Jeremy Corbyn: Seize the time!
John Molyneux, 29 October 2020
Today’s suspension of Jeremy Corbyn by Keir Starmer is outrageous but it is also the culmination of a long process that began the moment Corbyn was elected as leader of the Labour Party. From the very first day the British political establishment, led by David Cameron and supported by most of the mainstream media and a considerable section of the Parliamentary Labour Party, set out to discredit and destroy him.
This project had nothing to do with Corbyn’s personal strengths or weaknesses and absolutely nothing to do with anti-semitism, real or alleged. The motive was simple and obvious: from the outset they perceived Corbyn and especially those who supported him and were mobilized by him as a threat to their interests, precisely because he had a long record as a socialist, as an anti-racist campaigner, as a defender of workers’ rights and, particularly, as an opponent of war and British imperialism. The last they found especially unacceptable.
It was always very important to the British ruling class that they should be able, when push came to shove, to rely on the Labour Party leadership to be ‘loyal’ to the British state, ie their state, and by and large that was the case. It was the case in 1914 when most of them supported the imperialist slaughter of World War 1; it was the case even in 1945-50 when the Attlee Government aligned with the US in the Cold War and (secretly)built the atom bomb; it was the case with Gaitskell when he ‘fought, fought, and fought again’ to stop the Labour Party backing CND, with Neil Kinnock when he abandoned the miners in 1984, with Blair on Iraq and down the line. With Corbyn they believed he was unreliable and so every kind of mud should be slung at him to undermine and delegitimise him and almost all the media collaborated.
At first they used traditional red scare stuff and had been done before with Tony Benn in the 1980s. When this didn’t work and Corbyn was re-elected and easily defeated the challenge of Owen Smith, and also polled well in the 2017 General Election they had to come up with something else. What they came up with was equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism which enabled them to depict the Labour Party as riddled with anti-Semitism because it had some high profile defenders of Palestinian rights, including Corbyn himself, and this was relentlessly pursued and weaponised.
There were a number of factors that made this weapon effective. First it enlisted the support of the Israeli State (and therefore the Jewish Board of Deputies) which possesses a very effective propaganda machine. Second, a crucial role was played by certain right wing Zionists in the Labour Party, like Margaret Hodge, who were more than happy to mortally damage the Labour Party to defend Israel and get at Corbyn. Third, they could exploit the fact that in a mass party like the Labour Party it was inevitable that there would be certain instances of real anti-Semitism, especially as the level of political education in the Labour Party is not high, even though the number would be much less than in the Tory Party. Fourth, that same low level of political education in the Party meant that there was not a high degree of understanding of the Palestine issue among many members who were thus not clear what was going on and how to resist it.
As I said at the start what happened today is the culmination of this. However, it also raises fundamental questions about the structure and perspectives of the Labour Party. For more than a hundred years the Labour Party has been sustained by working class and left activists who have said to themselves they were staying in to fight to change the party. In reality the Party has absorbed all this support and all these efforts while maintaining built in structures like the dominance of the parliamentary party and the power of the trade union leaders which have always been able to block and sabotage real change. Time and again this loyalty has been exploited to prevent anything better emerging and time and again the opportunity to create a real party of the left has been missed in the name of loyalty and the need to ‘unite’ ie surrender to the right, to win the next election. But winning the election with a Blairite or Starmerite party doesn’t achieve anything- it just produces a Tory government Mark 2.
Of course many who joined to support Corbyn will be disillusioned and will now leave in disgust and they are right to do so. But surely there is a responsibility on the leaders of the Left, particularly the trade union leaders who consider themselves socialists and have real resources at their disposal, to make stand. Now, if ever, is the moment, for them to come together and offer something better, a real party of the left, to all those rank and file members and activists instead of leaving them to drift into disillusioned passivity.
Such a party would be able to reach out to millions of working people and mobilise the huge anger against the Tories over the Covid shambles, poverty and inequality, the NHS, racism and refugees, the climate and a multitude of other issues. If not now, when? Seize the time!
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