Labour Reported

I have just finished reading the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) report into Labour’s anti-Semitism. I have come to the conclusion that The British Labour Party is, indeed, a hotbed of anti-Semitism. However, the EHRC have failed to identify those responsible for fostering hatred against Jewish people. Those people are currently crowing at their success at getting a lifelong anti-racist suspended from the parliamentary party.

Despite the Labour Party declaring it a day of shame and demanding we all wear sack cloth for a defined period the report is not quite the damning indictment some would have liked. Two people, one of whom is no longer a member, were found to have committed unlawful acts. But, for others who were in the firing line the report is more ambiguous. Chris Williamson, for example, is exonerated by the report which resorts to vague accusations “of making public comments about antisemitism smears, supporting members expelled for antisemitism, and sharing social media posts relating to others accused of Holocaust denial and antisemitism.” Perhaps he did, but there is no evidence to support this beyond “an outcry from Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and Labour MPs and peers” An outcry from his political opponents is hardly proof of anything. To quote another court case “They would say that wouldn’t they?” 

Context

This illustration is one that points to the real flaw in the report, and that is that it does not actually contextualise any of this material. The report identifies 220 complaints, but does not tell us how many of these proved vexatious. The report assumes that all complaints are true because they are covered by the MacPherson Principle. This states that if you say you have two heads, then you do indeed have two heads and nobody has the right to tell you otherwise. I would agree that if there are 220 cases of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party this does seem rather high. But, in providing context I would want to know two further things. First, perhaps obviously, out of how many members? But, secondly, how does this percentage compare to other parties and wider society. Sadly, the report provides no detail and we therefore have to accept their assertion that the problem is disproportionate to the Labour Party.

Labour has approximately 550,000 members which means 220 cases is 0.04%. That is not to say those cases are unimportant or do not have a terrible impact on those affected, but does it warrant the huge furore that has been generated? The reports authors claim that “The investigation was prompted by growing public concern about antisemitism in the Labour Party.” But it fails to give any evidence for this. Like so much in the report assertions are made and simply accepted as facts. It is hard to believe that much of this would stand up if subjected to the rigours of cross-examination in court. 

Despite my best efforts I could not find a single poll which rated Antisemitism in the top 10 concerns of the British electorate. It is important to Jewish people for obvious reasons and it has become important to a commentariat who have seen it as a convenient stick with which to beat Labour. In fact, a YouGov poll from 2017 found that antisemitic attitudes were more prevalent in the Conservatives and UKIP than Labour or the Liberals (32% and 30% respectively agreed with at least one of four antisemitic statements.) Despite this a poll of Jewish people carried out 2017 found that 83% of Jewish people surveyed thought that Labour was too tolerant of Antisemitism, compared to only 19% who thought the same of the Tories. As with other polls, see the British Crime Survey for example, people’s perceptions of acts are likely to be greater than the incidence of those acts particularly where the acts themselves are highly politicised and subject to frequent press and media comment. 

Some will argue that this is mere distraction. An attempt to avoid the reality of the situation. Or worse, simply my own unconscious Antisemitism refusing to allow me to see what is self-evidently the case. But, if it is self-evident is it really unreasonable to ask for compelling evidence set in its social and political context to make the case. As somebody who has in the past marched against and confronted far right Antisemites I have never argued that antisemitism does not exist, but as a member of the Labour Party and a trade unionist I have always tried to balance my revulsion at antisemitism with the rights of Palestinians to live a life free of intimidation. For the record I do not hold all Jewish people responsible for the crimes of Israel, but I do think that in conflating the two the pro-Israel lobby (which is not exclusively Jewish incidentally) have themselves been guilty of deflection. This context is entirely absent from the report.

Civil War

But, this would not be my only contextual question. The Labour Party is a political party. There are inside any political party disputes. In the British Labour Party these verge on civil war. Many on the left believe that the allegations of anti-Semitism have been weaponised by the right in order to undermine what they saw as a left-wing take over of their party. This is not unimportant and yet the reports authors ignore this context entirely. The report was prompted by complaints brought by the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) and Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA). Both organisations are pro-Israeli, which they are entitled to be, but have also labelled as anti Semitic anybody who agrees with Jews who do not support their Zionist worldview. 

Angela Rayner, for example, was labelled anti Semitic by CAA for referencing a book by Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein which they claim is “hostile to Jews and Israel“. As a result Ms Rayner is one of 16 Labour MPs reported to the Labour Party this week which it has been given six months to act on. It’s not clear what happens then. The CAA is not a neutral observer. Its Chief Executive, Gideon Falter said on the publication’s release:”Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour Party became institutionally antisemitic. It drove almost half of British Jews to consider leaving the country.” Not to be nit picky but the EHRC report did not find the party “institutionally antisemitic” and neither is there any evidence that anywhere near half the Jews in Britain sought to leave the country.

According to the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Labour Movement now has 3,000 members following a recruitment drive in the wake of the December election. In the 2011 Census there were 263,346 who identified as Jewish. It is estimated that approximately 1,000 more Jewish babies are born each year than Jewish adults die, so there are probably around 272,000 Jews in the UK currently. This number is important and it is surprising therefore that the report failed to mention it. This means that Jews are less than 0.4% of the population of the UK. 1.1% of all Jews belong to the JLM. I could not find membership numbers for Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) but it has over 11,000 Facebook likes compared to JLM’s 3,000. 

In the report the JLM are mentioned 6 times specifically, though it is not clear when the report mentions Jewish Labour Party members, which it does on 10 occasions, whether it is actually referring to information provided by JLM. For example it is stated that “Labour Party members told us that the comments by Ken Livingstone..caused shock and anger among Jewish Labour Party members. ....Labour Party members also told us that Pam Bromley’s conduct, ..contributed to a hostile environment in the Labour Party for Jewish and non-Jewish members.” This may well be the case but the report fails to make it clear who these members actually were or whether they were affiliated with any other group. In fact, any suggestion of a political agenda by anybody is simply ignored. 

By contrast, the JVL is mentioned only once as a provider of information but with no substantive points attributed. The main difference between JLM and JVL is that one is pro-Israel and anti-Corbyn and the other does not make supporting Israel a condition of membership and has been pro-Corbyn. This may strike some people as unimportant but the truth is that in ignoring this important contextual information the report falls into a fairly typical antisemetic trope. That is it regards all Jews as an undifferentiated mass. 

An injury to one...

In such a view if one Jew is offended this person is taken as representative of all Jews. The Labour Party in uncritically accepting the report in its entirety has sent out official communications to all members in which it states “We have failed the Jewish community, our members, our supporters and the British people. That is why, on behalf of the Labour Party, we want to apologise for all of the pain and grief that has been caused to the Jewish community these past few years.” The suggestion is that there is a single, undifferentiated ‘Jewish community’ and that all have an equal stake in the report. Such a belief is no more true of Jewish citizens than it is of Muslims, or black people or, for that matter, white people or Christians. Meanwhile a prominent Shadow Cabinet member - Lisa Nandy -  was on nationwide radio and used an antisemitic trope declaring that ‘antisemitism punches upward” because Jews tended to be rich (which will of course be comforting to those Jewish citizens struggling by on universal credit).

