How ideology is key to the British state’s assault on the right to protest

Left journalist Ash Sarkar remarked on a recent episode of TyskySour that the police are actively constructing their own ideological narrative about what their job entails. It now includes covering their tracks by physically assaulting journalists reporting on police suppression of non-violent demonstrators. The right to protest is being attacked on two fronts: the physical dispersal and arrest of protesters, and ideological attacks from Boris Johnson and Priti Patel, with no counter-narrative from the Labour opposition.

The Independent reported that video footage from Friday’s protests in Bristol showed demonstrators “some sitting, others with their arms up, chanting ‘we are peaceful, what are you’ as officers use riot shields to push them back – in one instance using the edge of a shield to hit a person who was on the ground.” Daily Mirror reporter Matthew Dresch told the Guardian he was assaulted by police “even though I told them I was from the press. I was respectfully observing what was happening and posed no threat to any of the officers.” 

Ross Tatham, a 24-year-old student, said he was hit in the head by a police officer while standing on the frontlines of the protest. “I was saying ‘I’m peaceful’ and had my hands in the air saying ‘I’m here to protest not to fight’. The officer came and whacked me in the head with a baton. I got dazed and stumbled back. A lot of people got a lot worse than I did. … Further down the line, police were hitting them with the edges of the shield, which is obviously more painful,” he said. “The ones using the edges of the shield – that is done with vicious intent. There wasn’t any physical violence I saw from the protesters. The police didn’t need to clear the streets. The police could have just waited it out.”

This did not stop Patel saying she was “disgusted” by the violence of the protesters, adding “I’m in no doubt the silent, law-abiding majority will be appalled by the actions of this criminal minority.” Johnson chimed in: “Our officers should not have to face having bricks, bottles and fireworks being thrown at them by a mob intent on violence and causing damage to property.” They are portraying protestors as criminals and a violent mob, while at the same time chief constables are presenting the police as caught between their obligation to enforce covid laws in order to protect the public, and the rights of protesters who are breaking these laws. 

The function of these ideological attacks is not only to prime the public and media for the government’s draconian Police Bill restricting any form of protest, but to guide the actions of individual policemen. There is no need for Metropolitan police commissioner Cressida Dick to give them all detailed instructions: they act on their own initiative to deal with those they regard as troublesome. An example of the effect of this ideological framing of the protests is the comments of one policeman when informed that a man had exposed himself to a woman leaving the vigil for Sarah Everard, two weeks ago. The woman told Lambeth Life that a female police officer had indicated it would be investigated, but was overruled by a male officer who told her: “No, we’ve had enough tonight with the rioters” even though the vigil was nonviolent and nobody had accused the women of rioting.

As Ralph Miliband contended, ideology plays an important coordinating role for the state to maintain a central direction over the network of semi-autonomous bureaucracies that compose it. The importance of government affirmation of the legitimacy of police violence is confirmed by the reaction of police chiefs to Patel reneging on her promise to make a public statement urging people not to gather at the Clapham Common vigil. Chiefs felt they were “hung out to dry” by Patel, when she had told them in private that a ban on gatherings had to be enforced, but after the public outcry criticised the images of officers manhandling women, rebuked the Met commissioner and ordered an inquiry into the events. According to the Guardian, “A government source hit back at any complaints from within policing, saying that ‘pinning women to the floor and dragging them away from Clapham Common bandstand was an independent operational decision’ made by the police themselves.” 

The Labour leadership has swallowed the Tory narrative whole, aligning it with the political direction of the government. Shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds told BBC Breakfast that violence was completely unacceptable. She said protesters should be using “other ways of expressing whatever dissatisfaction they have,” taking at face value the statements of the Avon and Somerset police that police violence was a response to physical resistance from the protesters, refusing to blame the police tactic of kettling then charging them with horses and dogs while they were seated and nonviolent. 

To understand why the Labour right is so responsive to the ideological requirements of the British state, it is instructive to look at the politics elaborated by the party’s general secretary, David Evans, in a recent Zoom meeting. He described himself as a nonpolitical “oily rag” only concerned with the efficient working of the party’s electoral machine. “My business is running the Labour Party and to supply the people on this call with the very best possible election machine to help us win power,” he said. His highly political role in suspending left party members is thus subsumed by an ideological statement that aims at depoliticizing Labour’s constituency parties.

More significantly, he cites what he calls “Maslowian” politics, which implies a hierarchy of needs, as the justification for his argument for embracing the patriotism of conservative Labour voters. First of all, he says, “they have to have confidence you’ll look after their money, you’ll keep them secure, before you have permission to talk about their aspirations for a better life, about the benevolent society which as Labour Party members we want to get to.” He thus repudiates social welfare, the common good, in favour of individual security identified with personal capital. This makes the foundation of the British state – defence of property – the precondition for Labour politics, and enables social democratic values to be replaced with traditional “patriotism.” “The voters we try to reconnect with have Englishness as their identity,” he said, adding that his Labour-voting friends “have no problem literally wrapping themselves in the George cross.” 

Parallel to the way the British state is organized, individual regional officials do not need to be instructed directly to suppress discussion in CLPs or suspend their officers: the officials share Evans’ philosophy and so automatically remove those whom they perceive to interfere with the workings of the “machine.” And they are not above working with central office bureaucrats to facilitate their aims – as in the case of the selection of Paul Williams as the single male candidate on the shortlist for the Hartlepool parliamentary byelection. A leaked email exposed the local Labour right’s arrangements to foist their choice on the membership: “With a single candidate short list being fairly controversial (and with certain factions in the party certain to try to make a grab or call foul) LOTO [Leader of the Opposition’s office] require a formal letter from us to the NEC requesting that Paul be our candidate. The left will make a big deal of this and paint the selection as a stitch up by Starmer. We need to make it absolutely clear that these arrangements ore local and that, in the absence of a full selection process and the choice of a local candidate, Paul is the choice of the CLP.”

It is hard to understate how rightwing the thinking of these officials is, how reactionary and contemptuous of both the membership and the electorate. So when regional officials interfere in CLP elections, it is not necessarily because of a party-wide conspiracy to purge the left. It’s a result of the officials actively internalizing the direction of the central office. Since the officials, mostly young graduates, are intent on building a career in the Labour party machine, they are not going to tolerate even the slightest divergence from the general secretary’s recommendations.

The frustration of party members needs to be directed at dismantling the Labour right’s ideology by reaffirming social democratic values against its championing of property-owning selfishness, and continuing to fight for democracy within the party. Regional offices should be disbanded – they are perennially useless even in elections – and the funds retained for local use.

Yes, the Labour party is in the throes of a major crisis

Anna Rothery speaking in Liverpool

What else could you call it? Members are resigning en masse; volunteer constituency officers are being suspended across the country; the parliamentary front bench is unable to effectively challenge government corruption; thousands of people are dead because Boris Johnson was so obsessed with Brexit that he paid no attention to the pandemic when early action would have saved lives. And yet Labour has not made any inroads onto the Tories’ popularity because its leadership is blind to the nature of the historical moment.

Keir Starmer’s recent refusal to call for health minister Matt Hancock’s resignation after he was found guilty of breaking the law, and his decision to oppose corporate tax increases, are based on the electoral calculations of the party’s right: they believe that opposing the government in the middle of the pandemic would be seen as unpatriotic by the conservative ex-Labour voters the party wants to win back. But these calculations are based on the assumption that parliamentary elections will follow traditional rules, despite the fact that the Tories broke every rule in the book in 2019. The perspective of preparing for an election in 2024 by moving the party to the centre-right does not take into account the ways in which the government has been taken over by an extremist Tory group which will whip up its Brexit base with ever more outrageous denunciations of “the enemy within,” amplified by its direct collaboration with the media. 

