Labour: a hostile environment for socialists
JVL Introduction
Daniel Finn assesses the “mendacity in British public life” in the light of the findings of the Forde Report – which mainstream media have effectively buried.
He looks at the impossible situation the Corbyn leadership faced, particularly when it was under pressure in 2018 to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Even had it done so immediately, without hesitation, argues Finn, it would not have helped.
The concerns expressed that Jews would be under existential threat from a Corbyn government “lacked any empirical foundation”.
“The only pragmatic course of action available to them [Corbyn’s team] was to stand their ground and state the facts at every opportunity. Above all, they needed to challenge the relentless conflation of support for Palestinian rights with hostility to Jews that underpinned the media campaign against them.”
But the main purpose of this long propaganda campaign, argues Finn, was not to discourage prejudice against Jews at all, or even to protect Israel from scrutiny.
It was, rather, “to create a Labour Party that is a hostile environment for socialists.”
This article was originally published by New Left Review on Mon 26 Sep 2022. Read the original here.
False Compromise
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I think I’ll just answer the speculative point in the last sentence. No, it can’t.
The new definition of anti semitism needs to challenged by the definition of what it is to be a Jew ‘always with the oppressed never with the oppressor ‘
Therefore every vexatious claim of anti semitism can be answered with ‘your not Jewish’ you have none of our humanity
What an excellent article. When antisemitism allegations were first made against Jeremy Corbyn, I thought the Guardian would write an editorial saying that antisemitism is a serious matter and should not be used as a political football in this way.
In fact, the Guardian was central in the antisemitism assault on Corbyn and his supporters – 1,215 articles on the subject in three years: https://declassifieduk.org/how-the-uk-security-services-neutralised-the-countrys-leading-liberal-newspaper/
I couldn’t believe that an apparently once principled newspaper had stooped so low, and even now I find it in some respects at least quite baffling.
This is one of the best short analyses I have read. If the left does not absorb the lessons of these years, it will just repeat them.
Of course it was never going to be anything other than extremely difficult to stand up to the pressure of the establishment which was terrified of the prospect of a Corbyn-led Labour Party.
The ‘antisemitism’ smears were the product of an alliance between the majority establishment tendency within the Parliamentary Labour Party and the pro-Israel lobby – often, not always, the same people.
It was understandable for our left leaders to try to neutralise the attack by being defensive – understandable, but fundamentally a hopeless strategy. They retreated, conceded, apologised and appeased. It didn’t work, and couldn’t have worked, for the simple reason that this attack had precious little to do with any real issue of antisemitism in the party. Yet with every failure our leaders repeated the same remedy, whether it was the failure to defend Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson and so many rank and file mrembers, the failure to hold the line over the IHRA definition of antisemitism or ultimately the failure to defend Jeremy himself.
Many of us have been expelled from the party, a number during the Corbyn years – collateral damage in a bigger war to make the party safe for capital.
We’ve lost this battle. But there will be other fights in the years ahead, though whether these will involve the Labour Party is open to question. In these battles we must be armed with the lessons of previous defeats. That is why this article merits serious attention.
This article is pretty much spot on. It was clear to some of us that the mistake made right at the beginning of this confected crisis was going to be fatal in its consequences: Corbyn should have stood his ground and fought back immediately, before the hostile campaign had properly got under way.
Wouldn’t that have been difficult? Yes, of course it would, but not as difficult as trying to compromise with people utterly opposed to either or both of Palestinian rights and socialism. He could and should have pointed out the political affiliations of those who were making the most noise and insisted they produce actual evidence for their claims, but he did neither.
As one of his friends said to me: “his problem is that he’s too nice”. He expected that taking a conciliatory approach would result in an acceptable compromise, but it was just seen as a signal to ramp up the volume. A more street-wise politician would have listened to Jewish socialists and fought back. The Labour right and the Jewish Tories would have had to back down, because there was no evidence to support their claims.
Now we, as Jewish socialists, have to decide – along with the tens of thousands who have left or been expelled from Labour – how best our views can be represented in Parliament, in Councils and in our communities. It’s clear that we have no future in the Labour Party, whoever is leading it.
So, I emailed the moderators at the Guardian , as I was consistently being moderated, even for single sentence comments such as why is no one discussing the Forde Report. This has been happening for at least a couple of months, in political articles and also rolling coverage of the Labour Party, that it seems that key words and phrases relating to the Forde Report are being actively scanned.
Many a time I would post comments and sometimes it would be moderated immediately, other times there would not be a trace of it having been submitted in the first place.
