Whatever the outcome of the Labour leadership contest on 4 April, the ruling class will have no fears. Its Zionist shock troops in the form of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (BoD) have cracked the whip, and all the leadership candidates have jumped with equal alacrity to the dog-whistle of anti-Semitism. Once again, the Labour Party has shown that it remains a pro-Zionist party, and that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and influence have not made a jot of difference. The candidates’ response to the renewed attack has proved a litmus test for how they would respond to any serious ruling class pressure, and their collective cowardice exposes the reactionary nonsense of the opportunist left that the Labour Party can be a vehicle for progress or social change. ROBERT CLOUGH reports.
Referring to what it described as the ‘anti-Semitism crisis’ in the Labour Party, the BoD demanded that candidates for the leadership and deputy leadership positions sign up to ten pledges. Together they are designed to expel any pro-Palestinian sentiment from the Labour Party. One pledge, that Labour establishes an independent disciplinary process, would essentially hand over anyone designated an anti-Semite because of their support for the Palestinian people to a kangaroo court stuffed with Zionists. Another requires that any member who campaigns for or supports someone suspended or expelled for anti-Semitism should be themselves suspended from membership. This would have required Labour to suspend anyone who defended Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker or Marc Wadsworth against the falsified charges of anti-Semitism they faced, or campaigned for their re-admission. Such members would then be hauled before the ‘independent’ disciplinary process and summarily expelled, while a further pledge would then make that expulsion life-long without appeal.
The political motivation is quite clear: the BoD’s demands that Labour implement the IHRA definition without caveat, and that ‘it be used as the basis of considering anti-Semitism cases.’ Although Labour had capitulated to the Zionist campaign over the false allegations of anti-Semitism within the Party by adopting the full IHRA definition in September 2018, it had issued an accompanying statement saying that adoption of the definition and accompanying examples will not infringe the right to criticise Israel. This was even then unacceptable to the Zionists: criticism of Israel has to be banned altogether. The BoD also demands that Labour re-engage the virulently Zionist Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) to lead training on anti-Semitism, and that Labour should only engage with the ‘Jewish community via its main representative groups’ – that is, those Zionist groups approved by the BoD – and not through ‘fringe groups’ which are by implication anti-Zionist and would include the likes of Jewish Voice for Labour and Jewdas.
The five leadership candidates – Rebecca Long-Bailey, Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry, Lisa Nandy and at the time Jess Phillips – acceded to the BoD’s demands without reservation and so sided with the ruling class against the Palestinian people. Both Jess Phillips and Emily Thornberry are anyway members of Labour Friends of Israel. Long-Bailey, touted as the left-wing candidate, already has form on this: in July 2019, she told the JLM that Chris Williamson should not be in the Labour Party and that she did not know how he had not been expelled. Even then she was calling for an ‘independent body’ to review complaints of anti-Semitism, so her endorsement of the BoD’s pledges should come as no surprise, especially given the fact that her chosen campaign manager is Momentum leader Jon Lansman. Lansman has repeatedly echoed spurious claims of widespread anti-Semitism within the Labour Party and supported the expulsion of both Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson.
There has not been a squeak of support for the Palestinian people – all the leadership candidates have thrown them under the bus in pursuit of their personal ambitions. Their behaviour reveals how rotten the Labour Party remains after four years of Corbyn’s leadership. From the point at which he became leader the ruling class decided that he could only head a Labour government if he proved he would protect British imperialist interests, especially in the Middle East. He was to be whipped into line: no British government would be allowed to defend the Palestinian people or break the alliance with the Zionist state. For four years the ruling class orchestrated a witch hunt fabricating evidence that pro-Palestinian figures in the Labour Party were anti-Semitic; that anti-Semitism had spread uncontrollably throughout the Party, and that Corbyn himself had both endorsed this and had prevented the expulsion of those supposedly guilty of anti-Semitism. At every point Corbyn capitulated as he:
- opposed the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign;
- argued that calling Zionism a racist ideology is a ‘mistake’;
- spoke of his ‘admiration’ of ‘the separation of legal and political powers in the system of democratic government’ in the Zionist state without mentioning the racist oppression of the Palestinian people;
- endorsed the adoption of the IHRA anti-Semitism definition even though all sections of the Palestinian movement had denounced it as Zionist;
- failed to challenge the pro-Boris Johnson right wing white South African Chief Rabbi’s attack on Labour during the election campaign.
Two candidates for the deputy leadership, Richard Burgon and Dawn Butler – have refused to sign up to the BoD’s pledges. But both are utterly mealy-mouthed about it: Burgon wants clarification on how an outsourced complaints procedure would work, while Butler wants to implement the Equalities and Human Rights Commission report when its investigation into the Labour Party is published. Neither made any reference to Zionism or the Palestinian people when they announced their positions at hustings in Liverpool on 18 January. BoD President Marie van der Zyl, who had enthusiastically described Johnson’s general election victory as a ‘historic achievement’ while ignoring his proven racism, denounced both Burgon and Butler for ‘fighting the Jewish community about who gets to define our oppression’. This comes from someone who absolutely opposes the right of the Palestinian people to ‘define their oppression’ and instead endorses their ethnic cleansing, their dispossession and the murderous Zionist suppression of their resistance.
The response of the opportunist left inside and outside the Labour Party has been to double down on their fantasy that Labour is a force for progress. Momentum, for instance, has declared its support for Long-Bailey, claiming that ‘She’s the only candidate that will take on the political establishment’ when she had just conclusively demonstrated that she would not. In an interview with The Guardian, she spoke of meeting two of her constituents: ‘They were working class but they’d bought their own house, they’d worked hard, they felt they should be rewarded for working hard, they didn’t want to think that other people were getting handouts.’ What was important, she said, was to support such individual aspiration rather than say ‘we are going to save you’ – whatever that might mean.
Essentially Long-Bailey wants to appeal to the sort of petit bourgeois sentiment that Thatcher had created during the 1980s and which Blair latched on to as Labour built the electoral coalition which delivered the 1997 landslide. And to make clear her intent, she also wants to lay more stress on ‘national security’, saying ‘My approach to things would be very different … I think it’s important to make sure that people know that you’re going to keep them safe. Now that’s what Jeremy was going to do but sometimes that message didn’t come across.’ Her appeal to a ‘progressive patriotism’, a patriotism ‘rooted in working life, built on unity and pride in the common interests and shared life of everyone’, is a desperate appeal to the Tory-voting working class, as well as showing the right wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party how harmless she will be. The Labour left will have to be content with the crumbs of her uncritical appraisal of Corbyn’s leadership during the election campaign, and her endorsement of open selection of MPs, which will go nowhere, just as it did under Corbyn’s leadership.
There is no excuse for the Labour left. All it is concerned about is its own position, its hopes for preferment, for seats on councils or in parliament. It has connived in preventing any serious challenge to the cuts, national or local; it has covered up for the complete failure of trade unions to champion the interests of the working class. Its contempt for the oppressed is epitomised by its refusal to break with leaders who regard the Palestinian people as a disposable inconvenience in their efforts to make up to the Zionists. It has no principles: it does not matter who wins the leadership election, whether it is the cowardly Long-Bailey or current front runner millionaire Starmer, the Labour left will still be peddling its reactionary defence of a rotten party. We must not let it get away with this brazen contempt for the working class and oppressed.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 274, February/March 2020
