP), there was far too great an appetite from its leadership to hide behind “advice” from anti-Corbyn regional officials, and carry on a kind of “peaceful co-existence”. This “advice” was then marketed as “instructions” to the membership, preventing free discussion about the need to have Open Selection, or to discuss the slanders aimed at the most prominent and staunch pro-Corbyn members (e.g. Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Tony Greenstein, Chris Williamson).

So the failure to deal with those in the PLP hell bent on destroying Corbyn’s leadership was a serious mistake in my view, and permitted the character assassination to continue unabated for three years. We should have protected him and our fellow comrades better.

The second factor which allowed this paper-thin veneer of disapproval to settle on Corbyn – for some of our electorate at least – was the failure to robustly challenge the various witch hunts, most centrally the fake antisemitism campaign. We should have been clearer and, in Chris Williamson’s words, less apologetic.

Antisemitism is the oldest and – for the numbers killed, and the chilling industrial efficiency of the Holocaust, among other reasons – the foulest of the various racisms in our racist country. And antisemitism still exists throughout our society.

But it is at its most ideological in our ruling class and within the far right. As recently as the noughties, a Tory front bencher characterised the problems of the Tory Party as being centred on Michael Howard, Oliver Letwin and Charles Saatchi because … “could they know how Englishmen felt?”. This isn’t a slip in language, an ambiguous mural, a re-tweet of an obscure anti-Semitic meme or a harmless joke about Jewishness. It’s conscious, ideological racism.

The Labour Party has no reason to be defensive about its record fighting antisemitism. Had it not been for the labour movement in general, with the Labour Party at its heart, antisemitism would not have been challenged at Cable Street. This fight against Oswald Mosley was carried out against the wishes of the Jewish Board of Deputies, but with the support of vast numbers of Labour Party members, many of them Jewish. And we have no reason to be apologetic or defensive about antisemitism now.

Allowing ourselves to be driven onto the defensive had a negative effect in two ways.

Firstly, for those who were inclined to be taken in by the fake claims, our defensiveness and unending apologies made it look suspicious – as if we had indeed been up to something.

Secondly, for those who saw the smears for what they were, a political campaign to destabilise the Corbyn movement, our repeated apologies were a puzzle, demoralising, or worse. For these people, Corbyn’s repeated self-flagellation in the face of a fake campaign appeared strange. I have heard numerous people say so. For some, it took the shine off his well-earned reputation for plain speaking and probity. For others it appeared weak.

Since the election result, the witch-hunters have renewed their campaign with confidence. They have to be challenged robustly and directly.

The result of this prevarication and compromise was that some in the leadership ended up actually participating in the witch hunt. Much has been written about Momentum’s degeneration, both in terms of its democracy and its participation in the witch hunt. This was eventually echoed in the CLPs.

From being initially staunch opponents (at least vocally) of the witch hunt, some leading left members in our CLP ended up supporting it, or urging silence in the face of the suspensions. Solidarity with those suspended locally became weaker. And this was only an echo of what was going on in the national leadership circle.

As far as I understand, Chris Williamson’s expulsion was discussed by John McDonnell and his advisors – and McDonnell maintained a deafening silence when Williamson was suspended. At around the same time, McDonnell appeared in a cosy interview with Alistair Campbell, the snake oil salesman who sold us the mass murder in Iraq. During this chat, McDonnell chummily told Campbell that he’d happily have Campbell back in the party.

So in the same week we had two things: the strongest voice in parliament defending Corbyn being thrown to the wolves, and cosy overtures being made to a notorious Blairite liar.

I found this change in McDonnell quite shocking, and, if I’m perfectly honest, demoralising.

I felt the same shock listening to comrades locally who were quite happy to watch as a succession of innocent comrades were thrown under the bus on spurious charges, and who seemed indifferent to the fact that local right-wing councillors were behind this, routinely running to the hostile press, slandering local members, creating stress, health problems and family conflict.

Loss of solidarity at the top was followed by the same thing in our CLP.

