by Tom Bower
Formby interrupted Arkush before he had an opportunity to ask that question. Two weeks earlier she had fired John Stolliday, the head of the NEC’s compliance unit responsible for rooting out anti-Semitism. His replacement, Gordon Nardell, a lawyer who had publicly denied the existence of anti-Semitism in the party, was an ally of Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker and Ken Loach. Formby now went on to describe in endless detail Labour’s process to investigate the charges. The Board of Deputies’ delegation silently recognised that this was a ruse to take up the meeting’s allotted time.
When she finally finished, her comments were ignored. Arkush looked at Corbyn: ‘You need to take a personal lead to remove anti-Semitism.’
Milne interrupted. ‘That’s just what Jeremy has always done.’
‘We don’t want words. We want action,’ said Arkush. Labour, he insisted, needed to endorse the internationally accepted definition of anti-Semitism by the IHRA, which included eleven examples. In 2016 the NEC had adopted the definition, but had deleted four of the examples, which Corbyn had demanded should be rephrased to suit his opinion. According to him, it was not anti-Semitic to accuse British Jews of dual loyalty – being more loyal to Israel than to Britain (which embraced the old allegation of Jews being members of a worldwide, super-national conspiracy). He also wanted the freedom to say that Israel was a racist endeavour because in his opinion it had been founded on the basis of race. Labour members, he believed, should be allowed to call Jews ‘Zio’ or ‘Zionist Nazis’, as long as their intent was not anti-Semitic. And it was justifiable to compare contemporary Israel’s policies to Nazi Germany’s.
‘Labour only accepted the IHRA’s definitions with qualifications,’ explained Milne. The best they would do was to rely on Gordon Nardell to monitor the complaints.
‘You cannot cherry-pick the definition,’ replied Arkush, ‘and say that some forms of anti-Semitism are permissible.’
They had reached a dead end. Corbyn failed to agree to any of their suggestions. ‘Corbyn,’ Arkush told his colleagues afterwards, ‘has anti-Semitic views, but that does not mean he is anti-Semitic. He just has a blind spot about anti-Semitism.’ Later he would acknowledge his mistake. There was no blind spot.
In a public statement, Corbyn described the meeting as ‘positive and constructive’. The Board’s spokesman called it ‘a disappointing missed opportunity’. Labour’s leader, he said, had failed to grasp that he not only had to ‘build trust’ with Jews, but bring about ‘strong actions in order to bring about a deep cultural change in his supporters’ attitude to Jews’.
Corbyn was not worried. The opinion polls showed little damage from the latest arguments. Three days later, he voiced no protest when his supporters harangued Ruth Smeeth after she gave evidence in a disciplinary hearing against Marc Wadsworth for his anti-Semitic outburst in 2016. Nor did he comment about the fact that she had to be protected by Labour MPs and peers as she left the building. He was focused on the council elections on 3 May, in which Labour was predicted to make huge gains. ‘Tories are Bracing Themselves for Disaster in London’ was the Spectator’s headline. ‘Red London’, pronounced the magazine, ‘terrified’ the Tories. The flagship Tory councils of Westminster, Wandsworth, and Kensington and Chelsea were expected to fall to Labour because of Grenfell Tower,Theresa May, Brexit, and Momentum’s mass mobilisation of activists.
The polls were wrong. Labour failed to gain a single London council, and across the country the Tories lost only twenty-eight seats (mostly to the Lib Dems), while Labour gained just fifty-seven. Labour won just 35 per cent of the vote. There was talk of ‘peak Corbyn’. Defeated Labour candidates blamed their leader’s sophistry about Russia and the Salisbury attack, but most importantly his anti-Semitism.
But surrender to the Jewish demands was inconceivable. Although Corbyn had encouraged Ken Livingstone to resign from the party before he was expelled, and Christine Shawcroft had been persuaded to step down from the NEC, Gordon Nardell was not encouraged to hasten his inquiries. The wider public, Corbyn calculated, was not interested in a debate about the IHRA’s guidelines. At a series of events during the early summer, the faithful reassured him of their loyalty. In Islington, party members cheered his thirty-fifth anniversary as their MP, and at a fundraiser organised by his wife for ‘Justice for Mexico’, his South American friends were oblivious to any problems. To an extent, so was Corbyn.
At the start of his act at the Mexican event, the alternative comedian Jeremy Hardy quipped, ‘I’ve been a member of the Labour Party since 1980 – with just a short break between 1985 and 2015’ – the sort of comment that went down well with a London audience.
