I’m glad that the only vote I shall be casting this week, if I can be bothered, is for the meaningless non job of Avon and Somerset Police Commissioner. As a lifelong Labour voter who has never cast a vote for any other party, not even as a tactical vote because I could not bring myself to vote for the Lib Dems at the time, I wonder if I’d be as committed to Labour today as I was before. The almighty mess Labour has got itself into over anti-Semitism has not only exposed the problem the party has with the subject, it shows the (lack of) calibre of those at the top of the party.
Party leader Jeremy Corbyn condemns anti-semitism but can never, ever, finish his sentence with the proviso that he is also opposed to every other kind of racism. And then, after suspending Ken Livingstone and Naz Shah for their disgusting comments, he makes a barely veiled threat at his non hard left parliamentary allies by saying that “much of this criticism that you are saying about a crisis in the party actually comes from those who are nervous of the strength of the Labour Party at local level”. Yes, he is saying that those who are appalled about Livingstone and Shah are only angry about anti-Semitic comments because they are “nervous of the strength of the Labour Party at local level”. That’s just nuts. People are angry because two of his valued colleagues, including his best pal Livingstone, are engaging in anti-Semitism, racism, call it what you will.
Those condemning Livingstone have long been at the forefront of attacking right wing groups like the BNP for their blatant anti-Semitism. But there is a problem with Jewishness on the left of politics which has been ignored for too long and not that it has come to the surface those same leftists don’t like it.
“It’s not a crisis. There’s no crisis,” says an angry Corbyn about the crisis that continues to undermine his leadership, if you can call it that. What kind of parallel world does he live in?
It is a nonsense to suggest, as some do, that the anger at Livingstone is from the so called right of the party, the Blairites, as the hard left call anyone who is not of the hard left. Look at the words of Jon Lansman, the Bennite fixer, chief Corbyn ally and the founder of the hard left Momentum group, on the fringes of the Labour Party: “A period of silence from Ken Livingstone is overdue, especially on antisemitism, racism and Zionism. Ken Livingstone achieved many good things for London and beyond. But all political lives end in failure and he should now depart voluntarily.” Repeat: this is not someone from the mainstream left in the Labour Party. Lansman is Corbyn’s main man, just like he used to be Tony Benn’s main man in the 1980s when Bennite tomfoolery was taking Labour to the wastelands of the far left of politics, a million miles from power, just where Corbyn is taking Labour now.
It was obvious long before the leadership elections last year that Jeremy Corbyn was not, and never would be, up to the job of leading Labour and so it has been proved. His judgement in restoring Livingstone to the heart of Labour politics, despite not having held an elected position for eight years, was a crass error, as many expected it always would be. The man who will advise Labour that it should adopt a position of unilateral nuclear disarmament has exploded a political catastrophe of nuclear proportions over the party.
Not that the comrades who control Labour will care too much about that, not even if this week Labour becomes the first opposition party in Britain to lose council seats since 1985. The leader himself declared to the Guardian that he won’t be held to “arbitrary” measures of success in Thursday’s elections, which is astonishing, even for Corbyn, a Labour leader who regards winning elections as “arbitrary”.
Livingstone again repeated his mantra today that it’s only “embittered old Blairites” who criticise his return to the hard left gutter of anti-Semitic politics, a gutter he has visited before. That Corbyn has set up the usual “inquiry” that politicians always use when they want to kick a subject into the long grass, says everything about him. We all know what Livingstone said and we all know, rather more sadly, what Naz Shah said and setting up an inquiry is more a case of the leader avoiding the difficult decision a strong leader would take.
No one is saying that Corbyn is a racist or anti-Semite, but he is tolerating the conditions for racists and, particularly anti-Semites to exist in. More than that, he shows more each and every day, he is not up to being leader of the Labour Party and his competence is far more of a concern than some of the more controversial positions he holds.
In short, Jeremy Corbyn has to go before he destroys what’s left of the Labour Party and an overall loss of seats in next week’s elections should accelerate his departure.
