by Tom Bower
For his news, Corbyn relied on the Morning Star and occasionally the Guardian. He never read The Times or the New York Times. ‘Many of the supposedly well-informed major commentators in our media’, he said, were ‘shallow, facile and ill-informed’. His dislike of the media had been shaped by their ridicule of Tony Benn as leader of the ‘loony left’ during the 1970s. His ideological consistency extended to disdain for the aspirational white working class who had fled Islington, and for people who lived in country towns. Young people, he began to argue in 1997, should not assume that education was necessary for self-advancement. Those passing through university were artificially regarded as superior, to make people like him feel inferior. He also disliked the consumerism and competition encouraged by schools. Students should be taught that ‘getting rich at the expense of others was wrong’. Instead, he wanted education to increase social interaction and improve communities. His goal was equality of poverty, not equality of opportunity to earn wealth. To create the Marxist ideal, he believed in universal confiscation of the middle class’s wealth to benefit the poorest. Undiluted socialist equality, he believed, would cure his constituents’ problems.
By 1998, new arrivals from Somalia, Pakistan and Bangladesh had packed into Islington North. Queues of migrants and asylum seekers at the Red Rose sought Corbyn’s help to obtain homes, welfare benefits, character references for bail, help to reduce their sentences after criminal convictions, and intercession to avoid deportation. He was focused on them. There was one revolution that he despised: the one that had spawned Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft. To him, the IT techies’ wealth insulted the seventy nationalities struggling to survive within his constituency. He distrusted the internet’s empowerment of individuals, raged against the American titans he could neither understand nor control, and disputed any benefit of globalised markets, preferring to rely on organising labour in factories and offices. To him, the operation of capital markets dictated in nanoseconds by computer algorithms was a threat. None of those developments had been analysed by Karl Marx in 1867, but Corbyn assumed they offended socialism. In his debate-free zone, his convictions suffocated any evidence that every Marxist government of the previous hundred years had produced miserable poverty. He ignored the educated Chinese and Indians, driven by the profit motive, who had raised their country’s living standards by embracing the market economy, and disregarded the massive reduction of global famine, although the numbers employed in the agriculture industry had plummeted. Only communist Cuba and North Korea suffered constant food shortages, but in his world it was the bankers who were to blame. That was the message he repeated in the Commons.
Dressed in a series of new sports jackets – one was burgundy – bought, some assumed, under the influence of a girlfriend after his separation from Claudia, he endured mockery from Andrew Roth, the author of Parliamentary Profiles, as ‘a pastiche of the bearded Spartist fantasist still fighting fights in his own head at least’. He was regularly reminded that his cause had become out of date, and his own party had ditched Clause 4. ‘He speaks with great conviction,’ said one Tory, ‘and over the years has undoubtedly convinced himself. However, it is a comfort to know that people like him survive in Parliament as a reminder that some will not compromise their principles.’ Corbyn’s strength was his stubborn conviction that socialism would eventually prevail. The doomed Marxist cause in Chile could always be resurrected to prove that he was right.
Fifteen years after the murder of Salvador Allende there was a chance for justice. In 1998, Augusto Pinochet, the eighty-two-year-old former dictator who had led the coup against Allende, quietly arrived in London for medical treatment. Unexpectedly, on 16 October a Spanish arrest warrant was delivered to a British court requesting his extradition to stand trial for the murder and torture of thousands of Chileans during his seventeen-year presidency. Pinochet could not plead innocence. In an interview with the New Yorker, he had admitted that crimes had been committed both under Allende’s rule and during his own dictatorship. However, he said, he could not be held responsible for all of them. Pending the British court’s decision, he was placed under house arrest. ‘It will be the first time this ghastly dictator has faced questions,’ said Corbyn. ‘He is one of the great murderers of this century.’ British judges denied Pinochet’s argument that as a former head of state he had diplomatic immunity from prosecution. ‘He wanted human rights for himself,’ said Corbyn, ‘but not for his victims. None of his victims ever had the chance to go to court. They were merely shot and murdered during his disgraceful regime.’ His plea that Britain should not be a safe haven for dictators sat uneasily with his own support for similar tyrants in Russia and Cuba. Nor did it explain why the 3,197 innocents brutally murdered by Pinochet’s regime caused him more concern than the thousand killed by the IRA in Britain.
