Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  Singlemindedly, he condemned the British government’s refusal to support ‘the inalienable rights of the Palestinian refugees to return’, an opinion shared by the London Labour Briefing group. In 1982 the Labour Herald, which Ken Livingstone co-edited, had printed a deliberately provocative cartoon captioned ‘The Final Solution’, showing Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, dressed as an aggressive Nazi officer, squashing a pile of Arab corpses under his jackboot. An article in the magazine also suggested that Zionist Jews had collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. ‘Basically, your Zionist argues with the Nazis that Jews cannot be assimilated into Gentile society,’ it claimed. In other words, the Holocaust was the Jews’ fault. And, it continued, by exploiting ‘the sympathy stirred up … after the Holocaust for their own devious ends’, the ‘Jews needed a land of their own, not just any land, either, but only the land of Palestine’.

  Corbyn’s anti-Semitism was never that overt, but like Livingstone’s, it was deeply ingrained among the far left. One source of anti-Semitism in left-wing literature was ‘On the Jewish Question’, an essay written by Karl Marx in 1843. Despite Marx being himself Jewish, he denounced Jews as ‘hucksters’ whose ‘worldly God’ was money. It was ‘the jealous God of Israel … The bill of exchange (or loans) is the real god of the Jew.’ To liberate humanity, Marx concluded, the Jews should abandon their existence as a separate culture: ‘In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.’ He confirmed that opinion in an article for the New York Daily Tribune in 1854. Describing Jerusalem, Marx estimated that the town’s population was four thousand Muslims and eight thousand Jews. ‘Nothing equals the misery and suffering of the Jews at Jerusalem,’ he wrote, ‘inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town … and [being] the constant objects of Muslim oppression and intolerance.’ Although Jews were the city’s majority population, Marx believed they should integrate with the Muslims.

  His antagonism towards the assertion by Jews of their own identity cast him as a self-hating Jew. (Less well-known, Leon Trotsky, also a Jew, late in his life supported the idea of an independent Jewish state.) Marxist-Trotskyists like Corbyn imbibed Marx’s sentiment without explicitly acknowledging its anti-Semitism, but the virus influenced Corbyn’s language so that he automatically challenged the right of Israel to exist. ‘The power of the Israel lobby is truly phenomenal,’ he would say, referring to his conviction that there existed a global conspiracy of rich Jewish bankers, especially in New York, to orchestrate Zionist influence. He was not interested in comparing Israel, a democracy built in the desert, with the neighbouring undemocratic Arab dictators. He also ignored the fact that many Arabic Jews had fled persecution by Muslim governments in Egypt, Syria, Iran and Iraq to find sanctuary in Israel, and that Palestine had never been a state. Finally, he was indifferent to the legality of Israel’s existence. Most countries were created by international treaties or conquest, including Russia, India, China, the USA, Canada, Australia, and all the Arab states. But Corbyn singled out Israel as uniquely illegal.

  During the early 1990s, parallel with his support for the IRA, he had embraced the PLO, the Palestinian organisation responsible for scores of terrorist attacks across the world. While presenting himself as a man of peace, he accepted the PLO’s use of bombs and murder to further its agenda. Accordingly, in 1995 he supported Samar Alami and Jawad Botmeh, two Palestinians living in London who had detonated car bombs in the capital the previous year, one near the Israeli embassy in Kensington Gardens, and another outside Balfour House, a Jewish community centre in Finchley. Explaining in court the discovery of an arsenal of bomb-making equipment and pistols in their home, Alami and Botmeh said that they were researching explosives to help the Palestinian cause in the occupied territories. In their appeals after their conviction by a jury, both asserted that they had been the victims of a political trial. Their appeals were rejected. Corbyn led a campaign to secure their release, arguing that their convictions had been a miscarriage of justice. He did not make any comment about the damage caused by their bombs.

  There was a motive for Corbyn’s sympathy. One day in 2000, Paul Eisen, a Jewish anti-Zionist (in public meetings he had denied that the Nazis had murdered six million Jews), called unannounced at Corbyn’s home. Might he support Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR), an organisation that commemorated the victims of a notorious massacre in April 1948 by Jewish paramilitarists of about a hundred defenceless Palestinian civilians living near Jerusalem. ‘I wanted him to join,’ recalled Eisen. ‘I’d hardly begun my feverishly rehearsed pitch before his chequebook was on the table.’ Corbyn attended several DYR meetings until April 2013.

