On Wednesday Mike put up another piece reporting and commenting on Corbyn’s departure on a meeting Tweezer had called between the party leaders. He walked out when Anna Soubry and Chuka Umunna of The Independent Group walked in. The lamestream media were spinning this as a fit of pique on Corbyn’s part. In fact, as Mike and the peeps he quotes on Twitter pointed out, Corbyn was quite right: TINGe shouldn’t have been there. They’re not a party, and their inclusion in the talks was a calculated insult. Labour stated that Corbyn walked out as the talks were supposed to be bilateral, and Tweezer had changed the format from what had been previously agreed. And Mike and the Tweeters also weren’t impressed with Tweezer’s decision to hold a press conference later that evening at which she said zero that was new or even interesting. Many of them made the point that she’s now an utterly spent force, with no authority whatsoever. It’s about time she left and there was a general election.
There are other reasons why Corbyn was quite right to walk out on them. Firstly, they’re a danger to democracy. As has been said, they ain’t a party but a private corporation. This means that they don’t have to display their accounts as proper parties are supposed to, and so we don’t know who’s funding them. Donald Trump is under investigation in America of being a stooge for Putin. By the same logic, it’s entirely proper to ask if TINGe are also in the pay of a foreign government. And it is not remotely anti-Semitic to ask if that government is Israel, considering that their official have conspired to undermine the British cabinet, Zionist groups within the Labour party that are hostile to Corbyn, such as Labour Friends of Israel, have received funding from them and the Israeli government has an entire ministry, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs under cabinet minister Gilad Elon devoted to spreading propaganda, including most particularly accusations of anti-Semitism, against perceived opponents of Israel.
The question of funding also concerns potentially corrupt relationships between ministers and government officials and industry in this country. New Labour, and John Major’s government before it, became notorious for ‘sleaze’, in which private industry received favours from the government in return for sponsoring them. George Monbiot described the situation under Blair’s Labour party, and the holding of government posts by various leading industrialists in his book, Captive State. By keeping their accounts secret, it appears that TINGe are determined to go on in this manner. In America, the corporatist corruption of Congress has proceeded to such an extent that Americans have lost faith in their politicians’ willingness to represent them, and a study published by Harvard University stated that as a result America was no longer a fully functioning democracy.
Furthermore, TINGe also aren’t a genuine political party in that they have no mass membership nor any mechanism for allowing one to decide party policy. Just as they don’t really have policies. Except, of course, that Chris Leslie and the voting records of the others have made it very clear that they stand for all the neoliberal, anti-welfare policies of the Tories, including tuition fees and not raising taxes on the rich. They’ve also said that they would go into a supply and confidence relationship with Tweezer if the DUP pulled out of theirs.
It’s also been suggested by commenters on alternative media that they intend to try to discipline the Labour party and pull it in a rightward direction from outside, at the very moment that the country’s political mood as a whole is going left. TINGe have promised that they will open up their books sometime in the future, but this is just promises. As it stands, by incorporating themselves as a business, not a party, they have made themselves literally unaccountable as a political movement.
TINGe thus represent nothing so much as a Blairite splinter group, determined to shore up the Tories from outside. Just like Blairites in the local parties tried to get Conservatives and Lib Dems to join in order to oust Corbyn in the Labour leadership elections. Corbyn was right to see the political trap and walk. As for the meeting itself, I doubt Tweezer was going to say anything of value whatsoever. She didn’t when she called an earlier meeting of the leaders of the other political parties before. She didn’t listen to them, just harangued them about how they should vote for her deal. I doubt anything changed this time.
Tweezer and TINGe are an affront to democracy. We need a general election to get rid of both of them.
Haim Bresheeth is another Jewish critic of Israel. He’s put up a number of videos on YouTube covering the Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and their demonstrations of solidarity with him and against the anti-Semitism smears. In this video, posted on 20th February 2019, the academic and film-maker talks to the Iranian news service, Press TV about the Independents and particularly Joan Ryan.
The video begins with him telling the host that the only thing the Independents have in common is support for Israeli apartheid and the attacks on Gaza, and for wars everywhere. It that’s going to be their platform, and the founding eleven may be joined by one or two more, then Bresheeth states that he thinks they have no future. They are supporting another government, which is legally an apartheid government, is not going to bring voters to that movement.
The host asks Bresheeth for his response to her claim that she left Labour because of its anti-Semitism. Bresheeth states that he has been a member of the Labour party has been living in Britain for 45 years, and he has not met an anti-Semite, either in the Labour party or anywhere else in Britain. So they must be hiding so well it’s unbelievable. He’s not saying there are no anti-Semites in Britain, but they’re not in the Labour party. They’re more likely to be in UKIP. Joan Ryan was not only shown to be a friend of Israel, and is definitely not a friend of Labour, but she was working with Mossad people, Shai Masot, as shown in al-Jazeera’s documentary, ‘The Lobby’. They were plotting to bring down a British minister tells you just what Joan Ryan is about. She’s not the MP for North Enfield, she’s the MP for Mossad.