Corbyn turned to a friend and asked, ‘Why 1985?’
‘That was the year the miners’ strike ended, we lost the rate-capping campaign, a lot of strikes were crushed, and Kinnock attacked Militant.’
Corbyn nodded. His understanding of history remained vague. The highlight of the event was the auction, which included two autographed jars of Corbyn’s home-made blackberry jam. They were sold for £55 and £75. In all, £750 was raised for the cause, which a friend called ‘staggering’.
Corbyn’s immediate problem, however, was that the Jewish community refused to return to its usual placidity. His insistence that he be free to say ‘Zio’, call Israel a Nazi-style racist state, and accuse them of disloyalty, continued to outrage British Jews. By 16 July, tensions were at breaking point. Labour MPs – both Jewish and non-Jewish – were incandescent about the anti-Semitism in Corbyn’s office.
Margaret Hodge finally realised that her leader could not solve the problem of Labour’s anti-Semitism, because he himself was the problem. Denying that truth had become pointless. Corbyn regarded British Jews as different from everyone else. His leadership had cast them as pariahs, making them unsafe in their own country. He had betrayed the reason she had joined Labour, the natural home for Jews to fight racism and intolerance. His rejection of the IHRA’s guidelines was the final straw. Spotting him that afternoon in a Westminster corridor, the diminutive Hodge stood in his way.
‘You’re an anti-Semite and a racist,’ she said to his face.
‘I’m sorry you feel like that,’ he replied in a flat tone.
‘It’s not what you say,’ she continued, ‘but what you do, and by your actions you have shown you are an anti-Semitic racist.’
This time he made no reply.
Elsewhere at Westminster, Ian Austin spied Ian Lavery, the party’s chairman and a Corbyn loyalist. Austin, an intemperate man, was fuming as he approached him. Labour’s failure to tackle anti-Semitism, he snarled at Lavery, was ‘a bloody disgrace … The party has become a sewer.’ Lavery reported the attack to Formby and Milne.
Milne insisted that Hodge and Austin should be disciplined – he would not tolerate criticism from Zionists. The usual websites echoed his anger with outbursts of indignation. ‘Zionist agent Hodge’ was accused of acting ‘under orders from her paymasters in Israel’, and of using the Holocaust as a ‘weapon’ against Corbyn. Unlike the party’s nonchalance towards anti-Semites, retribution against Hodge and Austin was quick. Both received letters from Formby informing them that they would be formally investigated for breaking Labour’s code of conduct. Milne hoped that they would be silenced, and possibly deselected.
For the Jewish community, the Rubicon had been crossed. On 25 July the three Jewish weekly newspapers published identical front pages: ‘United We Stand’. A Corbyn government, all three declared, would pose an ‘existential threat to Jewish life’. Since Corbyn became leader, ‘the stain and shame of anti-Semitism has coursed through Her Majesty’s Opposition’. Either Labour would accept the IHRA’s definition, or the party would ‘be seen by all decent people as a racist, anti-Semitic party’.
The battle lines had been drawn. John McDonnell blamed Hodge for ‘a complete misinterpretation’ of the NEC’s rejection of the IHRA guidelines. ‘She’ll admit it,’ he wrongly announced. ‘She was angry, she lost her coo
l.’ ‘He’s distorting the truth,’ replied Hodge, recognising McDonnell’s need to bury the problem. The left-wing musician Billy Bragg joined in. British Jews, he warned, had ‘work to do to build trust’ with the Labour Party. At an NEC meeting, Peter Willsman, a Momentum activist, accused Jewish ‘Trump fanatics’ of ‘making up duff information’ and fabricating claims of anti-Semitism ‘without any evidence at all’.
One week later, the row exploded yet again when newspapers republished photographs showing Corbyn in 2014 at the ‘Cemetery of the Martyrs of Palestine’ in Tunis, standing near the mastermind of the murderous attack on Israeli athletes and officials at the 1972 Munich Olympics. ‘I was present when [the wreath] was laid,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I was involved.’ He was paying his respects, he claimed, to ‘a fitting memorial to everyone who has died in every terrorist incident everywhere, because we have to end it’. He seemed to have forgotten that the wreath was laid on the tombs of the PLO terrorists, not their victims. ‘I don’t share platforms with terrorists,’ he added, belying the countless photographs of him alongside Irish and Palestinian murderers.
