by Tom Bower
Josh Simons, a policy adviser in Corbyn’s office, noticed that as the staff prepared for the meeting, the mood was one of ‘flippant disdain’. For Corbyn, Jews were automatically assumed to be rich capitalist financiers and bankers backed by Wall Street, and were all undoubted swindlers. They were not victims of racism, but the enemy of the working class.
The Board of Deputies’ leaders arrived at Corbyn’s office on April Fool’s Day, 2016. Uncertain how to address them, he relied on a script given to him to read, and thereafter directed their questions to Seumas Milne. Ignoring that pass-off, Arkush asked Corbyn, ‘What do you expect the Jewish community to feel when you meet people who are blatantly racist? Do you accept that it was inappropriate?’ Corbyn hesitated, then finally replied that he would ‘reflect’. But he refused to express any regret about associating with Hamas or Hezbollah. He would meet the Palestinians again, he said. Positioned to one side of the room, Milne was seething. In the presence of Jews, his body language had visibly changed. His language did not. Replying to the deputies’ questions, he refused to say ‘anti-Semitism’, only ‘anti-Zionism’. His blatant anti-Semitism, said one of the visitors, was ‘frightening. Giving power to Seumas Milne is fearful.’ The deputies knew that he had recently quibbled about printing Corbyn’s Passover message to Labour supporters on cards that featured a Hebrew phrase. ‘We must be careful,’ Milne had said. ‘There’s a long history between the Hebrews and Zionism.’ Corbyn could not be allowed to sign a card that gave any hint that he might be betraying the Muslims. Arkush left the meeting disturbed, and still uncertain about where Corbyn stood, despite his prejudices being increasingly on open display. Concealed beneath his benign exterior was anger: antagonism towards the Jews and fury about his opponents in Westminster. Speedily, those two groups merged. Jewish MPs were conspicuous among those in the PLP considering whether to launch a new leadership election. But their disunity remained his strength.
Without a leader or an ideology, many MPs were cowed by Labour’s ‘shock troops’, led by Jon Lansman. Based in his office overlooking Euston station, Lansman claimed to control 90,000 supporters spread through a hundred groups – called by some ‘Militant Reborn’ – across the country. He spoke about ‘permanent mobilisation’ to defend Corbyn, not least action by Momentum’s members to trigger ‘mandatory deselection’ of untrusted MPs. To root them out, in early 2016 Katy Clark drafted a ‘loyalty list’ to classify MPs into five categories, from ‘core group’ to ‘hostile’. In between were ‘core group plus’, ‘neutral but not hostile’, and ‘core group negative’. She listed only seventeen unquestioned loyalists, including McDonnell, Abbott, Clive Lewis, Dennis Skinner and Jon Trickett, a Yorkshire MP since 1996. Emily Thornberry was ‘core group plus’; Rosie Winterton, the chief whip, was ‘hostile’. Every Jewish MP was ‘hostile’ or ‘negative’, including Ed Miliband. Chuka Umunna, another ‘hostile’, was described by Marlene Ellis, a Momentum activist, as not ‘politically black’, by which she presumably meant he was a ‘traitor’ to his race. While authorising these classifications from his own office, Corbyn publicly ordered his MPs to cease their personal abuse, public sniping and anonymous briefings. His overwhelming mandate, he said, justified his demand for unity and loyalty. The overt hypocrisy encouraged the Tories’ hopes for gains in the May council elections. The handicaps were their own splits over Europe, and what they recognised as a disastrous budget.
On 16 March 2016 George Osborne produced a statement before the House that was riddled with errors. His cuts to welfare provoked Iain Duncan Smith, who the week before had protested about Osborne’s cuts to disability benefits, to resign as secretary of state for work and pensions. Pointedly, he accused David Cameron of lacking compassion. At prime minister’s questions an open goal was awaiting Corbyn’s shot. Instead, he spoke about refugees, Amnesty International and whether Turkey should join the EU. Baying Labour MPs heckled him for being a loser, unwilling to fight for Downing Street. ‘We cannot go on like this,’ John Woodcock wrote in the Mirror. ‘How have we managed to turn one of the worst-ever weeks for David Cameron’s Tory government into another humiliation for the Labour Party?’ Criticising Corbyn for his ‘lack of intellect’ and inability to think on his feet, Woodcock called for a leader who could help the disabled: ‘These people are being appallingly served by a leadership team who cannot even get its act together properly to stand up for disabled people when they are screwed over by the Tories.’
