The strategy that began to take shape was no longer ‘Project Fear’. It was ‘Project Despair’. The idea was no longer to terrify people about Corbyn the Red and his Trotskyist interlopers but, through brute force and open sabotage, to cause members to despair of their candidate ever succeeding. To make them give up on their dreams and reconcile themselves to old-school ‘realism’ and its shopworn mantra: there is no alternative.
In a vicious circle of sabotage and blame, Corbyn’s critics were able to both mount damaging public attacks, or leak against him, and then blame him for the effects of this. Thus, for example, a document of unknown provenance, listing Labour MPs according to their degree of hostility toward, or support for, the leadership, was leaked to the press. This trivial incident was, of course, given an extraordinary amount of prominence in news coverage. David Cameron used it to attack Corbyn in parliament, while backbenchers scolded him to ‘get a grip on the situation’.
Soon enough, there were calls for Corbyn to resign, with Jamie Reed and John Woodcock, have-a-go heroes of the backbench Right, leading the complaints. ‘We should be talking about the chaos and the civil war that is destabilising the Tory Party,’ Reed complained. ‘If your boss is killing your firm, do you stay quiet?’ Woodcock, who had accidentally-on-purpose publicly called Corbyn a ‘fucking disaster’ on Twitter, added, ‘we simply cannot go on like this.’ Ex-whip Angela Smith added, ‘If Corbyn is not prepared to buckle down and show proper leadership he should just go.’4
A logical question at this point would be, why on earth would they expect him to go over such a pathetic non-issue as a leaked list? Why would they expect him to go over any of the pathetic non-issues that routinely prompted calls for resignation? Did they expect him to go, or were they just trying their luck? Would it have occurred to them that, for many people watching from outside the bubble, the spectacle of Cameron braying and backbenchers hyperventilating might be by far the most embarrassing aspect of the whole incident? Even allowing that for them, Corbyn’s failures were cumulative, that Corbyn’s way of doing politics was completely at odds with everything they had been educated to believe was effective, that every day of watching him on the job had been painful, that everything he said and the way he said it caused them head-clutching agony. Even allowing that Corbyn made real mistakes which, to those expecting a calamity from the start, must have given them a Cassandra complex. Even allowing for all that, they chose this as the issue on which to demand resignation. It only makes sense in light of a wishful assumption on their part that Corbynism was a temporary malfunction, a glitch rather than anything more deeply rooted. It also bespeaks their continued underestimation of Corbyn himself.
The next issue on which Corbyn was to be belaboured was that of anti-Semitism. There had been a few highly publicised allegations of anti-Semitism within Labour. One concerned claims of anti-Semitism at Oxford University Labour Club made by Alex Chalmers. There, a member of the OULC was supposed to have been formally disciplined by their college for having organised a group of students to harass a Jewish student and shout ‘filthy Zionist’ whenever they saw her. This was, in fact, the only checkable part of the allegations, and it was refuted by the principal of the college. Baroness Jan Royall’s inquiry into the allegations, while taking all the claims very seriously and making a number of constructive recommendations, found ‘no evidence’ of institutional anti-Semitism in the OULC. Another incident involved the views of a sectarian crank, Gerry Downing, who had urged military victory for ISIS against the US, and described Israel as a form of ‘the Jewish question’. (What, one wanted to know, was the question?) Downing was immediately expelled. A local Labour vice-chair, Vicki Kirby, had made a number of gratuitously anti-Semitic comments. There were already dark hints that these incidents were ‘not isolated’ and were part of a wider problem under Corbyn’s leadership – but this was hard to sustain when the evidence was thus far so limited.5
The false spring of the anti-Corbynites began when a classic online bin-hoking operation by the Guido Fawkes blog showed that Naz Shah MP, who had been working as an unpaid assistant to John McDonnell, had once posted a series of Facebook memes and statuses, which included some outright anti-Semitic statements (‘the Jews are rallying’) and some at least ambiguous memes. Shah immediately apologised, resigned from her positions, and was suspended by the Labour Party. The following day, a seemingly tired and emotional Ken Livingstone addressed the subject on the radio. He defended Shah, saying she was over-the-top but not anti-Semitic – a defence that, given Shah’s contrition and acknowledgement of anti-Semitism, must have been unwelcome. More problematic was the ground on which he made this case, embarking on a historical detour, claiming that Hitler had supported Zionism ‘before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews’.
