Other People's Money – The Degeneration of Thatcherism

 “The problem with socialism,” Margaret Thatcher famously said (or perhaps nearly said), “is you always run out of other people’s money”.

Subjecting everything to a merciless cost-benefit analysis was the core Thatcherite credo. ‘Lame Duck’ nationalised industries were privatised and left to sink or swim in the unforgiving waters of private sector, ‘uneconomic’ coal pits were shut down no matter what the cost to the communities dependent on them, and internal markets, pledged to scythe through waste and bureaucracy, introduced into national institutions like the NHS and the BBC.

Therefore, it’s one of history’s great ironies that in the 21^st century her party – the Conservatives – are, under the guise of ‘free market’ policies, more profligate with “other people’s money” than any socialist government ever was, or, if one wants to be optimistic, ever could be.

“Socialism”, Thatcher’s mortal enemy, by regulating the private sector, as opposed to throwing money at it, would be immeasurably cheaper.

Let me count the ways.

Energy

The enormity of Liz Truss’s energy price guarantee  a huge “state handout” of between £100 billion and £170 billion may have been scaled back by Jeremy Hunt but the principle remains: using taxpayer money to subsidise the profits of energy retail and supply companies because the prospect of public ownership – ‘socialism!!’ – is so horrifying it can never be countenanced.

And the huge cost of heating their homes to the public – the price cap is now at an annual level of £4,279 – has only been exacerbated by the Conservatives’ attempts to head off the idea of public ownership by introducing phony competition into a plainly monopolistic market. The £6.5 billion state bailout of the energy retail company Bulb – one of nearly a hundred new suppliers introduced to give the appearance of competition to the electricity supply system – will cost each household £230.

Despite the fact that, due to sharp falls in the price of wholesale energy, gas and electricity are cheaper than they have been since 2010, the market price will not be reflected in bills for a long time. “The cost of rescuing failed energy firms,” says Rupert Hargreaves of Money Week magazine, “will add hundreds to each bill, offsetting some of the declines in wholesale energy prices.” And of course the shaky finances of the still existing energy firms need to be secured.

It is reassuring to know that the opposition ‘Labour’ party, now safely back in Blairite hands, will continue this prudent use of taxpayer funds. Its stated approach of a six month price cap freeze, now judiciously mirroring Hunt’s policy, will give £29 billion to the energy firms, the mad Corbynite relish to “nationalise everything” at exorbitant cost having been thrown in the dustbin of history where it belongs.

It’s not surprising therefore that there is a singular lack of curiosity in Westminster as to why wholesale energy prices have been on such a rollercoaster in the first place, spiralling skywards and then crashing. It can’t have been solely down to Vladimir Putin , or the gods of supply and demand, because the falls continued, even sped up, after the Nord Stream pipeline, which syphoned gas to Europe, stopped operating and was then sabotaged.

All that Rishi Sunak will say is that it’s impossible to artificially hold energy prices down. But there is nothing natural about the ‘wall of money’ that drives speculation in commodities such as oil and natural gas. “Prices for food, oil and gas are determined independently of both wholesalers and costs,” noted economist Ann Pettifor in the Financial Times last September. “Wall Street and Chicago Mercantile Exchange investors deploy vast sums in speculation on movements in the price of both food and energy prices. It’s a profitable game.”

But rather than cracking down on speculation, the government, unfailingly loyal to a bastardised market fundamentalist ideology,  wants to encourage it. The Financial Services and Markets bill, currently being scrutinized by the House of Lords, will give the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority additional objectives of encouraging “economic growth and competitiveness.”

The idea that you should limit speculation in commodities, which drives up wholesale prices thus inflating everyone’s heating bills by thousands of pounds, is beyond the bounds of the thinkable. This is despite the fact that it has been done in the past by an American President who would have bristled with indignation at being called a ‘socialist’.

In 1934, Franklin Roosevelt passed a law that limited speculation in commodities to 20% of the market. Stability reigned until ‘New Democrat’ Bill Clinton – channelling the deregulatory spirit of Reagan and Thatcher – legalised credit default swaps in housing (paving the way for the 2008 financial crisis) and in the same law gave the green light to unlimited speculation in other commodities, such as oil and gas – the root of our current troubles.

But the notion that we might shun this 21^st century liberation and return to the benighted ‘socialist’ practices of the past – which kept energy bills low thus obviating the need for huge public subsidies – is clearly just puerile. Like King Canute ordering the tide to stop coming in.

Public Services in general

You might think that no-one in their right mind would want to copy our dog’s breakfast of an energy supply system in other public services. But then again you (probably) don’t live in the mind of a Thatcher-besotted British Conservative.

The roll out of broadband installation in the UK is (prepare for a shock) heavily subsidised by the public purse. Under the £5 billion “Project Gigabit” programme, the government is gifting most of this money to BT and BT Openreach, its broadband division. However, stung by the lack of progress, it has augmented this with the fake competition model pioneered in the energy distribution system, encouraging other suppliers, so-called “altnets”, to start laying fibre-optic cable. Unfortunately, reports the Times, these paragons of efficiency are – much like private medical firms cherry-picking the simplest procedures – concentrating on the easiest areas. So “we’ve ended up with hundreds of fibre companies all building in the same areas.”

