by Tom Bower
There was no mystery about Corbyn’s dislike of the new leader’s tepid socialism. Ever since the Young Socialists’ Skegness conference in 1972, he had been committed to the Trotskyite’s disdain for the notion that change could be achieved through Westminster. Although he remained an ostensibly loyal member of the Labour Party, he (like McDonnell) was committed to destroying Britain’s liberal democracy.
For twenty-eight years he had espoused causes rather than involving himself in the finer workings of a parliamentary system. And those causes – multiculturalism, immigration, pacifism, anti-globalisation and communism – were fashioned through his prism of resistance, all done in the name of the poor. He was a protester and a defender rather than a builder. While he had frequently asked questions about Ireland, the Western Sahara, South America and the fate of islanders expelled from Diego Garcia (a British territory in the Indian Ocean that is the site of an Anglo-American military base), he had rarely scrutinised legislation in a parliamentary committee, and had never seriously proposed any new law. His isolation was shared with Abbott and McDonnell. The three stood not just on the fringe of Labour, but of mainstream British society. Supported by a hinterland of far-left groups, the trio had remained unwaveringly loyal to their dream of radically changing Britain. As the least articulate of the three, Corbyn aroused the least antagonism.
To maintain the façade of loyalty to Labour, he spoke about the resurrection of the values championed by Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson. He eulogised about a return to that glorious era of class solidarity, trade union power, nationalised industries and civil servants in Whitehall dispensing care to Britons from cradle to grave. He blamed the 1979 nadir of Jim Callaghan’s government, with its devaluation, hyperinflation, strikes and de-industrialisation, on Callaghan’s betrayal of socialism. Since then, he portrayed Britain as one of the most unequal countries in the developed world, while membership of the EU was no more than a capitalist plot to hand power to ‘an unelected set of bankers’ intent on increasing unemployment. He was particularly outraged by the EU’s restrictions on government investment, its promotion of the privatisation of public services, and its support for competitive postal services. ‘The idea of competition in postal delivery is ludicrous,’ he said. That ‘crucial public service’ should be a government monopoly. Federal Express, UPS and the thousands of independent delivery companies servicing Amazon and all of Britain’s online retailers should be wound up. In thirty years, nothing had changed about Corbyn’s ideal route to a socialist society: leave the EU, erect trade barriers to cheap imports, nationalise the banks and industry, and tax wealth. He promised security of employment, but other than government borrowing and high taxes, did not explain how he would generate the money to pay for all the additional benefits. Although there was no evidence that the poor get richer by the rich being made poorer, he never spoke about increasing individual wealth. Rather, like Hugo Chávez, he favoured imposing fairness by levelling down. He championed the ‘equality’ of poverty. Communities, he believed, would be much happier with less material wealth. He wanted to return to past certainties by attaching new labels to old enemies.
In a reversal of roles, the old, anti-red witch-hunt was replaced by the ‘progressive’ left’s vilification of ‘neoliberals’. Characterised as decadent, self-enraptured, warmongering, anti-government globalists, this political group was synonymous with red-toothed capitalism. As a term of abuse, neoliberals were deemed to have abandoned the working class. Corbyn’s greatest hatred was of ‘markets’. Asked whether he understood the challenges faced by entrepreneurs, he would reply, ‘I’m friendly with the guy who runs my local caff.’ He could not name a single businessman or industrialist he admired. The American titans who built empires by developing railways, motor vehicles, oilfields, medical drugs, aerospace and computer technology offended him. He was baffled by how companies like McDonald’s, Starbucks, Google, eBay and Amazon became successful. The division between the creators of Airbnb and the uneducated employed in traditional workplaces defied the certainties of Bennism. Since he could not identify a class that was exploited by the creators of Google and Apple, his political certainties were confused by Silicon Valley’s emancipation of people from spending their whole lives working in a factory or coalmine. The unacceptable cost of the Techies’ triumph, he concluded, was the break-up of communities of workers. The anonymous masses were ignored while, to his disgust, the media placed the rich on a pedestal and praised the success of celebrities.