Readers of this blog will know the absolute contempt I have for the Iranian regime, its human rights abuses, corruption and oppression of that ancient nation’s working people. But, like RT, which is owned by Russia, it’s one of the few news broadcasters that’s actually telling the truth about the anti-Semitism smears.
Haim Bresheeth is not along when he states that he’s lived in this country without meeting an anti-Semite. Corbyn’s Jewish supporters in organisations like Jewish Voice for Labour, who are resolutely ignored by the media, have also said that, like him, they’re sure it exists, but they’ve never encountered it personally. Statistics show that only 3.6 per cent of the Labour have anti-Semitic views. In the Tories, it’s 3.9 per cent. And in UKIP it’s something like 4.2. per cent. I don’t know whether Masot really was part of Mossad, but it is certainly true he was conspiring to remove a Tory member of cabinet, Alan Duncan. Just as Ryan was shown manufacturing a fake anti-Semitism accusation against another Labour supporter, Jean Fitzpatrick. Ryan’s notorious advocacy of Israel at the expense of her own constituents is notorious in the Labour party, and earned her the soubriquet ‘the MP for Tel Aviv North’.
And I’ve no doubt that Bresheeth is also right when he says they stand for more wars everywhere. They all supported the Iraq invasion, and they are all desperate for there not to be a public enquiry, as this would no doubt expose their illegality, acquiescence and promotion of Blair’s lies. And as supporters of Israel, an apartheid state, they are definitely not anti-racists, no matter what they scream about anti-Semitism.
Domestically the Independents, or at least Chris Leslie, stand for supporting the Tory party against Jeremy Corbyn, privatisation, including that of the NHS, tuition fees, keeping the water companies private, destroying the welfare state, and more tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the poor. They are warmongering Tories, who have nothing to offer Britain’s working people, except possibly membership of the EU. There is absolutely no doubt that we should have bye-elections now, so that they can be voted out, and replaced with those, who really do respect the wishes of their constituents.
This is a video I’ve just uploaded to my YouTube channel attacking the suspension of Chris Williamson and the anti-Semitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour Party by the Blairites, and the political and media establishment.
Here’s the blurb I’ve put up for it:
In this video I attack the campaign of lies and smears against Chris Williamson, Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party. They are not Trotskyites, Communists or anti-Semites, as alleged, but members and supporters who believe in its traditional policies and values before Blair and his Thatcherite ‘modernisation’. Many are also smeared because they believe in Palestinian rights against the brutality of the Israeli state. So there is a campaign by the Israel lobby of smearing them as anti-Semites. Those accused and suspended have been decent, anti-racist non-Jewish people like Williamson and Marc Wadsworth, and self-respecting Torah-observant and secular Jews, like Jackie Walker.
I state that Williamson was right when he said that Labour was the most anti-racist party, and that they had given too much ground to claims of anti-Semitism. Because in many cases they weren’t real claims, but smears. Labour is now the biggest Socialist party with a membership of 500,000, far larger than the Tories. And that frightens Labour’s opponents. These include the Blairites in the Labour party and the Israel lobby. The Blairites fear Corbyn and his supporters because they, the Blairites, stand for Thatcherism – privatisation, including that of the NHS, and the destruction of the welfare state. This has led to mass poverty, a quarter of a million people using food banks, 3.5 million children in poverty, mass starvation and people stealing food from supermarkets because of problems with Universal Credit. And this is also what the people, who split from Labour, Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, Ann Coffee, Mike Gapes stand for. The Blairites are not ‘Centrists’ nor Social Democrats.
Corbyn’s supporters, on the other hand, have been smeared as Trotksyites and Communists. They are neither. Corbyn’s policies are actually closer to the Social Democratic politics of the 1970s as set down by Anthony Crossland. These were the nationalisation of the utilities, strong trade unions, progressive taxation and social mobility. He believed these would bring the benefits of nationalisation without having to go beyond the nationalisation of the utilities or bring about industrial democracy. The Labour manifesto demands the nationalisation of the rail and water industries, strong trade unions and workers’ rights. It also wants working people and employees on company boards. Which is more radical than historical Social Democracy, but not that much more extreme, as the Labour left were considering it in the 1970s.
The Israel lobby and the Jewish establishment are also keen to attack Corbyn and his supporters because they support the Palestinians. But this does not mean hatred for Israel or the Jewish people. It’s the Israeli state which makes people believe it does. And Corbyn has the support of many Jews – Jewish voice for Labour, for example, and spent the Passover Seder with the Socialist Jews of Jewdas. But these are the wrong type of Jews – Jewish socialists. The type of Jews, who, at the beginning of the last century, the right of the Tory party and groups like the British Brothers’ League were telling people were a threat, because they were going to bring with them Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, and throw millions out of work. And the newspapers now repeating this today, like the Daily Mail, were responsible for these smears then. Lord Rothermere was a fan of Hitler.