This inflammatory, bewildering digression referenced the Haavara Agreement between the Third Reich and the Zionist Federation of Germany. But it was historically inaccurate and even a bowdlerisation of his source, which was a critique of the Zionist movement written by Lenni Brenner in the 1980s. The Nazi regime had opportunistically come to an arrangement with the Zionist Federation of Germany, wherein some of the Jews fleeing Germany, and being fleeced of their possessions on the way out, could get some of them back if they moved to British Mandate Palestine. The Nazis were not supporting Zionism, but trying to expedite the expulsion of Jews from Germany by all means at their disposal. Even if Livingstone’s rendering had been entirely correct and sensitively expressed, it was an extremely odd moment to raise a recondite historical discussion of Zionism and the Third Reich. Livingstone’s stated concern was to distinguish opposition to Zionism on democratic grounds from anti-Semitic dog-whistling. Unfortunately, his intervention, by defending the indefensible and making a hash of history, accomplished the reverse. And provided fuel for a blaze that went on for weeks.
The nature of the claims that now made headlines was not new. Well before the Livingstone fiasco, an anonymously written piece in the Jewish Chronicle alleged that Labour was now attracting ‘antisemites like flies to a cesspit’. Dan Hodges had trumpeted in the Telegraph that ‘antisemitism is now firmly embedded in the Labour party’s DNA … Labour is a racist party now’. Jonathan Freedland had written in the Guardian that Jewish Britons were ‘fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews’. The news had spread overseas, with the Israeli liberal daily, Ha’aretz, observing that these were ‘difficult times to be a Jewish member’ of Labour. What was the basis for all this? A number of councillors and members had been suspended in the wake of the furore. Thomas Jones, writing for the London Review of Books website, pointed out what the numbers meant: 0.4 per cent of the parliamentary party, 0.07 per cent of the councillors and 0.012 per cent of the membership had been suspended for anti-Semitism. Even assuming that all of these suspensions were fully merited, and that no one was being trigger-happy in the face of an embarrassing scandal, this amounted to a grand total of fifty-six individuals.6
The argument was that, as Tom Harris MP and John Mann MP both averred, the main source of anti-Semitism was anti-Israel sentiment on the Left, and that Corbyn’s pro-Palestine leadership had made Labour a natural home for this kind of anti-Semitism. Sometimes this was linked to old and discredited smears against Corbyn, whether because he had defended the Arab Israeli Islamist Raed Salah following a failed Home Office attempt to smear and deport him, or because he had met members of the Palestinian group Hamas. This was enough to engage in a kind of nudge-and-wink that Corbyn was, if not anti-Semitic, then certainly not uncomfortable with ‘bigots, deniers and exterminationists’.7 In the early months of Corbyn’s leadership, an anonymous Labour source had told the press that ‘everyone knows there is a problem with anti-Semitism on the left but they continue with impunity, they have a carte blanche under Corbyn.’ The journalist Jamie Stern-Weiner, reflecting on these allegations, wrote of the ‘almost comical paucity of evidence’ for such claims, and the systematic misr
epresentation of such evidence as did exist. Many Jewish critics of Israel expressed alarm at the conflation of opposition to Zionism, or just to Israeli policies, with anti-Semitism, which was, in the words of Independent Jewish Voices, a ‘campaign of intimidation … the battle against anti-Semitism is undermined whenever opposition to Israeli government policies is automatically branded as antisemitic.’8
However, as Livingstone had unwittingly offered himself up as a striking example for the critics, he was immediately suspended. Corbyn responded to the scandal by asking Shami Chakrabarti, the respected former head of the civil liberties group Liberty, to investigate anti-Semitism and racism in the Labour Party and recommend appropriate action. As with Baroness Royall’s investigation, Chakrabarti found no evidence of systemic anti-Semitism. Labour, despite having suffered an ‘occasionally toxic atmosphere’ and ‘too much clear evidence’ of ignorant attitudes, was ‘not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, or other forms of racism’. The Jewish Labour Movement, which had expressed alarm over Livingstone’s remarks and other incidents, argued that the report was ‘a sensible and firm platform’ which ‘accurately diagnosed the nature of the problem’.9
In short, while critics had been right to be outraged at specific incidents of anti-Semitism, and some of Corbyn’s supporters had been mistaken to adopt a defensive position (by claiming, for example, that Livingstone had said nothing wrong), there was no basis for the claim that Corbyn had turned Labour into a hothouse of anti-Jewish hatred, or that anti-Israel attitudes were in general translating into anti-Semitism.