Demoralisation and drift away from the Party has been evident on social media for two years, but has speeded up in the last nine months. Those who have left were among the most politically conscious and experienced Corbyn supporters. Momentum membership has plummeted. There has been an initiative by some ex-Momentum members, and others concerned about the absence of a democratic grass roots movement, to set up a national Left Alliance. This may still go somewhere.

But the Party was seriously weakened at the grass roots before this election was called. You could see it at the various rallies, which whilst still outshining the Tories by a country mile, did not have the size or fervour of 2017.

So, where do we go from here? Is the Labour Party the vehicle we need to bring about radical, fundamental social change? Is it up to the task? Can it even play a part in a wider movement?

I’m asking that question because this article is aimed at those party members who do not want a return to the free-market, capital-friendly Labour Party of the past, which is being presented to us as inevitable.

If you can’t face that, there are two alternatives, it seems to me: 

We stay inside the Party, and make sure we get as good a leader as we can, continuing, as far as is possible, in the spirit of the Corbyn movement’s ideas. This will involve an urgent and determined fight to democratise the Party: open meetings, no limits on discussion, rotation of CLP officers.
We join with others, those socialists who remained outside, in a broad, democratic, grassroots movement.

I think we should do both. I don’t suggest this though without misgivings.

A close political friend told me four years ago that he wouldn’t be joining because the Labour Party was corrupt, pro-imperialist, and was incapable of change. Fuelling illusions in its capacity to do so would only bring about disappointment and alienation from politics for a large number of people. That comment has popped into my head a good deal recently.

I have to say that my own experience of the party is that its machinery has not changed much since a lot of us joined in 2015. The party’s bureaucracy remains out of democratic control, and its disciplinary processes are opaque and corrupt. Despite some limited improvements, attempts to change these things have essentially failed.

However, we do have some things in our favour. Half a million voices – while they remain – can make a lot of noise. Two or three hundred thousand people, a lot of them young and previously unengaged with politics, have experienced a very intense political education: the importance of trade unions, of fighting social injustice, learning about the Palestinian struggle. This knowledge and experience won’t go away.

The question is, will that knowledge now become active, part of an ongoing struggle, or will it turn to disappointment and disillusion. And if we do continue to try to change the course of this massive, undemocratic tanker that is the Labour Party, do we do it by trying to accommodate those on the right whose careers and material interests are bound up with a political ideology alien to ours?

In my view, the right wing of the Labour Party is a representative of capital within the workers’ movement. It acts as an agency of capital. Without defeating it, there can be no democratic socialist movement. It is acting now, ruthlessly, to try to extinguish our movement and our hopes. We need to confront it, without compromise, and re-build our trade unions and grass roots organisation. Our leaders can’t do this, we have to.

The Radio 4 programme I mentioned at the beginning of this article continued with the same journalists speculating on the next Labour leader. As if to reinforce how detached they are, one of these hired mouthpieces opined that the right-wing Labour MP Jess Phillips was a real, viable contender.

He continued, “those fanatical Corbynistas from 2015, they’ll all have disappeared in a week or so!”

Let’s prove them wrong.

■ More election comments on People & Nature: Nightmare on Downing Street (Gabriel Levy, 16 December), and After the election: standing up to the global rise of nationalism (Martin Beveridge, 17 December).

⏭ Keep up with People And Nature.

38 comments:

  1. As touched on here, Corbyn was weak. He kowtowed to the P.L.P, apologised for anti-Semitism when it was clear to those without an agenda he wasn't racist. This is why left wing politics succeeds less than right. They're too polite, always looking to build bridges even with people who clearly despise them. Even though I am not active in politics,I suppose I'll always oppose the right, there is a part of me that admires their single minded arrogance.

    ReplyDelete
  2. There's never been a 'left' leaning government of the UK as far as I can remember, even Blair was pro-market centrist. Fact is, the people didn't trust Corbyn in sufficent numbers and the spin job against him was grim.