  With that mindset, in 2001 Corbyn did not consider that the Stop the War Coalition’s discussions about an alliance with Muslims posed a dilemma. At pro-Palestinian rallies he openly associated with Muslim activists who rejected equal rights for women and homosexuals, and opposed socialism and secularism. He adopted Lenin’s maxim that to achieve the revolution socialists were justified in allying themselves to any group dedicated to the same goal. Like Corbyn, the Islamic extremists denigrated Britain’s institutions and were dedicated to destroying Western liberal society.

  With Corbyn’s support, the Coalition opposed the American invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime. Military action, they all argued, would not produce peace or justice. Food and kindness, rather than bombing, would win over the Afghans. Tony Blair rejected those arguments, and denied Corbyn’s claim that civilian targets had been bombed. In a Commons vote, Corbyn’s side was defeated by 373 to thirteen. One week later, about 20,000 supporters of the Stop the War Coalition marched through London. Attracting that number to Trafalgar Square to condemn America as a terrorist state for bombing Afghanistan was reckoned a huge success. In Corbyn’s eyes, the fall of Kabul and the liberation of Afghanistan from Taliban rule – just two months after the 9/11 attacks – confirmed the evil power of American imperialism. Next, he predicted, President George W. Bush would link the terrorist attacks and the ‘axis of evil’ – Iraq, North Korea and Iran – to justify an invasion of Iraq. His prediction was ridiculed by the media and the majority of MPs.

  Over the following year, Trotskyites and communists met frequently at a succession of parties in north London. These were often hosted by the Communist Party journalist Andrew Murray at his large house in Kentish Town. Regular guests included Seumas Milne, the Guardian’s opinion editor who championed Muslim fundamentalists, George Galloway, Corbyn, Tariq Ali, Ken Livingstone and Simon Fletcher – all untroubled that Murray’s lavish hospitality was financed by his wealthy family and that, as an employee of Novosti, the Soviet-owned news agency, he was known to favour North Korea, and limited his criticism of Stalin for having been a little ‘harsh’. But Murray’s good food and wine strengthened the bonds between all these comrades-in-arms – even if their new Muslim allies were not invited.

  By September 2002, the mood had changed. The government’s publication of an intelligence dossier describing Iraq’s ability to fire WMDs within forty-five minutes of the order at a British military base in Cyprus convinced the majority of Britons about the danger Saddam Hussein posed. To win parliamentary approval for the invasion of Iraq, Blair repeated that ‘fact’ three times in the Commons. A sizeable minority of MPs, including Corbyn, was suspicious of anything written by Labour’s director of communications Alastair Campbell and signed by Blair. The WMDs, they were convinced, had been invented to justify Blair’s agreement with Bush to topple Saddam.

  In planning London’s next Stop the War demonstration, Corbyn welcomed the support of the Muslim Association of Great Britain. The group was attached to the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organisation sponsoring suicide bombers to impose Sharia or Islamic law across the globe. Some on the left questioned the coalition of Marxists with political Islamists, but after a debate the union was approved as a tactical advantage by Andrew Murray, Lindsey German and Corbyn, the latter
explaining that the alliance was forged by a mutual opposition to Zionism. On the proposed march, protest banners against the war would be given equal billing with Muslim Association placards urging the destruction of Israel. The two, said the Muslim organisers, were linked: Zionists were planning the imminent invasion of Iraq. Corbyn agreed, and on 15 February 2003 at least 750,000 people – some said over a million – marched through London.

  In the days before the Commons vote to approve the invasion, the country was electrified.

  ‘Tony, just one question,’ said Corbyn during a rare meeting with the prime minister. ‘Why are we doing it?’

  ‘Because it’s the right thing to do,’ Blair replied testily.

  ‘That’s not an answer,’ said Corbyn, who would thereafter accuse Blair of committing Britain to an illegal war.

  ‘It’s the only one you’re going to get,’ said Blair.