Tony Blair was faced with a similar contradiction. In the halcyon early days of his prime ministership, his government had adopted what he called an ‘ethical foreign policy’. At the same time, he was drinking tea with the IRA killer Martin McGuiness. To make any progress, he had learned that a government needed to compromise, fudge and accept that half a loaf can sate one’s hunger. In the case of Pinochet, there was no advantage for Britain in preventing his return to Chile. After the former dictator had been in detention for fourteen months, four doctors declared that he was unfit to stand trial. Pinochet returned to Chile to live in peace until his death in 2006, aged ninety-one. Corbyn’s outrage was even dismissed by the Guardian. ‘It can be ignored like any Socialist Worker placard in a demonstration,’ wrote Simon Hoggart.
At that moment, Corbyn’s passion for human rights – he had urged that Pinochet should be prosecuted at the International Court of Justice in The Hague – did not extend to the prosecution of the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević for atrocities against Albanians in Kosovo. To stop Milošević’s ethnic cleansing, Blair supported the American bombing of Belgrade between 24 March and 10 June 1999. In the Commons, Corbyn would call the allegations of genocide ‘fraudulent justification’ for the so-called ‘humanitarian’ invasion – and voted against the military action notionally under NATO’s command. He blamed American bombing for causing a refugee crisis, and accused Germany of starting the Balkan wars in a plot with Croatia against Serbia, its historic enemy. Even after the war, he disputed the veracity of the atrocities – ‘They never really existed,’ he said, although about 100,000 civilians were reliably reported killed. He did not comment when the Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić was arrested in 2011 and later convicted of genocide at The Hague. Previously, the International Court of Justice had always attracted Corbyn’s praise. In his hatred of America, he ignored the fact that the US and Britain had protected Muslims from a fascist dictator. Among Corbyn’s critics was his usual ally Ken Livingstone, who in this case supported the bombing. Corbyn hated disloyalty. As a result, for the next three years the two barely spoke.
The same dilemma – whether a murderer could be an ally because he opposed Anglo-American imperialism – faced the left over the fate of Saddam Hussein’s factories that were reported to have been producing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The dictator’s continued defiance of a 1991 United Nations resolution that the alleged factories should be demolished prompted American and British aircraft to bomb them in 1998. Corbyn opposed the destruction. Using the same arguments he had deployed against the Falklands War, the invasion to liberate Kuwait and the protection of Muslims in the Balkans, he denounced Blair for causing ‘innocent deaths’. Britain should settle the disagreement, he said, through the UN. He and twenty-one other Labour MPs ignored Saddam’s disregard of several UN resolutions. To every challenge about the selectivity of his moral crusades, Corbyn replied that he was a pacifist, and did not elucidate further.
In particular, he did not reveal the extent to which British Muslims were beginning to influence his calculations. The procession of petitioners through the Red Rose reinforced his conviction that Britain sh
ould allow unrestricted immigration. Empathising with his ethnic constituents, he thought that Britain’s electorate should welcome the ending of immigration controls, offer the destitute of the world the economic benefits available in Britain, and condemn any critic of unlimited entry as racist. On that issue, he and Tony Blair for once agreed. In 1997 Blair had abolished the primary purpose immigration rule, which had restricted Muslim and Hindu families seeking to join their relations living in Britain. Within two years, an additional 150,000 migrants from the Indian subcontinent would be arriving in Britain every year. Neither Blair nor Corbyn seems to have considered how mass migration would depress wages, place pressure on public services, increase rents, aggravate the housing shortage, swell the cost of welfare benefits and alienate the white working class.