I was shocked to receive a reply , but below is the email that I have received from one of the moderators (I have excluded his name) .They are pretty much admitting that they are actively censoring any discussion of this.
Hi there,
If a hot button issue has not been covered in the blog then it is generally treated as off topic in the comments section. (It is not tenable for every contentious issue of the day / week / month to be a live topic on any given day. The broad spread of offensive content, flame war exchanges, & legal jeopardy that this would entail would run far beyond our capacity to oversee it. As such we restrict the blog’s discussion to the contentious aspects featured above the line.)
Can I just make a further point in respect of what Daniel said – ie that ‘There was no practical step that the Labour leadership could have taken to address concerns that lacked any empirical foundation. The only pragmatic course of action available to them was to stand their ground and state the facts at every opportunity.’ And he also says that:
‘At leadership level, a significant part of the Labour left made a conscious decision not to challenge the false narrative that was gradually constructed from 2015 onwards.’
Well the A/S smear campaign didn’t really kick off until the end of April 2016 with the Naz Shah/Ken Livingstone episode, and when it was put to him THEN that the party had an A/S crisis, Jeremy DID challenge the false narrative and, as such, denied that there WAS an A/S crisis. And was then attacked and vilified for doing so, and accused of being in denial.
And when – during the following year or two – you’ve got first one ‘moderate’ MP and then another and then another (mostly female MPs) saying that they have received thousands of abusive and/or anti-semitic messages (and all the Angela Eagle stuff as well), how can the leadership possibly challenge THAT.
And time and time again Jeremy said that it was Not being done in his name – ie all the (alleged) abuse and anti-semitism – but his ‘critics’ just kept on claiming and saying that it WAS, over and over again.
Yes this is a very good article. Its main point being that if Corbyn had stood his ground and fought back against those who weaponised anti-Semitism then things might have been very different. We will never know what would have happened because the fight was against the whole of the British Establishment but unfortunately much of the Left, especially Momentum, bought into the false anti-Semitism narrative.
This is why I disagree with Allan Howard when he says:
‘Jeremy DID challenge the false narrative and, as such, denied that there WAS an A/S crisis’.
Jeremy may have denied there was a crisis, at one stage saying there were ‘pockets’ of anti-Semitism’ in the LP, to which the Zionists suggested Corbyn was one of the pockets. But he DID NOT challenge the narrative that there was any anti-Semitism problem or phenomenon in the Labour party.
In particular Corbyn made a critical mistake when he did not take the opportunity of making a big speech or 3
a. condemning anti-Semitism and defining it tightly as per the OED
b. condemning those who weaponised anti-Semitism for political ends. In particular he should have gone for the JLM whilst it was in its infancy. He should have pointed out that they are, in their words, the sister party of the Israeli Labour party.
Instead for the first 2 years Corbyn barely mentioned Palestine and did his best to flatter and embrace the JLM e.g. the Del Singh Award, his adoption of the 38 word part of the IHRA, praising Israel’s judiciary etc.
What Daniel Finn missed out was that Corbyn’s strategy on anti-Semitism was part of an overall strategy of appeasing the Right.
Tony, I must confess that I’ve never heard of the Del Singh Award before, so I just did some research and, as such, read a number of articles. And once I’d done so, it got me to wondering how a winner of the award is selected – ie by whom. Do you happen to know, because I can’t help smelling a rat regards JLM being selected. But what I DID determine is that the leader of the LP always presents the award.
After aligning myself firmly with admirers of Finn’s excellent article, (in which I noted facts I had read elsewhere, but gathered in one place with commentary to provide a sound and comprehensive historical record) I now risk incurring the wrath of any Guardian moderators who happen to be reading this by raising an issue not found ‘above the line’. Namely, why, when the vexed issue of conflation of anti-semitism with support for Palestinians is explored and discussed, is the more fundamental and important question about the motivation for such nonsense so frequently ignored? Surely, if the media, the BOD, the JLM and even Starmer and the Labour right can successfully dismiss support for Palestinians simply as anti-semitism, then any rebuttal unhelpfully becomes the universe of discourse. So what is to be gained from provoking a mere rebuttal? Surely the answer is deflection from the issue of Palestine itself, where the absence of international outrage and sanctions against repeated and persistent breaches of human rights and United Nations resolutions is itself a strange and perplexing phenomenon. How has the Israeli government managed to ensure continuing international complicity with their policies towards the West Bank, Gaza and their residents? That question, it seems to me, is all too frequently unexplored in erudite and otherwise worthwhile articles.