Hard-Boiled Brexit
Other lines of attack unavailing, the issue that would trigger the coup attempt against Corbyn, and signal an acceleration of British political turbulence, was Europe.
This was perhaps surprising, given that Europe had long been a niche concern, and rarely at the top of people’s political priorities. But for the middle-class Right it had become a metonym for everything that was wrong with Britain in their eyes: immigration, too many pinko laws and regulations restricting small enterprise, a liberal metropolitan elite running things, political correctness, the decline of British common sense. According to this view, there was a de facto alliance between unpatriotic elites who had sold Britain out and the wretched of the earth, refugees and migrants, who supposedly undercut wages, took British jobs, overburdened public services, and brought crime and terror. This was a story about British decline, one that could be tailored to make sense of a patchwork of diverse life experiences.
And it was UKIP who had achieved this. First, they cut swathes into Tory-voting southern England, where things had never been so good as when Thatcherite estate agents and barrow boys were on the march. Then, they began to draw conservative voters in the rustbelts, where things had never been good and had got worse. UKIP, by this point, was trying to style itself as a party for the discontented working class, which would park its tanks on Labour’s lawn. This became, to a degree, a self-fulfilling myth. And insofar as the media and pundits bought into it, it helped UKIP, which did not otherwise have significant roots in working-class communities, to add workers to its base.
Prior to the 2015 general election, UKIP’s voters included more large and small employers than employees. The biggest chunk of its vote actually came from professionals and managers. However, its 2015 breakthrough, with 4 million votes, was impossible without adding more working-class voters to the mix. These were disproportionately white, male, and older, and often living in provincial or ‘left-behind’ areas, cut off from the centres of financial, communication, or political power, as well as from the growth of the ‘new economy’, and left for dead by the political class. Politically, their background was heteroclite. The biggest chunk of UKIP voters were ex-Tories, followed by Liberals, and 10 per cent came from Labour. But there were also quite a lot of former non-voters, as right-wing voters who had backed the BNP or the English Democrats.10
UKIP, with the Left still in abeyance, had become the most dynamic political force in England and Wales. It was setting the agenda every day. But electorally, it had cost the Tories more than it had cost Labour. In the northern rust-belt seats in which UKIP had made gains, it largely did so by hegemonising the local right wing, rather than eroding the Labour vote. By contrast, the Tories found themselves shedding almost as many right-wing votes as they gained centre votes from the Liberals. David Cameron, sick of being sandbagged by middle-class right-wing radicalism within his own party, and voted down by his own backbenchers, decided to gamble on offering a referendum on EU membership. As with the Scottish independence referendum, he raised the stakes, on the assumption that fear of the unknown would help the status quo: it was either ‘in’ or ‘out’.
In line with the ‘Project Fear’ strategy deployed in the Scottish referendum, the Remain campaign would be focused on the economic dangers of leaving a trading bloc that was, for economic purposes, essentially one country. But when it came to fearmongering, they were going to be outplayed. And when it came to telling a story about the future, theirs was sterile and weirdly oblivious.
Neither the feast of reason nor the flow of the soul, the official cross-party Remain campaign hit every possible wrong note. It chose for its name Britain Stronger in Europe, failing to notice the initials, ‘BSE’, as in ‘mad cow disease’. The ‘dangerously uninspiring, complacent’ launch at a hipster venue in London featured such luminaries as Tory peer and former M&S boss Stuart Rose, and ‘celebrity’ June Sarpong. Rose made a number of painful gaffes, and no questions were allowed from journalists.