I point out how false these claims are with the example of Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth. Walker’s a proud lady of colour, whose mother was a Black American civil rights worker with some Jewish blood, and her father was a Russian Jew. And Russian Jews know about anti-Semitism – Russia is the only country where you can buy the vile Protocols of the Elders of Zion on street kiosks. But she’s been smeared as an anti-Semite. As have so many other secular and Torah-observant Jews, some of who are the children of Holocaust survivors, or lost family in the Holocaust.
Then there’s Marc Wadsworth, who was smeared because he embarrassed Ruth Smeeth. They tried to smear him as an anti-Semite, because that’s how the press told it. But he wasn’t. Wadsworth’s a Black anti-racism campaigner, who worked with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the 1990s to frame stronger legislation against anti-Semitism when the BNP were beating Jews up around the Isle of Dogs. When the anti-Semitism accusation wouldn’t stick, they changed it to ‘bringing the Labour party into disrepute’. But he hadn’t. It was Smeeth, who had brought the Labour party into disrepute with her false accusations.
As you can see, this is quite an angry, impassioned piece. But this is a glaring injustice that infuriates me. I want this witchhunt, which I compare to that of 17th century Salem or McCarthyism, as Jackie Walker has said, to end.
Yesterday’s I also carried another interesting piece on page 9 by Adam Forrest, which reported claims that Chuka Umunna split off from Labour for no better reason than frustrated personal ambition. The piece ran
The shadow International Trade Secretary, Barry Gardiner, has claimed that Chuka Umunna only helped to form The Independent Group because “he knew he could never be the leader of the Labour Party”.
Mr Gardiner accused Mr Umunna of being motivated by frustrated personal ambitions. “It was fairly clear to me that the reason he wanted to leave the Labour Party was he knew hye could never by the leader of the Labour Party,” he told Sky News.
Mr Gardiner also cast doubt on anti-Semitic abuse as a primary motivation for leaving the party. Several of the nine Labour MPs who quit last week cited the party’s failure to tackle the abuse as a reason for leaving.
Mr Gardiner said he was “deeply saddened” that one of the MPs, Luciana Berger, felt she had to leave over the harassment she suffered in her Liverpool Wavertree constituency.
“I have no time for the others at all, because actually their reasons are varied by different,” he said. “What I’m clear about is that I don’t believe that [anti-Semitism] is the sole focus of why they’ve left the Labour party.”
No, I don’t believe that they left solely because of anti-Semitism either. It’s more likely because, like Umunna, all of them are Blairite mediocrities. Umunna was asked by Sky News to name a Labour policy he disagreed with. He couldn’t. Or, as has been remarked, he daren’t because they’re all popular. As for Leslie, as I’ve said, in his interview with New Scientist he was against a 50 per cent tax rate, renationalisation of the utilities, and ending tuition fees. Angela Smith’s also for keeping the water industry private. And all of them don’t want to hold an inquiry into the Iraq invasion. And they were all, or nearly all, the subject of ‘no confidence’ votes or threatened with deselection. They were jumping before they were pushed. Six of the original eight were also members of Labour Friends of Israel. And by anti-Semitism, they almost certainly anti-Zionism, or simply criticism of Israel. They’re thus standard Blairite neoliberals and warmongers.
And I don’t doubt, that as Blairites, they’re getting money from Israel. Joan Ryan was caught by the undercover journo for al-Jazeera’s documentary, The Lobby, saying that she met Shai Masot, the disgraced official at the Israeli embassy, most days for discussions. And Blair himself was financed by the Israelis and the Israel lobby through Lord Levy, whom he met at a gathering at the Israeli embassy.
These are almost certainly the real reasons they left: an attempt to preserve Thatcherite capitalism, western, corporate driven imperialism, and the preservation of Israel from justifiable criticism. Everything else is simply lies and propaganda.
After the departure of the nine Labour splitters, Tom Watson, the deputy leader of the Labour party, is up to his old tricks again trying to undermine Corbyn. Watson to my mind looks like the American comedian Greg Proops, but without any of Proops’ wit, personality or charisma. He’s a Blairite, who is now trying to use the splitters’ departure to try to get his old chums back onto the front bench, develop a separate back bench power base, and then purge Corbyn’s supporters on the pretext that they’re anti-Semites.
Watson was on the Andrew Marr show to peddle his malign views on Sunday. He claimed that he had received 50 complaints of anti-Semitic abuse from MPs, and that he had passed them on to Corbyn. Now today I read in the Metro that he was demanding to be allowed to deal with allegations of anti-Semitism as well as the party secretary, Jenny Formby, because Formby allegedly wasn’t dealing with them quickly enough.
Yesterdays I, for Monday, 25th February 2019, quoted Watson as saying
‘I think he [Corbyn] needs to take a personal lead on examining those cases and, if necessary, recommend to our [ruling body]NEC what has to be done.
‘The test for him as a leader is to eradicate anti-Semitism. It is not Labour party members, who will be the judge of that, it is the British Jewish community.’
He also demanded a reshuffle of the front bench to represent a greater range of views, saying
‘If there isn’t one, I think I’d need to give a platform for my colleagues who want their ideas to be listened to by the current Shadow Cabinet’.