The idea of a specific Jewish community is a reification of one specific essential characteristic. The report, to be fair, does not use the phrase ‘Jewish community’ preferring the more amorphous ‘Jewish stakeholders’. Unfortunately, this is left undefined, so that Jewish stakeholders could mean almost anybody who those implementing the report want it to mean. The phrase ‘Jewish community stakeholders’ is used three times in relation to the provision of antisemitism training. It is clear from the sections this appears in that the report is, essentially, supporting the right of JLM to be the providers of that training. This despite the fact that they are the smaller of the two Jewish Labour organisations and that they have as a condition of membership a commitment to Zionism. The logic is that the JLM are Jewish and therefore have a unique understanding of antisemitism. The fact that their definition of Jewishness excludes many Jews is conveniently overlooked and will be when the Labour Party capitulates to their demand that they be the arbiters of what constitutes antisemitism.

There is more context that the report lacks. The Labour Party is currently falling over itself to appease what they refer to as “the Jewish community”. In 2010 roughly one-third of Jews surveyed identified themselves as Labour supporters. By 2015, under Ed Miliband’s leadership (Miliband was a Jew incidentally), that support was down to 22%. By 2017  the support had fallen even further to 13%. The reason? It’s hard not to conclude that Labour’s support for Palestinian rights and lack of enthusiasm for Zionism led to a drastic decline in support amongst many Jewish people who found the Conservative Party more to their taste. Is this important? Even if Jews don’t vote for Labour in large numbers they should not expect to be discriminated against. But, that is rather a different proposition to organisations which have no intrinsic relationship with the party demanding that they should have a say in its running. 

The report notes: “In May 2020, the Board of Deputies sent the Labour Party a briefing on a number of cases of antisemitism that it believed were still outstanding.” But, the Board of Deputies has no official standing in the party at all. The majority of the Board are Conservatives. Why are they being allowed to dictate to an independent political organisation how it should deal with disciplinary cases and why is the EHRC amplifying this view that somehow the Labour Party is beholden to an organisation who campaign for a rival party? That all four leadership contenders were prepared to sign up to a set of pledges imposed by an organisation representing a tiny proportion of the electorate has certainly not generated the discussion in the mainstream that one might have expected. The Board of Deputies are fully entitled to take an opinion on the Labour Party, but they have no more right (perhaps even less so given their political leanings) to expect that view to be taken on board and repeated in an official report than any other affiliated organisation. Yet, organisations affiliated with the Party who may well have had Jewish members, trades unions for example, were not asked what they thought.

Balance

The context is not unimportant. The gathering of evidence should be undertaken to ensure that all sides of a dispute have the ability to influence the final report. The report notes: “After the Labour Party submitted its final evidence to us, an 850-page report titled ‘The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014-2019’ was leaked to the press on 12 April 2020. We were not informed that this report was being prepared and it remains unpublished. It was not proportionate for us to require the Labour Party to provide the evidence underlying the report.” Anybody who has read that report (another the party hierarchy barred constituency parties having a view on, so much for the party of free speech)  will note that what it showed was that members of Labour’s full-time staff were working to undermine the elected leader. Part of their campaign was to deliberately delay antisemitism cases because this was becoming an issue in the press. The people responsible for this were not the Leaders office but unelected officials who are afforded anonymity in the report, protected behind the term ‘whistleblowers’. The reports authors entirely omit the reason why this report needed to be leaked. In short following the election defeat those running the party had no intention of releasing into the public domain any material that would weaken the case against the former leader. 

The report concedes that “There is a dispute between the Labour Party and former employees about who began the practice of LOTO interference in relation to all antisemitism complaints in March and April 2018, why and how far LOTO was involved.” Despite the fact that there is no agreement and no reason to believe one side rather than the other the report seems to favour one version of events. Indeed, given the leaked report the balance of probability is that under intense media pressure the Leaders office sought to bring a number of cases, particularly high profile ones to a conclusion. However, the report appears to prefer a version offered by ‘whistleblowers’ even though the evidence is that far from ignoring these cases (there was “no blind spot” to quote Angela Rayner) Jeremy Corbyn was being frustrated in his attempts to have the backlog cleared by full-time officials who were running an anti-Corbyn campaign from within Labour HQ.

For most of the period under review Labour’s bureaucracy was under the leadership of Iain McNicol who left in 2017. He was replaced in 2018 by Jennie Formby. Formby is named 17 times in the report giving the impression that she was responsible for all the incidents reported. McNicol is not mentioned once. Aside from being an unforgivable oversight by the authors this does leave open the charge that the report is itself politically motivated. Indeed, it is noticeable that the only people named in the report are members of Labours left or clearly Corbyn supporters. The only other person named in the report is the current leader who conceded all its points before it was even written. (As an aside, it would be normal practice for a party to study a report before commenting. But, SirKeir made it clear that he would accept all its recommendations from the moment he became leader. As a barrister you would expect him to, at the least, read the thing before conceding).

The report notes that “of the 70 complaints that we investigated, 59 concerned social media.” That is 84%. Given that the vast majority of the complaints were from social media it should have been possible for the report to provide a range of evidence supporting the assertion that this was a major problem. Social media is a catch-all phrase which includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. Whilst Twitter is, mostly, an open platform, Facebook certainly is not. Differentiating between private and public would have been helpful. But the report whilst giving a few illustrative examples contents itself with: “In fact, as the evidence provided to the investigation shows, many people have been deeply offended by incidents on social media, whether or not they were named directly in the social media post.” Which raises the obvious question how many is many?

Politics

The real missing context here is that many people on the left felt that the entire debate was being framed in a way to undermine the Labour leader. There is plenty of evidence, including the leaked report and post-December posts from some Zionists, to support that assertion. I recently had a debate with somebody who claimed to be Jewish who labelled the left, though not me personally, as antisemitic. When questioned he said that the Zionists had succeeded. When I asked in what way, he said “We defeated Corbyn”. This context is not only missed by the report it is dismissed as antisemitic: “Suggesting that complaints of antisemitism are fake or smears,” it declares is antisemitic.

This is the equivalent of saying that any demand for evidence is actually evidence of the crime of which you are accused. Kafka would be proud. Under British and international law it is usually accepted that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Furthermore, that the burden of proof, beyond reasonable doubt, should fall on the accuser. Yet, the day after the publication I received a communication from my MP Anna McMorrin which starts off by referring to “the Jewish community“, a phrase I consider antisemitic, but then issues the following McCarthyite threat: “Keir gave each of us, as members, a stark warning yesterday. He said “If there are still those who think there’s no problem with anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. That it’s all exaggerated, or a factional attack. Then, frankly, you are part of the problem too. And you should be nowhere near the Labour Party either”.“ There is a big difference between saying there is no problem and that the problem has been exaggerated. I can easily believe that, yes, some members of the Party hold antisemitic views and that the entire issue was used by one faction of the party to attack another faction.

I fully expect to be expelled from the party for saying this. But, it is important that we respect the rule of law, specifically the presumption of innocence. The party’s response to the report is akin to implementing thought crime. Such a response should have no place in a mainstream political party and I’m pretty confident many of the allegations would crumble under legal cross examination. 

The report, in my honest opinion, is weak and partial. By naming only those on the left whilst allowing anonymity to those on the right it suggests bias whether that was intended or not. By giving prominence to one, small, Jewish organisation whilst ignoring counter opinion it suggests bias whether conscious or not. By ignoring entirely the febrile political environment surrounding these issues it suggests either political naivety or bias whether conscious or not. By completely failing to provide a social or political context the report has allowed the impression of a major wrongdoing within the Labour Party which despite the media attention did not, as the report states in its opening paragraph, prompt any significant public concern. 