The Labour right’s factional assault on the left is weakening the party and destroying its chances of winning elections. Bureaucratic manoeuvering in Liverpool, just as in Bristol, shows the development of an absolute antagonism between the party’s regional bureaucracies and the local memberships. Whereas previous Labour leaders have been able to hold the different parts of the Labour coalition together, Starmer has deliberately deepened the divide between left and right by maintaining Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the parliamentary party.

In Liverpool, Labour’s slate of candidates for the city’s mayoral election was scrapped on the same day that ballots were due to be distributed, after the intervention of a “right-wing mafia”, according to Skwawkbox. A six-person committee reinterviewed the candidates and decided to get a new shortlist, but the three women candidates were given no explanation, were excluded from the new list, and were kept in the dark about the decision until a global email was sent to all Liverpool party members. Favourite to win was Anna Rothery, a popular black, socialist, Liverpool councillor, who told the Guardian that she was “shocked by the party’s chaotic handling of the selection” and may seek an injunction against the decision.

Whatever the reason for selecting a new slate, the process was so secretive that members can only speculate that the intervention was to prevent a Corbyn-supporting politician becoming the new Liverpool mayor. The heavy-handed and politically incompetent interference by the right has the effect of cementing the perception that Labour is biased against its Black and Asian members as well as being anti-democratic. Liverpool is one of the strongest Labour bastions in the country, but its voters will not take kindly to candidates parachuted in from outside the area. Secretary of Walton CLP Alan Gibbons writes that some of the city’s Constituency Labour Parties are considering emergency motions, “condemning the alleged lack of transparency, U-turns and failures of process involved in the selections.” Liverpool councillors are considering voting to scrap the post of mayor completely at an emergency council meeting. “It scuppers the plans of Labour nationally, but there is not much HQ could do to stop it now,” says Elliot Chappell at LabourList.

In the constituencies, supporters of the leadership’s right-wing turn are telling members to ignore the anti-democratic actions of regional officials and rally behind Starmer to campaign in May’s local elections. But why campaign to elect a Labour council when they are being made responsible for measures to alleviate the effects of the pandemic with no additional government funding? Because of austerity cuts, councils are now dependent on council tax revenue at a time when, according to a new report from Citizens Advice, 11 percent of those furloughed are behind on their tax bills, together with 33 percent of those on zero-hours contracts. If they default, the penalties are severe because debt collection is governed by inflexible, centrally-determined regulations with a maximum penalty (in England) of three months’ jail time. Parliamentary objections to the government’s funding of councils won’t register with voters who see families facing jail for nonpayment of tax. 

UPDATE: According to Skwawkbox, “councillors in London and elsewhere are being warned by their regional offices on behalf of CCHQ2 that any councillors who dare to vote against budgets set in line with the Tory cuts that have blighted the lives of the poor and vulnerable for more than a decade  will face ‘very significant’ disciplinary sanctions and likely deselection.”

As Joe Guinan pointed out in Tribune, “politics as usual” ignores the multiple overlapping crises facing society. Not just the pandemic, but racism, a staggering economy, and environmental instability as major weather events flood parts of Yorkshire, freeze homes in Texas, and melt the permafrost in Siberia. Labour needs big ideas to address these emergencies. And it already has ambitious ideas, contained in the 2017 and 2019 manifestos. Socialist thinkers in the Corbyn era, says Guinan, charted a viable political-economic path forward that tackled the crises of “economic and regional inequality, climate change and financialisation (to which we would now need to add Covid recovery).” What is required is the delivery of “fundamental structural changes to the everyday functioning of the economic system itself” that move power away from the City of London to held-back regions and communities.

However, the Labour right are feverishly eliminating any policy or party candidate that could conceivably be reminiscent of “Corbynism.” Unless members take action to restore a socialist perspective, the Labour party will continue to decay and degenerate. That is why Momentum’s call for the NEC to organise an immediate recall conference should be supported. It will have the purpose of “restoring party democracy and achieving genuine unity as the only means for the party to achieve victory at forthcoming elections,” says Momentum.

In the longer term, however, the left needs to build a new movement of counter-power. There is no short cut to putting down roots in communities and participating in existing grassroots struggles. Transformative change will depend on the collaborative efforts of specific groups within communities to make a difference in people’s lives.

Book Review: “In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West,” by Wendy Brown

This is not an easy book to read, but I think it’s an important one. Recent events have given extra potency to political theorist Wendy Brown’s analysis of the rise of right-wing populist movements globally. Brown argues that these movements are part of a new social formation, brought into being through neoliberalism’s attacks on notions of society and the public good. There is an extended interview with the author in Jacobin magazine, which amplifies these points. 

Brown points out that the left’s analysis of populism as a response to the working-class experience of abandonment and betrayal does not register the subjective forces – racism, nihilism, assaults on constitutional democracy – that had the ground for them prepared by neoliberal rationality during the 2010s. Decades of neoliberal attacks on democracy, equality and society melded with a nihilism manifested as broken faith in truth, in fact-based argument and enlightenment values.

Drawing on Nietzsche’s philosophy enables Brown to follow the logic of nihilism in the separation of traditional values from their connection to social life, which then empties them of substance and enables them to be instrumentalized and taken over by the extreme right. The Tories continue this nihilistic campaign with their “war on woke” and deification of Churchill and Britain “standing alone” in 1940. But the most potent impact of nihilism in politics has been the attack on the left as anti-semitic. Here the values of the left itself are wrenched from their social foundations, enabling hostility to anti-semitism to be inverted and weaponized against Jeremy Corbyn, the most resolute of anti-racists in the Labour party.

The effect of this nihilism was to generate an anti-democratic culture from below while legitimizing anti-democratic forms of state power from above. As it saturated popular discourse, the neoliberal attack on the social reframed the culture wars and “produced massive disorientation for the left,” asserts Brown. The subjective effects of neoliberal economy fused with apparent ideological opposites, authoritarian neoconservatism or nostalgic nationalism, to create an antidemocratic citizenry that “expects neither truth nor accountability in governance and state actions.” The inegalitarianism of daily life manifested in tiered pricing of service access and treatment accustoms the subject to inequality but also intensifies the resentment of those left behind. 

While privatization is the economic face of neoliberalism, she argues, it is coupled with extending the protected private sphere so as to delegitimize the concept of social welfare provision and political democracy. The rights of the individual become politicized in such a way as to make them vulnerable to the substitution of contractual relationships for human connections. Traditional values are asserted as a replacement for these connections, but are unmoored from their social foundations, which makes their meaning superficial and easily instrumentalized against democratic political life.

The neoliberal deprecation of the political and the social releases the nihilistic subject from the constraints of conscience and gives rise to the aggression and viciousness of cable news and social media. Trump’s boorishness and rule breaking makes the white male supremacism at the heart of traditional values more explicit, whose waning “is a crucial spur to his support.” If neoliberalism is only conceived as a political rationality privileging markets, she says, “we cannot grasp the affective investments in privileges of whiteness” in national culture and morality, or the way “the hierarchies and exclusions of ‘tradition’ legitimately challenged democratic equality in the name of both family values and freedom.”

The Trumpist assault on the US Capitol in January is a dramatic confirmation of her argument. The Atlantic published a survey of the arrest records of those suspected of taking part in the riot, which found that a large majority were middle-aged, middle-class, and had no connection to far-right militias but were willing to join them in a “new kind of violent mass movement” to overturn a presidential election. The Capitol riot, it says, “revealed a new force in American politics—not merely a mix of right-wing organizations, but a broader mass political movement that has violence at its core and draws strength even from places where Trump supporters are in the minority.”

