- Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corby by Garbriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, Bodley Head, 376pp, £18.99 hardback.
- This Land: The Story of a Movement by Owen Jones, Allen Lane, 336pp, £20 hardback.
Reviewing these two books on Corbyn and his meteoric ascent into the leadership of the Labour Party after decades on the back-benches, and his disastrous performance in the 2019 general election requires a conceptual framework which can explain both. Neither of these books presents one which adequately explains this period in the history of the Labour Party. Both concentrate on the internal battles within Labour and how the party under Corbyn’s leadership responded to media pressures, but are unable to answer two basic questions: why was Corbyn elected, and was his defeat inevitable?
Pogrund and Maguire use the leaked March 2020 internal Labour Party report on its Governance and Legal Unit extensively to reveal the internal battles that were taking place throughout Corbyn’s leadership especially in the last two years. They dwell on his personal qualities to explain why in the end he failed: his reluctance to confront or decide difficult questions especially if they concerned individuals, his tendency to retreat into his shell or go AWOL when under attack. Although they work for the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times, their portrait of Corbyn is sympathetic. Their description of how Corbyn virtually collapsed under the pressure that followed the 2017 general election shows that he was never a leader, and it is an indictment of the Labour left which supposed the contrary. The thought that Corbyn, lauded during his 2015 leadership election campaign as a purveyor of a kinder, gentler kind of politics, would then be able to express the class hatred necessary to energise a working class movement against austerity was always wide of the mark. He had after all sat out decades as a Labour MP unwilling to countenance any break from a party complicit in war crimes and which in government between 1997 and 2010 had shown a vicious hostility towards asylum seekers, migrants and benefit claimants.
Unwilling then to lead opposition to these ruling class agents, reluctant to stand in the 2015 leadership contest, Corbyn wanted above all to avoid any confrontation with political opponents: maintaining Labour Party unity was to be his lodestone. His promise of a mass movement against austerity – key to his victory in both the 2015 and 2016 leadership elections – never materialised for the same reason. He could not lead the Labour Party against Labour-run councils which had chosen to implement cuts rather than mobilise opposition to austerity. But the promise was key: he was a safety valve for millions frustrated at the absence of resistance to the onslaught on working class living conditions, and the spectacle of four pro-austerity MPs fighting for the Labour leadership at the start of the 2015 election campaign opened the party to ridicule. Corbyn’s necessity was not to promote debate in the Labour Party (Jones, p49), but to make sure there were no consequences if the conclusions of the debate challenged the interests of the ruling class.
The 2017 general election is regarded as Corbynism’s high point even though Labour lost. But already there was a harbinger of the 2019 disaster: as Pogrund and Maguire point out, ‘Labour MPs whose seats had voted to Leave in 2016 saw the Tory vote increase dramatically even if they were still safe’ (p33). Six seats did in fact fall to the Tories. The divisions within the working class exposed by the 2016 EU referendum were still very present, and the May 2019 European elections confirmed this with Nigel Farage’s Brexit party taking over five million votes, more than double that for Labour which also lost Remainers to the Lib Dems. The result brought Prime Minster May’s resignation, and Boris Johnson’s election as Tory leader.
It was a combination of Brexit and the ‘anti-Semitism crisis’ that accounted for Corbyn. The yawning gap between sections of the working class who supported Remain and those who wanted to ‘Get Brexit done’ could not be bridged by the various formulae offered at different times by the Labour Party leadership. The division ripped apart Corbyn’s office as its members tried to find a slogan which could counteract Johnson’s simplistic chauvinist appeal; in the final weeks, even before the election, it had become almost completely dysfunctional (Pogrund and Maguire, pp262f), the sacking of Karie Murphy as chief of staff in October highlighting how deep the internal crisis had become.
This might have mattered less if there had been an effective response to the claims of rampant anti-Semitism within the Party. But this was impossible given Corbyn’s commitment to Labour Party unity: the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) were pro-Zionist, many being members of Labour Friends of Israel. Yet when he was being accused himself of being anti-Semitic, for instance by Labour MP Margaret Hodge, Corbyn refused to go on the offensive. Maguire and Pogrund suggest (eg p321) it was because he could not comprehend why he of all people was being accused of racism. Yet Corbyn’s personal sensitivity is not an adequate explanation for his paralysis: it was the fact that any rebuttal would have required a confrontation with the dominant Zionist wing of the PLP and split the Party, dooming either or both wings to parliamentary irrelevance.
Hence when the BBC aired the grossly biased Panorama programme Is Labour anti-Semitic?, the focus of the Labour leadership was the whistleblowers, explicitly urging supporters ‘DO NOT ADVANCE ANY GENERAL CRITICISM of Panorama or the show’ (emphasis in the original, cited Pogrund and Maguire p245). Excluded from any criticism were the four anonymous Zionist activists and officials – including Ella Rose, presented as an unnamed but tearful Labour Party activist, but in reality a former Israeli embassy employee and, at the time of the programme, Director of the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). Attacking her or the underhand way in which she and the other Zionists were presented could only be done in the context of defending the struggle of the Palestinian people. Pogrund and Maguire fail to point out Panorama’s dishonest representation of the Zionist activists despite spending about four pages (pp242-245) on the programme and Labour’s response to it: they do not understand the politics involved. Compounding this is the very gentle treatment of Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and his widely-publicised attack on Corbyn two weeks before the 2019 general election. Pogrund and Maguire paint a picture of the Chief Rabbi agonising over what he should say but do not contrast this to the effusive congratulations he offered the overtly racist Johnson when he won the Tory leadership election weeks earlier. No agonies evident there.