The I’s report about his intention to set up a back-bench group of MPs, ‘Splintering: Deputy leader to set up backbench group’, runs as follows
A new grouping of Labour MPs who are disillusioned with the party’s direction under Jeremy Corbyn is being set up by his deputy Tom Watson.
Its launch, which is expected within a fortnight, is aimed at preventing the trickle of defections of MPs to The Independent Group from becoming a flood.
But the faction will also inevitably be seen as a rival power based to Mr Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet. I understands that organisers hope to attract more than 100 backbenchers into the group, which will appoint spokespeople and work on policy initiatives.
Meetings will be held within days to gauge the level of support for the group.
‘We need to assert ourselves more than we have done in the last two years,’ said one MP.
Mr Watson said he wanted to ‘give a platform’ to Labour MPs who felt excluded by the leadership.
‘My central point is that the social democratic voice has to be heard, because that is the only way you keep the Labour party unified and prohibit other colleagues from potentially leaving the PLP_ [Parliamentary Labour Party]. The situation is serious,’ he told BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show.
Of course, Watson denies he is rebelling. The previous article in the I quoted him as saying that he was ‘standing up for pluralism in the party’.
This is just lies and doubletalk. Watson and the 100 MPs he wants to recruit are obviously Blairites, indignant at being forced out of power. They’ve been intriguing against the Labour leader ever since he came to power. They’ve threatened to leave several times before, just as they’ve tried to oust him as leader. But Corbyn is genuinely popular with the Labour grassroots activists, and his policies are immensely popular with the public. Which puts Watson and his fellow plotters in an awkward position: no-one wants their shoddy, mouldy neoliberal economics any longer. People are sick and tired of Labour trying to copy to the Tories as Blair and his coterie did. And the Blairites themselves were a small minority within the party. They dominated it because they seized control of party bureaucracy, just as Stalin and his supporters were able to seize control of the Communist apparat in the former Soviet Union. These backbench MPs may claim to be defending a plurality of views, but they only views they’re interested in defending and promoting are their own. Not Corbyn’s, and not anyone else’s in the party.
As for claiming to be Social Democrats, this is a sick joke. The Social Democratic tendency in the Labour party was the creation of Anthony Crosland. Crosland didn’t want further nationalisation, because he felt it was unnecessary. Its benefits, he felt, could be obtained instead through progressive taxation, strong trade unions and social mobility. Well, thanks to Thatcherism, social mobility stopped under Blair. In fact, I think under the Tories it’s even been reversed, so that for the first time since the late 19th century Marx’s statement that the middle class are being forced down into the working class is true, at least as far as middle class poverty goes. Similarly, Blair, as a Thatcherite, hated the trade unions and passed legislation aimed at destroying their power. With their acquiescence, it should be said. As for progressive taxation, they’re against that as well. Aaron Bastani quoted an interview in last week’s New Scientist with Chris Leslie in his article on the corrupt, compromised policies of the Independent Group. Leslie had said that he was not in favour of a 50 per cent tax rate. This was the tax rate set by Gordon Brown. And I don’t doubt Leslie was alone. My guess is that a number of the Blairites, who still remain in the Labour party, have the same noxious views.
Watson and the other Blarites aren’t Social Democrats: they’re Red Tories, Thatcherites. Any other description of them is a lie.
As for the anti-Semitism allegations, my guess is that it’s just more smears of people supporting Corbyn and standing up for the Palestinians. And when Watson says that Labour will be judged by the Jewish community, he’s not talking about the Jewish community as a whole. He’s talking about the Tory, Zionist Jewish establishment. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which is monstrously right-wing and which is an explicitly Zionist organisation. An organisation which is morally corrupt and deeply compromised. How else can you describe an organisation which issued nauseating, spurious justifications for the IDF shooting unarmed Gazans last year? Which excludes Orthodox and secular Jews? And which howled with rage when Corbyn spent a Pesach (Passover) seder with the socialists of Jewdas, and claimed this was an insult to the Jewish community?
And the same is to be said about the Chief Rabbinate. The former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, caused shock and outrage when he called Reform Jews ‘enemies of the faith’, like a medieval inquisitor about to launch an auto-da-fe against heretics and Jews. He also considered homosexuality to be a terrible sin and warned his congregation not to join a gay rights march, until he later changed his mind, that is. And he led a contingent of Jewish British thugs to Israel to join the March of the Flags. That’s the day when Israeli ultra-nationalists march through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem vandalising their homes and businesses and threatening and intimidating them. I see no difference between it, and Tommy Robinson and his odious crew marching into British Muslim communities, or Mosley and the British Union of Fascists goose-stepping into the Jewish community in the East End in the 1930s. And when the Jewish community held their rallies last summer against Corbyn, organised by the Board and the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, those attending including members and supporters of the Fascist organisations Kach, the Jewish Defence League, and the English Defence League Jewish Division.
