The Crisis Around Corbyn

On the surface, Jeremy Corbyn's aides appear to be mishandling the current crisis in the Labour Party - there is a lack of dynamism in responding to critics and an unnecessary defensiveness. The attack dogs of the PLP smell fear and it only encourages them.

Corbyn may now be wilting under pressure but there is undoubted bullying going on here. The alleged deletion of the hard drive on the finance bill (reported in the Guardian today) is a very serious matter that can only be interpreted (if not a genuine error) as political sabotage, one that could affect the lives of vulnerable working people negatively.

However, the more serious issue is the underlying political situation in the country which is more complex than it first appears. The recent increase in party membership seems to be in non-marginal non-Labour territory while the Party is weakening or shrinking in traditional Labour areas placing the marginal seats (the key ones in an FPTP system) at serious risk.

MPs fear for their jobs because Corbyn is allegedly not reaching out to working class constituencies but how can he reach out in this way if he is hobbled by the PLP itself? It is these MPs who have been disabling the Corbyn-McDonnell team from developing a message more in tune with the vote that took place on June 23rd.

The hollowing out of the Party in its traditional areas certainly has nothing to do with Corbyn and everything to do with Blair and Brown's era of control (and that of Milliband). Meanwhile, the coup leaders are radical middle class Remainers who may be incapable of communicating with the discontents that UKIP is now targeting.

It is arguable that Corbyn could have reached out to the working class long before this if he had not been hobbled by the Party's pro-EU position. Corbyn is a weak Leader thrown into an intolerable situation because of the refusal of the PLP to face reality on the ground.

His office know what is at stake - throwing the Party back into the hands of a professional political class which has failed to engage with the electorate in stages since the landslide of 1997 and has no coherent plan of its own for electoral recovery. A weak Leader of the Left cannot resign because its strong Leader (McDonnell) would not get on the ballot under current rules - the Left and the new membership would be erased from history and the Party handed over to make-weights.

The rebels huff and puff but cannot come up with their own alternative who could beat Corbyn in a straight democratic fight. They are also made up of multiple competing factions - the old Labour Right (represented now by Watson who seems to be playing as straight a bat as he can under the circumstances), the soft Left (represented by the younger Benn and Kinnock), the Brownites and the hard-line Blairites, allegedly manipulated from behind by PR advisers.

The PR Campaign which appears to have had months of preparation has framed the media and so much of the general public against Corbyn, thereby adding another weapon ('public opinion') to the rebel armoury but it is one which the Left knows is based on the same sort of false framing that we saw in the Remain campaign. Part of the crisis of our times is public resistance to manipulative political framing of the debate - the spinners are crumbling before the stubbornness of the people and are forced into increasingly hysterical and bullying positions as a result.

The unions are aghast and divided - some have thrown themselves in with the rebels because of potential Left rebellions in their own ranks, others are fully committed to the Left. The stakes are immensely high and the 'schwerpunkt' of the battle is the mind of Corbyn himself - hence the Left (which acts as a collective here) shores up and shields him in a ring of steel while the rebels apply extreme, often bullying, pressure directly and through the media on the man and only the man.

If he snaps they win. If he holds, they have to find a candidate-challenger and lose everything. This is, in short, one of the most brutal and ruthless engagements ever seen in British politics in which morality has no meaning.

There is one other factor which is driving the Blairites and, to a lesser extent, the Soft Left - Chilcot. There is no conspiracy theory needed here but Chilcot, pushed continuously into the long grass until now, will be a decisive judgment on a former Prime Minister and his Foreign Secretary. Normally, it would be a simple partisan matter and the effect would be neutered since a war crimes case is unlikely to be demonstrated under Nuremburg principles (or will it?).

If there is any ambiguity in this, however, Corbyn would be expected to turn on his former Leader and may even prosecute the case for war crimes. There is a back story here of conflict over Middle Eastern policies that pulls in criticism of NATO, of Atlanticism and of Israel - and the antisemitism narrative (also carefully framed to promote hysteria rather than thought) is part of the mix.

Corbyn is only dangerous if he is in office on Wednesday - once out of office, he is just a discredited Leftie. So, the mission from the old Atlantic Right is to get him out of office before Wednesday or destroy his authority.

Corbyn's alleged weak leadership of the Remain campaign was merely an excuse to drive this war forward and quickly and pull in an angry mass base behind it. The timing is carefully designed to split the Corbynistas over Europe itself.

The Left is actually highly critical of the EU. It only chose to campaign for Remain on a rather spurious makeshift policy of internal reform that had more holes in it than a Swiss cheese.

The reasoning (proven flawed) was based on a belief that by conceding on the European Union, the inevitable coup attempt could be deferred. The June 23rd vote now frees the Left to accept Brexit and then campaign for a Socialist Britain.

