The historical illiteracy of the Labour right
The labour movement in Britain has a rich history, not always good, but it has its moments. One of the astonishing things to come out of the reaction over the past year to Jeremy Corbynâs leadership has been the attempt by those seeking to undermine Corbyn to play with history, at times recuperating socialist, antifascist, anti-imperialist movements, at others completely twisting the historical record.
In recent months there has been an attempt by those on the right of the Labour Party to reposition themselves as socialist insurgents, in order to authenticate their challenge to Corbyn as anything other than a third-way/âmoderateâ/âcentristâ coup. Most laughably, Luke Akehurst, he of âBlairite and proudâ fame, made a strange invocation of Gramsci, Marx and Robert Owen to claim New Labour as a âsocial movementâ (and of course days later mocked Momentum activist James Schneider tweeting a Gramsci quote). Although Gramscian Eurocommunism somewhat fed into the Third Way ideology of Blairism, it takes some front to claim influence from a man whose main ideological works were written whilst imprisoned by the Fascist government, helped found the Italian Communist Party, and attended the congress of the Third International (or Comintern) when your own politics are unashamedly capitalist and imperialist.
Owen Smith also painted himself as some sort of neo-Bevanite firebrand, treating left-wing politics as some sort of cultural affectation that can be associated with the Welsh valleys merely by having a Welsh accent rather than being intrinsically rooted in working-class struggle. His shameless decision to hold one of his early press conferences at the site of the Battle of Orgreave came a cropper when ex-miner John Dunn approached him and rightly pointed out that Smith has never seemed interested in the struggle of the ex-miners, in particular their Justice for Orgreave campaign, at any other point in his political career. Dunn was later banned from voting in the Labour leadership campaign for comparing the MPs who launched the coup to the UDM, the strike-breaking minersâ union. Smithâs painful attempts to appear left-wing â citing his favourite biscuit as a Garibaldi because âyouâve got to like a biccy [sic] named after a revolutionaryâ, claiming that heâll deliver a ârevolutionâ, and going full-Fourth International by arguing that Corbyn only wants âsocialism in one countryâ â are topped off by his apparent transformation from pharmaceutical company Pfizerâs PR guy to the reincarnation of the founder of the National Health Service.
Perhaps the most tragic case of the recuperation of the left by the right of the party was Hilary Bennâs speech last winter in the House of Commons urging MPs to vote in favour of aerial strikes on Syria. From the comforts of the Palace of Westminster, Benn likened his words and actions to the courage of the international brigades who left home in their thousands to fight a crucial war against a fascist dictator, heroes whose legacy remains a burning flame for the left all around the world today. Having supported the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Benn has more to do with the spawning of ISIS than he does with any serious anti-fascist internationalist struggle. The paradoxical nature of his claims was pointed out by a group of British & Irish volunteers with the International Freedom Battalion currently fighting ISIS in Rojava. Owen Smithâs continual attempt to equate the conflict in Northern Ireland with the current state of the Middle East â claiming he was best placed to get all parties interested in peace talks â displayed a humiliating lack of gravitas from an aspiring statesman. Quite rightly, his call to get ISIS around the negotiating table, and Bennâs backing of Smith, showed the political opportunism on both parts as well as their historical illiteracy.
The subject of Northern Ireland indeed has been a perennial one since Corbyn became leader. Itâs clear that anyone on the right side of history who has been an adult since the 1960s will be accused by bleating liberal moralists of being both Stalinists and Trotskyists, terrorist sympathisers and pinkos, ineffectual and authoritarian, extra-parliamentary and entryists. The understanding in Britain about the conflict euphemistically known as the âTroublesâ, and indeed more generally about British imperialism, is pitiful, so that smearing politicians as terrorist sympathisers is incredibly easy and harmful to their reputation. It is no surprise that the guns have been out for Corbyn on this one â as with the pathetic attempt to instrumentalise antisemitism against the left, the accusers have such disdain and disregard for any actual victims of oppression that there is a wholesale willingness to disregard historical accuracy and memory in order to attach guilt for atrocities to Jeremy Corbyn. This is especially craven coming from people who supported a British Prime Minister who unnecessarily wreaked war across the Middle East. Suffice to say that the labour movement in Britain hasnât exactly covered itself in glory with regards to Ireland â the recently-published Hesitant Comrades portrays the tensions within the labour movement over Ireland that more often than not sided with the most conservative nationalist elements, when it took sides at all.