That there is antisemitism in society is, sadly, still the case. However, to infer that this is more widespread in the Labour Party than in other parties, particularly those of the right including the Conservatives, is dangerously misleading. That the Labour leadership have seemingly accepted that the party are the main culprits of antisemitism in the U.K. points to a political project of their own. In my opinion, this report will be used to purge the party of Left-wing activists who remain loyal to Corbynite socialist ideals. Those who remain will only be able to do so whilst sitting on their hands as their ‘comrades’ are castigated merely for asking for convincing evidence. Instead of fighting racism the party prefers to fight its own left wing. The effect of this entire episode has been to increase tension and anti-Jewish sentiment. By weaponising anti-Semitism the right and centrists have made antisemitism easier for the real culprits. The real antisemites are not to be found on the left of the Labour Party but where they have always been in the far right. By attacking its own members the right wing of Labour allow those with genuine hatred of Jewish people to get off scot free. That is of what the party should be ashamed.

Tory Scum

 

According to The Sun* a Tory MP’s Mum was called scum after Angela Rayner accused Tory MP Chris Clarkson of being scum. He demanded that Angela apologise to his Mum as apparently the word was invented in parliament this week. The newspapers are outraged that a Labour MP should use such language and the suggestion is that such “shameful” language is being encouraged by a Labour MP daring to say what most of us think. (*I almost wrote “The Sun newspaper” there, silly me.)

Meanwhile, Chris Clarkson, MP for Haywood and Middleton (see the image at the top), joined 321 of his colleagues to vote against an opposition motion to guarantee meals for school children during school holidays. Scum? Perhaps we need to think of a more polite word, but allowing poor children to go hungry does seem like the definition of scum behaviour to me. 

It did seem that this week was one in which Labour’s right-wing grew a backbone. What with Rhondda MP Chris Bryant telling TalkRadio’s resident nutter-in-chief Dan Wootton that he was a “dangerous nutcase” for peddling the ‘herd immunity’ myth. The Sun, inevitably, sided with the radio nutcase.  In Greater Manchester Labour Mayor and former leadership candidate Andy Burnham faced off against the Government’s imposition of Tier 3 status. Although, of course, this was reported in a number of papers as ‘Andy Burnham has become a sex symbol’ as the British media always manage to get to the heart of the matter.

Forgetful media

Faced with a government seemingly in free fall, their loyal friends of what is known as the ‘Fifth Estate’ (just the media to you and I) have found it difficult to maintain the charade of impartiality. But, impartiality is not so much what the media tell you, it is what they ‘forget’ to mention. 

The mainstream media did remember to tell you about the landslide victory for Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party in New Zealand. However, the election seemed to take them by surprise given the lack of pre-election coverage, and is of such little consequence that it has warranted barely a mention since. Indeed, before the day of the election there was only one mention of politics in New Zealand and that was an anti-Ardern piece on the left behind in South Auckland. Compared to the 3 news pieces on the New Zealand election there are 2-3 daily pieces on the US Presidential election and these go back months.

The British media assume that you are obsessed with American politics to the exclusion of everything else, bar our own politics. The British media also managed to pretty much miss the landslide victory of Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS). This was a rerun of a previous election in which MAS leader Evo Morales was forced into exile by a CIA backed coup against him. He could not be on the ballot paper but backed current MAS leader Luis Arce, who gained over 50% of the vote. As Bolivian journalist Ollie Vargas told Democracy Now: “It’s an extraordinary election. In 2019, Evo Morales won by a margin of 10%, of just over 10%. And now we have a margin of over 20% with which the left is ahead. So it’s an extraordinary election.” And, yet, since reporting on the exit polls the BBC have been silent.

The rest of the British media either ignored this “extraordinary election” altogether or gave a short report on the result. The Guardian, nominally Britain’s most left-wing national newspaper had the sum total of 2 reports. As a comparison it has so far had 6 reports on Strictly Come Dancing’s 2020 series. But, The Guardian are an interesting case when it comes to telling us what to think about, because often they like to tell us what to actually think as well. 

News is not, as you might think, interesting stuff that happens, it is what suits the particular agenda of news proprietors, editors, journalists and advertisers. The Guardian was one of the main beneficiaries of the Wikileaks data that showed the abuses of American troops in Iraq. On 22nd October 2010 Nick Davies, Jonathan Steele and David Leigh filed a front page report headlined “ Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture”. The report was based on information provided by Chelsea Manning to Julian Assange. WikiLeaks released US State Department cables, Iraq war logs, top-secret files on Guantanamo detainees and a video depicting the US military killing Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists from an Apache helicopter - with all the records leaked to the organisation by former Army private Chelsea Manning, a computer expert.

Julian Assange

Julian Assange, as I’m sure most readers of this blog will be aware, now awaits the result of a trial to extradite him to the USA, where he faces charges of espionage and a probable life time in a maximum security prison. I’m not going to go over the case here because both Craig Murray and Jonathan Cook have covered it extensively. What is interesting, however, is that a trial described by one person as ‘the trial of the century’ has received little or no coverage in the U.K. press. In fact, if you were the sort of person who gains all your news from BBC or Sky News or from a daily newspaper you could be forgiven for thinking that Julian Assange did not exist or that the election results in New Zealand or Bolivia had no significance beyond those countries. Or, that the most important thing to happen in the British Parliament this week was Angela Rayner telling the truth about Tories who have no issue at all with children going hungry.

You might think that what I’m pointing to here is a press not doing it’s job. Jonathan Cook makes this point regarding supposedly left-wing Guardian journalists. The problem is that they are doing their job. The existence of journalists like John Pilger, Paul Foot, Martha Gellhorn and Marie Colvin is the anomaly that allows the mainstream media to profess to champion freedom of the press whilst consistently closing down debate and supporting the establishment view of the World.

The problem is not just the press, but also politics. One of the characteristics that made Jeremy Corbyn so unacceptable to the establishment was that he actually cares about the views of ordinary people. Labour’s apparent growing of a backbone this week was a false dawn. Angela Rayner apologised almost instantly for her language. Dennis Skinner, the veteran MP for Bolsover was excluded from parliament on at least 10 occasions for so-called unparliamentary language including calling then Prime Minister David Cameron “Dodgy Dave” after he was named in the Venezuela papers. He did not apologise. 

Andy Burnham did not get the relief package he requested. His response was to ask parliament to take it up. In a letter to the leaders of all the main parties he said: ““This could be done by Parliament calling an urgent debate and vote this week to establish a cross-party consensus on what constitutes a fair financial framework for people in areas under tier three restrictions.” In 1985 when then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to allow Liverpool City Council to set an illegal budget (an anti-austerity budget) they called a city wide strike and had 30,000 workers on the streets in support of the stand they were taking.

The Establishment

I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression. I am certainly in favour of people in the Labour Party standing up to the Tories. I’d prefer it if they didn’t back down so quickly, but my concern here is with the political implications of a press which is simply a mouthpiece for the establishment. And, here I should perhaps be clear, when I talk about the establishment I do not only mean the Conservative Party. Owen Jones, the Guardian journalist, has written a book called, interestingly enough, ‘The Establishment’. In it he defines the establishment as “powerful groups that need to protect their position in a democracy in which almost the entire adult population has the right to vote.” (Jones, 2015, p.6) He goes on to describe those groups as: “politicians who make laws; media barons who set the terms of debate; businesses and financiers who run the economy; police forces that enforce a law which is rigged in favour of the powerful.” (ibid., p.7) Notice how he includes all politicians but only media barons. Perhaps to point the finger at journalists who work for those media barons is a little too close to home. 

