Marr Gives The Game Away

Yesterday, Andrew Marr gave the game away. Opening the Marr Show, on BBC, in a week when the disgrace over Windrush, and the revelations of the institutional racism that runs, like a yellow thread, through the Tory Party has been the dominant issue, he raised the side issue of the meeting between Corbyn and the British Board of Jewish Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, and let slip what the real reason for all the attacks on Corbyn, over anti-Semitism, are really all about. Those who want to protest over anti-Semitism, he concluded, would have the opportunity to express their concern in this week's local government elections.

Of course, most Labour Party members already know the real purpose of the attacks on Corbyn, and know why the attacks have come now, just ahead of those elections, just as they have come before every other set of elections, in the last two years. Len McCluskey got it quite right. The attacks are scurrilously taking a real issue, anti-Semitism, and using it, unscrupulously, as a means of undermining Corbyn, and the Labour Party, in the hope of undermining Labour's chances in the elections. The Right are doing that, because they know they have lost the battle of democracy, in the party, and because their whole argument and philosophy has depended upon the idea that Corbyn's progressive social democracy is not popular, and only their own brand of conservative social democracy, and pandering to popular prejudices – as with their advocacy of racist policies on immigration, and support for the same kind of policies of creating a “hostile environment” by the Tories – were capable of winning elections. 

Every time Labour does well in elections, under Corbyn, a Blair-right fairy dies. Each time, their vain hope that somehow, some way, fate will sweep them back into power takes another battering. Unlike the Left who have always made up the vast majority of the activists in the party, and who have thereby been used to having to make their own history, through hard work, the Blair-rights and soft Lefts relied on a desire of party members to win elections, and so put up with policies they disagreed with, and they have relied on the Tory media acting to provide them with a platform, as well as their control over the party apparatus to bureaucratically minimise the role of the rank and file, and to promote the right-wing careerists into their positions. They are not emotionally prepared to have to actually wage an intellectual and political battle for their ideas, which is why they now lash out at the party, in a similar way to how minority opposition groups around the globe, try to overcome the limitations of their tiny forces, by getting larger imperialist military powers to come to their assistance, in the name of humanitarian assistance. But, no one is coming to the rescue of the Blair-rights. 

The Tories have thrown them a bone, because the Tories, especially after the last election fear Corbyn more than the Blair-rights, but they could not help saving themselves, in relation to Windrush, by pointing out that it was Blair-right Home Secretaries that had first introduced policies of hostility towards immigrants, in the hope of currying favour with sections of voters, rather than tackling the issue of anti-immigrant bigotry head on. They couldn't help pointing out that the same Blair-right and soft left MP's who had helped them out over Windrush, by providing the diversion of the attacks on Corbyn over Syria, and over anti-Semitism, were the same MP's who had supported the 2014 measures that led to the current debacle. In the process, they succeeded, unconsciously, in illustrating that it was only Corbyn, and a handful of others, who voted against those measures, just as it is they who have been, consistently, the ones who have opposed all forms of racism and bigotry. 

And, the Tory media, whilst coming to their assistance, has done so in a rather half hearted manner. The Sunday Times front page article suggesting Russian intervention in last year's election was farcical. It is an amateur version of the notorious Zinoviev Letter. There is no reason why a right-wing nationalist like Putin would support a left-wing internationalist like Corbyn. There is every reason why Putin supports right-wing nationalists like Trump, Le Pen, Wilders, Farage and their ilk within the Brexit wing of the Tory Party. And, everyone also knows that Putin is building an alliance with the right-wing strongman Erdogan in Turkey, as well as having daily discussions with Netanyahu in Israel. These are all right-wing nationalists and populists, presenting themselves as “strong and stable” leaders, just as May attempted to do in last years' election. The choice of slogan was not accident. It is the mantra of the Bonapartist. 

Its not Corbyn that the Kremlin has been supporting, but the Tories, and their Brexit wing in particular. It's the Tories who have received hundreds of thousands of pounds from Kremlin cronies living in luxury in London; its Kremlin cronies who have paid tens of thousands of Pounds to play tennis with Boris Johnson, and similar amounts for access to other Tories. According the The Sunday Times, 5,000 Russian bot accounts were established during the last election. But, even if that is true, it would be insignificant. With 600,000 members, many of them young, there are hundreds of thousands of genuine social media accounts that rallied to Corbyn over the last two years. The thousands who turned up to open air events, certainly were not somehow, fictitious! 

The Blair-rights, and their supporters in the Tory media are becoming more frantic by the day. They have no tools to understand what is happening to them, no emotional, psychological or political capacity, no moral fibre to be able to deal with the situation they find themselves in, and so they lash out with all of the venomous tools they can lay their hands on. Len McCluskey is right, we should call them to account.