Corbyn's suspension is a disservice to anti-semitism report

As a UNISON member it is not usual for me to compliment my comrades in Unite very often. But Len McLuskey hit the nail on the head when he said: "This was a day for our party to move forward as one to defeat the evil of anti-semitism. However, the decision to suspend Jeremy Corbyn has threatened that opportunity.”

I wish my own union had made such a principled statement. Maybe it will follow.

It is also worth pointing out at the beginning that amidst many of the criticisms in the EHRC report, there is also a recognition that the problem had been recognised and attempts were being made under Corbyn’s leadership to improve disciplinary processes. See at least pages 36, 41, 71, 73 and 82. https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/publication-download/investigation-antisemitism-labour-party

Of course, the issues behind the current conflict are not just about the EHRC report or Corbyn’s response. Many on the right of the Labour Party have long made no secret of the fact that they hated Corbyn and the unprecedented enthusiasm for Labour he created, especially among young people in the party and beyond.

And it was not just the young who were enthused. For many of my generation, here was at last a leader and policies we could enthusiastically back, not just out of unity to try to make things just a wee bit better. At last there was a vision for real change that the hundreds of thousands who joined the party could identify with.

But, of course, he wasn’t and isn't the Messiah.

It is fair to say that his history, fairly or not, made lasting enemies in the party and no matter how principled his voting record was, he was always going to have a tough job keeping others to a whip he had broken so many times before. But none of these should have been insurmountable if the party elite had been serious about its calls then and now for unity.

Any leader would have had problems if faced with the entitled MPs who publicly (and fortunately incompetently) tried to unseat a leader who was twice overwhelmingly elected by the party’s membership. It is bad enough having to battle a hostile media outside without dodging persistent daggers in your back from within.

Those same voices for ‘unity’ who did so much to disunite the party, are now calling for unity again after suspending Corbyn - an action they well knew was nothing about unity and righting wrongs but all about trying to sideline the left.

Whatever you think of Corbyn, his lifelong credentials in fighting racism are undoubted and confirmed by people across the political and social spectrum. It could be argued that there can be no more disservice to the cause of fighting anti-semitism than to misuse Corbyn’s relatively measured comments on the EHRC report as an excuse to put the boot in.

I was always puzzled by the level of hatred for Corbyn within elements of the party. After all, they are the same people who rightly point to the NHS and the welfare state as Labour’s major life changing achievements for the people of the UK. But they were achieved by leaders whose radicalism - and willingness to articulate their socialism - went far beyond the comparatively modest social changes Corbyn was campaigning for. I suspect Corbyn’s critics may have found Bevan uncomfortable.

What was the matter with Corbyn’s focus on child poverty? After all it was Labour under Blair and Brown who made the biggest dent in child poverty in a generation, since rolled back enormously by the Tories. I never could get to the bottom of what policies they disagreed with.

Brexit was a clear dividing issue. One where the party failed to recognise - and therefore failed to organise around - the deep feelings of working class areas especially in the North of England. There was a failure to spot that the 2019 election was effectively another Brexit referendum, whether that made sense or not.

Don’t get me wrong. I was a Corbyn doubter in 2015 but I voted for him. I entrenched my vote with no doubts whatsoever after the self-serving antics of the Labour right in 2016. In that year London School of Economics research showed that the British media had consistently distorted Corbyn’s views and systematically attacked and delegitimised Corbyn as a political leader. The fact that many Labour MPs were doing the same thing didn’t help one little bit.

I did blog my doubts in 2015: “Corbyn has has a bit more charisma than Michael Foot but does he have the uniting qualities and the negotiating skills to be a prime minister? Does he have the presentation win over the wider public to the fact that there is an alternative to austerity?”, I asked. 

But what shifted me was that: “The problem since the 2010 election is not one of presentation but of basic beliefs. It is not that the shadow cabinet couldn’t effectively bury the lie that the Brown government caused the financial crash and national debt, it is that it never even tried to, despite all the evidence.

“It was not that the shadow cabinet failed to clearly articulate that the Tory cuts were political and not economic and there was an alternative to austerity. It was just that many of them didn’t believe there was an alternative in the first place.

“The fear of challenging the very things that many people voted Tory for, leaves us chasing the race instead of dictating it. We don’t, can’t and shouldn’t aspire to do austerity, immigration and welfare ‘reform’ better than the Tories. 

"That is not to say that we should not address the concerns of people about all of these issues. Lots of natural Labour supporters have strong feelings about ‘scroungers’, immigration and the media bombardment that tells them the country is skint. We need to listen but we also need to lead the debate forward not just follow it. 

"That is a gamble. With the might of the corporate media against us it will be an uphill struggle. But the alternative is to just give in, to move more and more to the right to satisfy the media agenda, to focus more on defensively avoiding saying the wrong thing than positively saying the right thing.”

My worry is that the alternative may already be here.

Corbyn was not a Messiah. It is clear, not least from the internal report in March, that Labour HQ was a shambles https://off-guardian.org/wp-content/medialibrary/200329-Labour-Report-Final.pdf?x29353

No doubt pro and anti Corbyn elements will have different views as to why that was but it clearly wasn’t functioning as the one organisation when it came to elections let alone the fundamental issue of anti-semitism.

It is also clear that, despite the problems and the efforts of Jennie Formby to do something about it, as recognised in the EHRC report, the organisational leadership wasn’t working.

What appeared to me to be genuine attempts from the top to deal with anti-semitism - at least from the March report - seemed at times to be ham-fisted.

The failure to always have a clear separation from investigatory functions and the ‘leadership’ is not unusual in organisations, not least in local and central government (dare I mention the Alex Salmond issue?). However, in such a sensitive issue it is surprising that people were not more aware of the need for clarity of responsibility. My sense is that this arose out of frustration.

Some of that, if you accept the March report, was due to obstructiveness in the organisation. The result was what seem to be attempts by the Leader’s office to get things done. That resulted, according to the EHRC, in unacceptable involvement of the leadership in the investigatory and disciplinary processes. The clear implication is that this is about ‘covering up’ anti-semitism.

However, the EHRC do not headline - and so neither does the mass media - that their own investigation shows that what ‘leadership’ intervention there was also included suspending Ken Livingstone for charges of anti-semitism.

Nevertheless, the leadership should probably have had a more sophisticated approach to the issue if anti-semitism, even if people had jumped on it as a bandwagon to undermine Corbyn.

Corbyn's EHRC response was a powerful condemnation of anti-semitism. Perhaps he should have thought again about not accepting all of the report and saying the size of the problem was ‘dramatically overstated’ for political reasons, even though that seems to be reasonable issue for debate. After all, anti-semitism existed before Corbyn and the party was having to deal with reports like 200 cases put in by Margaret Hodge when only 20 instances concerned Labour members.  

It may not have been the best political judgement to give opponents an open target. It may have been better to just draw a line under the whole issue, accept all of the report and move on. But then you can't help thinking that he would have been damned no matter what he said.

Which brings me back to Corbyn not being the Messiah. We shouldn’t need a Messiah, just a host of naughty people to keep plugging away and trying to keep the Labour Party on a socialist track.

It is galling that those who would not unite around Corbyn as the democratically elected leader - and who actively campaigned to undermine him - are now making a virtue out of the need for me to join in their unity.

I and many others will find a way through that because, like it or not, Labour remains the only realistic alternative to the evil of the Tories no matter where you live in the UK. We owe it to the working class to continue fighting to make that a radical alternative.

A good start would be to find a way out of this daft suspension and get on with the job of opposition.