  With Tory support, he comfortably won the Commons vote; but the Labour Party, like Britain, was divided. On the eve of the invasion, MI6 chief Richard Dearlove came to Downing Street.

  ‘Are you sure Saddam has WMDs?’ asked Blair.

  ‘Yes, absolutely,’ replied Dearlove. ‘Categorically.’

  Over the previous six years, Blair had corrupted Whitehall’s capacity to offer accurate advice on all policies, including those relating to the NHS, education and immigration. Distrustful of the civil service from the outset of his government, Blair had excluded independent senior officials from his inner sanctum. The constitutional checks and balances to preserve honest management had been deliberately dismantled. Consequently, the distortions that led to the Iraq war were not an aberration, but were characteristic of the unscrupulousness pervading his entire administration. The Ministry of Defence was helplessly excluded as Blair’s secrecy denied the military the chance to plan the post-war occupation of Iraq, obtain sufficient money to buy adequate equipment, or train personnel to understand their mission.

  There was little cheer in Downing Street in the days after Saddam’s statue in central Baghdad was toppled on 9 April. Despite the military victory, Blair was fretting. ‘Any news about WMDs?’ he asked. ‘No, prime minister,’ replied Admiral Boyce, the chief of the defence staff. Saddam’s defeat prompted Corbyn to announce a new demonstration. Under the banner ‘Stop the killing. No occupation of Iraq,’ he demanded that American and British troops should leave the country, transferring authority to the UN. Soon after, the UN mission in Baghdad was blown up by an extremist’s bomb. Twenty-two people died, over a hundred were injured, and all UN personnel were evacuated. At the end of the month, Blair faced the awful truth that no WMDs existed. ‘We were taken to war on the basis there was a real threat,’ said Corbyn. ‘He’s ridiculous.’ Previously, Blair had dismissed Corbyn’s extreme convictions as politically irrelevant, but after his monumental mistake in Iraq, the discredited leader found himself vulnerable to Corbyn’s attacks.

  Twenty years after entering Parliament, the Honourable Member for Islington North was finally winning recognition, if not admiration. Opponents of the war were not even surprised by his praise for those killing British and American soldiers as waging ‘an increasingly successful and popular guerrilla war’. His campaign was enhanced by the revelations of the torture of Iraqis by American army personnel in Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, and the fact that British officials had suppressed the truth for about two months. Accused by Corbyn of duplicity, Blair faced a party revolt which was magnified in July by the suicide of David Kelly, a government weapons inspector. Kelly had effectively accused Alastair Campbell of ‘sexing up’ the government’s intelligence dossier in 2002 to prove the existence of Iraqi WMDs. The official inquest into Kelly’s death, Corbyn hoped, would expose the conspiracy between Blair and Campbell to shame the hapless civil servant in order to distract the public’s attention from Campbell’s guilt. ‘I suspect that Downing Street has been involved from the very beginning,’ he concluded about Kelly’s death. A genuinely independent inquiry into Blair’s conduct would, Corbyn knew, be enough to depose the prime minister, but at Blair’s behest Whitehall circled the wagons. Those selected to serve on four successive investigating committees were trusted to fillet the truth, and Britons were denied the satisfaction of a final, accurate explanation. Many loyal Labour Party members were not deceived. Disenchanted, they drifted away, discounting the government’s achievements. Widespread anger about Blair’s deception could have been the turning point for Corbyn and the left, but traditional Labour voters were not attracted to his new group, Labour Against the War, once they saw it was linked to Britain’s enemies.

  Corbyn’s new ally, the Muslim Association of Britain, appreciated his belief in unrestricted Muslim immigration, segregated faith schools and Muslim women wearing the full-face veil. As an expression of his sympathy, Corbyn opposed the government’s invitation to Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s new prime minister, to address Labour’s annual conference in 2004. ‘Allawi,’ he explained, ‘has introduced the death penalty and banned a television station in Iraq.’ That argument generated yet further distrust of Corbyn among mainstream Labour voters. Those same criteria had not deterred his trust in the Iranian ayatollahs, the principal supporters of the Muslim Association, who imprisoned political opponents, brutalised women and executed adolescents for drug offences.