Reducing neoliberalism to economic policy alone blinds us to tectonic shifts in the consciousness of social space, says Brown. The first of these is the “lost horizon of the nation-state consequent to globalization;” the world has invaded the nation and transformed the existential conditions for the whole population. The second shift is the neoliberal destruction of the social, dissolving civic equality and concern for the common good into a market order. The third is the rise of finance capital, untethered to a tangible presence in the nation-state. 

The result is a social division between those rooted in a particular space and those who embrace a cosmopolitan, deterritorialized existence – a loss of the significance of family, tradition and religion. For the subject, “the toxic mix of nihilism, fatalism and ressentiment with neoliberal assaults on the social” leads it to rage against secular cosmopolitans embracing racial indeterminacy, gender fluidity, and other manifestations of social complexity. The privatization of everything, the attack on public ownership, made it easier for right-wing politicians to argue for the belonging of the nation to an ethno-nationalist population which was being invaded by outsiders.

The particular form of anti-democratic politics is necessarily different in different nation-states. Brown’s examples are mainly taken from the United States, but in Europe it is easy to discern parallel developments. Marine Le Pen in France and Pegida/AfD in Germany are expressions of such a trend, likewise the Vote Leave campaign in the UK. Right-wing Tories sensed the potential of the Brexit vote to disrupt the political order, and were attuned to it in a way that Labour was not. The left did not take this movement seriously enough and focused instead on economic issues, not grasping that the subjective roots of the Brexit vote lay deep in decades of marginalization and erosion of social values. 

Both left and right wings of Labour misunderstood the nature of Johnson’s appeal in the 2019 election. Sabrina Huck pointed out: “VoteLeave’s strategists manufactured a constituency for the referendum based on a system of social listening and targeting that was at that point unseen in political campaigning. … This coalition that VoteLeave constructed is the force that catapulted the Conservatives to power in December. They tapped into a feeling of loss and decline, deflected from their own political role in administering the closure of industries and lack of investment in the area by focusing on the European Union, remainers and ‘metropolitan elites’ as adversaries.” 

In a converse development, a radical democratic demand and vision is emerging from social movements like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion, presenting “a kind of naked demand on the part of the people for a better world and a world in which power was not concentrated, held, used against us, used against the planet,” says Brown in her interview. Labour has to restore its connection to the social – for example by using what parliamentary prestige it has left to back community movements that are springing up around the defence of the NHS against Tory predation and protesting the appalling death toll from Covid-19.

Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West, Columbia UP, New York, 2019

Storming the Capitol: A riot or an attempted coup?

Juan Cole cogently argues the case that Donald Trump intended to overturn the US presidential election result through an attempted coup. The ex-president followed a three-pronged strategy, says Cole: first, a propaganda campaign relayed by Twitter and Fox news that he had actually won the election but it had been stolen by irregularities in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. In all of these swing states, Latino and African American voters gave Biden the margin of victory – enabling Trump to exploit dog-whistle racism. 

The second prong was to browbeat and intimidate Republican election officials in those states to refuse to certify a Biden win. When these attempts failed, Trump resorted to his third plan which was to pressure Congress with a mass rally of the far right on January 6th. He intended to intimidate Pence and legislators with chaos and violence so as to derail Biden’s confirmation. Since some 140 congressional Republicans and 8 senators continued to support Trump’s attempt even after the mob had threated to kill or kidnap them, it was not altogether implausible.

Jacobin writers Daniel Bessner and Amber A’Lee Frost maintain, on the other hand, that the event was a mass riot responding to the idea that the election had been rigged. QAnon – a quasi-religious cult motivated by social dislocation, alienation, and resentment – was disproportionately represented among the insurgents. “As became clear once QAnon-ers entered the Capitol, they had no genuine strategy and no genuine program, instead relying on a millenarian faith that Trump would deliver them from the rule of elite pedophiles, heal the sick, comfort the poor, and establish a New Jerusalem. … Very clearly, they can’t overturn an election. Despite an alarming number of veterans and police officers, they have nowhere near the numbers to prevent security services from murdering them (at the very least, the elites who control American violence are not on board with Q).”

QAnon is a symptom of the derailing of rational thought brought about by years of neoliberal devaluing of political institutions and the idea that people’s lives can be improved within the system. Its bizarre conspiracy theories provide meaning in dislocated lives. Trump himself is another symptom, as Patrick Cockburn points out; he is the product of “a particular toxic variant of American nationalism now dominant in the Republican Party. It is rooted in a culture shaped by slavery, the Civil War between North and South, a century of Jim Crow discrimination against blacks, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and the reaction against it. It was this past that produced the white, male, Christian non-metropolitan voters who saw Trump as their saviour.”

The coup attempt – if it was one – was bound to fail because Trump had been unable to get the US military to abandon its traditional stance of impartiality, but it is fair to say that the extreme right benefited from a show of strength. What Trump achieved during his presidency by amplifying and encouraging the extreme white supremacist right was to break down the distinction between them and mainstream Republican party discourse, and by the same token make explicit the supremacist subtext of the Republican party’s message. However, that is far from saying that all Trump’s supporters identify themselves with the far right. The only thing that united and animated the disparate groups at the riot was their belief in Trump’s claim that the election had been stolen.

Elle Reeve covered the rally for CNN and has a lot of experience reporting on rightwing rallies. She comments: “People say Donald Trump plus the Internet brings out the extremists. But I think the reality is an inversion of that: that Donald Trump plus the Internet brings extremism to the masses. There are many more regular people now who believe extreme things – who believe there’s a secret cabal of pedophiles at the very top of the American government. … Most of the people [at the rally] do not think of themselves as white nationalists. Do not want to be seen as racist. I’ve interviewed a lot of them and they’re like, ‘We want nothing to do with those guys.’ But that said, the parallels are, when this huge swarm of people who’ve been active online finally get to meet each other in person. And there’s this thrill of it and it’s very high energy ≠ but they’ve also been anonymous for so long – it kind of relieves them of the responsibility for their actions.” 

Benjamin Schiller of International Policy Digest interviewed Dan Moran, a participant in Trump’s rally and a lifelong conservative. He had imagined that there would be thousands of Trump supporters taking part in a peaceful protest. On the march to the Capitol, “everything seemed fine (with) no issues.” As challenges were made in Congress to Biden’s election certification, Moran noticed men dressed in body armour and helmets, strapped with large megaphones and radio equipment. “I thought little of it then, so I continued to lead the group (from Missouri) through the crowd upright to the foot of the Capitol,” recalled Moran.

The group from Missouri arrived at the Capitol Reflecting Pool. “We stayed in this spot for a good while, and what we saw was the people that had reached the platform on top of the scaffolding started announcing through their megaphones to ‘advance! Move up!’ The messages were then copied and announced again by nearly every person that had a megaphone scattered throughout the crowd,” said Moran. As the police attempted to hold back the advancing crowd, “the message being spread from atop the scaffolding was ‘Pence has betrayed us! They are traitors!’ “ 

“Some of the people who walked by us seemed to be debating whether or not to charge the Capitol, and others I heard seemed to be debating whether or not to go around to the other side of the Capitol where apparently the Capitol had already been breached,” said Moran. After seeing a female protestor having an adverse reaction from pepper spray, he knew that it was getting dangerous for his group’s older members. “My group at this point decided to leave the event because what started as a show of support for President Trump had been turned into a riot and attack on the Capitol and the police,” he said.

Governmental institutions are still strong and the insurgents were easily defeated once reinforcements arrived, but there were clearly individuals from organized militia groups who had come prepared to take over the building and even to capture Congress members. “That was a heavily trained group of militia terrorists that attacked us,” said an African American officer with the Capitol police, who has been with the department for more than a decade. “They had radios, we found them, they had two-way communicators and earpieces. They had bear spray. They had flash bangs …. These guys were military trained. A lot of them were former military,” the officer said.

