https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/same-blade?pc=1618
Daniel Finn
16 July 2024
A few weeks before Rishi Sunak called a snap general election, an anonymous Labour source, supportive of the party leadership, expressed surprise at the failure of the left to cause problems for Keir Starmer over his obsequious backing for Israel’s war on Gaza. ‘I’m surprised at how little they’ve taken advantage of it’, they said. ‘If you can’t build a mass movement inside the Labour Party about this, what can you build it about?’ Around the same time, an MP on the Labour left explained why they had not attempted to build such a movement: ‘We are frightened of being called antisemitic.’

Not everyone in British politics was paralyzed by such timidity. After nine months of sustained mobilization against the attack on Gaza by a solidarity movement that faced down splenetic charges of antisemitism from its opponents, Starmer’s party took a notable hit at the ballot box from candidates who declared their support for Palestine. Four independents won seats at Labour’s expense with platforms that highlighted Starmer’s public endorsement of war crimes, while several other Labour MPs, including the new Health Secretary Wes Streeting, came perilously close to being defeated. Starmer himself saw his constituency vote share fall by 17.4%, thanks to the insurgent left-wing candidacy of Andrew Feinstein. The Green Party, which also stressed its opposition to Labour’s line on Gaza, elected four MPs with its highest ever vote share. Most woundingly for Team Starmer, Jeremy Corbyn easily retained his seat in north London after being expelled from the Labour Party, despite (or perhaps because of) the presence of Labour bigwigs like Peter Mandelson and Tom Watson campaigning for his opponent Praful Nargund.

These results told a tale about the eclipse of the Labour left, less than five years after it held the leadership of the party, and the search for new openings outside the ambit of Labourism. In the wake of the 2019 election defeat, the general staff of the Labour left collectively decided that there was no point challenging allegations of antisemitism, whether or not they had any basis in reality. As Rebecca Long-Bailey, Starmer’s defeated opponent in the 2020 leadership contest, put it in an article for Jewish News: ‘My advice to Labour Party members is that it is never OK to respond to allegations of racism by being defensive . . . The only acceptable response to any accusation of racist prejudice is self-scrutiny, self-criticism and self-improvement.’

As they offered this advice, Long-Bailey and her team ignored the fact that Corbyn’s opponents routinely blurred the distinction between prejudice against Jews and the most elementary forms of solidarity with the Palestinian people. A few months later, Starmer ousted Long-Bailey herself from the Labour shadow cabinet, having cobbled together a charge of antisemitism that was insultingly threadbare, but there was no reassessment of the defeatist line. When Starmer had Corbyn suspended as a Labour MP for stating the obvious truth that the scale of antisemitism in the Labour Party had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents’, the parliamentarians of the Socialist Campaign Group barely lifted a finger in response. They appeared to believe that Corbyn’s removal had no wider implications for their political project, even as Starmer steadily expunged any trace of left-wing influence from the structures of the Labour Party in a way that put Tony Blair to shame.

By the time the general election was called this year, the LSE economist Faiza Shaheen was one of the few candidates on the Labour left standing for a winnable seat – Chingford and Woodford Green, in northeast London – who had not fallen foul of Starmer’s purge. In keeping with the general approach of the SCG, Shaheen pointedly refused to criticize Corbyn’s exclusion, telling the New Statesmanthat his statement was ‘really stupid’ and incompatible with Starmer’s much-vaunted ‘zero-tolerance’ policy on antisemitism. This did Shaheen no good when, in the run up to the vote, Labour apparatchiks decided they wanted to replace her with one of their factional allies.

The list of unforgivable offences for which Shaheen was arraigned included liking a tweet that referred to the existence of the Israel lobby. Extraordinarily, during a BBC interview, Shaheen conceded that it was unacceptable to talk about ‘professional organisations’ which direct hostile flak towards critics of Israel (this at a time when, across the Atlantic, AIPAC was investing unprecedented sums in a Democratic primary race to oust Jamaal Bowman). As with their response to Corbyn’s suspension, the most prominent leaders of the Labour left once again seemed incapable of planting their feet on the solid ground of empirical reality, deferring instead to feelings and perceptions, however absurd they might be. To her credit, Shaheen declined to bow down and ran as an independent, matching the vote for Labour’s hastily drafted candidate; Labour’s insistence on pushing her out allowed the Tory politician Iain Duncan-Smith to retain the seat. Hopefully she now understands how easy it is to find yourself accused of antisemitism by cynical operators on precisely the same basis as the former Labour leader.

In that respect, the last nine months have been chock-full of what Barack Obama would call ‘teachable moments’. The same bloc of political forces that came together to vilify Corbyn has been campaigning tirelessly in support of the Israeli assault on Gaza. Earlier this year, two of Corbyn’s most indefatigable critics, Margaret Hodge and Ruth Anderson, posed for a photo alongside Israel’s president Isaac Herzog. This ‘solidarity mission’, as Labour Friends of Israel proudly called it, came shortly after the International Court of Justice had cited Herzog’s bloodcurdling remarks about Palestinian civilians when ordering the Israeli government to prevent incitement to genocide.