Owen Jones writes for The Guardian, the paper which probably did the most political damage to Corbyn. It was relentless in its pursuit of every Labour misdemeanour, real or imagined; it was as if every one of its highly-paid columnists were waging a personal vendetta. Jones himself was far more disingenuous, adding his pennyworth to the anti-Semitism crisis as what can best be described as a shamefaced apologia for Zionism. Hence he writes that ‘When the 1967 Six-Day War led to the Israeli annexation of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel came to resemble a colonial occupier. To some [on the radical left – RC] the Palestinians came to resemble the Algerians: a subjugated Arab people struggle against a European settler state. With the right-wing Likud party in power, Israel jettisoned its original socialist principles’ (p218, emphasis added). But, Jones says, Israel is not really like a European colonial-settler state, because it was ‘founded by victims of unimaginable horrors seeking a refuge’ (p219). That the establishment of an Israeli state had been a Zionist project since even before the Balfour Declaration of 1917 is ignored in this cod history, or the fact that Jewish refugees were denied entry into Britain and the US in order to force their settlement in Palestine. It is a colonial-settler state, envisaged and established as such, with the forced removal of nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian population. Its supposed socialist principles were for the gullible.
Jones continues: ‘For many Palestinians, the concept of Zionism cannot be separated from their lived experience of occupation and deprivation of their own right to national self-determination’ (p219, again, emphasis added). Not all Palestinians, it would seem, have an objection to Zionism. But it provides a neat connection for Jones to argue that ‘Different sensitivities apply to discussion in the West’ (ibid). It turns out that this means that we should not be quite so sensitive to the opinions of ‘many Palestinians’ as we should be towards the 59% of British Jews who support Zionism, and the 90% who support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state (pp219-220), and indeed that ‘For many Jews, angry denunciations of “Zionists” mean one thing whatever the intention of the speaker: purely and simply, a contemporary manifestation of age-old angry tirades against the Jews’ (ibid). Like former Momentum leader Jon Lansman, Jones clearly sees the term ‘Zionism’ as outdated and one which should not be used in any debate as in essence it is anti-Semitic.
The result is that Jones argues that Labour was completely insensitive to the Jewish community, that it should have had a strategy to engage with the ultra rightwing Jewish Labour Movement (JLM, p234), and that it should have adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in full from the outset (pp236ff). In other words, capitulation to Zionism should have been complete, immediate, and very public. He himself had decided in February 2017 to accept an invitation to speak on a JLM platform at a meeting hosted by Ella Rose. Notably, Jones, while devoting nearly 50 pages of his book to the anti-Semitism crisis, omits any mention of the Panorama programme, or the Mirvis attack. Of course, as a liberal, he is troubled by the plight of the Palestinian people, but only marginally compared to what he calls the ‘hurt and distress to Jewish people’ (p254) that resulted from the ‘profoundly depressing episode’ (p255). Nowhere does he present the necessity for Palestinian freedom, let alone concede that the Nakbah was the precondition for the establishment of a viable Israeli state.
The onslaught on alleged anti-Semitism was never just about Zionism or the Israeli state, it was as much a proxy defence of the global interests of British imperialism. The British ruling class had little to worry about with Corbyn directly. He had shown himself unwilling to fight back over the most basic issues of principle. The 2017 and 2019 Labour election manifestos committed a Labour government to remain in NATO, spend 2% of GDP on defence and renew Trident. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell was whispering soothing words in the ears of the City of London. Labour-run councils had been instructed to set legal pro-cuts budgets. However, a Labour election victory was anathema to the pro-Brexit faction of the ruling class, and in the 2019 election campaign it whipped up a chauvinist frenzy to mobilise the most backward sections of the working class to vote Tory.
Both Jones and Pogrund and Maguire believe that Corbyn’s leadership has had a lasting impact on British politics, that prior to Corbyn, Starmer’s ten pledges during his leadership election campaign ‘would have been condemned as hopelessly naïve and unrealistic’ (Jones p316), that ‘Starmer won power by embracing Corbynism’ (Pogrund and Maguire p360). But Starmer was bound to don Corbyn’s clothes if he was to win the Labour leadership, and then discard them as soon as it was necessary. Nothing has changed for the working class. Even as the coronavirus pandemic enters a second phase, Labour-run councils, having refused to fight austerity, teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. Starmer offers ‘constructive engagement’ with the most reactionary, incompetent government for generations. The working class still lacks any party to represent its interests. That is Corbyn’s real legacy.
Robert Clough
FRFI 279 Dec 2020 / Jan 2021