The Right not only do not want acceptance of Brexit, they don't want a Socialist Britain and they know that many young Party activists were as committed to Remain as they were to Corbyn. June 23rd thus offered an opportunity for the Right to mobilise the Remain vote alongside Liberal Democrat and dissident Socialist and anti-racist networks to create a 'popular' movement to contain and then defeat Corbyn.

However it seems as if the Neo-Remain movement is not all that it appears to be. 30,00-50,000 on the streets is not actually a lot, Corbynistas appear to be mobilising for their man in preference to Europe, there have been dodgy practices exposed in the petition and the involvement of big business and PR people is being exposed on social media.

It gets worse. Geldof and Izzard are now figures of fun, radical Remainers are not necessarily the majority in many CLPs and it is clear that no PLP member seems ready to rely fully on the Neo-Remain movement to launch them into office by mounting a challenge.

The public has moved on and it seems that only bankers and big business are continuing to moan about the result in public (alongside some petit-bourgeois students) - not exactly the natural friends of the working class. So, with four days to go to Chilcot, the choices are simple - will Corbyn accept some untrustworthy deal and go before the release of the Report, will he hang on to force a challenge or will he leave only on condition of a change to party rules that allows McDonnell to stand in his place?

The collective leadership of the Left and four decades of tough survival in the wilderness suggests that Corbyn will go to ground and hang on until he is challenged or the Left can be promised a viable alternative candidate. What we can rely on is that the operation to oust Corbyn will now increase in intensity until it reaches levels of unparalleled viciousness aided and abetted by the trained ferrets in the mainstream media.

At a certain point, though, the bullying may result in blow-back within the softer unaligned elements in the PLP who may begin to waver at the aggression of their allies. Bullying in itself may mobilise members and some of the public and union activists in particular (often hyper-sensitive to bullying in workplace situations) for Corbyn.

All in all, despite all the pressures on him, Corbyn appears to be down rather than out and there is still room for a fight-back although how this cannot end in some split in the Labour Party beats this observer. Eventually there will be a stabilisation based on compromise but surely either the Hard Left or the Blairite Right will be exuded from the Party within months.

Some Friendly Advice to Hysterical 'Liberals'

What is really fascinating about the last day or so has been the lesson that 'liberals', both London-based and American, appear not to like democracy very much, especially when it comes up with a decision of which they do not approve.

The current Remain response is to try to overturn a democratic decision by fair means or foul - by a replay ('best of three' or keep going until they win?) based on claims of lies from people who lied, by Parliamentary coup d'etat or by Lords blocking. What next? Calls for the Army to step in or for the Bundeswehr to be 'invited in' to liberate us.

60% of Scotland does not want to be part of the United Kingdom anyway and the Northern Irish nationalists, well, we know what they want, so the democratic vote in England and Wales was not 52% but much more than that.

It was a decision made not by racist Morlocks looking to munch on the effete Eloi in the universities but autonomous working class and middle class individuals, debating the issues, ignoring fear and slander, and coming to a view on what was in their and their country's best interest.

I really do wonder at the mind-set of these people. The European Project is truly proven here to be more important than national democracy. Or is this propaganda just coming from people nicely immersed in the gravy train and terrified of the plundering coming to an end. They really do seem to want a manipulative dictatorship of the intelligentsia. They really are anti-democrats.

Our side's reaction has (up to this point) been emolliative and magnanimous in victory. We have remained relatively silent. We have urged not only calm but unity in the national interest. We are seeking a negotiated withdrawal that is amicable and retains as much of 'European values' as possible. We have only asked that the final say on policy be ours because we have a democratic mandate.

And what do we get in return? Hysteria. Aggression. Slander. Attempts to mount a coup (not just in the nation but in the Labour Party). I have seen what amounts to a racist (or rather classist) cartoon apparently labelling 17m or so people as skinheads in, of all places, an Israeli newspaper - you would think they would know better, wouldn't you?

What should our reaction be? How long should we put up with this before ending our current demobilisation and pulling our troops off the reserve list to undertake a second campaign in which lessons will have been learned and no quarter can be given.

You see, our attitude to a war of aggression on us is to say - bring it on but only if you must! We don't want it but if you insist on it, we will respond. A majority of the English and Welsh people are neither racists nor fools.

They will be angered at the patronising attitudes of urban intellectuals who have been lining their pockets at their expense for far too long. I mean, how many cultural studies experts exactly do we need to export goods and services? They will be even more angered by a metropolitan political class that has failed and now purports to tell them how to think.

We who fight alongside them act as a restraint. We want peace, harmony, the opportunity to build a better and fairer and more prosperous Britain in collaboration with all the reasonable elements in the political class. But if you declare war on the people, you declare war on us, their intellectual allies.

A war of workers and intellectuals against a supine and weak, and failed, liberal political establishment can end in only one result - if not now, then in five years, ten years, twenty years - because we believe there is no value greater than national democratic sovereignty as a precondition of individual freedom and long term prosperity.