He disliked the cultural gap between himself and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who had created first PayPal then Space X, which successfully developed a better reuseable rocket than NASA. Yet he demanded that Musk and his ilk should be controlled. Those wealthy entrepreneurs, in his view, were obsessed by profits, and should be subject to workers’ committees. The people should be empowered to direct James Dyson and other innovators on how to run their business. ‘Those who contribute but have no wealth,’ said Corbyn during a TV interview in 2015, ‘should not be denigrated by the vested interests of the rich.’ Successful industrialists, he insisted, would not leave Britain to avoid workers’ control or higher taxes. Even if they did, an exodus of potential risk-takers did not trouble him. Equality was preferable to the disparity generated by high achievers. In his world, the ideal export was the sale of British skills to build railways in South America. ‘British engineers,’ he explained during the interview, ‘built most of the railways in Latin America.’ He ignored the facts that 150 years after those engineers sailed to South America, Britain’s own rail manufacturers had ceased to exist, and South America’s rail network was either decrepit or self-sustaining.
Economic matters also continued to be foreign to him. His reprimand to the PLP that ‘people are being forced to borrow money from hedge funds’ displayed his naïvety. He was more concerned that Ed Miliband had allowed the Conservatives to depict themselves as having inherited Labour’s reckless deficit, for which the only cure was huge spending cuts. Cameron’s call for austerity was a Tory trick, based on a myth created to harm the poor. Corbyn was appalled by the government’s plan to cut welfare benefits, which were at the heart of any civilised society. In his revolutionary vein, he advocated near-unlimited spending and direct action to solve the shortage of housing. Squatters, he said, should be allowed to occupy any of the UK’s ‘one million empty properties’. ‘The government is trying to criminalise resistance,’ he protested about a law to protect private property from illegal seizure. ‘Campus and workplace occupations have played a pivotal role in trade union and student movements.’ The squatters’ violence was acceptable to further the cause.
Yet he continued to parade himself as a pacifist. He could not imagine, he said, ‘any circumstances’ in which he would deploy the army. ‘I don’t wish to go to war.’ He ruled out Britain defending another European country if it were attacked by Russia. Among his many protests was an appearance outside RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, a control centre for Reaper drones. Drones, declared Corbyn, were an ‘obscenity’ and should be abolished. In his world, there was no such thing as a just war. The First World War, in his opinion, was ‘driven by big-power competition for influence around the globe’, and the government’s plan to spend £55 million on a ‘truly national commemoration’ of the centenary of the war’s outbreak in 2014 was wasteful and wrong. Never having read any analyses of the causes of the Great War, he dismissed evidence that the Kaiser had wanted to dominate Europe, or that Britain had fought to protect the Continent’s democracy. Even committing an army to combat Nazi Germany posed a problem for him. Blanket outrage sufficed.
The same simplified thinking shaped Corbyn’s support of the Palestinians – the symbol of his ambition to shift Britain away from the United States and NATO, and align it with leftist and Muslim governments. He had never read any study that dispassionately discussed the Jews’ acceptance in 1948 of a separate Palestinian state, or the Arab rejection of the UN settlement. Restricting himsel
f to speaking to people who shared his views, he barely considered how sixty years later a Palestinian state might be established without either Israel’s agreement or destruction. Nor did he take into account the fact that many Diaspora Jews across the globe relied on Israel’s existence as protection from institutionalised anti-Semitism – and even another Holocaust. To further his cause, he encouraged some Islington schoolchildren to visit a festival organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign so they could ‘understand the wealth and joy of Palestinian literature and a little of the history of the region’. He added, ‘It is not in any way biased’ – although the festival explicitly denied Israel’s right to exist. To his disappointment, the Education Act requires children to hear balanced presentations, and the visit was cancelled.