As Jonathan Cook and MediaLens have pointed out the silence of The Guardian over the persecution of Julian Assange included those ‘anti-establishment’ figures George Monbiot and, who would believe it, Owen Jones. These are probably the two most prominent left-wingers employed in the national press yet neither of them whispered barely a word in defence of Assange. There are unwritten rules about what is permissible for journalists and the hypocrisy of the newspaper industry is beyond what any journalist would dare to write, particularly if employed at the top of the journalistic tree. A while back I was at a conference where the guest speaker was Will Hutton, The Observer journalist. He spoke about the economy and how it was mismanaged. He had nothing good to say about the Tories who he thought were incompetent. I nodded along in support, but I was genuinely surprised when he turned his attention to what he referred to as “the left”, by which he seemed to mean anybody more radical than him. At that point it hit me that whilst he was not a supporter of the Tories, his real venom, and it was venom, was reserved for “the left” for whom he set up a set of straw man arguments in order to show how they had no idea how the economy worked.

The press, in the UK and elsewhere, do not report news. Of course, some things cannot be ignored. But it is surprising, or perhaps not, how much is ignored. Defending their refusal to cover the Assange trial BBC executives will point out they did cover it. They, in fact, had one piece at the beginning of the trial and nothing since. It was an omission that was repeated in every mainstream newspaper and news outlet. The lack of outrage at the treatment of Julian Assange has been as manufactured, to borrow the phrase coined by Noam Chomsky, as the mass hysteria around Princess Diana’s death was manufactured following her death. For most people it is easy to ignore things which do not impact upon your immediate daily life. But, when the press tell you non-stop that you are in grief at the death of very rich young woman, then you are likely to start believing it. When somebody approached me on a tube station platform and asked me to sign a card of condolence for Princess Diana it so took me by surprise that I just stared at her and said “why?” Its not that I am lacking in compassion but the death of a Princess, or for that matter the birth of one, or their wedding, has no intrinsic interest for me. Yet, when I hear that a young left wing activist - Nathan Harmer - had died recently I felt genuinely moved and saddened.

For what its worth this is my view. We spend far too much time placing our trust in people to do things for us. Those people invariably put their own interests before ours. The exceptions do actually prove the rule here. Why has the press been silent on Assange, on New Zealand’s success with Covid, on the Bolivian left’s remarkable comeback? Why did the British press consider the general strike in France so unnewsworthy? Why do they not follow what is happening in Europe, but obsess over America? In a way the press set the agenda which politicians, on the whole, follow. There have only been 16 tweets about the Assange Trial, a quarter of those from Richard Burgon. Only 17 MPs took to Twitter to congratulate Jacinda Adern on her victory. Not a single Conservative, but only 15 from Labour. There were only 12 tweets congratulating Luis Arce on his victory in Bolivia and one of those was from New Labour’s grim reaper lookalike Andrew Adonis criticising Jeremy Corbyn for congratulating the “anti-American” MAS Party, whilst condemning him for not being enthusiastic enough about “moderate” Jacinda Adern.

News is not neutral

News is not neutral. News is what somebody else decides you need to know. You don’t need to know about Julian Assange because, frankly, your life is best served by not knowing what ‘your’ forces are up to when you cheer them off to war. And, why would we need to know about New Zealand’s success at eradicating Covid when our narrative is one of anti-lockdown and herd immunity. Even supposedly left publications, who may realise that ‘herd immunity’ is up there with other Covid myths, rather like the fact that it is being promoted by scientists. They are also rather fond of pointing the finger at so-called #Covidiots, who you may notice are usually working class and very often young. And, as for Bolivia and France well everybody knows that openly socialist parties never win elections and that strikes never achieve anything. The dominant narrative is abundantly clear. In short, it is repeated ad nauseum in its various guises to convince you that you have no agency in your life. Others - politicians, journalists, business people, scientists - know better what is good for you. Yes, you get a vote but in practice your choice is limited to which members of the establishment you want to run society in their interest. 

The trick is to convince you that in supporting the status quo, even when that keeps you in various states of poverty, that you have a kinship with those who despise you. You grieve for a dead royal whilst condemning workers killed in the pursuit of their  livelihood.  111 deaths at work last year and unless you were personally connected to one of them (in which case my condolences) you will not know a single name. Tory MPs are keen to talk about ‘personal responsibility’ and extrapolate this to the idea of the deserving and undeserving poor. People are poor because of their indolence not because the system is rigged to keep them that way. The press dutifully repeat these notional ideas of ‘taking responsibility’ so that our empathy is chipped away. But they don’t really want you to take responsibility for your own life, any more than they really want a free press. What they want is for ordinary people to cede responsibility to those who can be trusted with it. MP’s, doctors, scientists, lawyers and even journalists all of whom are more than made aware that their role is not just to do a job but to maintain the illusion of freedom whilst at the same time supporting a system that denies even basic freedoms such as food to many of its co-citizens. All the professions are over-represented by people with a public school background and even those few oiks who are allowed in find themselves surrounded by those who have been brought up to believe in their basic social superiority so that they imbibe their prejudices and spit them out as ‘common sense’.

Socialism is the antithesis of establishment superiority. The reason they hate the left and trade unions is precisely because they encourage the pernicious belief that ordinary lives matter. As socialists we can’t simply ignore the all pervading influence of the establishment. But, neither do we have to surrender to it. When we put our faith in leaders we negate our own ability to work collectively in our own interest. When we wait for journalists to keep us informed we subscribe to the narrow world view they allow us. As socialists we cannot change the system overnight but what we can do is avoid falling into the trap of believing the system can be made to work in our interest. We can support alternative media (The Canary, Morning Star, Double Down News) and progressive blogs such as Charlotte Hughes and Northern Lefty and we can stop waiting for MPs and other self-appointed leaders to move us into a new era. 

Self-help is a peculiar 21st Century obsession (just type self-help into Google to see the number of nonsensical books published on the subject) but it is also the very essence of socialism and has been since socialists first began thinking about a better future. Self-help, in this context, is not about individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but about ordinary  people joining together in unions, in campaigns, in community organisations to change the narrative that only members of the establishment truly understand what is going on and only members of the establishment can be trusted to change things for the better. Tory scum come in all shapes and sizes, and it really is time we stopped pandering to them.

Truths, Untruths And Scientists

It seems fairly obvious, I’m sure you will agree, that politics is confrontational. That to be on one side of an argument is to be opposed to the other side. Quite often, as we all experience on social media, the evidence for particular arguments is, to put it mildly, tendentious. But, when arguing about  the pandemic we can always turn to science, can’t we? Whilst trust in politicians remains understandably low a recent poll carried out by Survation for the Open Knowledge Network found that 64% of those surveyed were more likely to trust scientists since the pandemic began.

In some ways the trust in scientists is to be expected. Most people, perhaps all people, want the pandemic to end. We are looking to science to step in where politicians (with the possible exception of Jacinda in New Zealand) have shown themselves to be hapless and out of touch. So, when a group of scientists tell us that they have the answer to the pandemic we are bound to listen and to take them seriously. But, trust in science is not quite the same thing as trust in scientists. Science has done a remarkably good job of presenting itself as above politics and most people’s view of scientists is a positive one.