The group’s board included, as well as figures from across the parties like Damian Green and Will Straw, football boss and Apprentice star Karren Brady, PR man Roland Rudd, Peter Mandelson, and millionaire businessman Richard Reed. The first ‘letters’ sent out by the campaign were written by such figures as Alan Sugar and Richard Branson, celebrating the fact that the EU gave them access to huge markets. The campaign’s first video featured Branson, easyJet CEO Carolyn McCall, and a range of exporters and CEOs, also cock-a-hoop about the wonders of free markets and deregulation. Plus, a student for whom the EU made it easier to backpack during summers and gap yahs.11
The burden of the campaign’s message was that the EU’s internal market is pretty good for rich people. As if voters didn’t already know that. Tacitly, it seemed to rely on the idea that most people admire and respect capitalists, their success granting them a kind of celebrity hero status. And, furthermore, that we all had and felt a stake in their gains. So there was no need for the Remain campaign to be overly politicised, or to address any legitimate sources of unhappiness with the EU and the economic model it represented. If discontents were addressed, it was in the form of rebutting ‘lies’ that ‘exploited legitimate concerns’. At times, the campaign would try to play its own version of the anti-immigrant card, as when it claimed that rapists, murderers, and thieves would be harder to deport if Britain left the EU.12 But against the resonant, racist imagery of Leave, which exploited accumulated resentments and scapegoated the EU and immigrants for them, Remain’s campaign was politically and emotionally hollow.
Paradigmatic of this were two debates between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage that had been staged before the general election and the EU referendum. Clegg had focused on fact-checking, on accusing Farage – correctly – of misrepresenting the truth. Farage dodged all this with his usual aplomb, depicted his opponent (correctly) as an-of-touch member of the elite, and then reiterated his basic claim that whatever the growth figures said, immigration only worked for the wealthy and not for the workers.
This has become a pattern. Liberals respond to the populist Right with a ‘fact-check’, to no overall effect other than increasing the smug complacency of their own side. Dodging their own compromised relationship with the truth – Nick Clegg, a paladin of political honesty? – they also take the claims of the racists and nationalists too literally. And then are baffled that people still believe in lies, even when they�
��re exposed. The lies are believed because they’re fables, morality tales which seem to explain the bad luck, the social misery, the decline, and the accumulated grievances of millions. Simply correcting a falsehood fails to get under the skin in the way that the original falsehood does. It fails to tell a more truthful story which engages popular desires.
The official Labour Remain campaign, Labour In for Britain, led by Alan Johnson and chaired by Phil Wilson, two of the party’s leading Blairites, wasn’t much better. In practice, it was a very low-key Labour version of the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign, with a specific emphasis on jobs, workers’ rights, and national security. Hence it was launched with a speech by Johnson highlighting such inspiring issues as the European Arrest Warrant. Corbyn, traditionally a eurosceptic, had campaigned for leader of the Labour Party on a ‘remain and reform’ ticket. He highlighted his reservations about the European Union’s lack of democracy, and support for neoliberalism, but, recognising the Left’s weakness and seeking compromise with the Labour establishment, argued that it would be better to stay in than leave on the basis of a hard-Right campaign which would strip away human rights, workers’ rights, and environmental protections. The thinking of some of Corbyn’s team was that this was also the only plausible position for Labour to take during a referendum called to settle a fight between two factions of the Right. A ‘critical remain’ position gave Labour the flexibility it needed to accept either outcome.
Owing to his lukewarm support – he famously declared himself ‘seven out of ten’ in favour of Remain – Corbyn played a subordinate role in Labour’s campaign. Where he did participate, he stuck to the ‘remain and reform’ position that he had been elected on. At the launch of the ‘Labour In for Britain’ battlebus, Corbyn’s speech urged people to ‘remain and reform the EU’, to ‘defend investment, defend jobs, defend workers’ rights and defend our environment’. But he also stressed the need to obstruct the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership being negotiated between the US and the EU, which he said would damage the ‘rights of ordinary people and consumers in this country’.13 Corbyn also refused to share a platform with David Cameron, saying he was ‘not on the same side’ as the prime minister who, he said,
Corbyn Page 19