Corbyn consistently invited anti-Zionists to the Commons, without ever offering Jews a similar privilege. Among his guests was Raed Salah, the leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, which had described Jews as ‘monkeys’ and ‘bacteria’. Salah had been convicted in Israel for saying that Semites had drunk the blood of non-Jewish babies, and used children’s blood to bake bread, and had pronounced that the 9/11 attacks were a Jewish plot – proven by an order from Israel to all Jews working in the Twin Towers not to go in to work that day (an order that was certainly never made). Corbyn also described the Reverend Stephen Sizer, an Anglican vicar who later approved on Facebook an article entitled ‘9/11, Israel Did It’, and was banned from social media by the Church, as a hero for daring to ‘stand up and speak out against Zionism’. In 2009 he had told a rally in support of Gaza about his ‘tears’ on reading a message from ‘my good friend Ewa Jasiewicz’ about conditions in Gaza. Jasiewicz, known for having daubed ‘Free Gaza and Palestine’ on the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, where 400,000 Jews had been interned before being shipped to Auschwitz, had also advocated that Palestinians should ‘bump off’ Israeli politicians.
On Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010, Corbyn had hosted a protest in the Commons to compare Auschwitz to Gaza, featuring a speech by Hajo Meyer, an anti-Zionist Auschwitz survivor, titled ‘The Misuse of the Holocaust for Political Purposes’. He also invited Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Muslim extremist, to Britain to address a Stop the War Coalition rally denouncing Israel, America and Britain. Jahjah was arrested at Heathrow, but Corbyn successfully lobbied Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, to admit him to the country to deliver his speech. Any doubts about Corbyn’s beliefs were dispelled by his own words.
On 3 March 2009 he said in a speech, ‘It will be my pleasure and my honour to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I have also invited our friends from Hamas to come and speak.’ In the lexicon of terrorists, few groups were more medieval than Hamas and Hezbollah. Both were committed to the violent destruction of Israel. According to Hamas’s openly anti-Semitic charter, five million Jews would be pushed into the sea or allowed to flee. Corbyn never criticised Hamas’s policy. Britain, he said, had made a ‘big, big historical mistake’ in labelling Hamas a terror group. Like Hezbollah, he said, Hamas was an ‘honest’ resistance organisation combating Zionist imperialism on behalf of the oppressed. The British government should negotiate directly with Hamas and Hezbollah to ‘bring about long-term peace and social justice’.
Iran was the paymaster of Hamas and Hezbollah: both were armed by its regular dispatch of weapons to their 60,000 militia members in Gaza and Lebanon. Iran’s plan, as Corbyn knew, was to use both organisations to replace Israel with a Shia Muslim Palestine and simultaneously to destabilise the Sunnis, especially Saudi Arabia, by establishing a military presence from the Mediterranean through Iraq to Yemen. In every way, Iran’s aggression ran counter to Corbyn’s pacifism. Nevertheless, in 2008 he would agree to appear regularly on Press TV, the Iranian state broadcaster, even though at the time the Iranian government was repressing the Green Movement’s campaign for democracy in the country. He was paid £20,000. ‘Not an enormous amount,’ he said. Considering that his MP’s salary was £60,277 and his expenses were low, the fee made up a considerable part of his income.
Corbyn’s values further emerged in 2011 after Shia ‘days of rage’ protests erupted on the eve of a Formula One race in Bahrain. Knowing that the demonstration had been organised by Iran, he led the protests in Britain against the Bahrainis’ ‘suppression of dissent’, and urged a boycott against the ‘totalitarian regime’. He also criticised the British government for accepting £3 million from Bahrain to refurbish a hall at Sandhurst, the British military academy, which would then be named after King Hamad of Bahrain. ‘I’m appalled,’ he said. ‘It’s simply wrong to take money from the dictator who shoots demonstrators.’ That year, Amnesty International reported that at least six hundred people, including juveniles, had been executed in Iran, mostly for drug-smuggling. At least three thousand more were held in appalling conditions on death row in Iranian prisons.