    ReplyDelete
  3. On the contrary I kmnow from personal experiencne in my local CLP and online that Corbynisim is/was a nasty personality cult in wnhich amyone deemed not to belong to the community of the good are labelled right-wing/Red Tory/Blairite/Zionist scum. The author's description of those who he deems hostile or sell-outs in precisely tnose terms.

    The author's description of Labour's "right-wing" as a representative of capital within the worker's movement" is so laughably 1970s.

    On antisemitism, the issue is not whether Corbyn is personally antisemitic but whether he and his officials were complicit in the antizionist , antissemitc culture that developed in the Labour Party under his watch and the extent to wnhich Corbyn's long associations with and apologia for extremists hostile to labour democracy such as the far left, Islamist hate preachers and regimes such as Iran, Russia and Venudela so tarnished the Labour brand so as to make it utterly unelectable.

    But a new dawn is emerging with the forensic qualities that Keir Starmer is bringing to the dispatch box and the way in which makes Johnson and the rest of his Vote Leave governmewnt squirm over their handling of Covid-19. Qualities that Corbyn could never bring to the dispatch box.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Twenty nine years and a few days ago I realised that the BBC were absolute liars, they, on their 13.00 hrs. news reported upon the funeral in west Belfast of the recently deceased Deputy for Fermanagh and south Tyrone, their reporter on the ground stated that 1000 people were in attendance, as always one could change channel to Radio agus Telefis Éireann which I did and there, as on Voice of America at 19.00 hrs. later the figure was given as the truth, 100,000 persons in attendance, this was my first experience of what today we know to be 'fake news' lauded by President Trump.
    As to the matter in hand, and with respect to Barry whom might well disagree, the British Labour Party did surprisingly well in the 2017 election there because an elderly Jeremy Corbyn had an appeal to young people (who ordinarily do not vote much) and a background in anto-EU politics. Had The British Labour Party managed to win some more seats there would have been another coalition with the, forgive me if, like my Daughter you were a student between 2009-15, Liberal Democrats which would have greatly changed world politics, and perhaps brought some peace to Palestine (I am, I believe, the only Irishman to have played a role in the 1989 Palestinian peace process), this was not however to be with the Mixed Message Media blowing cold on UK exit from the European Union.
    I have to admit, I was somewhat surprised at Keir Starmer's winning of the British Labour Party's leadership given the two huge votes for Jeremy, always a friend to Ireland and justice, therefore I suspect these £3.00 members, to quote Anthony's old friend Gerry 'haven't gone away you know' hopefully then they can elect an Ard comhairle which can hold the man who oversaw the failure to prosecute rape gangs in England to account.

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    Replies
    1. Menace

      I must challenge the last statement in your post in which you refer to "the man (Starmer) wnho oversaw the failure to prosecute the rape gangs in England".

      I may be wrong but is this a reference to a doctored video from an anonymous Twitter account which cuts bits from the original video in 2013 in which Keir as newly appointed Head of CPS said that he had inherited a system not fit for purpose for dealing with the grooing gangs.

      The edited video repeats a far right conspiracy theory that claimns to show in his own words "why he (Starmer) didn't prosecute grooming gangs when he was head if [sic] of CPS.

      This scurrilous clip was retweeted by Tory MPs Nadine Dorries, Lucy Allan and Maria Caulfideld who have since removed these tweets.

      If this is not the source of the case you make, I sincerely apologise. But I still wish to ask what is your evidence for your claim that Keir failed over groomiong gangs.

      The young people who voted Labour in such numbers in GE 17 were overwhelming Remain. It is they as well as the majority of party members and voters who were let down by Corby's ill-disguised pro-Brexit stance.

      As for Corbyn being a friend of Ireland; a true friend of Ireland talks to all sides in the NI conflict and to mainstrdeam opinion in ROI not just act as the useful idiot for Gerry Adams et al.

      Delete
  5. Barry
    What would be wrong in a politician taking an anti-Zionist stand?