The latest example in trying to discredit Corbynâs support for Irish republicanism is ex-Blair adviser and de facto yesterday man John McTernanâs interesting recollection of the Battle of the Bogside. âIf you mean the fascist IRA,â he tweeted, âthen we sent in troops to protect working class people from fascist violence.â This was slightly embarrassing, given that the IRA were basically inactive until well after the deployment of troops, when they were given the moniker âI Ran Awayâ after failing to protect the Catholic working-class from the pogroms and attacks from loyalists and RUC B-Specials. Indeed the out of control fascists in 1969 were the Royal Ulster Constabulary who killed two Catholic civilians shortly before troops were deployed, and colluded with loyalist militias who carried out a concerted bombing campaign throughout the early months of 1969. All this is forgotten, or shrugged away, because the political currency of conjuring up the balaclava-clad Provos is much more profitable.
All of this could appear moot or distant, were it not for an absolute continuity between this and the worldview that sets the market fundamentalists in the Labour Party apart from the socialist traditions of the labour movement both in Britain and internationally. For supporters of the Labour Party leader, it is clear that piecemeal reforms are not a sufficient curb on the excesses of capitalism. Forging the âthird wayâ has only emboldened the right-wing cause of there being no alternative, as erstwhile socialists happily sign up to the marketisation of public goods. The case in point here is J.K. Rowling and her extolling of the virtues of the New Labour government, to rapturous applause from the likes of Caitlin Moran, one Friday night on Twitter. On 2nd September, Rowling started listing all the achievements of the Blair government, apparently causing Luke Akehurst to cry on the bus home. These included the improvements to the NHS, children lifted out of poverty, increases in benefits, and so on. Of course framing these in certain ways occludes many of the downsides of that governmentâs attempted reforms â NHS improvement that was marred by the increasing use of PFI, increase of some benefits at the cost of others (single parents benefit for starters) but thatâs not to argue that there were not very good and necessary policies that came out of the Blair government. The crucial point here is that many of these good reforms â NHS improvement, spending on education, welfare, Surestart, tackling poverty, and so on â have been reversed by the Tory/Lib Dem coalition government of 2010-2015, and by the subsequent Tory majority government, by simple acts of parliament. This is because the Blair government ameliorated the worst of the Thatcher years by putting sticking plasters over the wounds of the neoliberal experiment of Thatcher without fundamentally altering the structures of the economy, or shifting the political mainstream so that such a structural change could be realised. This is the great missed opportunity of that government. And itâs why, unlike the Attlee and Thatcher governments, thereâs a very good chance the Blair government will be remembered by Iraq only, and not any economic reforms, as one by one they are simply repealed by the Conservatives. The current government, rather than making the labour movement pine for an âelectableâ (read Blairite, in the most descriptive way) leader, should be rousing it to the realisation that the Blairite experiment failed to structurally reform the economy in favour of the working-class, and instead empowered the same financial and political elites who were able to erode the social compact at the next available opportunity. It is for this reason, above all others, that Jeremy Corbyn will be re-elected as Labour leader today.
During the election campaign, Corbynâs opponent Owen Smith alluded to the Labour leader as a âlunaticâ. This made me recall a section of the introduction to Christopher Hillâs masterpiece âThe World Turned Upside Downâ:
"Each generation, to put it another way, rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe'. [...] Historians, in fact, would be well-advised to avoid the loaded phrase 'lunatic fringe'. Lunacy, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder. There were lunatics in the seventeenth century, but modern psychiatry is helping us to understand that madness itself may be a form of protest against social norms, and that the 'lunatic' may in some sense be saner than the society which rejects him.
......
There was a convention that on certain set occasions - Shrove Tuesday, the Feasts of Fools, All Fools Day and others - the social hierarchy and the social decencies could be turned upside down. It was a safety-valve: social tensions were re-leased by the occasional bouleversement; the social order seemed perhaps that much more tolerable. What was new in the seventeenth century was the idea that the world might be permanently turned upside down: that the dream world of the Land of Cokayne or the kingdom of heaven might be attainable on earth now."
Itâs worth noting that Corbynâs ilk was dismissed as the âloony leftâ in the 1980s, along with Ken Livingstone & the GLC, and left-wing Labour councils. What they dismissed as lunatic were ideas that have now become mainstream, indeed as Hill claims lunacy is in the eye of the beholder, and what was seen as lunatic then - racial and sexual minority equality, environmental concerns, pacifism - to a large extent are today seen as sensible and moderate. Whilst Corbyn was getting arrested for campaigning against apartheid, and attacked for his view on social and cultural issues, the conservative wing of the Labour Party were elsewhere. In 1986, Ealing Council debated a motion to support lesbian & gay rights, and the Tories moved a motion to remove the phrase stating that lesbian and gay relationships were âequally validâ. Hilary Benn was deputy leader of the council and supported this motion, which was carried, with only a few Labour members opposing it. This was at the height of the AIDS crisis, attacks and murders of gay people, in the run up to Section 28 and the stigma and public abuse of gay people was reaching very high levels indeed. So when these characters attempt to derail Corbyn and McDonnell with such poor appeals to history, it is worth remembering what they were doing when Corbyn and McDonnell were flying in the face of popularity to defend just causes.