Similarly, Watson’s declaration that he wants to assist in dealing with cases of anti-Semitism cases means that he’s unhappy with Formby’s handling of it for other reasons. He wants more Cobynites thrown out through the same spurious reasons that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism and that describing Israeli plotting to determine who should be in the cabinet as a ‘conspiracy’ is the same as reviving the smears on Jews as a whole of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Oh yes, and that showing a photoshopped image of a Jobcentre with the slogan ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ on it is another terrible anti-Semitic smear, rather than a justifiable description of the murderous policies of the DWP.
And his demand to decide these cases personally is the precise same tactic Stalin used when he gained power. Before Stalin became leader of the Soviet Communist party, the post of General Secretary was a relatively unimportant position. His comrades thought he was thick, and so gave him the job thinking that he would satisfied purging it of all the drunks and seducers. But as well as getting rid of them, he was also using it to purge his enemies’ supporters and fill it with his own. He’s supposed to have said of the power of elections, ‘It’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes’.
Watson is a typical Blairite. He follows Blair and the others as a destructive neoliberal, who wants absolute obedience to a highly centralised, dictatorial party elite. It is not Corbyn and his supporters who should be thrown out, but him and his.
In this 20 minute long video from Novara Media, presenter Aaron Bastani utterly demolishes the new ‘Independent’ grouping of MPs. He shows that rather than being any kind of new politics, they are simply the old, Blairite and Tory politics neoliberal politics. They are radically out of tune with what people really want, especially millennials, who have left much worse off than the preceding generation by the same politics the Blairites and Tories were pushing. And they’re being promoted by the media because they represent the old style of politics the media like: austerity with a smiley face.
Labour MPs All Going Before They’re Pushed
Bastani begins the video by describing how the departure of the seven Labour MPs – Gavin Shuker, Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Ann Coffee, Luciana Berger, Mike Gapes, Angela Smith, who left to form the Independents – wasn’t actually a surprise. They were all loud critics of Corbyn, and almost all of them had been subject to motions of ‘no confidence’ or were facing deselection. They were then joined the next day by Joan Ryan, another critic of Corbyn, who had also lost a ‘no confidence’ motion. They were then joined the day after that by Anna Soubry, Heidi Allen and Sarah Wollaston from the Tories, who complained about the old, ‘broken’ politics of Labour versus Tories.
Independents Not Democratic, and Not a Political Party
The Independents, however, aren’t a political party as such. Which means that they don’t get the Short Money given to opposition parties. This could add up to hundreds of thousands of pounds. They also don’t have to conform to the same standards as proper political parties, although they claim that they will try to do so as best they can. They also don’t have a membership. You can give them your name and contact details, and make a donation, but there is no mechanism for creating a mass organisation where the membership can determine policy. It’s a private organisation more than a political party. But what concerns Bastani the most is that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, because this would ‘crush democracy’. It’s doublespeak, and the truth is that they don’t want bye-elections because they’d lose.
Angela Smith’s Racism
He then goes on to describe how the seven founding ex-Labour members claim that they were driven out of the party by its racism, only for Angela Smith to say within hours the most racist thing he’s ever heard a politician say on television. To show how badly their launch went, Bastani produces some viewing figures. On the Monday the video of their launch had 75,000 views on Twitter. The video of Angela Smith’s apology got 700,000 views. But the video of Smith making her racist comments got even more – 1.5 million views. And while the Mirror and the Guardian wanted to splash on a video by Tom Watson, which got 500 shares on Facebook, Novara’s video of their own Ash Sarkar showing the corruption at the heart of the group – she challenged smith on her chairmanship of a parliamentary group supporting water privatisation, funded largely by the water companies – got 200,000 views. Chris Leslie then appeared later on the Beeb to sort this out. Where once again he talked about their love of democracy. A love so strong, that they don’t want to hold bye-elections, thus disenfranchising the hundreds of thousands of people, who voted for these 11 MPs. They claimed to be anti-racist, but set a new record by being racist ‘pretty much by lunchtime’.
People More Politically Engaged, Not Less
But their fundamental principle is that people don’t want Labour or Tory, but what Labour used to be 15 years ago. But at the 2017 election, 82 per cent of the population voted for either of the two main parties – Tories or Labour. That was the highest percentage the parties had since 1979. In 2010 only 65 per cent of the public voted Labour or Tory. The idea that people are turning away from the two main parties when there is a clear choice, socialism or neoliberalism, isn’t true. And the claim that people are disengaged from politics doesn’t stand up either. Voter turn-out was higher in the 2017 election, just as it was higher during the Scottish reference in 2014, and the Brexit referendum in 2016. Which was the biggest democratic exercise in British history. More people voted in that than in any previous general election or referendum. And Labour now has more than 500,000 members – more than it has had in a generation. The same is true for the SNP. More people are members of political parties now than at any point in Bastani’s lifetime. And if people genuinely do want centrist politics, how is it that the Lib Dems, who got only 8 per cent of the vote in 2015, got even less in 2017? This was despite the ‘media Einsteins’ telling us all that they would do well against the two main parties in a Brexit election. It’s almost as if, says Bastani, that the media don’t know what they’re talking about when they claim to know what the public wants.
