The British establishment's herd mentality and obliviousness to suffering

 Review of The Department: How a Violent Government Bureacracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence, by John Pring, part two

 There is always a TV documentary. Just as the Department for Work and Pensions readies itself to make disability benefits harder to get – for example by disallowing mobility problems  or the inability to cope in social situations from counting towards a successful claim – a documentary magically appears on state television (Channel 4 in this case) explaining why the changes must be made, and in fact probably don’t go far enough.

The country faces bankruptcy because of the mounting benefit bill, we are told on Spectator journalist Fraser Nelson’s film Britain’s Benefits Scandal; millions of people are being ‘written off’. I think I’ve heard this story somewhere before …. Ah yes, it was under the post-2010 Cameron coalition when the assault on the ‘unsustainable’ benefits bill resulted – as Pring documents in his book – in hundreds of deaths.

Curiously, the person invoking the horror of the government running out of money is a spokesman for the Centre for Social Justice, the think-tank set up by Iain Duncan Smith who, as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, oversaw the previous round of culling. And so the baton passes to a new generation.

The shallow propaganda is on show almost from the first frame. There was outrage in the 1980s, Nelson recalls with a darkened face, when unemployment hit 3 million or more, so where’s the outage now when similar numbers are on “long-term disability benefit” (whatever that is)? But the outrage in the ’80s was about so many people being unemployed, not that they were on unemployment benefit. The only outrage about that emanated from Thatcher’s Cabinet and the Adam Smith Institute.  The equivalent outrage today would lead to asking why so many millions are physically and mentally sick.  But posing that question seems to be exclusive province of niche publications like Pring’s Disability News Service.

Oddly, among its vanishingly small valid points, Nelson’s documentary inadvertently makes the case for Unconditional Basic Income. Benefits are too generous, we are told, and thus people have no incentive to take jobs. This is because if you do go into work, all your benefits are instantly removed. But unconditional basic income – as opposed to the hugely conditional (and meagre) income support we now have – would not be removed whether a person had three jobs or spent every waking hour reading analytic philosophy. Thus it would ‘make work pay’ in a humanitarian way. This point was made by John McDonnell’s former economic advisor, Guy Standing (so obviously it’s extremely suspect and probably anti-Semitic).

But to return to the reality we unfortunately inhabit, it is a sight to behold the way British political mono-thinking instantly clicks into gear without any orders having to be given. Thus the cross-party Economic Affairs committee of the House of Lords (a body whose members are funded by taxpayers to fall asleep) solemnly intoned in January that the Work Capability Assessment “isn’t rigorous enough”, and that their lower conditionality means people have an incentive to apply for disability benefits. Meanwhile, Number 10 and Number 11 are apparently “pulling their hair out” over how long it is taking the very right-wing Labour secretary of state for Work and Pensions, Liz Kendall, to make welfare cuts. Faster! Faster!

As if to throw some meat to the baying hounds, Kendall has announced a resurrection of Rishi Sunak’s plans to rifle through the bank accounts of sick and disabled people suspected of (virtually non-existent) fraud, without even having to apply to the courts for permission. As an added touch of vindictiveness, driving licences may now be taken away. It is now clear – if it wasn’t before – that to the political class, of whatever shade of rosette, there are certain classes of very vulnerable people to whom it is possible to do anything, no matter how callous and draconian.

At this point you may be forgiven for wanting to hide under a rock (although we need to eradicate the incentive for misusing rocks in this way), but one of the many virtues of Pring’s book is that it reveals how we’ve been down this road before. With all due respect etc., the path to hell can also be paved with very bad intentions. But it helps to know that the unheavenly choir we are forced to listen to has a very limited, though up to now astonishingly effective, repertoire.

On three separate hinge points – when all this began in the dog days of Thatcher, when the Blair government wanted irrefutable evidence it was no longer ‘old’ Labour, and when the coalition was itching to pin the budget deficit on “shirkers” cheating the system – the media was on call to spread the message.

And by the media, I don’t just mean the usual suspects at the Sun or the Express or Mail. I also mean the more ‘liberal’ media like the BBC or the Guardian, or other broadcasters. For example the 1996 documentary The System on BBC2 hinted at widespread fraud and described Invalidity Benefit (the then the out-of-work disability benefit) as “known to cynics as the bad back benefit”.