Science And Scientists

Here’s a little thought experiment. In your mind conjure an image of a scientist. What do you see? Did a white coat, a test tube, a laboratory play any part? For many people it is likely to be a picture of Einstein or some other famous scientist from our past. Science is about people conducting experiments in a search for the truth and in so doing helping to take society forward. It is not characterised by, for example, Josef Mengele who carried out appalling experimentation in concentration camps. Neither is it characterised by thalidomide which destroyed so many lives during the 1960’s. Or, by the many scientists employed to create weapons of destruction, or whose life work is supporting the so-called ‘beauty’ industry.

Science has been responsible for some of the most amazing advances our society has made. It has eradicated smallpox, for example. It has made possible open heart surgery which I was recently a beneficiary of. So, in no way, am I suggesting that science is a bad thing. But, it also makes mistakes and my main point is this: scientists are not modern day gods, nor paragons of virtue. They are, like the rest of us, prone to egoism, narcissism, and, my main point, political views. Of course, they are entitled to have political views. Everybody is. But, the idea that politics follows the science and that science is above reproach is a fairly dangerous one, for it places scientists (not science) on a pedestal and allows their opinions a weight not always deserved.

According to The Spectator (the Johnson family house blog), there is a conspiracy to prevent people from hearing about the Great Barrington Declaration. Toby Young claims that if you google it you get pages rubbishing it before a link to the declaration itself. Far be it from me to call Toby Young a snivelling, self-important, lying weasel but this is a screenshot of my Google search, and as you can see the link to the declaration is at the top. 

There are certainly plenty of conspiracies around the pandemic an attempt to silence those promoting the ‘herd immunity’ thesis is not one of them. Young gives the illusion that the declaration should be taken seriously by stating that these “experts” propose a “tried and tested way of managing the risk posed by a new infectious disease, dating back thousands of years”.

Young, like many in the anti-lockdown camp, are keen to spread unscientific opinion as fact masked behind the fact that those expressing the opinion are “scientists”. The closest the declaration  gets to admitting it is not a scientific paper but a political declaration is in its opening passage which says that those signing it are “from both the left and right”. What they do not tell you is that the declaration is sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER). This might not be that important, after all if they are genuine why should it matter where they chose to get together. But the AIER is owned by a company called American Investment Services Inc. AIER was founded in 1933 and, according to its website, “educates Americans on the value of personal freedom, free enterprise, property rights, limited government and sound money”, all of which are decidedly right-wing concerns connected to a philosophy known as libertarianism. In and of itself, of course, this does not invalidate the claims of people connected with them.

Focused Protection

The declaration makes a number of claims, some of which are undoubtedly true, but uses them to produce a conclusion that what is needed is the abandonment of lockdowns and a policy of herd immunity together with what they call ‘Focused Protection’. Nobody is denying that the national lockdown in the UK resulted in “lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health”, but whether these amount to a strong case for abandoning lockdown altogether is a matter of opinion not science. As Professor James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute has said:

“I do not think anyone disagrees that the disruption to education, social life and the economy have been very hard to bear and that they particularly disadvantage the young, the group least likely to suffer serious ill effects from covid-19.” But, as he continues:  “One can promise a scheme that is very easy to describe but is hard to deliver.  The declaration is silent about what happens if we resume normal life (the easy bit) and fail, for whatever reason, to protect the vulnerable (the hard part). ”

I don’t want to be accused here of what-ifery, but vaccination rates amongst children are also disrupted by poverty and war. For example the World Health Organisation and UNICEF whilst voicing concern about the effects of Covid on childhood vaccination rates note that: “Progress on immunization coverage was stalling before COVID-19 hit, at 85 per cent for DTP3 and measles vaccines.” In Syria, or Gaza vaccination rates, and mental health issues are being exacerbated by Covid-19, but political decisions which none of the signatories to the GBD seem overly concerned with are the root cause. A point made by Stephen Griffin, Associate Professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Leeds: “Sadly, focusing on the pandemic rather than the cultures and environments in which it arose ignores long-standing issues in society that existed prior to, and likely long after the pandemic has passed.”

The authors of the declaration ignore any evidence which might contradict them. For example, they argue that “Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice,” and advocate “Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed.” There is very little doubt that the re-opening of schools helped to fuel the latest spikes in Covid leading to further lockdowns. At the last count, according to the excellent @ToryFibs Twitter account, some 3,000 schools had children in isolation. There does not appear to be any attempt by the four governments of the UK to log all the cases. But the BBC reports that in Liverpool there are currently 500 staff and 8,000 pupils who are self-isolating. Meanwhile, according to the Manchester Evening News, more than 500 schools in the Greater Manchester area now have pupils or staff who are self-isolating.

Education is important, and I am not in any way suggesting that it should be a secondary issue when dealing with an unprecedented pandemic situation. Nonetheless, again if we look on a global scale, Nature reported prior to the pandemic that on current predictions only 61% of young adults (aged 25-29) will have finished secondary education. That most of these are in the poorest countries of the World, is one reason why those of us in the relatively wealthy parts of the World (Europe, America, Australia etc) spend so little time worrying about it. The point is that no matter how disruptive lockdowns are to education, for some children the free market (which the AIER promote) is hardly doing any better.

Age and Covid

However, whilst the UK is in the grip of a second wave of Covid, the authors repeat the half-truth that the ‘vulnerable’ are from a particular age-related cohort. They claim that “vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza.” It would help here if the authors were to define what they mean by ‘old’ and ‘young’. It is certainly the case that older people are the vast majority of deaths. Taking just hospital deaths in the UK, 53% of Covid deaths have been in the over 80’s. For those aged up to 19 years the percentage is 0.07%. However, as a matter of maths that is less than one thousand times, actually around 780 times. If we are supposed to accept that these are scientists without a political agenda then it would help if they at least got the basic maths correct.

As for flu, according to the latest figures for England and Wales released by Public Health England. The proportion of young people under 19 dying from flu was 0.86%. As a matter of maths that is 13 times the proportion of young people dying from Covid. In terms of numbers 13 under 19’s died from flu in 2018, whilst 21 have so far died from Covid this year.

Whilst it is true as the Declaration says that older people have a greater chance of dying from Covid than younger ones, the rates of infection according to the World Health Organisation are greatest in the 25-64 age group who accounted for 64% of infections from January to July. But, even if we just concentrate on fatal cases, we should not forget that in England alone, 2,599 people aged under 60 have already died from Covid. The authors are pursuing a libertarian agenda which is roughly one of ‘survival of the fittest’. As Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health, University of Southampton, commented: “There are countries who are managing the pandemic relatively well, including South Korea and New Zealand, and their strategies do not include simply letting the virus run wild whilst hoping that the asthmatic community and the elderly can find somewhere to hide for 12 months.”

According to the Declaration: “As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e.  the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine.” It would be true that if immunity was building the risk of infection would, by definition, fall. However, there is not a scrap of evidence to support either the assertion that immunity is falling or that populations will reach ‘herd immunity’ without the aid of a vaccine. As Professor Jeremy Rossman, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Virology, University of Kent says: “First, we still do not know if herd immunity is possible to achieve.  Herd immunity relies on lasting immunological protection from coronavirus re-infection; however, we have heard many recent cases of re-infection occurring and some research suggests protective antibody responses may decay rapidly.  Second, the declaration focuses only on the risk of death from COVID-19 but ignores the growing awareness of long-COVID, that many healthy young adults with ‘mild’ COVID-19 infections are experiencing protracted symptoms and long-term disability.”

