By Steve McKenzie
The farcical spat at the top of your party was perhaps an inevitability, an accident waiting to happen. Travelling back a few years to September 2018, we can observe the Corbyn movement in terminal decline. The pressure put on it by the establishment and the cowardly and cynical machinations of the backroom bureaucrats behind Corbyn sealed its fate. Many of the same individuals still lurk behind closed doors today.
At the beginning of September 2018, a Labour Party NEC meeting took place and committed the horrendous blunder of accepting the deeply flawed IHRA definition of antisemitism. It was a pathetic attempt by those really pulling the strings in the party to appease the ruling elite.
Such was their fear of the British establishment and the Zionist lobby, those calling the shots in the Labour party were determined to prostrate the Labour party completely and utterly. They were desperate to present the vote on its adoption as unanimous.
However one NEC member, 75-year-old, Peter Willsman, a man with some integrity and backbone, put a spanner in the works. He refused to vote for its acceptance. He was therefore made to leave the room when the vote took place.
The ‘left wing’ General Secretary of Unite, Len McCluskey, penned a hand wringing article on whether a vote in favour of accepting it was the right thing to do or not. In the end, and of course for the sake of unity, he would have us believe that he had no option but to capitulate and accept it.
IHRA definition of antisemitism
Jeremy Corbyn, who by that time was a mere figurehead, attempted to move a very mild and minor ammendment, but those pulling his strings told him to put the ammendment away and be quiet.
So the IHRA definition of antisemitism was adopted by the Labour Party unanimously. As is well known it is deeply flawed – there are far better definitions, like the Jerusalem declaration – and it is cynically used to smear any criticism of Zionism and recently any criticism of Israel over the genocide in Gaza as “antisemitic”.
Given developments since and the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza, the shame of that decision by the Labour’s NEC that day leaves an indelible stain. A fortnight after this retreat, at the 2018 Labour Party conference, these same cowardly wire-pullers conspired to ensure that the open selection was side-tracked.
Right wing Labour MPs saw open selection as a threat to their careers, and the union bureaucrats saw it as a threat to the comfortable status quo. Democratic accountability and real membership control is something that MPs and well-healed bureaucrats are not prepared to tolerate.
Capitulation on open selection
Open selection would have been a step in the direction of democratic accountability and real membership control. Len McCluskey voted against Unite policy on this issue: the union he had had a policy in favour of mandatory reselection.
His justification for the capitulation this time, was that Jeremy wanted him to vote against it. So heroically ignoring Unite conference policy, the Unite delegation to the 2018 Labour Party conference bowed down in the face of the iron will and dogged determination of Jeremy Corbyn and voted against their own union policy. Pathetic doesn’t begin to describe these events.
The key players from Unite from that era were not the only ones guilty of destroying the potential of the Corbyn movement. There was (and still is) a conglomeration of vested self-interest, whose tried, tested and failed bureacratic approach has let us down again and again in recent years.
These characters and their secretive controlling, top-down approach are still clinging to Jeremy Corbyn, who in turn steadfastly refuses, or pretends not to see, what is going on. Their fingerprints were all over the debilitating public spat, ostensibly between Corbyn and Sultana, that threatens to derail the Your Party project before it even gets off of the ground.
Indeed Your Party may not get off of the ground, and will certainly achieve very little if it does, unless it is purged of this debilitating factor. The only way to build a party properly is to identify a problem and deal with it; ignoring what is clearly going on, who is responsible for it, and issuing inane calls for ‘unity’ will achieve nothing.
Dismissing a fundamental issue like this as just “teething problems” is evading the issue. The far right and the establishment are laughing at us. It is time to rid ourselves of the excess baggage and start building a real left alternative from the bottom up.
[Feature photograph shows the 2018 LP conference festooned with Palestine flags]
There is no need at all for the IHRA or Jerusalem Declaration defining antisemitism.
Antisemitism is the hatred of Jews because they are Jews
John, have a look at 10B of the JD, this is antisemitic…but the Jews did not, and do not, extend these “rights” to the Palestinians. They simply stole their land and moved in to their properties then re named it Israel as though no one lived there before them. We know what happened in 1948 and since.
I have’nt seen any specific document about the anti Palestinian, or anti Black, anti Muslim or even anti Irish. So why do the Jews require a JD, this is a declaration of exceptionalism, i.e hierarchical.
Dave, there are two points: you suggest looking at 10B of the Jerusalem Declaration, by which I think you mean B10. It says that antisemitism includes “Denying the right of Jews in the State of Israel to exist and flourish, collectively and individually, as Jews, in accordance with the principle of equality”. We should agree with that right. Jews should have a right to live in an Israeli state, should they wish to, although with agreed borders and “in accordance with the principle of equality.”
You then say that “the Jews” “did not, and do not, extend these “rights” to the Palestinians”. The Jerusalem declaration specifically says (11C) that the following is NOT antisemitic: “Supporting the Palestinian demand for justice and the full grant of their political, national, civil and human rights, as encapsulated in international law”.
The second point: I must take issue with you about your conflating “Jews” with “Zionists”. It was not “the Jews” who stole Palestinian land and denied them their rights; it was “Zionists”, followers of a political movement. When Jews were escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe a hundred years ago, the vast majority of them went to Western Europe and the USA. The Zionist movement (ie to Palestine) was only given impetus after the Second World War when no Western European states (or the USA) would accept the hundreds of thousands of surviving and displaced Jews.
For the record, not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. We should not conflate the two. Netanyahu does that as a matter of policy.
The only part of this article I disagree with is that the Jerusalem Declaration is better than the IHRA. It is a different take, but no better, it, like the IHRA is essential an advocation for a hierarchy of racism. We do not need qualifications of racism, levels of racism. If it is racist, it is racist. And all of it is vile and unnecessary.
There is nothing hierarchical about the Jerusalem Declaration that I can see. Just because it deals SPECIFICALLY with antisemitism, doesn’t suggest a hierarchy. It’s first paragraph says: “It is racist to essentialize (treat a character trait as inherent) or to make sweeping negative generalizations about a given population. What is true of racism in general is true of antisemitism in particular”. So it acknowledges racism as a general case, and antisemitism as a particular case.