The leaders of this political bloc directed their fire against the Palestine solidarity movement that has organized so many big demonstrations in London and other British cities calling for an immediate ceasefire. To their immense frustration, they found that movement unwilling to capitulate or jump through hoops at the behest of its opponents. A figure like Mike Katz, the corporate lobbyist who chairs the Jewish Labour Movement, was left to engage in the usual vague innuendo, implying that Labour’s image was at risk of contamination from ‘the regular protests down the road in Parliament Square’ without being able to say what was wrong with those protests.

As the carnage in Gaza continued, Britain’s anti-Palestinian front began to lose its cohesion. The soi-disant Campaign Against Antisemitism overreached itself by picking a fight with the Metropolitan Police as part of its vendetta against the pro-ceasefire marches. The former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger was bold enough to raise some questions about the ‘closely guarded secret’ of who owns the Jewish Chronicle and what influence they may have on the newspaper’s ‘pungent line’ over Gaza. After several years in which national media outlets, including the Guardian, were happy to present the Chronicle as the unmediated voice of Jewish opinion in Britain, this was quite a breakthrough. When Starmer made some ambiguous comments about recognizing a Palestinian state, the Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons accused him of ‘surrendering to jihad’ and ‘rewarding the worst pogroms since the Holocaust.’

If the Labour left had not internalized the notion that support for Palestinian rights was a liability, it might have taken the opportunity during these months to push back hard against the false narrative of pervasive, quasi-genocidal ‘Labour antisemitism’ under Corbyn and explain how that malign fable fed directly into Starmer’s endorsement of mass killing in Gaza. In practice, the SCG couldn’t even cause Starmer difficulty when he suspended their own members on absurd pretexts: Kate Osamor for listing Gaza as an example of genocide along with Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia (she immediately apologized for doing so, which wasn’t enough to satisfy the Labour leader); Andy McDonald for promising not to rest ‘until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea, can live in peaceful liberty’. The obvious response to McDonald’s suspension would have been for other left-wing MPs to repeat his statement and challenge Starmer to explain why he objected so vigorously to the notion of Palestinians living in ‘peaceful liberty’, but they were unwilling to do so.

In the end, Osamor and McDonald both had the whip restored after Labour came under strong pressure from the outside. First the Scottish National Party brought forward a pro-ceasefire motion in the House of Commons; Starmer had to lean on the Speaker of the House, Lindsay Hoyle, to break the rules of parliamentary procedure so his MPs would not have to vote on the SNP motion (Hoyle was rewarded for his misbehaviour after the election with a fresh term as Speaker). Then George Galloway took a seat from Labour in a Rochdale by-election at the end of February by turning it into a referendum on Starmer’s Gaza policy. McDonald’s return to the Parliamentary Labour Party came within days of Galloway’s victory, while the leadership appeared to be saving up Osamor’s eventual readmission as a pacifying gesture, since it coincided with the defection of Natalie Elphicke, a Conservative MP whose record of bigotry was so extravagant that even a dedicated Blairite like the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley found her recruitment hard to swallow.

There were a few more teachable moments in the course of the election campaign. At the beginning of June, the Starmer leadership announced that it was dropping a vastly expensive legal action against five former party staffers whom it accused of leaking a report on Labour’s organizational culture under Corbyn. The main purpose of the action – apart from unadulterated spite, a motivation we should never discount when Labour’s right-wing faction is involved – was to discourage public discussion of the report by creating the impression that there was something illegitimate about its contents.

This effort was vital, since the evidence in the report discredited the lurid version of events peddled by Corbyn’s inner-party opponents in productions like the BBC documentary ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?’ In another report, this time commissioned by Starmer himself, the lawyer Martin Forde deemed that version of events to be ‘wholly misleading’ and vouched for the accuracy of the leaked report. As election day approached, Forde revealed that he had also been threatened with legal action by lawyers acting on Labour’s behalf in an unsuccessful attempt to deter him from speaking about his findings. Forde may well regret having given the members of this clique the benefit of the doubt about their motivations at several points where there was no doubt available.

We will never know how the period since 2019 might have unfolded differently if the Labour left had displayed the same combativity as politicians like Rima Hassan and Rashida Tlaib when faced with deceitful attacks. Corbyn’s suspension was a turning point – the moment when some of his allies decided that telling the truth about their own record was simply too hard. Fortunately Corbyn himself decided not to go quietly. His successful campaign, along with those of the Green and anti-war candidates, delivered a blow to Starmer just as he seemed to be triumphant. From the outset of his leadership, Starmer and his team decided to conflate uncritical support for Israel with a righteous stand against antisemitism so they could use this conflation as a weapon with which to slay the left. Now they have ended up cutting themselves on the same blade.

In the short term, Labour’s position on Gaza is unlikely to shift in response to the election. Despite the Green and independent gains, the bloc of Westminster MPs challenging that position is actually much smaller than it was before polling day after the SNP lost most of its seats in Scotland because of factors that had nothing to do with international policy. Ousted Labour MPs like Thangam Debbonaire and Jonathan Ashworth have displayed all the humility we might expect since losing their seats, telling the broadcast media that they were the victims of dark, illegitimate forces. John McDonnell’s suggestion that Corbyn might be readmitted to the PLP is yet another example of wishful thinking about the nature of Starmer’s project and the place of the left within its confines. But the evidence that Labour can be punished at the ballot box in areas it took for granted, even at what is likely to be the high point of its fortunes under Starmer, has put down an important marker for the years to come, and should give more confidence to those organizing outside the party.