Please do not underestimate the sheer force, the cold determination, the rationality of our position - or that we will not harden over time.

So, a piece of advice. Lay off the patronising attitudes. Lay off the aggression. Work with us to build a pluralistic, tolerant, independent Britain that is fundamentally democratic and is ready to work with and not against the European nations to build a better world. But if you want to push us all into a cultural civil war, that will be your decision and not ours and you must take the consequences.

Independence Day: Resurgence

Last night I had genuinely not expected to wake up to a Britain in the first stages of national independence - and nor did many others. Many leading Leave activists were predicting a Leave vote of 40-45%. Although I was not so negative, I thought Remain would push us down to 47-48%, respectable but, as Harry Oppenheimer once said, '51% is control'.

On the Left, my friend on the Morning Star editorial team was getting angry at what he thought were lost opportunities and the capture of the debate over 'free movement of labour' by the Right. Later that evening on the BBC, it was heartening to see John McDonnell at least try to address this concern where no Kinnockite or Blairite  would - perhaps there is hope for the Labour Party after all.

I dropped in on the Leave.EU Post-Referendum Party and nearly the first person I saw was a chipper Arron Banks who told me that private polling of 10,000 people had predicted a 52:48 vote in favour of Leave and that the swing would be produced by an angry industrial or post-industrial Northern working class but that London and Scotland would counter that somewhat. He turned out to be right.

I kept an open mind but no one else I spoke to at the event (I left early to 'be with my family' at what might have been the political equivalent of armageddon) took the poll seriously. This is how gloomy Leave had become after the onslaught of the entire Liberal Establishment, the manipulations of Project Fear, the viciousness of the Labour-driven Project Slander and the calculated sentiment of Project Vigil.

And then I awoke (my family remained for the duration) to victory and to the prospect of sunshine, a day off and a visit to the cinema to see the afternoon performance of 'Independence Day: Resurgence'. What had originally been an ironic consolation will now be an unalloyed pleasure regardless of the quality of the film. Suddenly all the planning for the consequences of defeat was no longer required. There was only one task ahead - to 'defend the revolution' by any means necessary.

Since Remain had behaved so appallingly in the last ten days of the Campaign and still appears not to get (at least on its Left) why it had lost, we Leavers must act without any weakness of will or false attempt at a reconciliation with people who have bullied and lied but, above all, shown utter cavalier lack of respect for the independent decision-making powers of the British people. The people who had been ignored and treated with disrespect had fought back. If Labour does not learn its lesson (and it shows every sign of being incapable of doing so) what happened in Scotland will happen to in the North of England.

There is no reason to explore the reasons why Remain lost (because, let us be clear, Leave only won because Remain lost) but only to note that the alienation of the Leave Left started and ended with an atmosphere of bullying and disrespect that was evident as early as April. Left Leavers will not be easily cowed now. But there is something more disturbing to note - Leave managed to tip itself over the edge because of the organisational drive and activist dynamism of UKIP.

That is just a fact on the ground. The irresponsible abandonment of the Northern post-industrial working class by the Labour Party (John Mann was visibly angry about this on the BBC last night very early in the game) had handed it over not to wet liberal middle class patronising bastards in the centre but to national populists. National populists are democrats but they can and will ally with similar forces across Europe who are speaking for the abandoned classes of Europe while the middle classes enrich themselves on globalisation. And these democratic forces are not socialist or liberal, some may not even be democratic.

That is the real change to consider - the utter failure of the Radical Centre, whether Kinnockite, Blairite, Liberal Democrat (long since busted) or Cameronian to share power with the mass, bring prosperity, share difficulties fairly and evenly but, above all, not to disrepect a working class they clearly despise openly and sometimes humiliate. The failure of the Left has been the opportunity for the Right. Remain's debacle is down to the soft and liberal left, not the Right which is only learning to be politically effective year by year because the Left is run by fools.

The revolution (so to speak) is not the independence of Britain (which is simply a restoration of the right order of things and an opportunity to make change happen) but the potential for the overturning of a failed and arrogant elite. This elite presumed to speak for the people despite the dodginess of its hold over democratic procedures. Even now prominent Centrists regret the very fact of a referendum because it came up with the 'wrong result'. Now that is arrogance!

Democracy is an absolute value and yet the democrats are now on the Right. This should worry everyone who claims to liberal or socialist values. It is the 'real' Left that has to organise now both to challenge UKIP within the framework of national independence (for the sake of liberalism and socialism) yet, if necessary, to work alongside the independence Right against the Radical Centre (for the sake of democracy) and either to force Labour to return to its roots or get out of the way.

Some recognition is due to Left activists who fought the good fight against the odds but picking out names would be invidious. They know who they are. They would have fought on even if Remain had inveigled itself to victory through its command of the media and government. Life is good today but it is only the first day of a struggle to make the prospect of a paper independence a material reality that will bring a fairer Britain.