At this point, Len McCluskey – who would wave the Palestinian flag at the party conference – came to the rescue. The Jews, he said, were to blame for everything. ‘The more Corbyn has sought to build bridges,’ he complained, ‘the worse the rhetoric has become.’ The Jews were ‘refusing to take “yes” for an answer from Corbyn’s commitments’. They had ‘wildly exaggerated’ everything, showing ‘intransigent hostility and utter refusal to engage in a dialogue about building on what has been done and resolving outstanding difficulties’. They should ‘abandon their truculent hostility, engage in dialogue and dial down the rhetoric’. McCluskey did not criticise Corbyn for refusing to accept the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, but instead blamed Blairite MPs for seeking to weaken the party leader. Andrew Murray, now his chief of staff, would go further. A ‘deep state’ in Britain, he would claim, was working to prevent Corbyn becoming prime minister. Mark Serwotka fuelled the debate. Israel, he said, could have ‘created a story that does not exist’ about anti-Semitism in the party. Labour’s leaders had adopted the centuries-old allegations against the Jews: conspiracies, disloyalty, distortion and dangerous.
Corbyn could not have anticipated the next blow. Just one week later, newspapers were sent a video of him speaking in 2013 at a meeting of the Palestinian Return Centre. The group, which was allied with Hamas, blamed the Jews for the Holocaust. At the meeting he had addressed the problem of British ‘Zionists’ criticising Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian Authority’s representative in Britain, who was in the audience. ‘So clearly two problems,’ he said. ‘One is that they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either … so I think they need two lessons which we can help them with.’ From his own mouth came the declaration that ‘Zionists’, alias Jews, were not genuinely British.
Amid the cacophony of outrage, no one was more virulent than Jonathan Sacks. Corbyn, he said, was an ‘anti-Semite’, a supporter of ‘racists, terrorists and dealers of hate who want to kill Jews and remove Israel from the map’. The Labour leader’s remarks were the ‘most offensive’ since Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968.
Corbyn’s office openly mocked Sacks’s comparison. The former chief rabbi, it was suggested, was just another wailing Jew. Disgusted, two days later Frank Field resigned the Labour whip. In his letter to Corbyn he blamed ‘Labour’s leadership becoming a force for anti-Semitism in British politics’. Corbyn was delighted. Ridding the party of Field had always been one of his aims. The next to be toppled was Joan Ryan, the MP for Enfield North, after she criticised Corbyn’s failure to tackle anti-Semitism. Her defeat in a vote at her constituency was filmed and broadcast by Press TV, Corbyn’s Iranian outlet. For some Labour MPs this was too much. ‘Call off the dogs,’ Chuka Umunna told Corbyn, who he blamed for turning Labour into an institutionally racist organisation.
Corbyn was as unapologetic as ever, using the recent killings of over 160 Palestinian protesters, including children, by Israeli soldiers on the Gaza border to justify his anger. He arrived at the decisive NEC meeting on 4 September, which had been called to decide whether Labour would accept all the IHRA guidelines. Clutching a five-hundred-word statement approved by Milne, Corbyn argued for nearly three hours that he should be allowed to say that Israel was a racist state without being accused of being an anti-Semite. McDonnell and union leaders agreed with him, but refused to sacrifice a possible general election victory to a matter of principle. Speaking as if an election were imminent and victory inevitable, McDonnell resisted Corbyn’s arguments. ‘We’ve got to speak as if we’re going into government,’ he repeated. ‘We’ve got to take ourselves seriously, and can’t have this row going on any more.’
Worn down by the opposition, Corbyn eventually relented, and agreed that Labour would accept the full IHRA definition. The party dropped the disciplinary proceedings against Margaret Hodge, albeit the announcement inaccurately asserted that she had apologised. To draw a line under the dispute, Corbyn agreed to appeal to the Jewish community at the party’s annual conference in Liverpool.
At that conference, the moderate MP Stella Creasy took a swipe at her leader. Addressing the Jewish Labour Movement, she said, ‘I was going to start with a joke about what it must feel like to be a Jew in the Labour Party. But somebody told me you guys don’t get irony.’