In 2007, when Labour was introducing the Work Capability Assessment, The Guardian newspaper, now on board because it was Labour who were doing it, gave the floor to Matthew Elliot of the right-wing Taxpayers Alliance to bemoan the fact that many claimants were “taking advantage of the good nature of their GP”.

And of course we now have the obligatory documentary, urging the government to do what it already wants to do, on state-owned broadcaster, Channel 4.

What these others, the non-right-wing media, do is to ‘close the loop’. If even the Labour party is saying fraud is a massive problem in the benefit system, then it must be. Actually, it’s virtually non-existent. If even a cross-party House of Lords committee says the Work Capability Assessment isn’t strict enough, then it must be letting the lazy enjoy a life on benefits. Actually, as Pring shows, there have been hundreds of deaths (at least) because the Work Capability Assessment is so callous.

This process will end in a human disaster, and it already is for people who have no choice but to eke out an existence on disability ‘benefits’. We are now entering the surreal territory of the Labour party claiming, in the pages of The Sun, that the Tories weren’t tough enough towards claimants and allowed the ‘benefits bill’ to spiral out of control. Poor Iain Duncan Smith, he tried his best but it wasn’t good enough! But, says Rachel Reeves, Labour will act.

The system does not preclude any dissent. Channel 4, to be fair, did broadcast a film three years ago on The Truth About Disability Benefits (now interestingly only available on YouTube). But like bison deciding where they want to move to, the direction of travel is indicated and everyone in the establishment herd instantly knows what to say without having to be told. And as demonstrated by what happened to the outsider Jeremy Corbyn between 2015 and 2019, if anyone not in the group finds themselves, by some freakish accident, in a position of power or influence, the hostility is unrelenting.

If this is freedom, as we’re told it is, then freedom desperately needs some pluralism.

 

Here is part one

The Political Significance of The Beatles

 

What was the political meaning of the Beatles? I realise this is a rather dilatory question to ask of a band that broke up in 1970. But fascination with them endures and the real answer to this question, is, in my opinion, utterly different from the ones that are usually put forward.

On the surface, the political significance of the Beatles is exactly that, superficial. The company they established, Apple, did not embody, in Paul McCartney’s description, “Western communism”, whatever that was supposed to mean. John Lennon’s utopian, anti-materialist song ‘Imagine’ undoubtedly had, and still has, influence but personally I can’t take seriously someone wondering if I’m able to “imagine no possessions” while playing a grand piano in his stately home (and employing a gardener, a cook, and an art advisor).

As political role models, the Beatles were terrible. They moaned about paying too much tax – which Lennon claimed made them “anti-establishment” – and expected the minions they employed to indulge their every wish. In 1969, their press officer, Derek Taylor, was prompted to wonder why on earth he worked for them:

Whatever the motivation the effect is slavery.  Whatever the Beatles ask is done. I mean, whatever the Beatles ask is tried. A poached egg on the Underground on the Bakerloo Line between Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross? Yes, Paul. A sock full of elephant shit on Otterspool Promenade? Give me ten minutes, Ringo. Two Turkish dwarfs dancing the Charleston on a sideboard? Male or female John? Pubic hair from Sonny Liston? It’s early closing, George (gulp), but give me until noon tomorrow. The only gig I would do after this is the Queen. Their staff are terrified of them, and not without reason. They have fired more people than any comparable employer unit in the world. They make Lord Beaverbrook* look like Jesus.

But despite the egotism, they managed, in their later years, to produce the most innovative, experimental and influential music in pop history, while remaining – to quote a phrase – more popular than Jesus. In April 1966, for example, they recorded this and in the same month this ‘song’. In a two month period spanning December 1966 and January 1967, they produced Strawberry Fields Forever and A Day in the Life, which no-one, to this day, has come close to imitating. In the summer of 1967, when a normal band would have been promoting their last ground-breaking album, released a few months before, they took a completely different tack. The following year, the sound changed again and again from month to month. In 1969, they could still knock out classic pop songs while increasing disliking each other. And they probably invented heavy metal, either in 1965 or 1968.