President Joe Biden’s call for national unity may play well with the Republican establishment, but the polarization of its base will not go away. It is a lot bigger than Trump. Talking Points Memo reported that “A full 70 percent of Republican voters in a Quinnipiac Poll released January 11 said that the Republican lawmakers who tried to stop the formal certification of President-Elect Joe Biden’s win were protecting democracy. Only 23 percent said they were undermining it. … The Republican numbers are similar in an ABC/Washington Post poll released Friday: of the 78 percent who approve of GOP lawmakers’ attempts to help Trump overturn the election, 51 percent said they didn’t go far enough. A mere 16 percent of Republicans said their attempts went too far.”

“These polls lay bare the massive problems with both holding Republicans to account for their behavior and purging Trump from the party. Trump’s poisonous election conspiracy theories, amplified by Republican lawmakers, have effectively seeped into the worldview of their constituents captured by this polling. Even if they don’t like the invading of the Capitol itself, the majority of Republicans appear to agree with the rioters’ underlying fury stemming from a conviction that the November election was stolen, and that Trump’s administration is coming to an unfairly early end.”

A three-word slogan like “Stop the Steal” can focus a whole universe of discontents. In Britain, Boris Johnson was able to mobilize leave voters behind “Get Brexit Done” in the 2019 election, that equally focused the nationalist response to unemployment and lack of prospects. Now the Tories are trying to conjure up more identity politics around furlough benefits and asylum seekers, not to mention statues. What is striking is the inability of the Labour opposition to successfully challenge the government from within the parliamentary system. Johnson is still able to leverage the identification of Leave voters to sustain the Tory base. 

Labour is taking all the wrong lessons from Biden’s victory. The Democrats did not succeed by winning back white working-class voters from Trump — that didn’t happen. They won by expanding the electorate in the key swing states through grassroots campaigning aimed at African American and Latino American voters. Labour needs to learn from this experience. The party will not win elections by dialing back its policies and focusing on socially conservative voters, despite Starmer’s promises. Activists need to look for inspiration elsewhere: Jeremy Corbyn’s initiative in setting up the Peace and Justice project can be welcomed as a step to creating new connections between activists in Britain and with international organizations. It makes it possible to come to grips with the deep-seated roots of people’s despair in the midst of overwhelming crises and to offer a perspective of change through their own efforts, in alliance with others across the world fighting the effects of neoliberal politics.

Corbyn makes a stand for social justice and political hope

Jeremy Corbyn has launched a new organisation with the aim of bringing people together for social justice, peace and human rights, in Britain and across the world. He said the new organisation, called the Project for Peace and Justice, will not be a new political party, but a platform for campaigns, for social movements and trade unions, sustaining research into common problems and their solutions, and becoming a means of building networks for progressive change. 

He stated: “It’s there to create space, hope and opportunity for those campaigning for social justice and a future that works for the many, not the few,” adding that “we can build on the popular socialist policies developed in the Labour Party over the past five years. This year, many of us have felt powerless in the face of forces beyond our control. It doesn’t have to be like that. Things can, and they will, change.”

The new organisation will provide a political home for the many thousands of Labour party members who have left in protest at the Starmer leadership’s policies and its vindictive treatment of Corbyn himself, and those who remain in the party but are prevented by bureaucratic officials from discussing or taking a stand on social or international issues. 

It also creates a forum for the dissemination of socialist ideas independent of the rules of the Labour hierarchy. What is even more important is that it reconnects the social and the political, reinforcing the idea that democratic political action can change the world, recognizing a joint human fate across national borders.

The Starmer leadership is sending the opposite message. By removing the parliamentary whip from Jeremy Corbyn and unleashing the attack dogs of the party bureaucracy on local branches, it is signalling that social dissent must be confined to the parliamentary system, that all hopes of effecting real change should be forgotten, and the party must dispense with the idea that its political campaigning should actually engage social issues.

In one revealing example, Squawkbox reports that a party official wrote to the Bath CLP warning them that their plan to donate money to homeless charities and food banks was “not an appropriate use of funds,” which should only be used for returning Labour representatives to parliament or local government. He threatened: “If I become aware that the CLP has voted on and in support of this proposal I will instruct the CLP Treasurer that the funds should not be released and then seek guidance from the Governance and Legal Unit on possible further action.”

Supporting the local community is not seen by this official as in any way strengthening the party’s relation with the electorate. Instead, as Squawkbox points out, “Bath CLP was told that it must put forward a plan to prove how it will support the party’s campaign to elect its candidate in next year’s election for the south-west region’s mayor – and if the regional office likes the plan, only then might the party approve the spending on homeless people, poor children and the hungry.”

The implication of this intervention is to restrict the sphere of the political to the drab routines of leafletting and knocking on doors for the benefit of Labour candidates, and thereby wear down or eliminate the democratic energies of the membership who might be concerned with building the party’s political base in the community.

This dovetails with the neo-New Labour demand by general secretary David Evans that political discussion in the branches should be shut down in order to protect the sensibilities of individual members with different political agendas. He emailed local party officials in November that motions on the suspension of the whip from Jeremy Corbyn – including expressions of solidarity – would be “ruled out of order” because they provided “a flashpoint for the expression of views that undermine the Labour Party’s ability to provide a safe and welcoming space for all members, in particular our Jewish members”. In a second email, he wrote that the party must “double down” on “anything” that may cause members to feel unwelcome or unsafe, and that members’ rights of free speech are subordinate to the beliefs of anyone who might object to a viewpoint being expressed. 

This is much more than an arbitrary decision by the general secretary. These draconian moves are driven by the inability of the Starmer leadership to resist the authoritarian drift of the Labour right wing. Its long-term strategy is to encourage the suspension of branch officers and members who might elect radical delegates to the 2021 party conference. The two Labour councillors from the Jewish Labour Movement who gathered statements for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission admitted to the Guardian that their aim was to suppress grassroots’ influence in the party conference. Adam Langleblen, who left the party after losing his council seat, and Peter Mason both consider that Labour has to do more than just accept the EHRC’s recommendations. “It’s going to be how Keir Starmer deals with the [Jewish] community more broadly, but also the party politically and the culture,” Mason said. “If Labour conference were to convene today, with the same delegates from 2019, there’s not a single recommendation that the EHRC could make that would survive conference floor.”

While focusing on its factional fight against the left, the Starmer leadership has let slide the Johnson government’s authoritarian concentration of power in the executive. Every day government decisions are being made without parliamentary consultation, on Brexit or the lockdown tier system that blatantly discriminates against the north and Labour-voting regions. Unlike Harold Wilson, who while being an unscrupulous opportunist knew enough to be able to keep the party together, Starmer has shown himself to be politically inept by splitting Labour while the Tory government has awarded multi-million pound contracts to cronies in a blatantly corrupt process, has thrown money away on PPE contracts, has presided over thousands of unnecessary covid deaths, and has steered the country into a no-deal Brexit. 

Government officials have shown no shame or remorse for any of this, and no wonder: they pay no significant price for blatantly lying. The nature of politics has changed, but the Labour front bench acts as though parliament can continue with business as usual. Corbyn’s former policy chief Andrew Fisher pointed out that it has framed its forensic criticisms of the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic in terms of wasting money. “Let’s call it what it is: corruption,” he said. “There’s a lack of political analysis, of framing the debate.” 

The nature of this new politics can be discussed by Labour members who can join Corbyn’s new project individually, or support local constituency parties who are already beginning to affiliate to the project, allowing their members to refresh their political enthusiasm unencumbered by right-wing officials. It also serves to send a message of dissent from the broken promises of the Starmer party leadership.