There is also the clear and present danger in the current climate that some of these “altnets” could go bust. So, as with the energy supply ‘market’, the government is setting up a Supplier of Last Resort system, naturally at the public’s expense. Unavoidable bail-outs, in the manner of Bulb, are on the cards. According to investigative journalist Solomon Hughes:

Customers of failed broadband firms will be shunted back to the old monopolistic firm, BT. The cost of these bailouts will be borne by the customer or the government. Just as in energy, trying to break [up] monopolistic firms by encouraging new entrants might end in costly failure.

The ‘socialist’ alternative, outlined by Corbyn at the 2019 General Election, would have been far more effective and cheaper. He wanted to entrust broadband rollout to a new public firm, called British Broadband, created partly by nationalising BT Openreach, and funded by taxing trillion dollar tech monsters like Facebook and Google. But this “crazed communist scheme”, to quote Boris Johnson, was too much for freedom-loving Brits so we’re back to gifting private firms public money to dig up the same stretch of road.

It has dawned on some right-wingers that the privatisation pioneered by Margaret Thatcher at the start of the 1980s has morphed into something else without many people noticing. Initially the Conservatives did simply divest themselves of state-owned companies (that had often been nationalised in the 1970s because they were at risk of bankruptcy). Firms like Cable & Wireless, British Steel, Rolls-Royce, British Airways, Jaguar and even Thomas Cook, were sold and had to make their own way in the private sector. Sometimes they survived and often, as in the case of Jaguar, British Steel and Thomas Cook for example, they didn’t.

But from the Tell Sid era of the break-up of British Gas in the mid-1980s, so-called ‘privatisation’ changed its nature. It became synonymous with contracting out monopoly services from the state to the private sector on the dubious grounds that this would be more efficient. This process is now so ubiquitous, encompassing services like water, gas and electricity, the railways, academy schools, NHS services, air traffic control, and care homes, that its uniqueness, and crucial difference with authentic privatisation, is often overlooked. These services were funded – and continued to be funded – by the government and, most importantly, could not be allowed to cease to exist.

After British Rail ‘privatisation’ in 1996, for example, the operation of lines was subject to a franchise system companies could bid to run. At the same time, the public subsidy awarded to this allegedly privatised system has increased by over 200%. And when the train operating companies are faced with a strike by their employees, they are reimbursed by the government for lost revenue.

In the words of a journalist for the right-wing Spectator magazine:

The rail industry hasn’t really been privatised at all. It remains underwritten by the taxpayer. Nor is there much in the way of competition: local monopolies are guaranteed by the franchising system.  The only difference is that the system is rigged so as to allow the private companies owning the franchises to make a profit, even if their underlying operation is making a thumping loss.

Predictably, faced with this “rigged” system, the writer wants to return to the original spirit of Thatcherism and genuinely privatise the railways, abolishing state subsidies and forcing “the industry” to stand on its own two feet. But this solution would simply result in a system of free market anarchy that laid the ground for Thatcher’s bête noire of ‘socialism’ in the first place. Fares would be hiked into the stratosphere and ‘uneconomic’ lines shut down. What is socially necessary is not always profitable – in fact the two are often in conflict – and the fear of this realisation is why this country lives under the sway of bastardized Thatcherism.

Where did it all go wrong?

In part two, I will continue to list the myriad ways that 21^st century conservatism props up the ‘free market’ system with public funds, in addition to asking why.

The answer, in my opinion, lies in both a putatively realistic but flawed vision of human nature and the unacknowledged economic failure of Thatcherism. She told herself, and everyone else, that releasing the forces of enterprise and beating back trade unions and socialism would result in a future of unending prosperity for all.

However, it hasn’t turned out that way and all they can do, to tweak a well-known phrase, is ‘throw [other people’s] money at the problem”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The inability to make half an argument

The startling thing about the death spiral currently engulfing the UK economy is that the medicine prescribed to deal with it – austerity and tax rises on ordinary people – will only make the economic pain worse. And yet they are seen as the only conceivable option.

Jeremy Hunt soberly tells us we must “pay our way in the world” as he ordains £30 billion in spending cuts and £24 billion in tax rises. Meanwhile the ‘Labour’ opposition rules out taking “risks with public finances” and or “getting its big government cheque book out”. Given that Hunt’s public spending cuts will take place in 2025 – after the next general election – and that the Labour party will almost definitely, following Blair’s example in 1997, not dare deviate from Tory spending plans in a bid to appear economically ‘credible’, it is an odds on certainty that austerity mark 2 will happen regardless of which party is in power.

That that party is the Conservatives, is dependent, we are told, on the unlikely event of them recovering their reputation for “sound money and sound public finances” lost in the Liz Truss debacle. But the incredible thing is that following the Cameron/Osborne years they had it in the first place.