In 1967, they were warned by the press that the Maharishi, the Indian meditation teacher under whose spell they were falling, was “commercial”. To which, Lennon replied, “Well, that’s fine because we’re the most commercial band in the world”, or something like that.

And, in terms of sales and merchandise, they certainly were. But judged by the standard of our current definition of “commercial” – following established trends, playing it safe for maximum sales, not upsetting anyone – the Beatles were anything but.  That determination to innovate, to go against the grain, to not give a damn what anyone else thought – while successfully remaining  at least as popular as during Beatlemania in the early sixties  – is what makes the Beatles historically interesting and politically significant. Their last album, Abbey Road, sold more copies in America than Sgt Pepper which, in turn, sold vastly more copies than the early Beatlemania LPs.

Barry Miles, a friend of the band who, as owner of the Indica bookshop in London introduced them to underground books and trends, said something perceptive about them a few years back. “The interesting thing,” he noted, “is that the Beatles were not only the world’s most commercial band but, at that point, [1966] they were also the world’s most experimental band, which was very unusual”.

“Brian Epstein [their manager] was concerned that they were going too far ahead of their fanbase,” he added. “But they were always very sensible, they wanted to bring the fans along with them. They did want to become some wild, avant-garde band that only 150 people had heard of.”

Back in 2009, the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher spoke about the “cult of minimal variation” – the pervasive compulsion to produce cultural products that are almost indistinguishable from those already successful. But, said Fisher, this ignores what people instinctively desire which is “the strange, the unexpected, the weird”.

“These can only be supplied,” he went on, “by artists and media professionals who are prepared to give people something different from that which already satisfies them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain kind of risk.”

This is precisely what the Beatles, devoted members of the cult of maximum variation, were determined to do, even when it was met with incomprehension or hostility.

To this day, some Beatles fans complain that eight minutes of the White Album is taken up with ‘Revolution No 9’, a non-song consisting of noises and snatches of conversations aimed to paint in sound, in Lennon’s words, “a picture of revolution”.

Whether he succeeded or not (he later thought it was “anti-revolution”), Revolution No 9 became, in author Ian Macdonald’s description, “the world’s most widely distributed avant-garde artefact”. The track was “one of the most striking instances of the communicative power of pop”. Rather than remaining “the preserve of the modernist intelligentsia, Lennon’s sortie into sonic chance was packaged for a mainstream audience which had never heard of its progenitors, let alone been confronted by their work.”

The point is not whether the Beatles experimental work was good or bad (half a century on, I think the jury’s decided that most of it, maybe not ‘Revolution No 9’, was extremely good) but that, in stark contrast to today, they were able to produce it whilst remaining wildly popular. What the Beatles had, in fact, was an out of control popularity, which is why powerful people (like Nixon’s future Vice President Spiro Agnew or the anti-communist John Birch Society) were always trying to ban their songs, often for exceedingly dumb reasons.

Music aside, the Beatles’ influence – popularising meditation, promoting LSD or inspiring Charles Manson – was questionable but it certainly existed as a force and they knew it did. This is why Lennon spent the Beatles’ dying days planting acorns and singing about peace while sitting in bed – because he knew the media would report whatever he did because of who he was.

And there is something inherently subversive about uncontrollable popularity, whether it is used wisely or not. This is while the elites that have power within western societies are fixated on controlling popular opinion. They’ve realised there’s no need to ban radical manifestoes, uncomfortable facts, or avant-garde expression but just make sure that only fringe minorities are exposed to them. Usually this works quite efficiently.

But when elites lose control of the narrative most people consume, that’s when they get desperate. The ‘shock’ 2017 General Election campaign – in which the left-wing, anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn got 41% of the vote in reactionary old England – happened in large part because the broadcast media were suddenly legally obliged to report what the socialist Labour party was actually saying, rather than just amplifying smears from the billionaire-owned right-wing (and liberal) press. Everything that has happened since – the blatant lying, the purges, the establishment arrogation of the liberal media, the mysterious algorithm changes, has been about regaining control.

