Jeremy Corbyn has been raised from the political dead courtesy of the SWP, the Socialist Party, The Communist Party of Britain, Socialist Alternative and sundry other opportunist organisations. This dishonest and cowardly reactionary should have been left to a much-deserved oblivion. But hundreds descended on his constituency to support him against a Labour candidate, pretending to the world that he had a progressive position on Palestine – although he did not say a word on Palestine in his election leaflet – and that he was anti-Labour – although his leaflet avoided any criticism of Labour, its policies, or its leadership. They also made up stories about how he could lead a new movement or party – although he has made it absolutely clear that he will not.
Corbyn’s supposed radicalism is made up of innumerable fictions. We need to remember that as leader of the Labour Party he had thrown the working class under the bus when he, along with the then Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, ordered Labour-led councils to set legal and therefore cuts budgets completely undermining his promise to lead a campaign against austerity. At every point during the tabloid and Zionist campaign over alleged anti-Semitism in the Labour Party Corbyn capitulated: allowing the expulsion of pro-Palestine activists, capitulating to the most reactionary pro-Zionist MPs and worst of all, endorsing the Zionist IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. He made his peace with Labour’s support for NATO, nuclear weapons and Trident renewal. Throughout, the opportunist left aggressively protected him from any criticism.
Corbyn continues to be clear that despite his expulsion from the Labour Party he will support the Labour government. His October 2023 condemnation of Hamas was an attack on the whole of Palestinian armed resistance and the right to self-determination; it revealed the reactionary essence of his pacifism and how it overlaps with the unashamedly pro-Zionism of the Labour Party. In The Guardian he hopes for a new movement ‘that offers a real alternative to child poverty, inequality and endless war. A movement that provides a real opposition to the far right…[one which] will eventually run in elections’ (12 July 2024) – but not a movement that opposes the Labour government despite its utterly reactionary character. His resurrection means that the opportunists can continue to spin their fictions about his politics, tell us sycophantic stories about how he could or should lead a new party, and in the meantime deflect any serious opposition to the Labour government into harmless channels.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 301 August/September 2024