The twin disasters of Austerity Mark One

It is established, if not universally known, that the original version of austerity was a disaster in social terms. The 40 per cent cut in funding for public services, most apparent in huge reductions in local authority social care budgets (for home visits, help with dressing, washing etc.), translated to 335,000 excess deaths and falling life expectancy .

But austerity was also a disaster economically.  GDP per head only reached an average of 1.2% between 2010 and 2018, lower than the previous decade (which was already low). Despite a mania for selling off public assets, which raises revenue in the short-term, public debt rose from 65% of GDP in 2010 to 79.1% in February 2020, and then mushroomed further because of the Covid lockdown.

Under ‘Osbornomics’ all this pain for masses of people was accompanied by an unconditional bounty for the super-rich in the form of quantitative easing, a state subsidy which raised the value of financial assets like shares. In the Eurozone, a mirror-image – ‘Draghinomics’ (after Mario Draghi former head of the European Central Bank) – likewise dispensed the suffering and largesse to, respectively, the undeserving poor and the undeserving rich, resulting in similarly comatose economic growth.

That there is a connection between falling real wages, lacklustre GDP growth, rising government debt, and austerity (which cuts the public sector workforce and reduces spending power and thus has ripple effects in the economy, and therefore on government revenue) can only be denied by an ideologically-induced blindness, which handily our government and its handmaidens in the media have in abundance.

Nonetheless, the barely contested response to projections that government revenue will be reduced in future, in the context of even larger falls in personal income, is to reintroduce austerity, the effect of which will be to further reduce government revenue.

It must have been this kind of iron-clad logic that earned the Conservatives their reputation for economic competence.

Don’t cut your cloth according to your measure

It shouldn’t take a PhD in economics to see through it. Despite the tenacity of home-spun wisdom that the government is like a household and must budget for hard times accordingly, cutting its outlays to take account of lower income, it isn’t and shouldn’t*.  The government’s spending – on for example enhanced salaries for nurses and other public servants – will multiply through the economy by being spent by individuals, and eventually turn into income for the government paid through tax. As economist Anne Pettifor points out:

Once earned, individuals, households and firms spend and invest their new, higher income. They spend on goods, on rent, on food, and on services provided by for example, football clubs, lawyers, accountants, musicians, artists etc. That spending generates additional tax revenues for government, this time paid by football clubs, firms, shops, landlords, farmers, lawyers, musicians etc.

This anti-austerity insight that the government is not like a household and shouldn’t behave like one essentially comes from John Maynard Keynes, who famously said in 1931, “You cannot balance the nation’s books by cutting its income”. That this perception, which comes from a man who explicitly wasn’t a socialist, is now indelibly associated with the Left and non-mainstream economists is an indication of how far to the Right politics and economics have shifted in the West in the last four decades.

The economic limits of shopping

Because in the context of 2023, not 90 or so years before, there’s something wrong with it. It, and its contemporary proponents, are making half an argument.

Resuscitating what economists call “effective demand” – a virtuous circle that ensures people have more disposal income so they go out and buy consumer goods, thus stimulating production to keep up and, through increased tax, shrinking government debt – is not the panacea for the economy because it doesn’t get to the root of what’s fundamentally wrong with it.

For decades the economy has become more dependent on profits from finance and speculation for the prosaic reason that more money can be made that way than from expanding production. This is despite unrelenting efforts to sustain demand in the form of escalating personal debt. And as a profits are made, more capital is inevitably produced, conditioned to seek profitable outlets of one sort or another. Curiously, governments in the West in the last decade responded to this surplus of capital but creating even more of it through Quantitative Easing.

There is no realistic way of expanding demand quickly enough to absorb this ever growing mass of capital. Even if the UK government miraculously saw the light and stopped suppressing demand through austerity and holding down public sector pay.

In this financialised economy, government progressively becomes more indebted as it has to support a weak private sector through bail-outs, tax cuts and subsidies to low pay. Meanwhile private sector debt escalates because being “highly leveraged”, in technical parlance, is seen as the way to increase exposure to financial products and thus bring in future profits.

Theoretically, the route out of this conundrum is strong economic growth which enables the gradual amelioration of debt, private and public. In its own rather pathetic way this is what the short-lived Truss administration was trying to do through its “investment zones” and scattergun tax cuts, which would supposedly have ‘paid off’ after a few years. That the ‘markets’ quickly pulled the rug from under Truss’s feet is an indication that no-one really believes revived economic growth is possible. With Sunak and Hunt, we’re back to stabilised misery.

Socially it is imperative that the RMT and others win their pay disputes. It is vital that the NHS is properly funded and re-nationalised. It is essential that Sunak’s attempts to force workers to continue working even if they want to go on strike – reminiscent of the Fascist regimes of the 1930s and one continuity with Liz Truss – are defeated. But we shouldn’t pretend that these victories – should they happen – will bring about an economically sustainable system.

*The idea that the government should ‘trim its sails’ in hard times, much like a sensible household, has proved to have a tenacious hold on public opinion, since it was first outlined by the conservatives and their allies in the media in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But not only is the analogy wrong, it is belied by the fact that most people don’t take any notice of it in their own lives, in that personal debt goes on rising year by year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.