This multi-fanged operation has undoubtedly been successful, at least temporarily. But the genocide in Gaza has revealed that controlling the narrative is more difficult to sustain in era when people have alternatives to legacy media at their fingertips. And the desire to control popular reaction is leading to outright repression, even in esteemed liberal democracies. Whether this impulse will be ratcheted up is a distinct possibility. The Hague Invasion Act, authorising the US President to invade the Netherlands should the International Criminal Court put any of its citizens on trial was passed in 2002 under George Bush but has now been extended to Israel.

Whether faced with overt authoritarianism or the manipulation of opinion (or, as is likely, a combination of the two), the only ‘cure’ is reform of the media to ensure that diverse opinions reach the mass of people: ‘cure’ in the sense that the patient may die in a nuclear conflagration, or endure the slow death of global warming, if this course is not followed. But because of what it will lead to, it will be fought tooth and nail.

In this future conflict, what the Beatles said politically or explicitly represented is really not interesting at all. It’s a total blind alley. What is interesting is that they were able to experiment and reach hundreds of millions of people directly while remaining beyond the grasp of their detractors and conservatives of all stripes. That is the most precious form of power of all.

 

*Beaverbrook (Max Aitken), a sort of proto-Rupert Murdoch, was the owner of the Daily Express (in addition to being a government minister in Britain in the two world wars) and was famous for sacking journalists whose output was not to his satisfaction.

Drag Me to Hell – Why are we so right-wing?

 

Margaret Thatcher is known for many things – declaring war on trade unions, initiating the mass privatisation of publicly-owned utilities, selling off council houses, deregulating the City of London, cutting taxes on the rich, to name a few. But one thing she is not famous for is being on the Left.

Nonetheless, in 1982, she did something which, in today’s climate, would be seen as left-wing, even ‘far left’. She suspended arms sales to Israel. This was in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which was prompted by the fact that the Palestinian Liberation Organisation had relocated there.

Many civilians were killed and Thatcher’s government took immediate action. An invitation to Israel to attend the British Army Equipment Exhibition was withdrawn and arms sales were stopped. One Foreign Office memo stated, “It would be odd if we were now to conduct bilateral business with the Israelis as though nothing had happened”.

Contrast this with the current British government’s reaction to the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza, which has already killed far more civilians than the Lebanon War did. In fact, the official number of dead – 30,000 – will be swelled by so far unreported deaths – those dying at home and missing because they are buried under rubble.

Atrocities definitely happened in the 1982 war, most famously in refugee camp massacres. But, as far as I’m aware, deaths from malnutrition did not occur, as they are now. Nor were starving people deliberately massacred by the Israel Defense Force.

Nonetheless, this time Britain is definitely conducting business as though nothing had happened. Arms sales continue, and indeed the “defense relationship” and “growing Israel-UK partnership” is celebrated by the IDF.

Virtually the only person in the UK Parliament to object to this state of affairs is a propagator of ‘far left’ ‘socialism’ who has been cast into out darkness on the patently ridiculous grounds that he enabled antisemitism to flourish when he was leader of the Labour party.

I doubt somehow though that Thatcher is turning in her grave.  She regarded her greatest victory as compelling the Labour party to renounce its mixed economy, social democratic ideology in favour of her right-wing, corporate friendly, anti-worker economic world-view. Something Corbyn, all too briefly, reversed.

The Ultimate Compliment

Present leader Sir Keir Starmer is the perfect compliment to Thatcher’s legacy.  Despite being elected on a promise of upholding Corbyn’s economic policy, he has jettisoned every element of it, leaving a husk of Thatcherite nostrums impeccably attuned to the political and economic establishment which has grown to such dominance in her wake.

For example, in throwing overboard a pledge to spend £28 billion a year on green energy projects, Starmer and de facto deputy Rachel Reeves consciously aped the language of the Cameron-Osborne government employed to justify austerity. They accused the government of “maxing out on the nation’s credit card”. The same mind-numbing phrase cropped up in Starmer’s response to the Budget.

Reeves has, in redoubtably conservative fashion, promised to balance the nation’s books, despite, somewhat hilariously, having her own Parliamentary credit card taken away in 2015 for over-spending on expenses.  She has also promised not to reintroduce a cap on bankers’ bonuses abolished by the Conservatives, as this would mar the charm offensive with the City of London that she and Starmer have methodically deployed over the last few years.