Herd Immunity

There is no recorded instance in history of herd immunity being achieved without a vaccine. People often cite the Spanish Flu of 1918 as an instance. As Euronews reported earlier in the current pandemic, the Spanish Flu (it didn’t originate in Spain by the way) was dealt with by extensive lockdowns and in America you could be fined $100 for not wearing a mask in public. Nobody knows for certain how the pandemic ended, although better sanitation and the use of anti-viral drugs seems to have played some part and some measure of immunity building up. 

As Dr Julian Tang, Honorary Associate Professor in Respiratory Sciences, University of Leicester points out flu has not been eradicated, but its effects can be managed with a range of interventions: “each year during our annual influenza season, we vaccinate the vulnerable – elderly and those with comorbidities – including pregnancy and even primary school children who have contact with such vulnerable groups in an effort to further protect the vulnerable. And if this fails to prevent influenza infection of the vulnerable groups, we have antivirals like oseltamivir and zanamivir that we can give to anyone who has influenza or in whom we even just suspect influenza to reduce the severity of their illness. But we don’t yet have these additional ‘tools’ (the vaccine and antivirals) for COVID-19, to assist with this ‘Focused Protection’ approach.”

The approach proposed by the GBD is one of prioritising the economy over the lives of the ‘vulnerable’. According to the declaration: “nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors.”  A herd immunity approach will inevitably increase the burden on the entire health care system. We know that health care workers are extremely vulnerable to death from Covid. The Health Services Journal did a survey between February and April when Covid was first developing in the UK. They  identified 109 health care workers who had died in that period. Of those, 89 had verifiably been working, mostly in patient facing roles. Of the others, there was no evidence that they had not been working.

Just under a third of those who died were under 50, with 8% under 30. The median age was 54. The majority of deaths were among nurses and midwives who accounted for one-third of deaths. It is not just age it appears, but viral load. The more contact with Covid 19 the more likely you are to contract the disease and the more likely, therefore, you are to suffer severe symptoms including death. Age is clearly only one, if an important one, of a range of variables. Around 18% were doctors. What is most shocking in the statistics is the over-representation of BAME individuals. 71% of nurses who died were identified as BAME (compared to their 20% of the NHS workforce), 56% of healthcare support workers who died were BAME (compared to their 17% of the workforce), whilst 94% of doctors were BAME (compared to their 44% of the workforce). 

The inability to define the ‘vulnerable’ is a major flaw in the declaration. It is assumed that the only bad outcome of covid is death, of course we now know that many people are suffering long-term fatigue and other ill effects, and that these lingering affects are just as prevalent amongst the younger cohorts as the older. But, even leaving ‘long Covid’ aside for a moment, the excess deaths are disproportionately to be found in poorer communities. A study in the journal Frontiers in Sociology found that in the USA “the number of deaths confirmed to be caused by Covid-19 demonstrated a pattern whereby the number of deaths was greater in areas of relatively greater poverty”. Meanwhile, J Patel writing in Public Health journal in June concluded that “a combination of factors leaves the most economically disadvantaged particularly vulnerable to COVID-19”. Patel argues that in describing “the vulnerable” governments should be clear who they mean and not just consider it as “the elderly”. That advice was sound then and remains sound in the face of so-called ‘experts’ calling on a return to normality for those not vulnerable. As Dr Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health, University of Southampton noted in relation to the focused protection plan: “It is a very bad idea.  We saw that even with intensive lockdowns in place, there was a huge excess death toll, with the elderly bearing the brunt of that, and 20-30% of the UK population would be classed as vulnerable to a severe COVID-19 infection.”

The way forward

There is certainly a debate to be had about the way in which governments of the right (UK, USA, Brazil etc) are dealing with the pandemic. Surely I am not alone in thinking that they either should adopt this herd immunity approach (with the resultant high number of deaths among elderly, poor and/or BAME communities) or they need to stop bringing in half-measures. For what its worth, and I accept that my opinion is actually worth very little, it does seem that politicians and scientists are being far more led by what they perceive as public opinion than by science.  Covid-19 is a virus. It is passed from person to person. It therefore does not need a ‘scientist’ to work out that the more people you come into contact with the greater your risk of contracting the virus. To stop a virus spreading you need to reduce the contact between people. Keeping schools open because young people don’t die at the same rate as older people is ludicrous. Schools and universities do not just contain young people. Teachers, lecturers, cleaners, administrators etc. are generally of the older generation. The number of deaths in the 40-59 age group in England (and this is only deaths in hospital) is 2,358. Although that is under 8% of the total, it still represents a 1 in 32 chance of dying if you become infected.

The signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration should be honest. They are not signing as scientists following the science, but as individuals with a right-wing libertarian agenda, who believe that the free market can solve all our problems. They are not concerned particularly with the education of young people, but rather with the activities of economically active individuals, whose ability to maintain the economy is being disrupted by what the authors see as the protection of a small minority. They are not insensitive enough to say ‘let the old die’ but have no idea how their proposals would work in practice. As Dr Rupert Beale, Group Leader, Cell Biology of Infection Laboratory, Francis Crick Institute noted: “This is wishful thinking. It is not possible to fully identify vulnerable individuals, and it is not possible to fully isolate them.”

The Declaration came at a perfect juncture for the right-wing libertarians who regard any curtailment of their ‘freedom’ as an imposition. It has given succour to the anti-lockdown, anti-mask and anti-vaccination movement by proposing a laissez fair, survival of the fittest strategy wrapped in an illusory jacket of care for the elderly. As Wired Magazine’s Matt Reynold’s noted in an opinion piece: “What is more interesting about the Great Barrington Declaration is what is missing. There is nothing about test and trace or mask-wearing – two interventions that we know are effective at stopping the spread of Covid-19 and don’t require any curtailing of our individual behaviour.”

People, whether scientists, politicians or just members of particular communities, are entitled to hold contradictory and sometimes unpopular opinions. People’s opinions don’t necessarily have to be evidence-based. But, scientists, especially when talking as members of the scientific community, have a duty to be careful what they claim, especially when the evidence does not exist. Scientists can make political statements, but they should make it clear when they do so that these statements are their personal opinions not based necessarily on scientific rigour. I object to the Great Barrington Declaration because it is based on unfounded allegations of the possibility of herd immunity, and because it provides a platform for those who care little for other members of their community and simply want to whinge about how their personal freedom is being affected. News alert people: we are all having our personal freedom curtailed because it is the only way we can protect the most vulnerable in our society. I object most strongly though because people citing this declaration almost always preface it with the fact that the main signatories are “respected scientists” and are from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford as if these two facts alone mean that they have a knowledge that is above politics and greater than anybody else. Although I would not call them frauds because that would not be true I do believe that the fact that the declaration emerged from a right-wing libertarian think-tank is significant, and that people should not be taken in by those promoting a society where the vulnerable will, in all probability, far from being protected be thrown to the wolves.

Leaving Labour Reconsidered

In last week’s blog I argued that the Labour Party, under SirKeir’s leadership, had abandoned any commitment to socialism. Whilst I am clearly not alone in thinking this, I did receive some critical commentary from people who remain committed to working for a left-wing Labour Party. I have always maintained that a debate requires two sides and that if you are involved in a debate you should listen to and respond to those who disagree with you.