Labour Policies Massively Popular
And then there are the policy issues. Labour’s policies are very popular. They’re right at the top of the list of why people voted Labour. But they don’t want to imitate these popular policies. Chris Leslie in an interview with New Scientist said he didn’t want a top tax rate of 50 per cent. That’s not a Corbynite policy, it’s one of Gordon Brown’s. He was also against stopping tuition fees and rejects the renationalisation of the railways, both extremely popular policies. These aren’t just popular with Labour voters, but also with Tories and Lib Dems. And polls conducted by IPPR And Sky News did polls at the end of last year which showed clear majorities of the British public wanting the Bank of England to keep house prices down and a minimal presence, at least, of workers on company boards. People don’t want centrist policies. They’re moving left, as shown on poll after poll.
Millennials Left-Wing because of Neoliberalism
And there’s a clear generational difference. At the last Labour split in 1981 when the SDP was formed, there was a clear movement to the right and post-war socialist policies had become unpopular. And yet when this split happened, the Economist carried an article decrying the popularity of socialism amongst millennials both in America and Britain. This meant ‘Generation Z’ young people, who want the government to address climate change as a fundamental part of 21st century politics. And these millennials despised the Tories, as shown by footage of an anti-Tory march. These are going to be the voters of the 2020s. And they’re not going to be bought off. They’re not left-wing because of something the read in a book, or because they want to be countercultural. They’re left-wing because their living standards and expectations are lower than their parents, they have a less expansive welfare state, they’re going to have higher levels of debt and earn less, and they will have to deal with systemic crises like demographic aging and climate change. They rightly feel that they’re screwed over. And the idea that these same people are going to agree with Chris Leslie’s idea of politics is probably the stupidest thing you’ll hear this year. And this is only February.
The Failure of Centrist Parties in France, America, Italy, Spain and Canada
But since 2015 centrist politicians have been hammered in election like Hillary Clinton in 2016. Emmanuel Macron in France was hailed as the saviour of French centrism, despite only taking 24 per cent of the vote in the first round. Now he’s the most unpopular president in French history after months of protests by the gilets jaunes, which have been met with tear gas attacks by the gendarmes, which have left people losing their eyes and their lives. Then there’s Matteo Renzi of the Partito Democratico, the Democratic Party, the Italian sister party to Britain’s Labour. In 2014 they took 42 per cent of the vote. But he was out within two years, having lost a referendum by 20 points. And in the last election the party lost half of their senators, leaving Italy governed by the Five Star Movement and the far-right Liga. Then there’s the example of the PSOE’s Pedro Sanchez. The PSOE is the Spanish equivalent of the Labour party. He’s also suffered mass protests and this week Spain called new general elections, which his party are certain to lose. Centrism is not popular in Europe or America, so the Independents have to turn to Canada’s Justin Trudeau. But Trudeau is now less popular in his country than Donald Trump in the US. Not that the media pushing ‘centrism’ will tell you this.
The Centrist Real Policy: More Austerity
The unpopularity of centrist politics is due to the fact that they still haven’t solved the problems of global capitalism created by the 2008 crash. They believed that financialisation would create the economic growth that would support public services. But financialisation hasn’t created growth since 2008. And as they can’t create prosperity and tackle income inequality, all they’ve have to give us is austerity ‘with a nice smiley face’.
Labour Splitters against Iraq Inquiry, For Welfare Cuts
And not only do the eight former Labour MPs have Brexit in common, they also voted against an independent inquiry into Iraq. A million people have been affected by the war, along with those, who suffered under ISIS, and Iranian influence has expanded across the Middle East. The idea that Iraq is irrelevant is not only absurd, it is a disgrace. People have died, and it has made an already volatile region even more so. And Britain is directly responsible. The former Labour MPs also abstained on the vote of welfare reform before Corbyn came to power. They do not stand for a moral foreign policy, or for a more just social system at home.
Their politics are a mixture of careerism and opportunism, and their opposition to Brexit actually makes a new deal more likely. They are driven by fundamental democratic principles, but won’t stand for a bye-election. No members, no policies, no party democracy, no vision. Bastani states that this isn’t the future of politics, it’s the past, and the worst aspects at that. He looks forward to sensible people joining them, because they’re going to be found out sooner or later. And if we want to establish the primacy of socialist ideas, he says, then bring it on.
There’s been much shouting this week by the Labour defectors – Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Gavin Shuker, Joan Ryan, Lucian Berger, Angela Smith, Ruth Smeeth and the Blairites inside the Labour party – Tom Watson and John Mann, about how anti-Semitic the Labour party is. But the Independents themselves share at least two features with Mussolini’s Fascists.