A Different Country

The question that should then be asked is how did British politics get so sclerotically right-wing, especially when, in terms of social attitudes, the diametrically opposite trend has occurred?

Last autumn, for example, the researchers behind British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) proclaimed that Britain had undergone “a near revolution” in terms of social attitudes over the last four decades:

One clear theme emerges. On many social issues, such as sexual relations or whether women with young children should go out to work, there has been a long-run secular change trend towards a more liberal climate of opinion. In what might be thought a near-revolution in the country’s cultural outlook and social norms, Britain has increasingly come to believe that what people do in the bedroom, what kinds of family they live in, and how they combine family life and paid work should be up to them. The job of government is to respect and facilitate the decisions they make rather than try and take those decision[s] for them. 

In 1983, half of all respondents said that same sex relationships were “always wrong” compared to just 9% two years ago. Over three quarters of people support a woman’s right to have an abortion, compared to just 37% 40 years ago.

Other seismic changes can be found in attitudes toward premarital sex, having children outside wedlock, and gender roles in the workplace and the home. In 1987, for example, 48% agreed that ‘a man’s job is to earn money, a woman’s job is to look after the home and family’. Now only 9% of people do.  Britain “now looks and feels like a different country from 40 years ago”, the BSA says.

These are all welcome changes but in terms of politics, and the attitudes underpinning it, Britain doesn’t “feel like a different country from 40 years ago”. It feels like a worse country.

To go back to the example that introduced this article, in 1982 – when dinosaurian attitudes on social issues held sway – Margaret Thatcher could, with minimal opposition it seems, suspend arms sales to Israel. It is inconceivable that such a policy would be enacted today and if, by some miracle it was, it would be instantly accompanied by howls of antisemitism. 

It may justifiably be pointed out that these changes in social attitudes did not just happen. According to journalist Ian Sinclair, reporting on the BSA survey curiously neglected mentioning the role of “groups like the Women’s Liberation Movement, Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front and Outrage dealing with violence, threats and abuse in their struggle to win equal rights, changes in the law and shift public opinion.”

But there is no shortage of activist groups – on anti-austerity, public ownership, the rights of disabled claimants, inequality, and corporate taxation for example – trying to shift Britain’s economic policy and politics marginally to the Left. But in this case, barring minor victories on things like the municipalisation of bus services, they have just been banging their heads against a brick wall.

Why is this? Why did activists, admittedly after years of struggle, succeed in prising the door open on gender issues, gay rights, and sexual choice but in terms of politics and economics meet a defiant ‘No Pasaran!” from the elite?

1983 will never die!

I can’t give a definitive answer but one notable feature of British politics over the past four decades has been an innate conservatism in the worst sense of the word. Instead of taking on vested interests, it has opted to protect and preserve them.

In party political terms, we have one side fixated on a perpetual emulation of Thatcher’s epoch-changing 1983 victory facing off against the 1997 Reenactment Society. Rather than changing, as social attitudes obviously have, politics is frozen in aspic, like some endless rerun of Yes Minister (which for those who don’t know was a ‘comedic’ representation of the right-wing Public Choice Theory and obsessed with cutting government waste).

In 2008, our necrophile political system bailed out, with public money, a financial system that had imploded entirely due to its own inner workings. Not only was this an enormous transfer of wealth from poor to rich, it also rescued and further entrenched a sector of the economy that feeds off debt and thus loves conservative economics.  

Finance wants austerity because, as a result, wages are held down and people become even more susceptible to getting into debt and having to make interest payments. For the same reason, it has an aversion to trade unions. Finance is also a prime mover behind the privatisation of public assets, funding the Private Equity groups that often take over public services, like water or health, thus benefitting from the rising user fees that people are compelled to pay to gain access to basic services.

If ‘market failures’ exist and they aren’t being dealt with, you can bet that for some people, invariably extremely well-off, these aren’t failures at all but successes and the source of their wealth.

Hysterical Billionaires

And when the billionaires who run Britain’s mass media organisations ran into some turbulence after revelations of phone hacking, the obedient political class was on hold to limit the fall out. The initial enquiry into unlawful conduct by the newspapers, led by the judge Brian Leveson, was meant to be followed by a second part (‘Leveson 2’) that would have looked into “corporate governance issues”. But this was scrapped by Matt Hancock because of the “significant progress” that had apparently been made.

