The war of the wings

I

The war has begun. The first shots have been fired. From the rantings of Labour right-wingers preparing to install Jess Phillips as their leader and purge Momentum members from the party; to “Lord” John Mann announcing that he will be “investigating” The Canary for anti-Semitism, the war against the left has begun in earnest. 

Very few people predicted the Tory majority. I certainly didn’t and as late as Thursday still expected a hung parliament. Despite Labour receiving over 10 million votes, more than delivered a Labour majority in 2005 we lost substantial ground.

Whilst I am pleased I correctly predicted Jo Swinson losing her seat, it is devastating to lose Laura Pidcock and Dennis Skinner. But, we have no time to grieve, because as I wrote in October we now face the battle of our lives.

 “A General Election, particularly one in which we lose, is going to leave many activists burned out and disillusioned. Moreover, we will be subjected to a gloating Labour right, supported by the massed ranks of the media, telling us that Labour lost a ‘winnable’ Election because it was too left-wing. Some MP’s we currently consider to be on our side will join in with the demand that we must pursue “sensible” policies for there is no point in having great policies if you cannot implement them.”

What I had perhaps under-estimated was the venom with which the PLP would renew its attacks not just on the leadership but the members. But this is not surprising. The PLP has been hostile to Jeremy Corbyn since day one. Unlike many on the left I had not been an enthusiast for an early election. It was not that I wanted the Tories to remain in power, but that I wanted us to have the chance to remove sitting MPs who were hostile to the socialist project. In the event that never happened and, in reality, I doubt it would have made much difference.

The right showed in the trigger ballots how adept they are at using the party machinery to their advantage. If we had managed to replace one or two MPs it would simply have been used to reinforce the perception of the left as ideological bullies. The right are not acting in a vacuum as Dan Evans-Kanu points out in his blog:

“…make no mistake, the corporate media in this election acted as an arm of the Conservative party and are largely responsible for their victory.”

As true as that undoubtedly is, the anti-Corbyn stories were not media inventions. They were being fuelled by the constant attacks orchestrated by right-wing MPs for whom this election result is manna from heaven. The idea was to ensure that whatever else this election was about, and to be clear it was the Brexit election, they could use the result not only to remove Corbyn but his followers.

Ian Murray MP tweeted that at all 11,000 doors he knocked on they all hated Jeremy Corbyn. Putting aside the fact that he would have had to knock a door every 5 minutes continuously for 5 weeks to reach that number, the chances that the only reason for not voting Labour was Corbyn, who coincidentally Murray loathes, is implausible.

Other right-wing MPs were quick to pile in blaming Corbyn personally for the loss. Margaret Hodge claimed, incredulously given her seemingly unassailable position in the party, to have been a victim of anti-Semitism. Anna McMorrin, who has promised to keep Britain in the EU, also attacked Corbyn personally, and her partner Alun Davies, the little known AM called for a purge on Momentum.

 Yet, the BBC Wales website which spoke to voters on Friday found that most were concerned with Brexit. Their replies were almost uniformly of the “now we can get Brexit done variety”. The people who have spent 3 years refusing to get Brexit done and advocating for a second referendum, and three years smearing Jeremy Corbyn seem absolutely shocked that a) the smear campaign worked and b) that people we’re frustrated by being told that only the liberal elite was right and that those who voted for Brexit were “thick racists”. Disingenuous does not even come close.

As Dan Evans-Kanu points out:

“A huge amount of people regurgitated, verbatim, media attack lines about Labour and Corbyn. Many would preface this by saying ‘I seen on the news that…’ or ‘they say that Corbyn is….’ For the first time in my life I encountered people I was convinced didn’t exist- lifelong Labour voters who were voting for the Tories. This was because they were absolutely convinced that Corbyn was a terrorist, that he would bankrupt the country, that he was an anti-semite.” 

Ordinary voters are not, on the whole, politically engaged. The British Social Attitudes survey (one of the largest and robust social surveys in the UK) finds only around one-third of the population profess a great interest in politics , but whilst around 40% have some interest, somewhere between 32-37% say they have no interest at all in politics. Whist there is a correlation between professed interest in politics and voting the truth is that many ordinary voters are simply absorbing whatever they pick up from whatever media they are getting. Many of these same people are on social media where the Tories spent billions on targeted ads, 88% of which were categorised as misleading by First Draft – a non-profit organisation which works on debunking fake news.