Book Review: Owen Jones’ “This Land: The Story of a Movement”

The book’s title is somewhat misleading: it’s the inside story of the circle of advisers and strategists around Jeremy Corbyn’s office, not the story of the movement that backed him. Jones gives a lively account of Corbyn’s election as party leader and the immediate attempts by the parliamentary party to unseat him. He describes the initial disorganisation of the leader’s office confronted with the infighting of the party bureaucracy, which was resolved when the calling of the 2017 general election gave the Corbyn team a new focus: an “insurgent, take-on-the-elite populism.”

The party’s relative success in the election led to new problems, in particular the need to articulate a coherent policy on Brexit. Jones argues that the Corbyn leadership missed the chance to make clear it would not support a second referendum and present instead an alternate Brexit plan that would focus on workers’ rights and jobs. That didn’t happen: it’s easy to say these things in hindsight, but at the time the party as a whole was conflicted over whether to advocate a progressive leave strategy, or work to stay in the EU.

Jones points out that the Remain movement, which gathered steam through 2018, had the support of many in the membership who reacted to the xenophobia of Tory Brexit propaganda. But there were also bad actors within Labour who saw Brexit “as a convenient wedge issue, something to provoke a split between the Labour leadership and the largely pro-Remain Labour membership,” as he puts it – including hostile MPs and even more hostile political operatives like Peter Mandelson.

The compromises made at the 2018 party conference on the issue “catastrophically damaged” Corbyn, says Jones. Keir Starmer broke with party policy to advocate a second referendum with Remain on the ballot. But by attempting to bridge the sides in the cabinet, Corbyn, says Jones, “had spent the two and a half years since the election in a constant but erratic retreat from accepting the referendum result,” and by 2019 voters saw him as “weak, indecisive and a flipflopper.” Jones implicitly blames Corbyn’s indecision for the conflicts within his leadership team. But he doesn’t discuss the ideological confusion over Brexit on the left, some tending to submerge it under domestic economic issues, although he credits Seumas Milne with keeping Labour’s Brexit position “intentionally vague.”

Were the accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party all the responsibility of the leader? Or were there larger social forces at work? The support for Corbyn had channeled the mass antiwar movement of 2003 into the electoral system. This posed a challenge to the military and intelligence communities in the Anglo-Israeli-American alliance as well as the lucrative British arms industry with its links to both Labour and Tory politicians, both closely connected to the media. Corbyn’s foreign policy plans that would have ended the selling of arms to Saudi Arabia were a threat to these entrenched forces, and they worked assiduously to discredit him.

At first, as Jones points out, the onslaught against Corbyn centred on his lack of patriotism, then on his contacts with the IRA during the peace agreement negotiations, then on his initial decision to accept the results of the Brexit referendum. But the anti-semitism allegations were more difficult to defend against. They were taken up and amplified by Corbyn’s many political opponents in the establishment.

After Jones gives a sanitized version of the relations between Israel and Labour, he gives the impression that more effective political messaging would have dealt with the accusations. He criticizes Labour’s responses as being ad hoc, there was “no coherent strategy within the leader’s office on how to tackle claims of antisemitism,” he says. Corbyn’s public interventions “were often angry and defensive, centring on his lifelong opposition to racism.” After Margaret Hodge called Corbyn “a fucking antisemite” in the House of Commons, he was “shaken up;” when John McDonnell attempted to patch things up with Hodge, fearing a split in the PLP, Corbyn refused to speak with him and became detached from his staff. According to Karie Murphy, “he was paralysed. He was being asked to do things that in some way would confirm in people’s miinds that the reason he had to do those things was because he was antisemitic.”

Jones blames the “lack of both strategy and emotional intelligence” on the part of the leadership, which he thinks should from the start have “displayed an uncompromising opposition to antisemitism, and offered more vocal support for the Palestinian cause.” But Corbyn’s defensiveness “led him to disengage and shut down when antisemitism was discussed … Corbyn’s slow-motion collapse encapsulated that of the movement. The relationships within the leader’s office had started to crumble.” This begs the question of whether any form of strategic appeasement would have ended the assault from social forces hostile in the extreme to a socialist foreign policy. The fragmentation of the Corbyn leadership team reflected not just its unpreparedness, but the extent of the establishment’s opposition to a socialist agenda. If Corbyn appeared to be “broken” by the antisemitism claims, that demonstrated the extent of his isolation at a time when he was trying to hold the party together.

Jones constructs another narrative of leadership paralysis after Johnson took over the Tory party – it was “frozen in the headlights of Johnson’s victory.” When Tom Watson faced being sacked, “as usual, Corbyn, when faced with an impasse, had gone AWOL.” But Jones is an unreliable witness when he discusses the 2019 conference vote on a second referendum. Out of two competing resolutions, one advocated that the party remain neutral in the referendum, while the other mandated it to campaign for Remain. Delegates voted down the Remain motion, while according to Jones “during the whole process Corbyn himself had been withdrawn, almost invisible.” Jones was at the conference, as I was, so he knows that during this time the Supreme Court was adjudicating the legality of Johnson’s prorogation of parliament. Corbyn was working with MPs at Westminster to work out some kind of strategy. Before the vote on the referendum he intervened at the conference with a compelling speech arguing that the party should advocate for a neutral stance in any forthcoming referendum – which is why it was carried. He was hardly “invisible.”

Although Jones acknowledges that Corbyn was driven by a deep-rooted commitment to building a world free of exploitation and racism, he concludes that Corbyn’s aversion to conflict “rendered him chronically indecisive, and his leadership sometimes directionless and rudderless.” Corbyn was in an impossible position: “His stubbornness ensured his survival in the face of an unprecedented assault from every direction, but it also left him all too defensive and contributed to a bunker mentality some of his allies perpetuated.” Jones thinks it a tragedy for the left that McDonnell never assumed the leadership. But whether members would have voted for him, “whether there was something about Corbyn’s personality … that was key to his triumph” is untestable. But he leaves the question of what that “something” was unanswered.

Perhaps a better coda to Jones’ narrative is Craig Murray’s comments about the leaked report on rightwing factionalism within the Labour bureaucracy. He says it is hard to read the report without concluding that Corbyn lacked the requisite ruthlessness to deal with his enemies in the party. “But then, his not being a ruthless bastard is why so many people flocked to support Corbyn in the first place.”

Owen Jones, This Land: The Story of a Movement, Allen Lane/Penguin Random House, 2020

Can British Labour learn from Biden’s defeat of Trump?

Joe Biden’s clear victory in the US presidential election has prevented Donald Trump from doing what he threatened: using what journalist Patrick Cockburn calls the “Turkish playbook” to cling to power. This is, he explains, a “strategy employed by several populist national leaders across the world in recent years to stay in power by prematurely claiming a win at the polls, and then manipulating the final result in their favour through their control of state institutions, such as election supervisory boards and the courts.” The classic example is Erdogan in Turkey.

Anticipated violence at the polls never materialised: the electoral system quietly and efficiently dealt with a huge number of mail-in votes. But Trump leaves behind a legacy of a packed Supreme Court and appointees to the federal judiciary. To rebalance the courts would require a Democratic majority in the Senate, but the party leadership’s strategy of channeling resources to handpicked centrist candidates in the hope of winning over moderate Republicans (if they still exist) failed miserably. Novara Media pointed out: “As progressive Democrats were sidelined by the leadership, [Senate minority leader Chuck] Schumer threw millions of dollars into his appeasement slate. And by the time of the election on Tuesday, upwards of $350m had been spent on [failed] Senate races in South Carolina, Kentucky, Iowa, North Carolina, Maine and Montana. Meanwhile, in West Virginia and Tennessee, where progressive Democrats claimed the nomination, candidates were comparatively starved of resources – $1.1m and $400,000 were spent respectively on the races of Paula Jean Swearingham and Marquita Bradshaw.”  