17
Resurrection
Liverpool, 25 September 2018: the four hundred Palestinian flags waving over the heads of the packed conference centre confirmed Corbyn’s victory. After years of struggle and humiliation, the Labour Party was firmly under his control. Over three days, the 1,300 delegates in the hall endorsed their leader’s left-wing policies. Even their profound division over Brexit had passed without the emotional explosions that had embittered the ideological battles of previous decades. The delegates understood that election victory required the image of unity, and also a collusion to obscure the proposed seizure of private wealth. The word ‘socialism’ was barely uttered in front of the television cameras by either Corbyn or McDonnell. In his speech to the delegates, the shadow chancellor introduced the dictatorship of the proletariat under the banner of ‘industrial democracy’. He proposed to confiscate 10 per cent of all private businesses with over 250 employees from the owners or shareholders. This was presented as ‘mainstream’ and ‘common sense’. Eventually, all those enterprises would be owned and managed by the workers. By then, McDonnell’s ambition to replicate Hugo Chávez’s Venezuelan achievement in Britain would be fulfilled. Time, however, was short. At sixty-seven, he was impatient for an election and his arrival at No. 11 Downing Street as chancellor. ‘I’m having to do all the hard things,’ he had recently complained to aides beyond Corbyn’s hearing. The atmosphere in Liverpool justified his sacrifice. Filled with confidence, at the end of his rousing speech he was unable to resist raising a clenched-fist salute – to a standing ovation.
The Trotskyist shadow chancellor had obeyed the ideologue’s manual. Every defeat over the previous thirty years had been a reason to move on to the next challenge, until the unimaginable happened and the party had been captured. Ever tightening control, the purge – so often denied by Corbyn, McDonnell and McCluskey – had reached a new intensity. In Hampstead, Enfield, Lewisham, Hastings, Mansfield, Stoke and Brighton, moderate Labour MPs were under siege. The first stage was motions of no confidence; deselections would follow. Jon Lansman personally demanded expulsions in Ealing and Sheffield, and encouraged his team to complete the eviction of Frank Field, who had represented Birkenhead since 1979. In Haringey, members of Momentum intimidated the moderate councillors to succumb to a ‘democracy review’. Claire Kober, the borough’s popular Labour leader, resigned after ten years because the activists’ anti-Semitism and misogyny, she said, ‘got too much’. Richar
d Horton, the chairman of Haringey’s Stroud Green branch, complained of aggressive Marxists who, in the name of democracy, pursued ‘a narrow sectarian view of what the Labour Party should be which was destroying my mental health and damaging my family life’. He too departed. Laura Parker, Momentum’s national coordinator, made the movement’s intentions clear to MPs who supported the government on Brexit. ‘There is no room for Labour MPs,’ she said, ‘who sided with the reactionary Tory establishment.’
A slew of other Members – all critics of Corbyn – were suspended from the parliamentary party for alleged sexual misconduct. John Woodcock was accused of sending ‘inappropriate texts’ to a former employee, a charge he strenuously denied. After seeing that the disciplinary proceedings were rigged against him, he resigned from the party but remained an MP.
His fate was markedly different from that of Leicester East MP Keith Vaz, a friend of Corbyn’s. As chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, Vaz was renowned for his tough questions to public figures about their moral conduct – this, despite his own suspension from the Commons in 2000 for dishonesty. In 2016, a further cover-up was exposed by the Mirror – he had been secretly filmed discussing drugs to enhance sexual performance with Romanian male prostitutes. The video showed Vaz offering to pay for cocaine before having sex with the men. ‘Well, he hasn’t committed any crime that I know of,’ Corbyn said, dismissing the incident as ‘a private matter’. Vaz escaped formal investigation of his behaviour for ‘health reasons’. Thus were Corbyn’s old allies protected and moderates crushed. The Liverpool Trotskyist Derek Hatton was readmitted to the party, while Owen Smith was fired from the shadow cabinet after he called for a second referendum, a policy supported by Keir Starmer, Labour’s Brexit spokesman.
Radical democracy, however, had limits. The battle for control within Labour was as old as the socialist movement, having started in the nineteenth century with Marx, Lenin and their opponents. The lesson taught by the Bolsheviks was to promise empowerment to the grassroots – but only after the revolution was completed. For Corbyn, the next step was to force Iain McNicol out of office. As the person controlling the party’s membership, selection of MPs, and discipline and finance, McNicol was blocking the left’s final triumph. The bastion fell after the NEC elections in January 2018. Three new hard-left candidates won places, giving Corbyn control of the majority of votes. Soon after, McNicol meekly tendered his resignation, with a promise of silence in exchange for a peerage.