  The glue cementing Corbyn to Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was Israel. ‘The Zionist regime,’ said the ayatollah in 2003, ‘is a true cancer tumour on this region that should be cut off.’ Khamenei’s ultimate weapon to annihilate the Jewish state, Corbyn knew, was a nuclear bomb. Although a self-proclaimed pacifist opposed to all nuclear weapons, Corbyn did not comment on the International Atomic Agency’s confirmation of Iran’s secret nuclear programme, or criticise Iran’s development of the bomb. Yet in May 1986 he had told the Commons: ‘There is an inextricable link between the production of civil nuclear power and the warheads which result from it.’ But he did criticise Israel for threatening to destroy Iran’s underground factories to forestall the existential threat. As ever, his moral indignation was selective. Aligning himself with Muslims, he urged the British government to ‘end its shameful complicity with Israeli and US policies and reverse Britain’s historic betrayal of the Palestinian people from Balfour to Blair … All who abhor Israel’s outrages should support such key policies as economic sanctions, boycotts and an end to arms trading.’ Iraq and Israel had widened the gulf between Blair and Corbyn.

  In January 2004, Blair’s government was in danger of defeat despite its 159-seat majority. In response to Blair’s promise to ‘quicken the march of progress’ on foundation hospitals and the privatisation of public services and education, Corbyn reinforced the revolt to stop the government’s rush to entrench Thatcherism. Although his Campaign Group had fewer than a dozen hardcore MPs, he drew on the dissatisfaction of many Labour Members who were opposed to Blair in principle rather than on ideology. A vote to introduce student fees was on a knife-edge, and potential rebels were invited to meet the prime minister, although Corbyn was pointedly excluded. Despite seventy-two Labour MPs rebelling, Blair scraped home by five votes. ‘This isn’t over yet,’ warned Corbyn. Reflecting Blair’s loosening grip before another vote, a Labour MP stood by the entrance to the opposition lobby in the Commons shouting, ‘Line up, line up! This way for the rebellion!’

  Unlike other Labour MPs, Corbyn felt no compunction about voting against his own party. He had done so eighty-seven times since the 2001 election, 148 times since 1997. For most of his colleagues, his dissent was a ‘self-inflicted wound’, the product of ‘a psychological flaw on the left’. For a brief moment the rebels exercised some power, but would then be forgotten.

  In the run-up to the 2005 election, the left hoped that Labour’s majority would be slashed to just fifty, giving Blair ‘a bloody nose’ before he was replaced by at least a token socialist. To embarrass him, Corbyn made a rare appearance at a PLP meeting. People on the doorstep, he told the prime minister,
were concerned about Iraq. Labour MPs heckled him, but failed to dent Corbyn’s self-confidence. ‘He’s got to show a degree of contrition about the language he used in the run-up to the war,’ he went on. Blair accused Corbyn, who had just voted once again against the Prevention of Terror Act, of protecting Britain’s enemies: ‘These people would kill thousands of our people. It is terrorism without limit.’ The prime minister’s supporters spoke about ‘show trials’ to deselect rebel MPs, but Blair lacked the strength to demand obedience. Historians compared his plight to Robert Peel’s after the Tory revolt against the Corn Laws in 1846, which had led to the Tory Party being in disarray for twenty years. Labour’s own days of reckoning would come before long.

  The general election on 5 May 2005 brought few surprises. A disorganised Tory campaign led by Michael Howard assured Labour of a third successive victory. Although Blair won a majority of sixty-six, he was a lame duck. In any controversy, Corbyn and fifty Labour rebels were certain to oppose the government. Corbyn even opposed chancellor Gordon Brown’s demand for higher productivity from the public sector. Critics noted the irony that, while he rebelled against every change proposed at Westminster, especially those related to the NHS and education, he had remained absolutely silent when the management of Islington’s failing schools was handed over by the council to Cambridge Education Associates, a private consortium.

  Corbyn’s constant rebellion made him vulnerable to one irrefutable criticism: that his political heroes were tyrants who rewarded their followers with poverty. In 2005, that prejudice was reconfirmed when Corbyn found a new hero – Hugo Chávez, alias Il Commandante, elected Venezuela’s president in 1999. The former soldier turned populist politician was waging war against the oil-rich nation’s middle class with ‘socialism of the twenty-first century’, a mixture of nationalist fervour and Marxism.