Many of these ads were aimed at undermining trust in Jeremy Corbyn and one of the key attacks was around anti-Semitism. As Robert A H Cohen points out in a recent blog on pathos.com:

“The number of Jewish voters in the UK is tiny. Including adults and children, we make up only 0.5% of the population. There are only a handful of constituencies, mostly in North London, where Jewish votes (assuming they are cast uniformly) could make a decisive difference to the outcome. In any case, the majority of Jews stopped voting Labour long before Corbyn became leader. That’s to do with the economic and social advancement that most Jews in Britain have achieved. Until recently, it’s had nothing to do with Corbyn or antisemitism.”

He goes on to examine the “evidence” and comes to a surprising conclusion:

“If Jeremy Corbyn is truly antisemitic he must be the most unusual and eccentric example of antisemitism ever displayed by a British political leader and perhaps any political leader.

When you are told that a politician is a diehard antisemite you don’t expect to then discover that over the decades he’s signed dozens of Early Day Parliamentary motions condemning antisemitism; helped organised protests against anti-Jewish marches; visited the Terezin concentration camp to commemorate Holocaust victims; attended numerous Jewish events in his constituency; and read the war poetry of Isaac Rosenberg at his local Remembrance Day service.”

But, regardless of the truth of the claims it cut through. I don’t want to rehearse all the arguments here, but one question I would ask is this: where have these allegations of anti-Semitism actually come from? It is fairly easy to find the answer: Margaret Hodge, Luciana Berger, Joan Ryan, Ian Austin and then amplified by other right-wing anti-Corbyn MPs sharing and liking social media posts “exposing” the institutionalised anti-Semitism within a party of which they are a part. 

Those now calling on Corbyn to resign immediately and for a return to the failed politics of New Labour are the very people who started and amplified the 2 main issues which were used against the left in this election.

For if unproven allegations of anti-Semitism were used to delegitimise the Labour leader, it was in the context of Labour voters voting Conservative to “get Brexit done”. Our policy in 2017 had been to accept the referendum but negotiate a better deal than the Tories. Unfortunately, and as it turned out disastrously, that policy became negotiate a better deal, then put it to a second referendum with most of the Shadow Cabinet saying from the start they would campaign for remain. This was a policy foisted upon Jeremy Corbyn by the right wing who, correctly as it turned out, saw it as undermining his credentials as leader. And, personally, I blame Keir Starmer for this for it was he who announced the policy at conference, admittedly to cheers from those who dogmatically refused to accept the referendum result.

Those now demanding a ‘return to centrist politics’ are essentially accepting that the only way to beat the Tories is to be more like them. However, why vote for a synthetic Tory when you can have the real thing? Labour got away with this under Blair mainly because Tory voters were so disillusioned after Thatcher was removed by her own party that they did not vote. Blair may not have been their choice but they were prepared to let him win because he offered no threat. 

That was a strategy that worked in the short-term but was defunct by 2010 when the austerity promoting coalition got into power. Indeed, between 1997 and 2010 the Labour Party lost 4.9 million voters. Yet, this is held as the high water mark by those on the right who cannot see beyond the three consecutive victories. Whilst those victories were impressive they were the result of the specific circumstances of the time, and by 2010 most voters were fed up with the vacuous New Labour Tory-lite policies.

The battle for the Labour Party is now afoot. This will be a vicious struggle as those right wing MPs use their own perfidy as an excuse to attack one of the few politicians of his generation with a genuine commitment to compassion and equality. Many on the left will feel like throwing in the towel and leaving. We must not do so. At least, not yet. These careerist enablers of Toryism do not have a window into the minds of working class voters, nor do they really care about the impoverished or destitute. They are self-seeking narcissists. We cannot let them drive us out of the party. This battle is every much as important as those we have been engaged in over the past three years. Unity is strength. We must fight on. There really is no alternative.