I was accused of being selective with the facts I presented in order to encourage people to leave the Labour Party. I want to clarify this point. I did not say others should leave the party and was expressing my personal views. If others agree, as many seemed to, it is then up to them to decide what action they intend to take. As it turns out a fair few had already left the party and seemed surprised that it had taken me so long to reach the same conclusion.

Generally the blog got a positive reaction. Such as this from Sheila Gorman Flynn: “Just read your excellent article Dave. Thank you so much for your clear and incisive analysis of the gut wrenching so many of us have faced.”  Or this from Jacqui B: “Just read your blog, Dave. I'm afraid I can never vote labour again. Too old to hang round waiting for another Socialist leader. Which we all know, ain't never gonna happen in my lifetime.”

But, despite this the accusations that I had been selective with the facts are serious enough that I feel I should respond to them. The suggestion was that I deliberately played down the importance of the Socialist Campaign Group, and also gave a misleading account of the ability of the left to dominate the NEC. In addition, I was told that the Labour and socialism dichotomy was a false Aunt Sally set up without explaining what exactly I meant by socialism. And, finally, it was asserted that by even suggesting that I would not campaign for Labour I was undermining any chance of a Labour victory.

Socialist Campaign Group

I’ll take these in order. The Socialist Campaign Group includes Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, Richard Burgon and Zarah Sultana all of whom were acknowledged in last weeks blog. According to their Twitter account the SCG currently has 34 members. The Labour Party has 201 MPs in Westminster. To put that in simple terms, 83% of the Parliamentary Labour Party are not part of the Campaign Group. Just 17% are. That figure is important because to mount a leadership challenge you need 20% of the PLP.

Their recent online rally attracted around 8.5k participants according to RedFlag website. The Campaign Group Facebook page records some 90k views.The difference in numbers is those who took part ‘live’ and then those who have looked at the recordings. As a technical issue that views figure can include multiple views and also those who have watched for only a few seconds. So whilst 90k is impressive the actual number of people is probably lower. The rally included speeches from a range of left-wing MPs including Jeremy Corbyn. I am not saying that the rally is unimportant it is clearly an opportunity for the left to rally behind their torch-bearers. I have now looked at some of the videos and nowhere is there talk of a leadership challenge. Whilst Jeremy talks of politics beyond parliament he does not say what this amounts to. But, as I have stated previously, I have no criticism of Jeremy Corbyn who was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise putrid political environment. Had Labour’s right got behind Jeremy’s leadership I am convinced he would now be Prime Minister and the Labour Party would be a very different organisation.

I have attended numerous rallies over the years, some addressed by current or former members of the Campaign Group, and I have often wondered at the end of them what am I supposed to do now. I remember one rally in Chesterfield during the miners strike where Tony Benn announced to great cheers “Dennis (Skinner) and I are going back to parliament to put down an early day motion.” A friend turned to me and said “well that’s it then. The NCB will crumble now.” And, yes that was sarcasm. Rallies are important but they are no indication of your actual strength and, this is more my point, they perpetuate a myth that most of us are followers and all we need are the right leaders to get what we want. 

The problem with the Campaign Group is not, however, a lack of ambition, but rather that they are, predictably, focused on Parliament. This is not surprising. They are MPs, it is what they are paid to do. But they do not, in my opinion, offer a strong reason for anybody to stay in the party. Is it better that there is a strong left presence? This rather depends whether you believe that Labour can be a vehicle for progressive social change. Personally, I feel bad abandoning these MPs, but on the other hand I don’t particularly feel that they are ‘my’ MPs. I don’t get a sense from the Campaign Group that they particularly see a dialogue with other socialists as key to building the left in the U.K. Rather, we become reduced to a fan club looking to them for leadership. To be fair, this will seem to those determined to stay inside Labour as a very harsh judgement, and perhaps it is. But, for all the years of left-wing MPs making fine speeches and supporting good causes how much closer are we to realising that left-wing Government. That it seemed so close recently is not evidence that it is achievable, but rather the opposite.

This week there were two votes in Parliament in which I would have expected left-wing MPs to be against. These votes essentially legalise torture, rape and even murder by British agencies. So why, I have to ask, were there only 20 names from Labour in the ‘no’ lobby. If MPs are more concerned not to offend the whip than stand against the legalisation of torture and rape then really, how left-wing are they? As Labour Left Alliance wrote in an email to its members this week:

“It is a shame that almost half of the 34 members of the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs (SCG) followed Starmer’s whip and abstained on both bills. In our view, these MPs should either grow a backbone or leave the SCG, if this group actually is to play a role in fighting to preserve the gains made under Corbyn and organising the left in the party in an effective and democratic manner.”

Leadership challenge

I am also told that I should see the potential for a leadership challenge because they are only 6 short. Let’s be clear it might as well be 600. If there were 6 more MPs supportive of the Campaign Group they would have identified themselves and would have voted against these torture bills. The only way the campaign group can mount a leadership challenge is either through winning 6 Tory held seats in by-elections which is unlikely. Even if the NEC elections go well for the left, and that is still to be determined, any candidates would have to be selected in their constituencies and then endorsed by the NEC. The alternative would be a series of extraordinary events reducing the threshold as Labour’s right lost 30 by-elections. That is even less likely. So, for the foreseeable future all talk of a leadership challenge is simply that - talk.

I want to be clear here. I am not saying that the Campaign Group are not worth supporting. Neither am I saying that the people who logged on to watch them speak should not have done so. But, it is not clear to me exactly what my support for the Campaign Group amounts to? Yes, it is nice to have supportive MPs who oppose the government with conviction, but the Campaign Group have existed since 1982, be honest, how important have they been in your life up to now? That is not to say that the Campaign Group could not be instrumental in setting up an extra-parliamentary organisation but is that what they are calling for? I realise that for those still committed to the Labour Party and convinced that it can be turned into a genuinely campaigning socialist organisation this sounds like defeatism and betrayal. I regret that but it is my opinion, and I believe that history supports that opinion. Moreover, it is my opinion as I said last week that the party is now moving indelibly to the right.

That belief got me into trouble with one writer who claimed, somewhat counter intuitively, that the party has not turned away from the left at all. Their evidence for this is that the members have not all suddenly started supporting SirKeir, and that the left will re-emerge at the next conference. It is true that there are still plenty of left-wingers in the party, the 90k who watched the Campaign Group rally no doubt contained a number of them. But the evidence for the right turn is to be found in the leadership election where 275,000 voted for SirKeir. The left candidate, and member of the Campaign Group Rebecca Long-Bailey received 135,000 votes, less than half of SirKeir and only just over a quarter of votes cast.

The argument here is that the members who voted for SirKeir will realise that he is not the leader they thought they were getting and will turn against him. There is no real evidence for this, although the LabourList surveys suggest that his star is not quite as bright as he would probably like.  That said, some 50% of LabourList readers were happy with his leadership compared to 48% who were unhappy. So, perhaps there is a groundswell of disaffection out there. The question is where is this to manifest itself? And, will this dissatisfaction last if Labour finds itself ahead in the polls.

An Opinium poll for The Observer gave Labour a 3 point lead last week whilst an Ashcroft poll for the Daily Mail revealed that more people think SirKeir would make a better PM than Johnson. (Apologies for including a link to the Daily Mail but I don’t want to be accused of making this up.) Now, we on the left, might point out that given the appalling nature of the government and their incompetent handling of the pandemic the shock has been that they maintained their lead for this long. The point is that a poll lead and the electorate seeing SirKeir as prime ministerial is not fertile ground for either a leadership challenge or a move to reassert the party as a left-wing organisation. Given that the majority of Labour members believe, according to another Ashcroft poll, that winning elections is more important than having principles, the right will see these results as vindication for distancing themselves from the 2019 Manifesto. In this scenario there is only one direction the party is heading and it is not to the left.