Corbyn’s take was completely different. Back in his office, he, Milne and their team were joyous. ‘They had deliberately ignored Duncan Smith’s resignation,’ noted an eyewitness, ‘to subvert the system and the Commons. They refused to play the game.’ Few beyond their group understood such an outlook. Conventional politicians, not for the first time, spoke about Corbyn’s position as ‘unsustainable’.
The best form of defence is attack. After pounding up and down the corridor, Milne came out fighting. In an unexpected appearance at a meeting of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, he urged the hard left to ‘isolate those [moderate MPs] who want to create a feeling of confusion and failure’. He was supported by Lansman, who urged his supporters to accelerate the purge of moderate Labour councillors. ‘This is our party now – we shouldn’t allow others to take it away from us,’ said Jackie Walker, Momentum’s vice chairman, choosing to attack ‘the enemies within the Labour Party’ on RT, Russia’s TV station.
At that moment, Katy Clark’s secret loyalty list was leaked. Its categories, renamed ‘Gallows’, ‘Gulag’, ‘Re-education’, ‘Jury’s out’ and ‘Comrades’, was a gift to Labour’s critics. In the Commons, Cameron waved the list at the Labour benches. ‘Hands up who’s core support!’ he shouted. His glee concealed his own weakness. Labour was now ahead of the Tories in the polls, and only 7 per cent of Labour supporters trusted ‘Bullingdon’ Cameron, the Old Etonian and Oxford toff, on Europe. By contrast, over 70 per cent of Labour supporters trusted Corbyn. Just as Bernie Sanders, the seventy-four-year-old Vermont socialist, was being taken up by ‘betrayed’ young Democrat voters in America, Corbyn was appealing to insecure young voters in a backlash against Britain’s elite. Opinion polls in 2015 had shown Labour with a 16 per cent lead among eighteen-to twenty-four-year-olds. One year later, that had risen to 41 per cent. Cameron was blamed for rising house prices, increasing student loans, inadequate welfare payments, an underfunded NHS and a 10 per cent fall in average real wages between 2007 and 2015. Corbyn was applauded as he marched through Whitehall with Yannis Gourtsoyannis, the doctors’ leader. Cheers also met his demand that Jeremy Hunt should negotiate during the junior doctors’ all-out strike, the first in NHS history. The public ignored the seventy meetings between Hunt and the BMA over the previous three years. Facts never undermined Corbyn’s support for a strike, especially after new statistics exposed an obscene inequality: the chief executives of Britain’s top hundred corporations were earning on average 183 times more than the average employee. Those at the very top earned 810 times more, and no one could demonstrate that those stratospheric levels of income delivered better performance.
More ammunition was added to Corbyn’s attack on the Tories by the media’s publication of ‘the Panama Papers’, a vast trove of leaked confidential documents from an offshore law firm. Hundreds of the world’s richest people were exposed as successful tax-avoiders. Among them was David Cameron’s father Ian, a stockbroker who had died in 2010, long after he had deposited his family’s funds in a firm based in the Bahamas. The prime minister himself had also owned shares in the tax haven worth £31,500, which were sold on his entering No. 10. Although his dealings were totally legal, his complicity in capitalism’s amorality was stark. Asked for an explanation, his spokesman stonewalled: ‘That’s a private matter.’ Following the ‘omnishambles’ budget, and with the cabinet deeply divided over Europe, Downing Street gave the impression of being mismanaged by a secretive, sleazy, multi-millionaire prime minister. ‘There’s one rule for the r
ich and another for everyone else,’ Corbyn commented. ‘The government needs to stop pussyfooting on tax-dodging.’ Cameron, he sniped, was a wealthy Etonian leading the posh party to reward the rich at the expense of the honest poor. Cameron’s personal ratings slumped below Corbyn’s for the first time. The prime minister’s credo of helping the poor to get rich and reducing taxes for those who worked was forgotten. To silence the uproar, Cameron belatedly published his tax returns, which showed that he had paid £400,000 in income tax over six years. His conduct had been irreproachable, but for Corbyn – pledged to levy punitive taxes to abolish the rich once and for all – his rival’s conduct remained immoral.