As a result, rather than clipping their wings, moguls like Rupert Murdoch were emboldened. His News UK launched the right-wing Talk TV station in 2022, emulating the hysterical Fox News in the US despite laws against broadcasting bias in the UK which didn’t seem to make much difference. The fact that Talk TV is soon to become a streaming only service does not denude from its intention to further lock British politics into a right-wing direction.

Its ‘rival’ GB News plays a similar role. The co-owner of the channel is hedge fund billionaire Sir Paul Marshall. In a previous incarnation he funded and edited the 2004 ‘Orange Book’, a collection of free market espousing essays by leading Liberal Democrats which set the tone for their role in the Cameron coalition after 2010.

Marshall, who has been outed for seeming endorsement of far right conspiracy theories, has previously lamented the fact that financiers like him ‘made out like bandits’ as a result of the government’s decade-long Quantitative Easing programme. But despite this honesty, he hasn’t been deterred from putting the money to effective use.

If you create a large coterie of billionaires, as our political system has, you shouldn’t be surprised when they use that enormous wealth to mould public opinion and protect their interests. 

Liberal and progressive opinion in this country has been profoundly shaped by the Whig theory of history, which is convinced that the British story exhibits a steady, if slow, progress towards more liberty and rights. However, the experience of the last 40 years does not bear this out. Progress and reaction can co-exist, each in their own separate sphere of influence. Reality, as opposed to the idealised narrative that exists in our heads, is frequently messy and may point in two contradictory directions at the same time.

 

 

The Importance of Being in Denial

Late last month an interview was published that you probably never saw. You never saw it not because it was tedious or inconsequential but because of the opposite. It took apart the consensus narrative on which British politics has rested for the past four or more years. The result has been silence. The arguments it contained are not disputed but rather the continued existence of the perilously shaky edifice that is British political common sense depends on maintaining that it never existed.

The interview is with Geoffrey Bindman, renowned human rights lawyer and former deputy leader of Camden council. He is a member of the Labour party, who, according to his own admission, straddles left/right divides. He is, incidentally, also Jewish.

Bindman addresses the notion that antisemitism was rife the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn and that Keir Starmer has shouldered the burden of ridding the party of this stain by expelling the guilty parties. “You can look at all the statistics and studies that have been made,” says Bindman. “If you look at the facts you can’t justify what Keir has said or done unless he’s using it as a pretext. A political strategy. That’s all I can say.”

He is particularly dismissive of the notion that Corbyn himself is antisemitic. “I like Jeremy tremendously,” he says. “…. But he has his faults. And part of his problem is he's too honest and too decent to be an ideal leader. He's not tactical. He just says what he thinks, which gets him into trouble. And he never defends himself.”

Corbyn’s continued suspension from the Parliamentary Labour party is unprecedented in British political history. Disgraced former political leaders have never been treated in anything like this fashion. Neville ‘In the name of God, go’ Chamberlain – replaced by Churchill as PM after the botched Norway campaign of 1940 – remained leader of the Conservative party and a member of the War Cabinet. George Lansbury, forced to resign as Labour party leader in 1935 because of his pacifist stance, continued to sit as a Labour MP until his death five years later. His former deputy, Clement Attlee, paid tribute to him as a “champion of the weak”.

Not so Corbyn, who has lived in the political equivalent of outer Siberia since claiming that – quite correctly – that “[A]nyone claiming there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party is wrong … but the scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media”. The Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, who you might imagine would have resolutely defended him as one of their own, could muster little more than a mildly riled press release. And even that wasn’t unanimous. Labour MPs in general have treated him like a pariah, refusing to be seen together in photos  and remaining unmoved when someone spat in his face during the height of Covid (which could have been fatal).

The lawyer Martin Forde, author of the eponymous Report into the leaked report of the work of Labour’s Legal and Governance Unit, lauded the compilers of the leaked report for not succumbing to “denialism” about the seriousness of antisemitism in the party. But it strikes me that, for the sake of historical truth and any future democracy may have in this country, a measure of denialism is exactly what is needed. As Bindman says in reference to the EHRC finding that the Labour party broke equality law, “the worst part of it was the party took it all lying down …. They accepted it when they should have challenged it.”