If a leadership challenge seems highly unlikely in the short term then the left can still win control of the NEC. I was accused last week of playing down the importance of the NEC. I described it as Labour’s ruling body so I’m not entirely sure how I played down it’s importance, but what I said which upset a couple of people was that it contained a built in right-wing majority. To be fair, this may have been an over statement. Those of us still members will shortly get a vote and I will use mine to support the left-wing slate. For the avoidance of misunderstanding here. My membership renewed for 12 months in August and so, unless expelled, I remain a member, if a somewhat uncommitted one, until next year.

National Executive Committee

Contrary to the impression that I may have given last week the make up of the NEC is more complex than stated. There are 38 people on the NEC. In addition to the 9 CLP reps there are also elections for the Young Labour, BAME Labour, and the newly created Disability reps. In addition Scottish Labour and Welsh Labour have a place each. There are 13 trade union delegates who split roughly 50-50 left-right. There are 3 Front Benchers, 3 PLP members and 2 Councillors - all of these are on the right. I should be clear some of those I’m describing as on the right would describe themselves as ‘centre-left’ or ‘moderate’ but in as much as they are SirKeir loyalists I regard them as on the right. The left did well in gaining CLP nominations so perhaps I was wrong to dismiss the NEC as inherently right-wing, that said even if the left win all 9 CLP positions the NEC will be split 50-50 right-left.

Since SirKeir became leader there have been two important NEC votes. First on a change to the voting system and second on the new General Secretary. On both these votes the left lost. Whether the elections will shift the balance decisively one way or the other is difficult to see, but generally speaking the NEC tends to support the leader of the party, although sometimes very narrowly. In other words, although it is conceivable that the left could win control of the NEC it is unlikely that will significantly change the direction in which the leader wants to take the party. Indeed, one of the first things new General Secretary David Evans did was to issue an edict forbidding CLPs to discuss the leaked report, payments to so-called “whistleblowers” or the EHRC report. The NEC could have overturned that decision, which was anyway unconstitutional, but did not do so.

Those who choose to stay in the party perhaps need a justification for doing so which is more than just winning an election. The idea that by winning “control” of the NEC or supporting the Campaign Group or by having left-wing delegates on the conference floor (should we ever see a conference floor again) that they are bringing socialism closer is an appealing illusion. To believe otherwise would involve saying that they are staying in a party that is diametrically opposed to things they believe in. To spend your time fighting for left-wing causes within Labour you need the occasional victory. A motion passed at a CLP meeting, a left-wing candidate elected to the NEC or even a prospective parliamentary candidate fill the time between elections. But do they have anything to do with socialism?

Socialism defined

Labour’s left have always made much rhetorical use of the word socialism without really defining what it is. It used to be summed up in Clause 4 Part 4, but the Blairites removed that and the members have not managed to get it put back in. I wrote a blog entitled ‘What is socialism’ last year. In it I wrote:

“If we consider the conditions in which socialism is likely to evolve, it is unlikely to be as a result of the election of a Labour government. As desirable as such an event may be the last time I checked socialist revolution was not an objective of the Labour Party. That election would be a symptom of a deeper crisis not its catalyst.” 

I then went on to suggest ways in which socialism would differ from capitalist: “Production of goods would not be for profit but to benefit society. Decisions instead of being motivated by maximising advantage for one enterprise (regardless of the effect on other institutions or wider society) would be taken to increase the well-being of the community. People would no longer have most of their life chances determined by where, and to whom, they were born. Education would be available for all, and every child would have the opportunity to reach their full potential. There would inevitably, in such a society be a change in people’s attitudes.”

A few weeks ago I followed this up with a piece entitled ‘Can you imagine’ in which I asked readers to imagine a society which was socialist. This is what I had to say about democracy:

“Democracy will not be casting a vote for one of an identikit array of people who want to “represent” you. A socialist democracy would create an informed electorate who would make decisions based on both evidence and their lived experiences. The officials and administrators would not work for the mayor or the local council but for the people. All positions of civic responsibility would be open to all, shared and subject to democratic recall.”

I find it just a tad irritating, therefore, to be accused of not defining socialism by people whose only reference point seems to be that it is stopping the Tories. Those who criticised me, and they have the right to do so, whilst telling me that I had set up a straw man argument did not tell me one positive policy that they could see being enacted in the coming months. They did not describe the progressive policies that somehow we would maintain by committing our energy to the Labour Party. They certainly did not explain how supporting a Labour Party led by SirKeir would lead to socialism. Instead they criticised my lack of enthusiasm for internal party politics and accused me of not defining what I meant by socialism and of aiding the Tories by not campaigning for a party that is looking decidedly conservative in its approach.

I may be entirely wrong about the future socialist society and about how it will emerge. I may be wrong about the nature of the Labour Party. But it does occur to me that if the main aim of socialism is to stop the Tories as so many people claim, then why do the left in Labour not embrace the Scottish National Party who are clearly the anti-Tory party north of the border? Why does Labour’s left never stand down in favour of the Lib Dem’s in seats where they are the clear favourites to oust the Tories? Why do the Labour left spend so much time organising to beat the right in various internal elections but then turn out to support right-wing candidates for local and national elections? If such a strategy is defensible when the leader and manifesto are on the left even if your local candidate is not, how is it defensible when the leader is dragging the party slowly, but inexorably, rightward based on an analysis that says “it’s no good having good policies if you are not trusted”?

Again I have to be clear. I am not advocating an electoral pact with the Lib Dem’s, though to be honest if I were in Scotland I’d probably support the SNP. The obsession with elections is part of Labour’s problem, and no amount of tinkering (including advocating PR) is going to change that. Labour is first and foremost an electoral party. It’s constitution commits it to maintaining a parliamentary party. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. But those elections take part in a capitalist parliamentary democracy where for most of the time the views of ordinary people can be safely ignored. As Stevie Wonder once put it “you only come to visit us around election time”. For a while I hoped that a left-led Labour Party could be the catalyst for progressive social change. I was wrong. The establishment, including its adherents embedded within the Labour Party itself, were never going to allow it. 

The Labour Party is a vanity project for people who should know better. I was desperately trying to think of a counter argument to this in terms of all the good things Labour has done. The NHS, the welfare state, equality legislation are the usual examples, the last two of which were actually designed by liberals (Beveridge and Steel). But these are easily countered with PFI, student tuition fees and, the low blow, Iraq. To that we can now add turning our backs on the Palestinians. Labour politicians and their supporters (on both left and right) like to think of Labour as the moral high ground of British politics. But, their claim to moral superiority rests on shaky grounds. Of course, there are outstanding individuals but even in a barrel of rotten apples it is possible to find a couple of decent Coxes. The point is that it is not the individuals, per se, but the very system that is corrupting. In the end I am forced to conclude that John Bernard who left a comment last week is probably right:

“It is the duty of all good socialists to do precisely nothing to enable a Labour victory in 2024 for two very clear reasons. First, it will not deliver change that amounts to anything, and second and most importantly the myth that somehow Labour cannot get elected unless it moves to the right and abandons a policy agenda which is and was the very raison d'etre of Labour.”