The Labour Right Would Prefer a Johnson Government to a Corbyn One. It’s Time to Replace Them

Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters have been far too nice for far too long to these wicked disgustingly disloyal Tony B Liars rump still plotting and scheming to topple him. They have used very nasty horrible methods to attack us all, they don’t care that they are giving huge ammunition to the terrible tories who are actually supporting openly racist homophobic misogynistic leaders around the world. JVL PLEASE HELP US GET OUR SUPPORT AND VOICES HEARD NOW. They trying to isolate, smear and bully the Labour Party when we should be preparing for an election and a Labour Government to take office.

Agree totally – brilliant response.

I’d like to put in a provocative and I’m sure controversial word for the defence, not just for the sake of being provocative/controversial but to see if there’s any possible discussion with perhaps a way to heal the terrible wounds in the left, and then the fractures in the wider society.

I’ve wanted a Labour government ever since the defeat of 2010, and I wanted it to be a Corbyn-led government, which is why I voted for him in 2015. But what I want to talk about now is encapsulated in the ancient Greek word, ‘kairos’, which by the way has much the same meaning as the Hebrew phrase, ‘she’at kosher’, the opportune moment, the critical time for an action of some kind, or for speaking about something.

For ages we’ve desperately needed a Corbyn project and the leadership to put it across robustly. But from the moment Jeremy himself began to be attacked, I’ve been haunted by the Chris Mullin novel, ‘A Very British Coup’ with its presciently created Corbyn character, Harry Perkins, brought down by a coordinated reactionary force of elite establishment figures, several of the key players hidden from public view in what’s sometimes called ‘the deep state’.

Look at the nature of the country in which we’re living: the rightwing press increasingly now echoed by broadcasters in their mucky so-called journalism, the deeply entrenched power of the City, the military, the arms sales, the murky governmental involvement with nasty, vicious regimes around the world, the growing links with politicians and business leaders in the USA, salivating over the Tory-savaged NHS and other public bodies, as we turn from the EU: I can’t avoid the thought, much as I’m totally against such violence, that nothing will shift this lot with power in the UK at this time short of a bloody revolution. (To be clear, I’m not calling for one and wouldn’t support it.)

But I’m thinking back to 2015 and more recently to all those figures, call them Blairites if you must but I don’t think it helps, who said the things I don’t need to repeat here about why it was a mistake to elect Jeremy to the leadership.

We tend to talk of backstabbers, traitors, (more politely maybe, simply of rightwingers), and worse epithets, but consider a different approach. I’m not referring now to the commentators and broadcasters and a host of civil institutions and pressure groups who would always be hostile to any Labour government (with the possible exception of one led by a Blairite figure). No, I’m talking about those Labour MPs and Labour voters and supporters who genuinely wanted, and wanted to campaign actively for, a Labour government.

My case is that they knew, and some friendly journalists knew (and a couple of them work for the Guardian) that although something like a Corbyn project was long overdue, the time wasn’t kairos, not she’at kosher. The mountain of opposing forces was simply too high, despite the popularity of many of the goals in the 2017 manifesto.

The threat of a Corbyn government was just too great, and the way things are with our mainstream media simply impossible. In particular, as we know, the threat of a Corbyn government to the UK’s relationship with Israel was manifest, involving a complete change regarding arms sales, discourse on the illegal settlements, and lots of other such matters.

It was interesting that towards the end of that Panorama “documentary” hatchet job the other night, someone said that one of the ways Corbyn could start to “redeem” himself (I’m paraphrasing from memory) was for him to say that Israel had a right to exist. Leave aside the philosophical argument as to whether states have “a right” to exist in the way people have, what would it mean for Jeremy to accede to that urging? It would be tantamount to endorsing an apartheid system, the use of torture in army interrogation centres with medical involvement, a semi-starvation programme enforced with criminal brutality in Gaza, an unjust legal system for Palestinians and the rest of it.

(I’m reminded of the suggestion made by Margaret Hodge in a Channel 4 News programme a year or two ago, when asked by Cathy Newman what Corbyn should do to make things better. One of the things top of her agenda for Jeremy was that he should go to visit Yad Vashem. Who was it who was supposed to be bringing Israel into the issue of anti-Jewish prejudice?!)

Finally, Tom Watson. Yes, I know — his past words and behaviour would make Macchiavelli envious (might even shock him as he looked at the depths of the deviousness). But again look at it another way. For all Tom’s record of secret politicking manipulation, cloak-and-dagger, crafty skullduggery, he surely loves the Labour party, he’s Labour to his marrow. It’s certainly not the kind of redblooded socialist Labour party that Jeremy and most of the current membership want, it’s the kind of pragmatic party that is always aware that politics has to be the art of compromise, of balancing conflicting pressures in a free and complex society.

I voted for him for the deputy position in 2015 because (wrongly) I thought he’d be a good foil for Corbyn, able to put across the project message to the PLP, a kind of bridge. Yes, I was wrong there. But I still can’t think of Watson as a traitor, still less (as I’ve seen around recently) a worm, a lowlife, a disgusting creature released by the turning of a rock.

He may sometimes be clumsy and hamfisted, occasionally brutal, an old-style backroom bruiser in his element in what we used to call smokefilled rooms (probably with beer and sandwiches, though I imagine these days he’s not on the beer much). Oh, and that’s another thing: look at the personal discipline, all that weight loss!

I would love to see a more equal society, one at peace with itself, industrious and rewarded fairly for that, a nuclear-weapons-free military, a country that will have renounced belligerency, culturally open, outward-looking, internationalist. Oh, and the real implementation of Robin Cook’s ethical foreign policy, not the watered-down “ethical dimension” version. And I’d love to have seen Corbyn introduce it. But I can’t help thinking that it will come about in an age when — kairos and she’at kosher again — there’ll be Corbyn Halls in every town and probably a statue to the great man, a man before his time, in Parliament Square (I’m not being sarcastic, it will happen).

It’s time to identify The Guardian as one of the enemies of both Labour and Palestine. Another Steve Bell cartoon has just been censored, apparently because Tom Watson was shown as a witchfinder general. The daily diet of anti-Corbyn editorials has become tiresome; we were even treated to yet another piece yesterday by Margaret Hodge. She has nothing new to say but we should be grateful that, this time, she left out the four-letter words.