On the other hand, Sanders-inspired socialists in Congress like “The Squad” – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts – were reelected with significantly increased majorities. Two more socialist-backed candidates were added to their number: Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep.-elect Jamaal Bow­man in New York, and Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep.-elect Cori Bush, the first ever Black Con­gress­woman in Missouri. 

So it’s laughable that centrists in the British Labour party like Wes Streeting could tweet “Definitely need to learn lessons from the Democrats. Particularly the part where they won,” crediting Biden’s centrism for the result. Streeting completely misunderstands US politics: Trump increased his vote share from white Americans while Biden benefited from the community organising of Latino, Black and Asian Americans who had been campaigning over the last four years against voter suppression and racial discrimination. In Georgia, campaigns to expand the electorate after Stacey Abrams’ narrow defeat in the 2018 gubernatorial election proved that increased nonwhite voter turnout could change the balance of power in the state irrespective of the white vote. In Arizona and Nevada, a decade of organising by Mexican-Americans against discrimination energised the Latino community. Rashida Tlaib mas­sive­ly increased vot­er turnout in Michigan from the 2016 election. And Biden’s majority in Pennsylvania, which clinched the presidency for him, was owed to campaigning by organisations such as Reclaim Philadelphia, a group focused on working-class issues founded in 2016 by local organisers.

Biden had to take on board policy positions from the Sanders campaign: notably his version of the Green New Deal, an increase in minimum wage, and an expansion of Obamacare (if not Medicare for All). After Bernie Sanders gave Biden his support, a de facto Democratic coalition extending from conservatives to the progressive left worked to overturn Trump’s presidency. 

Far from learning from the presidential election, the Labour party centrists have adopted the opposite strategy. Instead of uniting the party to fight Boris Johnson’s corrupt and incompetent government, they are doing their best to marginalise the Corbyn left. Community organising won Biden the presidency, but Labour’s plan is to shut down the party’s Community Organising Unit. Starmer is slavishly imitating the mistakes of the Democratic party establishment by pinning his electability on winning votes from disaffected Tories. He won the leadership by promising to continue the party’s 2017 and 2019 policies, but has broken his pledges at the first opportunity. After getting elected on the basis of a lie, Starmer is carrying out his own pale version of the Turkish playbook by using control of the party apparatus to purge any opposition.

Labour’s General Secretary David Evans has emailed all local party officials to warn them he will “not hesitate to take action” if members are allowed to discuss Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension or the EHRC report at meetings. But the Starmer leadership has seriously misjudged the party membership. It expected to be able to unite the rightwing of the party with centrist neoliberals while intimidating the left with threats of lawfare. The middle of the road membership was supposed to stay inactive while this was going on, but instead has been outraged. While not necessarily supporting Corbyn politically, they identify with his ethical socialism because it forms the DNA of the party.

The result has been to polarise much of the party membership against the bureaucracy. This is significant because it brings to a head a simmering member discontent with arbitrary officialdom, especially over its role in the general elections, even if they approve Starmer’s politically inept approach to opposing the Johnson government.

Constituency parties are defying the General Secretary and party officials by passing resolutions condemning Corbyn’s suspension and taking to social media to publicise them. One of the first is South Thanet Labour Party which voted by an overwhelming majority to call for Corbyn to be reinstated. According to their Facebook page, chair Norman Thomas said he thought the vote reflected widespread anger among Labour Party members. He said: “Jeremy is not an antisemite, he is a man of utter integrity. I believe it’s a measure of how much the party establishment fears Jeremy that they have taken this incredible and outrageous decision.” 

Welsh Labour Grassroots, the Welsh equivalent of Momentum, said the suspension was an “unwarranted attack on those many thousands of Labour Party members who were and remain inspired by Jeremy’s socialist vision and principles, who now feel let down by the leadership’s action”. Blyth Valley CLP in the northeast formally expressed solidarity with Jeremy Corbyn – and demanded his immediate reinstatement. 

At the important London Regional Executive Committee, meeting over Zoom, delegates from Unite the Union attempted to share an emergency motion that called on the party leadership to restore the Labour whip to Corbyn. On their Facebook page, the London REC reported: “A clear majority of members voted to hear the motion but staff advised they could not be present during the debate as it was not ‘competent business’. The staff turned off their cameras and chose not to participate until the next item of business.” While the motion was debated, a party officer prevented the vote from going ahead by removing the chair as a co-host of the Zoom call, disabling his control of the voting functions. The report calls this “clear interference from staff who should be neutral in the democratic decision-making of the Labour Party.”

Momentum national coordinating representative Mick Moore declared after the meeting: “The Labour leadership and their allies in the party are embarking on an authoritarian, factional crackdown. First they told members they couldn’t meet over lockdown, then they tried to ban motions on the suspension of a former leader, and now they are preventing members from exercising their democratic rights – party unity is being systematically undermined by a culture of control-freakery and forced silence.”

Hilary Wainwright writes eloquently in the Guardian that, “contrary to the mainstream perspective, the Corbyn period was not ‘an aberration’, but a period of renewal and growth that now needs to be built on and expanded, not destroyed, in order to unite to bring down this cruel, incompetent and now divided government. In the interests of free expression, party unity and party renewal, his voice and that of his supporters must be part of the debate and his membership reinstated.”

UPDATE: Keir Starmer has jumped on Biden’s bandwagon, suggesting that the Democrats won with a “broad coalition, including many of the states and communities that four years ago turned away from them.” Starmer is trying to make an analogy with the “red wall” voters Labour lost in the last election; but he conveniently ignores that the grassroots organising in key states that won the election for Biden did not succeed in convincing Republican voters to abandon Trump, but instead extended the nonwhite Democratic electorate in key states. Labour also needs community organising to rebuild its base, but how can the party do this when it is losing members at a great rate?

What a Labour government would do differently about Covid-19

Andrew Fisher, former adviser to Jeremy Corbyn, has been pilloried by the more dogmatic sections of the left for calling for an alliance of the Labour left with supporters of Keir Starmer in order to defend the party’s policy programme. The left should not go back into a self-imposed “sealed tomb,” he said.

Fisher’s complete argument, however, published in OpenDemocracy, is considerably more nuanced. The Corbyn left’s rise and fall in the party was the consequence of “structural factors,” he says: the left was simply not prepared to manage a major political party, and Momentum’s original purpose of transforming the party into a social movement was diverted because of the huge resistance from the PLP and the senior staff at party headquarters. When Corbyn took the leadership in 2015, the Labour left was not an organised force within the party’s institutions. “This long-standing absence of an organised Left imposed material constraints on Corbyn’s leadership from the start.”

But, he points out, “The structural conditions that gave rise to Corbynism still persist. The Left is in a stronger position than it was in 2015. The membership is still favourable to the key tenets of the policy agenda (as is much of the public). The new party leader ran on a 10-pledge policy platform almost identical to Corbyn in 2015, and called the 2017 manifesto (unfathomable for decades in Labour politics) his ‘foundational document’.”

The shift in the centre ground of debate within the party means that “the Left can play a constructive (and, when necessary, constructively critical) role that reflects both our influence and the position of the current leadership … the Labour Left must work constructively to build on the best of Corbynism’s legacy, while organising to remove the structural factors that inhibited its success.” 