Both men supported multiculturalism, and refused to attempt to persuade Muslims to integrate into British society. Neither seemed concerned that the doctrine placed liberals and socialists in an ideological straitjacket. Their blind spot was self-inflicted. Both denigrated their country’s history and ridiculed the notion of British traditions unified by a common language and culture. Despite the evidence that poor Muslim ghettos spawned Islamic terrorism, Corbyn tolerated segregated Muslim audiences at his meetings, and voted against the anti-terror laws aimed at Islamic extremists. He rejected the argument that such laws saved lives because potential terrorists could be identified before their atrocities were committed. In his opinion, so-called terrorist organisations were legitimate resistance movements to destroy imperialism. Similarly, he opposed a law criminalising the incitement of religious hatred. He made no public protest when crowds of his constituents flocked to the Finsbury Park mosque to hear Abu Hamza’s racist sermons, and claimed that there was ‘zero support’ for the preacher in the area. In his regular visits to Friday prayers at local mosques, said the atheist Corbyn, he had never met anyone who did not condemn terrorism.
Corbyn had reached a watershed. Over the previous twenty-five years he had endorsed communist groups fighting against America and Britain, and had championed the IRA to unite Ireland. Without exception, all his causes had been either contained or defeated. In Islington, Haringey and the Labour Party he had championed Trotskyist agitation, but despite some successes, Margaret Thatcher and then Tony Blair had eventually marginalised him and his fellow hardliners. Patiently he plodded on, a pulp politician with a guaranteed income and status at Westminster, dreaming of an opportunity to seize power. In 2001 he did not imagine that a Muslim fundamentalist inhabiting a cave in Afghanistan would set in train events that would eventually dethrone the Blairites, or that his lifelong denigration of Israel would lay the foundations for an alliance with enemies of the Labour Party.
7
Circle of Fear
In March 2001, Western intelligence was monitoring al-Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist group led by Osama bin Laden, a rich Saudi national. Bin Laden was held responsible for the 1998 bomb attacks on two American embassies in East Africa that killed 224 people, and also for an attack on an American warship in Aden in 2000, killing seventeen. In alliance with America, the Labour government banned members of twenty-one Islamic terrorist groups from entering Britain. Corbyn, in unison with McDonnell and Abbott, voted against that order.
Six months later, on 11 September 2001, bin Laden’s followers flew three passenger jets into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing over three thousand people. At first, Corbyn doubted that Muslims were involved. Once the evidence proved irrefutable, not least because bin Laden publicly boasted about his success, Corbyn condemned the mass murder, but went on to praise the pilots who flew into the Twin Towers for showing ‘an enormous amount of skill’. The attack appealed to Marxists. In Corbyn’s opinion, America and Britain were to blame for bin Laden’s widespread popularity among Muslims because of the West’s responsibility for ‘Israel’s occupation of Palestine’ and ‘the unbelievable poverty and misery in Afghanistan’.
In the midst of the global shock, Corbyn felt that nothing should be done by American or British military forces to bring bin Laden to justice or prevent further attacks. ‘I do not believe that the Pentagon or NATO are bodies that can administer world justice,’ he explained. Only the UN and the International Criminal Court could be trusted. He refused to explain how either of those bodies could arrest bin Laden, and since he had long argued that the British Army should be disbanded, he offered no solution to end bin Laden’s murderous campaign. On the contrary, in the name of ‘progressive socialism’, Corbyn demanded that the US should not bomb bin Laden’s bases in Afghanistan.
The certainty that America would retaliate sparked a uniquely diverse coalition among the left. Lindsey German, a Trotskyist, Kate Hudson, the general secretary of CND, Andrew Murray, a member of the Communist Party and a journalist at the Morning Star, and Mike Marqusee joined with Corbyn to create the Stop the War Coalition. At the outset, the group seemed destined to exist only briefly before disappearing like so many of its predecessors. The difference was Muslim interest in joining.