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  6. David

    Antizionism (on its own an ideology of dubious provenance shared by far left, far right and Islamism) too frequently descends into outright antisemitism as the EHRC investigation into Labour Antisemitism is likely to conclude.

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  7. Barry,
    Why do you feel anti-zionism is of dubious provenance? I disagree that anti-zionism and anti-Semitism are as closely related as you suggest. My own experience is when people marry the two it usually has a bit of intellectual laziness. Instead of dissecting Zionism, they can scream bigot.

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  8. David

    Because antizionism stands for opposition to the existence of the State of Israel as opposed to criticism of Israeli governments (for which there is much justification).

    Antizionism was widely used as an ideological tool in the former Soviet Union and as rallying cries by Arab dictatorships to deflect from their failings. Many antizionists promote the falsity that Hitler supported Ziomism, that Ziomist collanborated with the Nazis in the implementation of the Holocaust, that Israel was at its conception a racist enterprsie and that Israeli actions are comparable to Nazism. All these assertions fall within the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of anmtisemitism.

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  9. Barry,
    I've read a few anti-zionists who, not to my knowledge, don't even mention Israel. I think it's fair to have an honest critique of Zionism, where it's going etc without having tired old debates. Why is it okay to criticise Fascism and leave out the the papal influence? Why is the criticism of Zionists automatically seen as an attempt to dismantle one of the strongest countries on the planet. It seems a bit preposterous to me. For what it's worth I repudiate the I.H.R.A definition it cast far to wide a net.

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    Replies
    1. David - the IHRA definition is a disgraceful attempt at censorship and suppression of criticism. When the Israelis behave like Nazis as they frequently do they should be called out on it. I simply ignore it.

      Delete
  10. David

    Honest critique of Zionism like any form of nationalism is perfectly fine. It is its elevation to the status of all-controllling evil by conspiracy theorists like David Icke who talks constantly anbout Rothschild Zionists or when it or its shortened form "Zio" as an insult i.e. Zio-Nazi or caling journalists like Nick Cohen and Jonathan Freedland "Zionist c___s" or when flags with the text "Zionist police state" near Jewish graveyards as happened this week in East London that it becomes problematic.

    The IHRA definition was originally formulated as an operationmal tool for European police forces to deal with racism and antisemitism. It does not have statutory effect and academic discussion is specifically exclucded from its purview.

    The Labour Party's NEC, its democratically elected supreme governing body, has agreed to endorse it and I believe that Party officers anmd reps should be bound by it. But I am not asking anyone else to abide by it.

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  11. Barry,
    That's fair enough. There is no all-controlling evil. Only humanity. I don't understand the big deal about Icke. Read one of his books it was all about vibration energy. Never got any anti-Semitism from it. Why is his name banded about? Also you mention the Rothschilds, I'noticed you mention their name and an anti-Semitic trope, think it was to Frankie, what does that mean? I.e if I'm critical about Osbourne and Mandelson being on Nathaniel Rothschild's boat prior an election, implying they hold too much sway, am I perceived as anti-Semitic?

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  12. David

    David Icke promotes a number of conspiracy theories including that 9/11 was an inside job amd that Covid-19 was generated from a lab. He pushes rubbish about the Illuminati and the New World Order

    The alleged power and influecne of the Rothschidl family and that of George Soros are staples of antisemites of the far right and far left invoking as they do ancient stereotypes about Jews and money and about wars being financed by Jewish capital.

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  13. Anthony,
    Ha ha has he retired his divinity? I don't get the big deal about that guy.
    Barry,
    Obviously such a family has power and influence, why say alleged? Why can't you separate criticism of their apparatus and their religion? I.e when people, correctly in my view, criticise the Windsors nobody says you're being anti C.O.E even though the head the thing. You're always going to get people calling all Jews money grabbers, all Catholics paedophiles etc. Using the example of these people to censor criticism is more dangerous, in my opinion, than the slurs themselves.

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    Replies
    1. that's an interesting question. Maybe he still thinks he is a divine creature.