Fisher doesn’t include the party bureaucracy in the structural factors. But Martin Smith, a community organiser who ran Labour’s campaign bus in the 2017 election, came up against the entrenched prejudices of headquarters staff, which he calls a party within the party. He thinks that the biggest threat to the election of a future Labour government is “the overwhelming scale and depth of centrist groupthink and confirmation bias among Party staffers on all matters, big and small, which stems from the dominance of single faction monoculture. What divides the Party is not mere ideology between centrists and the Left but organisational and bureaucratic control and power.”

Paid officials loyal to this faction have almost unchallenged control over the appointment of regional organisers, and from there “who gets shortlisted and selected as candidates in elections, and who sits on the NEC. And all too often with the coordinated assistance of people the monoculture has placed in the political departments of major affiliated trade unions.” The elected members of the NEC need to “take back control of the Party machine and bring in more diverse voices and experience … [and] reform the process of selecting candidates to tackle the domineering ability of the Party staff culture to ‘pick winners’ from among their friends.”

The NEC needs to take back control in the course of upholding the party’s policies, particularly those in the 2019 manifesto. These policies constructively address the problems surfacing because of the coronavirus crisis. Yet when members of the opposition front bench are asked what they would do differently about the pandemic, they are unable to articulate the manifesto policies of insourcing public services and ending the presumption in favour of privatising them. Instead, they criticise the government for failing to act rapidly and aggressively enough along its current course.

Aditya Chakrabortty writes in the Guardian that the sidelining of the public sector is directly responsible for the current chaos in the “test and trace” system. “The Nobel laureate and head of the Francis Crick Institute, Sir Paul Nurse, wrote three times to Downing Street and Hancock at the start of the pandemic, offering to coordinate university labs to help the NHS in testing for Covid. Had his proposal been taken up, he says, up to 100,000 tests a day might have been done from very early on. That alone could have avoided some of the deaths in our care homes. He didn’t get a reply, so his institute went ahead anyway. Similarly, nearly 70 leading virus experts wrote twice to Downing Street’s top scientists offering to help. As public health officials working at local and regional level, they were brushed off. Control was centralised. Even after all the lethal errors, Hancock and Johnson plough on, offering a vast £5bn contract for private companies to take over Covid testing.”

In a letter seen by the Independent, the experts warned that the privatisation strategy would cause problems that would “inevitably cost lives” yet were “wholly avoidable.”  The government decision to commission private sector laboratories they considered a major mistake that was made too late and without consultation. The experts said “privatised labs were often taking 72 hours from the time they received tests to determine a result – by which point the results were of no use for wider strategy or policy. By contrast, they said local labs could give results in six hours from the point the test is taken.”

The private sector Lighthouse labs were set up by the accountancy firm Deloitte, bypassing the NHS and the public health network. Prof Alan McNally, of the Institute of Microbiology and Infection at Birmingham University, who helped set up the first private Lighthouse lab in Milton Keynes, said it was hard to know why tests were unavailable. “It is the most closely guarded secret in the UK right now,” he told BBC Radio 4. “I wish that there would have been some clarity and honesty and open communication. If this was Public Heath England or the NHS that was running this testing system, there would be full transparency and public disclosure of what the issues were.” It was fairly clear, he said, that the private labs were intended to be a long-term replacement for the public health network. 

Allan Wilson, the president of the Institute of Biomedical Science, the professional body for lab scientists, said more openness from the private sector labs was essential. They had not disclosed how many tests they were able to carry out, and may now be overwhelmed because their capacity was insufficient. He said the secrecy was frustrating and that he didn’t think the Lighthouse labs ever reached the capacity that was hoped. “That’s been exposed because there is a bulge in demand.” He said the two pillars – NHS and Lighthouse – should be merged and samples taken and processed locally.

The case for consolidating testing and contact tracing through the NHS and local public health teams is overwhelming. This is what a Labour government would do differently, and it is about time the Labour front bench asserted it against the Johnson government’s shambles of a privately-run system. When the new NEC is elected, the left should seek the membership’s support for insisting the leadership fulfil its promises of defending the party’s policies. 

No need to wait and hope. The left has every right to fight for party democracy.

Jeremy Corbyn has thrown his hat into the dispute over the internal Labour party report that revealed the extent of factional activity by senior functionaries that could have cost Labour the 2017 election. 

Corbyn and his 2017 election committee have made a submission to the Forde inquiry set up by Keir Starmer to investigate the leaked report, claiming that the diversion of funds under the control of hostile officials could constitute fraud. The report alleges that they set up a “secret operation,” hidden from the leadership, in a separate Westminster office location as part of efforts to shape the election result to favour the rightwing. 

The report states that the aim of the operation “appears to have been to funnel additional resources into seats of key figures on the right of the party.” The leadership was pushing for resources to be targeted at key Tory marginals, but instead they were funneled into seats “that would actually – thanks to the ‘Corbyn surge’ – return overwhelming Labour majorities, such as those of Tom Watson and Yvette Cooper. Other key figures from the right of the party in completely safe seats, such as Angela Eagle, Heidi Alexander, Chuka Umuna, Rachel Reeves, also received additional funding, as well as Facebook advertising.”

The Guardian reports that the joint submission said: “If claims in the report of significant sums of money being spent on such actions without authority are correct, then the inquiry must consider ‘whether it may have constituted fraudulent activity’.”

The significance of the report is that it gives context to the motives of the party officials who were promoted as “whistleblowers” in the BBC  Panorama programme “Is Labour anti-semitic?” The party pushed back by criticising the partisan nature of the accusations, which prompted lawsuits by the officials involved.

Starmer circumvented the lawsuits with an apology and payment of substantial damages, which undercut the party’s rebuttal of the accusations. He justified his action with the claim that the Corbyn left had been defeated in the 2019 election and it was time to draw a line under the Corbyn era. The party, he said, was now under “new management.” However, the left was not defeated in that election and the party’s manifesto policies remain popular. Labour lost because it was up against a reactionary Tory populism that broke all the election rules to denigrate Corbyn, and because the right-centrists in the party saddled it with the policy of a second referendum.

Starmer was elected as party leader by winning the votes of a large number of Corbyn supporters through promising to respect Labour’s ethical values, end factionalism and win elections. But if we revisit his soft-left election statement from January 2020 it is profoundly ambiguous. His initial sentence states he has “always been motivated by a burning desire to tackle inequality and injustice, to stand up for the powerless against the powerful. That’s my socialism.” Note that he envisages himself as a (literal) knight in shining armour defending the powerless, not as an agent who will enable the powerless and marginalised to stand up for themselves – which was always Corbyn’s perspective. He goes on to say: “Labour’s values are my values: peace, justice, equality and dignity for all.” But these values can only be realised within a common culture of cooperation and equality. In practice, Starmer has not treated party members as equals with equal rights. Instead, he defers to the established social hierarchy. 

For example, Starmer has visited a number of constituencies without informing the local party and excluding them from his appearances. In July, he visited the coastal town of Falmouth in Cornwall and called for support for the tourism sector. But Jennifer Forbes, who was the party’s Truro and Falmouth candidate in 2019, and a Momentum supporter, pointed out: “First he failed on courtesy to contact the CLP exec, or myself as ex-PPC. Having worked for 70 hours a week for nearly 2 years. I know a thing or two about what worked in Truro & Falmouth – we learnt, and had some valuable successes. As has been noted elsewhere, his visit was organised along factional lines. So, we were snubbed. Besides the rudeness, there are two significant problems with this. One: he promised unity. I really want him to just try a little to deliver on that. He seems to be doing the opposite & that’s not good enough for the whole party.”

“Secondly and most importantly, he got the policy issues embarrassingly wrong. Twitter picked it up before he even arrived. One of the poorest counties in the UK does not need more of the same [increased tourism]. The polices we put forward to expand the docks and the green industrial revolution were hugely popular because they were based on what the voters want. Tourists might want to protect our tourism industry, but locals want more high quality jobs.”