By coincidence, during the first week of September 2001 a UN World Conference Against Racism had met in Durban, South Africa. At the initiative of Muslim delegates, Zionism was identified as the world’s most evil form of racism for forcibly separating Jews and Arabs. Israel was classified as an agent of Western imperialism, deliberately positioned in the region to stifle ‘progressive’ Arabs. A country the size of Wales, with a population of just seven million, threatened the lives of one billion Muslims. The conference classified the most totalitarian Muslim states as the ‘good oppressed’ – the victims of Anglo-American imperialism. Labelling Israel uniquely as a ‘racist state’ was the climax of twenty-five years of lobbying started by Labour MP Peter Hain, the former student anti-apartheid campaigner, who accused Israel of oppressing the Palestinians even more than South Africa had oppressed blacks under apartheid. Over that period, and especially during the year before they met in Durban, the anti-Zionists’ language had become increasingly anti-Semitic.
At the beginning of 2001, the groups that were to meet in Durban had celebrated the final collapse of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. To their satisfaction, the Palestinians launched a second intifada, seeking to kill as many Israelis as possible. Eight months later, at the climax of the Durban conference, thousands of activists and delegates marched through the city waving placards reading ‘Kill All Jews’ and ‘The Good Things Hitler Did’. Against that backdrop, many British Muslim sympathisers of bin Laden ended up in an unnatural alliance with Corbyn and the Stop the War Coalition. ‘I am not prepared,’ said Lindsey German, ‘to … regard the state of Israel as somehow a viable presence.’ Born in 1951 and active for nearly thirty years in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, German agreed with Corbyn to forge an alliance with fundamentalist Muslims to fight Zionism, despite their holding illiberal opinions fundamentally contrary to Corbyn’s own, such as asserting the supremacy of a Muslim god over non-believers and rejecting gay rights.
In approving Corbyn as the group’s vice chairman, the Coalition’s Muslim members assumed that his anti-Zionism chimed in with their anti-Semitism. ‘The Israeli tail wags the American dog,’ Corbyn had written. In his view, Israel was the keystone of global imperialism, controlling America and the rest of the world. He shared the Muslim belief that Israel’s creation was a crime, and should be reversed. Zionist Jews had rarely featured in his personal life since his employment by the tailors’ union in 1973. With only 260,000 Jews living in Britain, just 0.4 per cent of the population, he had become more familiar with what he called ‘the wonderful faith of Islam’. An atheist, he never spoke about ‘the wonderful faith of Christianity’, nor Judaism or Hinduism.
Corbyn did not seek to understand the history of the persecution of Jews after their forcible expulsion from Palestine two thousand years earlier. According to those who had talked about the subject to him, he was clearly unaware how anxious Europe’s Je
ws had been to escape oppression. Their survival, the Zionists believed, could be guaranteed only by a return to their ancestral home.
In the wake of the Holocaust, the left, including Stalin, had supported the UN decree of 1948 to replace Britain’s Mandate over Palestine by two states – Israel and Palestine. The Jews agreed, but the surrounding Arab states rejected the proposal. In radio broadcasts from Cairo, Palestinians were urged to leave their homes while Arab armies invaded the fledgling Israeli state to kill off the occupiers. During that war, America and Britain refused to supply any weapons to the Jews. Their salvation was Stalin’s approval of sales of weapons by communist Czechoslovakia. After the Arabs’ defeat, the US declared that Israel had a right to survive. By default, the nascent Palestinian state had been destroyed by the neighbouring Arab states. In 1967, Egypt’s President Nasser massed his army on Israel’s border and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships. To end the threats and the continuous Arab attacks, Israel launched a surprise invasion of its three neighbours. Six days later, each of the Arab governments surrendered. Thereafter, the Soviet Union and other communist governments sided with the Arabs – except that even Russia recognised Israel’s right to exist. By contrast, on his return to Britain from Jamaica, the young Corbyn had aligned himself with the anti-Zionists’ denial of Israel’s existence. He preferred to ignore the fact that Israel was created by the United Nations and fulfilled all the legal requirements for international recognition. In the early 1970s he had defined Zionism as racism. He accused Jews of acting as supremacists, oppressing Arabs in what he called ‘Israel’s apartheid occupation’ of Palestine. Pertinently, he never complained about the creation of Pakistan in 1948, when the partition of the Indian subcontinent had caused millions of deaths and the persecution of Hindus in the new Muslim state. In Corbyn’s eyes, only the Jewish state had no right to exist.