This denialism should take two main forms:

1. Jeremy Corbyn is himself not antisemitic, nor did he protect antisemites from exposure

The ‘mature’ Labour antisemitism ‘crisis’ narrative, in full flow from 2018, did not content itself with claiming that the party itself was riddled to the core with antisemites. It also asserted that Corbyn himself was personally so full of animosity towards Jews that he represented an “existential threat” , that, should he be elected Prime Minister, he’d be the first antisemite in government in the West since the Second World War, and that he even planned to “reopen Auschwitz”.

The companion piece of this effluvium was that Corbyn, in league with his team of like-minded crony advisers, was badgering away behind the scenes endeavouring to shield the antisemites his leadership had attracted into the Labour party from public exposure and sanction.

This was the story that blazed its way across the media in the spring of 2019, with The Observer claiming that the Labour leadership “opposed recommendations to suspend several party activists accused of antisemitism”.  The Sun followed suit with allegations of “meddling” by Corbyn and co. to prevent their “friends” getting kicked out of the party. The iconoclastic Private Eye joined in with a claim of 100,000 emails revealing “the protection of anti-Semites … on a scale the public does not begin to understand”.

The trouble is this cache of damning emails doesn’t appear to exist. Or if it does exist it indicates an entirely different motivation to the one presented. The evidence points in the opposite direction. When Corbyn was finally able to choose the General-Secretary he wanted – Jennie Formby – the prosecution of internal antisemitism cases tripled. The EHRC report into antisemitism in the Labour party did indeed find that the leadership had interfered in cases (which it found was unlawful), but mainly to speed them up. The aforementioned Forde report from July of this year called out the “wholly misleading media reports” suggesting that Corbyn’s staff “had aggressively imposed themselves on the process against HQ’s wishes.” In fact, says Forde, they did so at the request of the Governance and Legal Unit (the part of the Labour party bureaucracy responsible for complaints about member behaviour) and “in good faith”.

In truth Corbyn responded with alacrity to claims of antisemitism within the Labour party; something that cannot be said of his predecessors. He commissioned the Royall Report into allegations of antisemitism at Oxford University Labour Club and the Chakrabarti Inquiry into antisemitism in the wider party both within a year of becoming leader.  The latter, certainly, has been airbrushed out of existence by parts of the Labour party and the media.

Corbyn is still facing the demand that he apologises “unequivocally, unambiguously and without reservation” for his comments in response to the EHRC inquiry nearly two years ago. Though whether that will gain him readmission to the Parliamentary Labour party is a moot point. However, on this evidence, other people should be apologising to him, not the other way around.

2. Labour under Corbyn was not overrun with antisemitism, nor was it institutionally antisemitic.

Corbyn, as can be seen above, did not respond to the EHRC report by claiming – to use Starmer’s résumé, obediently parroted by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg – that antisemitism in Labour was “all exaggerated”. He explicitly stated that there was antisemitism in the Labour party, “sometimes voiced by people who think of themselves as on the left”, but that its scale had been “dramatically overstated”. That seems, notwithstanding the ructions it produced, quite a realistic assessment of the true situation.

As cited at the time by Corbyn, statistics indicated that only 0.3% of Labour members had been accused of antisemitism with allegations serious enough to warrant an investigation. That figure does not authenticate wild claims that the party was a “cesspool” of antisemitism, that it was an inherently racist party, that it was “the party of Holocaust denial”, or that it was afflicted by “epic” levels of antisemitism. Nor does it justify false assertions from the top of the party that Labour under Corbyn had been found guilty of institutional antisemitism by the EHRC.

It might be argued that the bare figures don’t encapsulate the “seriousness” of antisemitism in the Labour party. Martin Forde takes this line, praising the compilers of the leaked report for not surrendering to the notion that allegations of antisemitism were nothing more than a smear.