      Delete
  14. David

    Just as the begey man of black male sexuaity is a recurring thme in white racist/nationalist/supremacist discourse, so the pejorative association between Jews and control of money (think of Shylock) is, in addition to that of Christ killer, Blood libel and rootless cosmopolitans, is a recurring theme in Jew hatred down thde centuries. The Rothschilds fairy tale forms a part of that demonology.

    Compariosns with the House of Windsor do not cut the mustard because Anglicanism like other Christian faiths and cultures have never been subject to the othering and associated persecution that Jews and Muslims have been.

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  15. Barry,
    I disagree. Persecution is comparative to where you live on the globe. I don't know what you mean when you say Rothschild fairy tale. Are we saying they don't have influence? Or are you saying because some delusional individuals call them demons or whatever then all criticism is automatically associated with lunacy?

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  16. The Rothschild's could clear this nonsense up but refuse to reveal details of their history and wealth (which is their right).

    Icke changed his bonkers outlook from divinity to a 'prophet' over the years.

    And as rational as I am 9/11 is a bit dodgy. The Yanks have form for false flags and there are a lot of alarm bells when you dig a bit deeper into it.

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    Replies
    1. Steve R

      9/11 came about because of a catastrophic failure of the US authorities to act on clear intel that a major Al-Queada attack was in the offing. No false flagd about it.

      Delete
    2. "9/11 came about because of a catastrophic failure of the US authorities to act on clear intel that a major Al-Queada attack was in the offing."

      No end to this pish.

      Delete
  17. David

    Just Google Rothschilds and see what comes out.

    Where in the world has been extermination campaigns and ethnic cleansing of Christians comparable to that suffdered by Jews and Muslims in 20th century Europe not to to mention thde genocicides of native peoples in the Americas by Spanish Chrstian conquistadores in the 15th and 16th Centuries?

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  18. Barry,
    I'm not comparing people's suffering it's pointless. I'm not interested in other people's theories, you seem well versed in this. Hypothetical situation, say there's a global conflict involving the U.S and China and after the dust settles an investigate journalist exposed that the Rothschilds benefited massively, as somebody always does,would that person be labeled anti-Semitic? It seems to me anti-Semitism is being politicised for censorship purposes and that's a shame. Where's the line? Why is criticism of Soros and the Rothschild family automatically labeled anti-Semitic? That seems absurd to me. Anybody could use their lineage to cry persecution.

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  19. David

    Because of the identies of those wno make the allegagtions. Top of the list is Victor Orban's far right govt in Hungary. The notiom that George funds "globalist" projects is a well recognised antismemitc trope.

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  20. MickO

    You may wish to see the TV series Looming Tower on catch up somewhere which features the heroic but futile efforts of FBI agent John O'Neill to warn his superiors of the oncoming homicidal catastrophe in which, ever attendant to duty, he lost his life, to get my drift.

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  21. " You may wish to see the TV series Looming Tower on catch up somewhere which features the heroic but futile efforts of FBI agent John O'Neill to warn his superiors of the oncoming homicidal catastrophe in which, ever attendant to duty, he lost his life, to get my drift."

    No I don't wish....

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  22. Barry,
    All due respect, that wasn't my question. There's always going to be people with agendas. Is criticism of aforementioned individuals actions or potential actions regarding their financial or political dealings anti-Semitic? If a scumbag states a fact it doesn't make the fact less true

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  23. Barry,

    "9/11 came about because of a catastrophic failure of the US authorities to act on clear intel that a major Al-Queada attack was in the offing. No false flagd about it."

    Not just clear intel, this EXACT scenario was predicted in the early 90's by themselves in their handy little playbook on how to postion the US in the next century (Project for a New American Century). Even The X Files mentioned it on their pilot TV episode.

    Two days before hand, Cheney announces billions of dollars has just disappeared from their budget, by sheer coincidence exactly where those papertrails were leading to just so happened to be in the exact office hit by the plane on the pentagon, and in WT7...itself the only building made of concrete and steel in history to collapse due to fire(!)