Starmer also visited Stoke-on-Trent in early August, which Labour lost badly in the election. He met with former MPs Ruth Smeeth and Gareth Snell, who both lost their seats, but ignored local activists. A Facebook comment read: “Local Labour party activists who have a wealth of knowledge on the community were not invited – nor even informed of his visit. But he invited Blairite rejects Ruth Smeeth and Gareth Snell to join him …”

He has used the ideological narrative that the Corbyn left were responsible for the election defeat in order to encourage the right to suppress and exclude the left in the constituencies. A clash is likely over party democracy: Starmer’s appointment of rightwinger David Evans as General Secretary, together with hints in the party’s report on the General Election result, point to a downgrading of the party conference in deciding policy. Evans wrote a report for Blair in 1999 that advocated “representative democracy should as far as possible be abolished in the Party.” He proposed that General Committees in local Labour Parties be replaced with a smaller “working Executive” in order to marginalise the left. 

The left needs to prepare for a fight to prevent the gains of the Corbyn era from being rolled back. The rightwing narrative about the election defeat must be rejected and confidence restored by bringing together socialists as a group. Writing in Red Pepper, Momentum activist Sabrina Huck proposes: “Rather than taking over Labour in order to win elections and take over the bourgeois democratic state, we should see the party as a platform to agitate and educate from. … For the Labour Party to be a useful instrument we cannot shy away from arguments within the party for the sake of ‘unity’. If the party at present captures the constituency in British society that is most interested in socialist change, then focusing on mobilising them to consolidate a critically minded group must remain our main goal. A focus on internal battles is a distraction from this more important task.

“The Labour Party should be viewed as a catalyst that can equip us with skills, resources and people to work towards building an alternative public sphere and erecting the counter institutions that support it.” In other words, she suggests, the Labour party can function as a temporary scaffolding that can be discarded when counter institutions have been constructed.

Even in the current circumstances where constituency parties are unable to meet, it is still possible for the left to cohere around the Corbyn team’s submission to the Forde inquiry. Moreover, the huge sum raised spontaneously by Labour members for Corbyn’s legal defence against the threat of a libel action by John Ware, the maker of the BBC Panorama programme, shows that his supporters are still a political force.

Communities will find their own voices – despite the Labour right

The Labour ex-staffers who took part in the BBC Panorama programme purporting to show that the party is anti-semitic are threatening to bankrupt it unless the parliamentary whip is withdrawn from Jeremy Corbyn. The party is now caught between the accumulation of financial settlements with a hostile anti-Corbyn faction and the slump in membership dues as Corbyn supporters drop out.

The programme maker, John Ware, is to take Corbyn himself to court for libel because of his criticism of the Panorama settlement. The “whistleblowers” who were interviewed are reportedly “astonished” at the fact that Corbyn is resisting the characterisation of antisemitism; what they have all overlooked is his supporters in the party who have raised over £300,000 in a few days to pay for his legal defence.

Carole Morgan, who organised the defence fund, wrote that she needed to express her support for Corbyn and found that many people felt the same way. “Those of us who have always longed for a better world, one that ensures dignity, security and peace for all humanity found ourselves voiceless after the terrible general election result and the subsequent loss of Jeremy as our democratically elected Leader of the Labour Party. Through Jeremy’s fund we have found our voice again.” 

Why are all the agencies of the British establishment so determined to destroy Corbyn politically? After all, Keir Starmer and the right have re-established their firm control over the party and Corbyn himself has been relegated to the back benches. A material factor in the explanation is the extent to which Corbyn shocked and alarmed the political class with Labour’s strong showing in the 2017 election. It was then that accusations of anti-semitism were ramped up, culminating in the Panorama programme shown just six months before the 2019 election.

Corbyn’s firm defence of colonial peoples against state oppression, including that of the Palestinians, breaks from Labour’s traditional alignment with Tory support for the arms trade and overseas wars. If he had become Prime Minister, the balance of European support for countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel would have been tipped in favour of the oppressed.

Should activists leave Labour now? That must be an individual decision based on concrete circumstances, but it is worth considering why the ruling elite are so determined to control the party ideologically – as signalled by the 10 pledges candidates for the Labour leadership were made to sign in exchange for not being witchhunted for anti-semitism. Why is it so important to prevent Labour showing any political opposition to the populist right? 

The establishment anticipates mass protests after the economic impact of Brexit and the coronavirus crisis begins to hit the public. They do not want a Corbyn left to legitimise these protests with any recognised presence in Labour, and so far Starmer has acquiesced with this requirement.

Corbyn’s legal stand provides a new focus for clarifying the anti-semitism canard, but it doesn’t have the same popular impact as his leadership campaign in 2015. The problem for the left is its ideological confusion, which centres on contested narratives of the 2019 election loss. Those who supported Corbyn had expected at the very least another hung parliament, if not a small Labour lead, so the 80-seat Tory majority disoriented and demoralised them. It’s not surprising, then, that Keir Starmer’s appeal to “electability” and promises to continue with the party’s radical policies won him support when Labour had to elect a new leader.

But there are different narratives about Labour’s electability. There is what I will term the “sociological” account, made recently by former Corbyn adviser Andrew Murray in Tribune, that points to “class disintegration” in the north and midlands seats where Labour’s vote dropped sharply. No longer does the “entwining of work, community, trade union and party” underpin a cultural affinity to Labour, he says, and so the Brexit politics of identity filled the vacuum created by the collapse of class consciousness. Corbynism was “unable to cut through” in working-class communities with a message of economic solidarity.

The answer for Labour, he suggests, is to find enough political compromises with disaffected voters so as to rebuild its electoral presence in northern communities. But this views these communities as objects to be negotiated with from the outside, as part of a set of coalitions, rather than acting on their own account. Murray can only hope that Starmer will “lead the long march from the security of North London to the battleground industrial hinterlands” – in other words, rebuild Labour’s putative coalition from above.

A different narrative about the election stresses the Johnson government’s populist success in shifting Labour from being the anti-establishment party to being perceived as part of the establishment opposition to fulfilling the Brexit referendum decision. “Class politics,” which Murray seeks to re-establish, is back already from the point of view of the grassroots – because of the attacks of the ideologically vicious Tory government. 

Andy Searson, a Labour activist and working-class thinker from South Yorkshire, argues in a guest article for Skwawkbox that working-class communities can only be revived from below. Socialism is “just an abstract idea,” he says, if it’s not tangibly related to people’s everyday experiences. For this reason, “community control of economic frameworks” is needed to create an economic practice of fair-shares equality. He emphases the need to find local leaders, “those who instinctively stand up for their community,” to serve as local election candidates. Rebuilding trust with the voting public depends on “a new generation of authentic, altruistic candidates.”

A new base is needed for the movement that doesn’t rely on the past solidarity of industrial trade unionism. He contends that the answer can be found in the communities already. “There are huge amounts of people already engaged in working for the common good within our communities. Unsung heroes who work tirelessly for no reward other than the feeling that they’ve achieved something positive for someone else. … Nearly always these people are driven by social conscience not personal gain. They’re unwilling to walk by on the other side whilst they [see] suffering or people in need. They see value in the idea of working for the ‘common good’.”

The Labour leadership has no appetite for the radical change that people are demanding. But what about the thousands of members who signed up to the party to support Corbyn? Searson foresees the danger of a “major split” if Labour continues on its present trajectory. “Without the will or commitment for real systemic change, more citizens will become indignant, disenfranchised and without a voice,” he concludes. “In those circumstances, people will find their own voices and organise outside the usual main party structures. That moment may be here sooner than we think – and it will come from the ground up.”