And there is evidence of the existence of antisemitism in the orbit of the Labour party that wasn’t simply confected or ‘weaponised’ to attack Corbyn. For example, the book Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party & Public Belief ­­– which cannot be accused of being hostile to the Corbyn project as it is source for the opinion poll finding that the public believed 34% (not the real figure of 0.3%) of Labour members had been accused of antisemitism ­– lists several examples, gleaned from interviews with Labour activists, of seemingly genuine antisemitism.

These include the creation of antisemitic sub-group with a Constituency Labour Party that posted four or five articles a day all about “blood libel, Rothschild, conspiracy etc.”, culminating in “outright holocaust denial”. Another activist who had administered the left-wing Red Labour Twitter account highlighted several instances of online antisemitism “from people who identify as Labour left”, enough “to have reported at least a dozen people a year”.

Likewise the case of a council candidate sharing an article on holocaust denial (before the Corbyn era it should be pointed out) does not appear fabricated.

That said, of the 15 Labour activists interviewed in Bad News for Labour, 11 reported seeing no antisemitism at all in party circles, with one remarking, “I am completely at a loss to understand what this antisemitism row is all about.”

That is why many activists reacted with incredulity when asked by the soft left to sign a letter in March 2019 saying they had personally witnessed antisemitism in the Labour party. It’s why there is no reason to doubt Geoffrey Bindman’s sincerity when he says, “I have had close involvement with the Labour Party for many years, and I can say that I've never really experienced antisemitism among fellow Labour Party members or in Labour meetings.” Curiously (Don’t) Change UK defector and former leadership hopeful Chukka Umunna said the same thing before he got with the programme.

Attempts to substantiate the notion that antisemitism was rampant in Corbyn’s Labour party always seem to fall down on the specifics. For example, the EHRC report lists “evidence of antisemitic conduct by an ‘ordinary’ members of the Labour party”. This list includes “comparing Israelis to Hitler or the Nazis” and deriding a witch-hunt in the Labour party or blaming the “Israeli lobby” for the volume of complaints. The former depends on the details: for example in 2011 the sociologist and historian of the holocaust Zygmunt Bauman compared the West Bank separation wall to the Warsaw Ghetto and he clearly wasn’t antisemitic. The latter just isn’t antisemitic. Nor is there any attempt to identify how common this conduct was in the context of rapidly growing Labour party membership under Corbyn which peaked at just under a sixth of the population of Wales.

There are grounds to be suspicious of the large volume of complaints received about antisemitism. According to the leaked data used in the Aljazeera documentary The Labour Files, 23% of complaints about antisemitism in the Corbyn era came from one person. Corbyn staffer Phil Bevin was seconded onto logging antisemitism complaints (to get rid of the backlog) and reports that the majority he saw came from two individuals. “There was a lot of duplication of the complaints, in terms of they were about the same people for the same things,” he claims. “And very often – probably more often than not – it wasn’t specified whether they were actually Labour members”.

And the whole narrative about unbridled antisemitism in the Labour party under Corbyn is undermined by the fact that the crackdown on it avidly pursued by his successor has disproportionately target Jews. Jewish members of the Labour party are five times more likely to be investigated for antisemitism than non-Jewish members. Overall at least 56 Jewish Labour members have been investigated, suspended or expelled from antisemitism (1.09.00). This is seriously odd. It’s akin to an investigation into anti-Black racism singling out black people or one into Islamophobia going after Muslims. It must also be case that the 56 form part of segment of 0.3% Labour members charged with allegedly ‘genuine’ antisemitism.

The full quote from Corbyn adviser and ex-Guardian journalist Seamus Milne that was selectively truncated in the BBC Panorama documentary ‘Is Labour Antisemitic?’ ironically gives a good summary of the absurd situation that has actually transpired. “If we are more than very occasionally using disciplinary action against Jewish members for antisemitism,” he wrote, “something’s going wrong and we’re muddling up political disputes with racism.”

In truth, the Labour antisemitism ‘crisis’ was and is a textbook example of a moral panic. A group of people perceived as threatening to society’s interests – in this case the Corbynite Left – are accused of something because the way in which they are threatening cannot be faced head on. What they are accused of may contain a grain of truth but it is vastly blown out of proportion. However, it is in the nature of moral panics that what really drives them is never openly admitted. Especially in Britain the demand for new moral panics is an unending feature of politics.