    There are literally hundreds of concerning questions about 9-11, and they all point to uneasy truths. False flags happen throughout history, and in todays media saturation were the public has an attention span of about 6 weeks, it's very easy to bury something.

    Hell, Epstein didn't kill himself and already nobody gives a shit.

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  24. Steve R

    That it may have been forecast is no forensic proof of a false flag operation. Were Muhammed Atta and the other 18 hijackers mere avatars then?

    Responsibility for this suicide mass murder lies with one group and one group only; a group of indoctinated and sexually repressed young men. What Christopher Hitchens called "the scum of the earth".

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    1. Yes, the hijackers...that the some ones that had their passports found BEFORE even the towers came down. The US Commission Report makes for interesting reading..

      "Four of the hijackers’ passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered
      from the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. One belonged to a
      hijacker on American Airlines Flight 11. A passerby picked it up and gave it to an
      NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed....."

      Now with those odds I'd be doing the lottery!

      Not to mention the teensy weensy little detail that at least four of the hijackers had the ability of other famous historical Arabs in 'rising again'...

      http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1559151.stm

      FOUR at least are alive and well.

      Why didn't OBL claim responsibility? In fact, why'd he deny any involvement?

      I believe there WERE hijackers there but far fewer in number, and the way was paved for them by the Cheney Group.

      Delete
  25. And there is still no definitive proof that Epstein did not commit suicide no matter how much some would like to believe it. It's plausible but no more than that.

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    1. Yes, no definitive proof..

      1, Amazingly he'd been taken off suicide watch despite a previous attempt
      2, The CCTV cameras weren't working.
      3, The guards decide to have a snooze (THREE HOURS!)
      4, He was not put in with another inmate as per the previous suicide attempt
      5, The hyoid bone being broken far more prevelant in strangulation than murder than suicide by hanging.

      And more, yet all this around the absolute number 1 prisoner on the entire planet who should have been watched like a hawk due to his political connections. Stevie Wonder could have seen this coming.

      Not definitive because it was well planned. He was too dangerous to allow to bargain to save himself.

      Delete
  26. Steve R

    OBL most certainly did claim responsibility. To deny that on the grounds that (as some argue) that Arabs/Muslims were incapable of planning and executing such a mission is to deny that they have any agency.

    As a trained civil enghineer OBL knew exactly what thde impact of aircraft fussliage would be on buildings.

    So your 9/11 theories are like Holocaust denial, Srebinica denial and the false flag smear narrative about the Syrian White Kinghts - for the birds.

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    1. Say what you will, as I've said, I believe that it was carried out by jihadist hijackers but what I am saying is that it was allowed to happen/instigated by a conspiracy on the ground of those wanting to postion the US for the next century.

      And what better way to situate a nation that relies on it's military-industrial complex than to be fighting 'evil' in a war without end (The War on Terror)?

      And don't try to smear me with a strawman analogy regarding the Holocaust/Srebincia/Syria, that's beneath both you and me.

      Delete
  27. 9/11 was a massive cock-up rather than conspiracy. The machinations by the neo-cons that led to the Iraq war ... now that really was conspiratorial.

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    1. So you aknowledge the groundwork by the neo-cons, but refuse to entertain the notion they perhaps facillitated it's path? I believe too that the conspiracy was on the ground. It suited the neo-cons perfectly. Follow the money, who made billions out of the War?

      "There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, 'The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out.' And when it got down to, 'The plane is 10 miles out,' the young man also said to the vice president, 'Do the orders still stand?' And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, 'Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?' Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant.

      — Norman Mineta, 9/11 Commission"

      The same Cheney who made millions from Halliburton's Oil exploits in Iraq as the CEO!

      If our grandchildren live long enough they will look back at all this and wonder how we didn't see the obvious!

      Delete
  28. Steve R

    Conincidences do not create conspiracies but conspiracy theories. The neo-cons were fixated on Iraq from Day One of the Dubya Bush Presidcency.

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