Tag: Labour

Anti-semitism and the Labour leadership race

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It is beyond any doubt that there are people sporting ‘I’ve voted Corbyn’ twibbons on both Twitter and Facebook who have indulged in the most horrendous anti-semitic statements and abuse — awful people who think it’s okay to use language like ‘Jewish scum’ when talking about Israel, or who believe it acceptable to make quasi-racist statements such as ‘not all Jews are bad’.

There are also fanatical Zionists who choose to regard all criticism of the Israel state under any circumstances as anti-semitic. Their campaign to depict the consistently pro-Palestine Corbyn as anti-semitic started some years ago (at least as far back as 2012) but has obviously intensified over the last few months.

There have been some legitimate questions asked of Corbyn in relation to people he has had contact with in the past. He has directly addressed those concerns to the satisfaction of all reasonable parties, explaining that he did not know and could not reasonably have been expected to know that such people held anti-semitic beliefs. Corbyn’s record on anti-racism throughout his political life is absolutely impeccable.

The British media has been playing a very dangerous game in openly suggesting that Corbyn is an anti-semite. It appears that in regularly producing headlines such as ‘Corbyn denies anti-semitic links’ the right-wing media has both achieved its target of associating his name with anti-semitism (possibly as a result attracting anti-semites to his cause), and also evinced and evoked deep-seated anti-semitic impulses in British society. These have found expression among a tiny but vocal minority of his hundreds of thousands of supporters, but are clearly not restricted to them.

As Owen Jones says, we have to be extremely vigilant about each and every instance of anti-semitism wherever we encounter it. We have to publicly and immediately denounce those who express anti-Jewish sentiment. However, the right-wing media and their pro-Israel allies have now developed a new line of attack, saying that anti-semitism is peculiarly common on the British left. This is pernicious. The history of anti-semitism on the right in the UK is very well-known. To pretend that there is a tradition of anti-semitism peculiar to the British left is deeply dishonest and it is designed to destabilise the British left and discredit those who express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. There is a current of anti-semitism in British society. It must be exposed and challenged, but it is deeply wrong and dangerous to summon it up for short-term ideological purposes.

Corbyn, Cooper, Burnham and the other one: A full and fair debate

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Even though the result of the Labour Leadership Election won’t be officially announced until the 12th September, UK betting shops are already paying out to customers who put their money on a Corbyn victory. It’s been a spirited and fractious campaign throughout. Obviously we all knew right from the start (and especially since the unofficial audition for Leader for the Opposition on July 20th — you’re supposed to oppose the Government, guys!)) that Cooper, Burham and the other one never stood a chance of winning (God forbid! They’re unelectable) but it was important to have their names on the ballot paper nonetheless. At the very least no-one can claim it wasn’t a democratic election. A full and frank debate was necessary, and it has certainly been had. Now it’s time to take on the Tories.

What is smearing Jeremy Corbyn destined to achieve?

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So a social democrat of impeccable integrity enthuses hundreds of thousands of people, particularly the young, about the radical potential of parliamentary politics. In response, the entire British political establishment, both politicians and media, launch an incredibly vindictive campaign to smear him on charges which even they don’t believe — and it works. However ludicrous the accusations, they succeed in associating the Corbyn brand with antisemitism, and he loses the election. Someone very similar to the previous Labour leader takes over, and things continue along their previous dismal and disheartening trajectory, towards a point where it’s hard to find anyone who gives two shits about conventional political parties, in fact the very mention of them makes almost everyone extremely angry. The things that politicians say on TV and the reality of people’s lives under endless grinding austerity just do not correspond, and things get worse, and worse, and worse, until someone, a bit like Nigel Farage, but with more plausability and charm, turns up on TV offering easy solutions that exploit people’s sense of powerlessness and frustration (not against the elites, obviously, there’s nothing anyone can do to challenge them, we’ve learnt that, but against more available targets, like those homeless people on the streets who never seem to go away, and all those migrants on TV clamouring for a new life, and who wouldn’t want one of those, and those people whining about how they can’t feed their kids, well why did you have them in the first place then?!, and yes this guy apparently said some unpleasant things about Muslims and Jews, but they kept saying that the Labour guy, the one who lost, was anti-semitic, and personally I really wasn’t so sure it was really true…), and suddenly there’s a new sense of purpose in the air, let’s clean those streets and tidy away the scum littering them, let’s put young people to work guarding our borders…

Have the people at the top of the Labour Party stopped to think for a moment about the consequences of what their no-holds-barred media assaults on Jeremy Corbyn will ultimately achieve?

The smears against Corbyn are, wittingly or not, an assault on our system of democracy. If they are successful, its reputation (and in particular the reputation of the Labour Party) will not be able to recover.

Corbyn and New Labour: Don’t take the electorate for a hippopotamus

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There is no doubt that Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall believe themselves to be in the appropriate political party. They would like to use it to introduce all sorts of radical changes in society. The problem, as they appear to see it, is the voting public. Ordinary people are, to put it bluntly, considerably more stupid and right-wing than they themselves are. They will not vote for progressive social and economic measures. The best that can be hoped for is that they can be nudged, like grumpy cantankerous hippopotamuses, in the right direction. They must be moved gently, without ever appearing to threaten their sense of security and comfort, as the electorate, if riled, will simply lash out, always in the wrong direction. Ordinary people are very susceptible to messages which appeal to their most base instincts, which trigger the sensitive defense mechanisms which surround their senses of identity and security, and appealing to those instincts remains the only proven way to get them to move in the direction you want them to — but only so far, because no matter how gently you try to persuade them, they will never step outside of their comfort zone.

This is New Labour electoral dogma. It is written through the DNA spirals of leadership candidates like a stick of rock. It dictated Harriet Harman’s admonition that Labour must not fall into Osbourne’s trap of being seen to oppose profoundly radical changes to the Welfare State. It is in right there marking the beat of the thoughts of each candidate as they voice their euphemisms about ‘economic credibility’. What has happened over the last few weeks is that it has been shown to be, as it were, hippopotamus shit. Ordinary people are, it transpires, infinitely more politically agile than their aspiring leaders. The effect of this revelation has been deeply traumatic for New Labour. Not only does it fundamentally challenge their view of the electorate and the world in general, it detonates a highly explosive package at the very core of their political identity. And so they are now exploding in all directions, turning in panic to the right-wing media and their emergency weapons of character assasination, trying even to dismantle at whatever cost the electoral apparatus they themselves established in the complacent certainty that voters would never have the courage or the wherewithal to consciously use it to further their own genuine interests.

They must now be aware that even if they managed to successfully rig the election, their shoehorned-in new leader would lack credibility to the extent that Labour would face a historic wipe-out in England similar to the one it has experienced in Scotland, with millions of voters lost to electoral apathy, the far-right and (hopefully) some sort of meaningful left alternative. They must know those things at some level, but the depth of the trauma occasioned by Corbyn’s imminent storming to victory is so great that they appear to have lost all sense of what they are doing and what it is destined to achieve. While the smears against Corbyn are designed to trigger the famous don’t-think-of-an-elephant effect, perhaps a fitting epitaph for New Labour could be: don’t take the electorate for a hippopotamus.