Firstly, they both started out claiming not to have any set policies. Mussolini started off as a radical Socialist, and the 1919 Fascist manifesto was as radical as that of the Italian socialists. Later, Mussolini opportunistically moved to the right, taking money from big business and attacking organised labour – the free trade unions, and socialists and anarchists. He began his tenure of power by proclaiming that his policies would be pure Manchester school. In other words, absolute free trade. In fact, within a few years of his seizure of power, Mussolini had set up the classic features of the Italian Fascist state: his personal dictatorship, autarky and a rigidly controlled economy, and the replacement of the Italian parliament with a Chamber of Fasci and Corporations. The corporations were industrial organisations containing representatives of management and the unions, as well as members of the Fascist party to represent the people. Mussolini then sat down to write his own account of the principles and policies of Fascism, The Doctrine of Fascism. Which he then had recalled and pulped the next year, because, he declared, Fascism had no doctrine. And in fact many Italian intellectuals had voted for the Fascists because they believed that. The Fascists stated that action preceded theory and philosophy, and so they would simply whatever was necessary to solve Italy’s problems without worrying about a fixed political programme or underlying ideology.
And now we have the so-called Independents, who also claim not to have a fixed programme or ideology. They also claim to be flexible, and that they will be doing things in a new way. The party is a corporation, so they don’t have to reveal their donors, as required by electoral law. At the same time, while they claim to be receiving many inquiries for membership from the public, they don’t actually seem to have a mass membership. Rather like Mussolini later declared that the Fascists didn’t want to be a mass party, and limited the number of party members to the sansepolcristi, those who were present at the party’s foundation. But whereas Mussolini tried to limit party membership, the Independents have gone one better, and don’t seem to have any members at all.
And they also stand for corporatism, albeit of the Thatcherite/Reaganite kind. This is when private corporations determine policy through donating to political parties, which then act in their interests and frequently give staff from those same corporations posts in government. As the Blair government did, and which is extensively documented in George Monbiot’s Captive State. So far, Umunna, Leslie and the others haven’t yet adopted the cult of the infallible leader, as that remains firmly around Margaret Thatcher. Nor are they greeting each other yet with the Fascist salute. But nevertheless, despite their fine verbiage about free institutions, parliamentary democracy and a free media, they are very antidemocratic.
Like Mussolini’s Fascists, they are a party for the rich against the poor and working people. They should be recognised and discarded as the danger to the British people they are.
Here’s another cheering little video, although unfortunately it is from the Grauniad so you will have to hold your nose. It’s of Jeremy Corbyn at the rally in Broxtowe really putting the boot into the Labour defectors. He says what they really stand for: austerity and protecting the rich against the poor.
The video begins with Corbyn saying that he’s very sad at the people, who’ve left the party. He says this to them, that on June 2017 he was elected on a manifesto, a manifesto that promised to end austerity. A manifesto that promised to end student fees. A manifesto that promised to bring into public ownership rail, mail, and water. It was a manifesto that was to be transformative for the lives of people of this country. And so when the media talk about the bravery of those who walk away, Anna Soubry voted for austerity and said it was a good thing. Almost immediately after leaving, Chris Leslie tells us that we should not be ending university fees, we should not be increasing corporation tax for the rich of this country, we should be cutting corporation tax and increasing the burden on others. He then shouts,
‘I tell you what, the Labour party believes in equality and justice. That was what was at the centre of our manifesto, and that is what will be at the centre of the next manifesto, whenever that election comes.’
He then goes on to talk about the increase in the Labour vote at the 2017 election, which was the biggest in any election since 1945. That was because the party campaigned, the community campaigned, people got together and started talking about politics, about life, about how our society could be run. It wasn’t the old transactional politics, but the new involved politics of the future. And what’s different about Labour is the membership is three times bigger, but it’s also much more involved, much more involved with the communities, and it is those communities and those members that will be making the policies that will write the manifestos for the future.
Absolutely. And it’s because Labour’s policies are inspiring, and that the party is empowering people, that Red Tories like Berger and Leslie have joined true blue Tories like Soubry. And they and the media are attacking Corbyn and smearing him as an anti-Semite, because they have nothing else to use. Their policies are old, outmoded and massively unpopular. It’s time they, and the Tories themselves, were gone.
Yesterday, a group of seven MPs formally split from the Labour party. Now going independent, this glittering array of third raters, has-beens and deadbeats were supposed to form the nucleus of this new, shiny Blairite ‘centrist’ party that has been mooted for the past year or so. The group included such luminaries as Gavin Shuker, Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Angela Smith, Mike Gapes and Ann Coffey. They were all Blairites, who had been trying to overthrow Corbyn or undermine his leadership since he was elected head of the party. Or else had been threatening to quit.
Comparisons have been made to the Labour split in the 1980s which saw the notorious ‘gang of four’, including Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams form the short-lived Social Democratic Party. They ended up shortly forming an alliance with the Liberals before finally merging with them to form the Liberal Democrats. At the time there much verbiage in the press about the SDP ‘breaking the mould’ of British politics. It didn’t happen, despite the TV critic Clive James in his Observer column sneering at Tony Benn, who said that support for the SDP had peaked. But, as Zelo Street has pointed out, the comparison also doesn’t do the Quitters any favours in another way. Some of the MPs, who formed the SDP were actually first rate politicos. As Home Secretary in the 1960s, Roy Jenkins oversaw some profound changes in the liberalization of British society. Like the partial decriminalization of homosexuality, for which, among other things, he’s still bitterly resented by the Tory right today. Reading Shirley William’s 1979 book, Politics Is For People, it’s clear that she did have a powerful mind with strong, distinct views on how socialism should improve British society and industry.