By chance, Corbyn soon had an opportunity to display his even-handed pacifism. In January 2014 he made a short visit to Iran with three other MPs. There was an early hiccup: he refused to fly business class. ‘If you don’t agree,’ he was threatened by the former Tory chancellor Norman Lamont, who was one of his companions on the trip, ‘then we’re not going.’ Corbyn gave way. Despite his insistence before leaving that his prime interest was to ‘address issues of human rights’, he remained strangely silent during the MPs’ meetings with government officials about the regime’s execution of gay men, juvenile drug-takers and political opponents. Back in London, he never mentioned human rights in Iran during his appearances on Iran’s Press TV. Acting as the host on an Iranian television discussion programme, he made his consistent theme Zionist conspiracies. To one contributor who called the BBC ‘Zionist liars’, Corbyn asked if he had ‘used his right as a licence-payer to complain about their coverage’. When Osama bin Laden was killed by American special forces in May 2011, he appeared again on Iranian TV to proclaim that the assassination was ‘a tragedy that would make the world a more dangerous place’. Rather than being shot, he said, bin Laden should have been put on trial.
Corbyn’s attitude towards murderous Muslims was, as ever, confused. Also in 2011, David Cameron agreed with the American and French governments to destroy an armoured column advancing on Muammar Gaddafi’s orders to Benghazi to quash a rebellion in Libya’s second city. Had Gaddafi’s soldiers not been killed by allied aircraft, the uprising would have ended in a massacre. Corbyn not only opposed that operation, he did not comment about the refusal of neighbouring Arab governments, especially Egypt, to come to the aid of Gaddafi’s opponents in Benghazi. Instead, he attacked Cameron for criticising multiculturalism as a source of terrorism, and for branding British Muslims murdering Britons as the new ‘enemy within’.
And then Cameron made a mistake.
Rather than ending British intervention after saving Benghazi, he agreed to continue air strikes to topple Gaddafi. Singling out the Libyan tyrant while tolerating other dictators drew criticism. ‘Just because you can’t do the right thing everywhere,’ replied Cameron, ‘doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do the right thing somewhere.’ Lacking accurate intelligence about Libya’s tribal society after forty-two years of dictatorship, he made no attempt to develop a plan for governing the country after Gaddafi’s fall. Arabists, including George Galloway, predicted chaos, but were ignored. Corbyn, leading a protest outside Downing Street against Tory ‘imperialism’, focused on money. ‘The stench of hypocrisy is overwhelming,’ he said. Always convinced that American and British foreign policy were shaped to win commercial advantage, he insisted: ‘The war is about oil – the theft of that country’s oil and resources.’ The evidence was the opposite: BP had just concluded an oil deal with Gaddafi that would now be lost. Corbyn brushed aside that inconvenient truth and disregarded the enthusiasm of exiled Libyans about the removal of a mass-murdering tyrant. As usual, he also ignored the UN resolution authorising the allies’ intervention to save lives – but not Gaddafi’s
eviction. In the Commons vote, Cameron’s intervention was supported by 557 for, with thirteen against, the nays including Corbyn and McDonnell. Cameron, warned Corbyn, was ignoring the lessons of the Iraq war.
After Gaddafi’s death in October 2011, Cameron walked away, and Libya fell into a bloodbath. Corbyn was not credited for his accurate prediction. His motives were suspect after he explained the main reason for his opposition: the British people, he said, were worried that each rocket had cost £500,000, at a time when public services were being slashed. It appeared that he was preoccupied by money, and not by the liberation of Libyans from oppression.
His contradictions multiplied over the following year. Daily, Islamic fighters attached to ISIS were raping both men and women, burning civilians, forcing young Christian girls into sexual slavery, orchestrating public beheadings and drowning opponents in cages. Corbyn blamed the existence of ISIS on the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and support for Saudi Arabia. He condemned British volunteers fighting for ISIS only insofar as he condemned all violence. ‘It’s wrong to make value judgements,’ he said. After Reyaad Khan, an ISIS terrorist from Cardiff, was killed by a drone, Corbyn commented, ‘I’m unclear as to the point of killing the individual by this drone attack.’ He opposed any retribution. ‘Yes, they are brutal,’ he told the Russian television channel RT. ‘Yes, what they have done is quite appalling; likewise what the Americans did in Fallujah and other places is appalling.’ In Corbyn’s eyes, there was a moral equivalence between the American army using excessive force against organised Sunni and Shia terrorist armies in Iraq that were responsible for planting huge bombs in Baghdad and other cities, and ISIS pushing gays off tower blocks.