This bunch, by contrast, don’t seem to have any distinct views or anything more to offer than rehashed, warmed up Blairism. Before their website crashed yesterday, Zelo Street was able to get on it and read what they had to say. Which seemed to be a lot of flannel. More fine-sounding words about democracy which didn’t actually come down to meaning very much. The website said
Our primary duty as Members of Parliament is to put the best interests of our constituents and our country first. Our free media, the rule of law, and our open, tolerant and respectful democratic society should be cherished and renewed. We believe that our Parliamentary democracy in which our elected representatives deliberate, decide and provide leadership, held accountable by their whole electorate is the best system of representing the views of the British people. Zelo Street remarked that the first part of this statement, about cherishing and renewing free media, rule of law and democratic society doesn’t actually mean anything, while the second – about parliamentary democracy being the best method of representing the views of the British people – is just what every MP in the House believes.
But what the group really stands for is best shown by the group’s legal organization and its members’ very cosy relationship with private enterprise. The group’s website was set up in 2015 in a tax haven. The new party actually isn’t a party. It’s been registered as a private corporation, Gemini A, which means that it doesn’t have to identify its backers. This also, apparently, makes it exempt from the spending restrictions on campaigning which apply to genuine political parties.
And then there’s Angela ‘People of funny tin…’ Smith’s connection with private water companies. Smith is chairman of the all-party water group, which is mainly funded by private water companies like Wessex Water and Affinity Water. Talking to Smith on This Morning Yesterday, Ash Sarkar pointed out that her group were some of the very few people left, who still believe in water privatization. She predicted that people would like at Smith’s leadership of the group and say, ‘You know what, that stinks of corruption’.
Sarkar isn’t going to be wrong either. The Canary in their article on this pointed out that 83 per cent of the population want the water companies to be renationalized. And Blair’s very strong links to private industry were very heavily criticized when he was power. Blair was a corporatist, who gave business leaders and senior management key positions in government in exchange for donations. This whole, nasty web of corporate links was exposed by the Groaniad’s George Monbiot in his book, Captive State, which lists various businessmen and the government positions Blair gave them. Even at the time Blair’s government was notorious for doing political favours in return for donations, as Blair did for Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One magnate, in return for something like a million pounds of corporate dosh.
‘Bevan Boy’ described what other Blairite policies this crew probably also stand for in this tweet, quoting by Mike in his article on them:
What will this new “Centrist” party stand for?
More Austerity?
Rampant marketisation & uncontrolled capitalism?
Neoconservative Thatcherism?
I suspect all of the above under a pro EU banner. The policies are being rejected & thank Christ they are.
We need a socialist LAB govt!
And what the splitters really think of democracy is shown by the fact that none of them actually want to hold a bye-election and give their constituents a say in whether they want them to represent them in parliament. It’s been pointed out that only one per cent of voters say that they actually vote for the individual MP, rather than the party. But these avowed democrats really don’t want to give their constituents the opportunity to decide whether they want to keep them as their MP or whether they want to elect someone else.
Which is what you could expect from a group that includes Luciana Berger. Berger, or should that be Lucrezia Borgia?, was facing a vote of no confidence from her local constituency. She then declared that they were bullying her, and demanded Jenny Formby expel the constituency party from Labour. Formby told her that she had no cause to do this and refused.
But Borgia, sorry, Berger, has carried on whining about bullying and intimidation nonetheless. Just as all the Quitters have moaned about anti-Semitism. The truth is, anti-Semitism is not the reason they’re splitting. It never has been. It has only been a convenient stick with which to beat Corbyn and his supporters. In fact anti-Semitism in the party has fallen under the Labour leader. It is lower in the Labour party than in the others and in the general British population. And the anti-Semitism accusations against him and the majority of those accused are nothing but contrived smears.
The real truth is that Berger, Umunna, Shuker, Leslie, Smith, Coffee and Gapes are corporatist anti-democrats. They wish to hang on to power against the wishes of their constituents, in order to promote the power of private corporations. Just as Mussolini and Hitler promoted private industry and gave it a seat in government and the management of the economy in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
I’ve also found this short video from Kevin Logan saying exactly what the majority of real Labour supporters are saying: ‘Good Riddance to the Red Tories’. Logan’s a male feminist and anti-racist vlogger, who’s put up a series of videos attacking the misogynists and Fascists of the ‘men’s rights movement’ and the Alt Right. I’ve reposted many of his videos on this blog.
The video begins with the statement
On 18th February 2019, seven ‘Labour’ MPs resigned from the Labour Party, betraying their electors, the party and the British people.
The rest of the video is photographs of the ugly mugs of the quitters, each marked ‘Traitor’, while a folk rendition of the ‘The Red Flag’ plays over it all.
Listening hard to the lyrics, I’m struck very much by how the lines ‘cowards flinch and traitors sneer’ as well as about other traitors to the movement seek ‘pelf and place’ wealth and positions of power – describe this gang.
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