In Corbyn’s scenario, children should not inherit their parents’ wealth. But to the Tories’ glee, he appeared to have forgotten his own inheritance in 1987 of £37,478 – about £100,000 today – from his mother’s estate, and he had also ignored how the Miliband brothers had avoided paying taxes on their parents’ home by a deed of variation in their father’s will. Moreover, the publication of Corbyn’s tax return revealed both a £100 fine for late submission and his failure to include his state pension as income. That omission highlighted his prejudice against private income. Over the previous thirty years he had received an estimated £1.5 million from the state. His parliamentary pension, also funded by taxpayers, was worth £1.6 million, paying him about £50,000 a year on top of his state pension and his salary as leader of the opposition. But he was impervious to accusations of hypocrisy, and equally unembarrassed that Ian Lavery, his friend and shadow trade union minister, had not declared to HMRC his receipt of a £72,000 cheap mortgage from the National Miners’ Union in 1994, and then refused to disclose whether the money had been repaid.
The public test of Corbyn’s values would be the council elections on 5 May 2016. Since 1985, when Labour was in opposition it had never lost seats overall in any council election, but now the party faced a new situation. The white working class in the rundown northern cities blamed Labour and the EU for increased immigration. They complained that their incomes had fallen, public services were stretched, and their communities troubled by unwelcome changes. Nor did they like Corbyn’s metropolitan contempt for English culture. Most had heard about Emily Thornberry’s mocking tweet during a 2014 by-election: the caption ‘Image from #Rochester’ accompanied a photo of a house partly covered by the flag of St George with a white van on the forecourt – the symbol of a patriotic Englishman made good. The working class’s concerns about an uncontrolled influx of foreigners produced the same answer as before – Labour wanted more immigration. Although 330,000 migrants had legally settled in the UK in 2015–16, and at least another 100,000 had arrived illegally, Corbyn was unfazed. The result, the BBC reported, was that only 16 per cent of voters over sixty years old would vote Labour. The party was predicted to be heading for 150 lost council seats, a considerable defeat.
Corbyn was unyielding, and agreed with Milne that the media, ‘are obsessed with trying to damage the leadership of the Labour Party and unfortunately there are people in the Labour Party that play into that’. At a public meeting, Corbyn smiled as his supporters jeered the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg for asking a critical question. For some time he watched her discomfort before asking for silence. He saw no reason to alter his image as the authentic anti-establishment icon. ‘Don’t do anything that could damage the party,’ said Jon Trickett, reappointed by Corbyn to run the council elections campaign. But then, unexpectedly, anti-Semitism became an issue.
Sufyan Ismail, the chief executive of Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND), was known for using anti-Zionist language. Naturally, he sought a like-minded personality as the guest of honour at MEND’s fundraising dinner on 22 April 2016, and invited Naseem ‘Naz’ Shah, Bradford’s new Labour MP in succession to George Galloway. Two years previously the forty-two-year-old Shah had written on Facebook that Israel should ‘relocate’ to the United States, because ‘America has plenty of land to accommodate Israel as its 51st state’, and would ‘welcome Israelis with open arms’. Once the ‘transportation’ was complete, she argued, evoking the image of cattle trucks arriving at Auschwitz, ‘the Middle East would again be peaceful’. Her post, accompanied by a map, showed Israel plonked down in the southern states of America and concluded ‘Problem Solved.’ In another post, she added: ‘Never forget that everything Hitler did was legal.’ Employed on McDonnell’s team, she had been encouraged by party leaders to seek membership of the Commons select committee inquiring into anti-Semitism. Clearly, she would have a particular contribution to make.
On Tuesday, 26 April, Corbyn’s staff was asked by a journalist about Shah’s Facebook post. Summoned to Corbyn’s office, she waited for nearly an hour while a dispute raged inside. ‘We forgot you’re here,’ she was finally told. Party general secretary Iain McNicol had demanded that Shah be suspended, but Corbyn had refused, hoping that an apology from her would be sufficient. Quickly composing a statement presented for approval to Seumas Milne, Shah claimed that the post had been written before she was elected to Parliament. Before the publication of this explanation on her Facebook page, Milne removed her reference to anti-Semitism. With that, he believed, the problem would go away; Corbyn did too. Neither considered how Shah would reply to racists if she were asked whether Britain’s ‘problems would be solved’ by all the Shahs returning to their country of origin. Or, as Jonathan Arkush later noted, ‘If a Labour MP was to propose the transportation of black people back to Africa, I just can’t imagine the shock, the outrage if that person was allowed to remain in the party a split second.’ Neither Milne nor Corbyn considered the question worthy of an answer. Both sympathised with Shah’s anti-Zionism, and were unconcerned that she was also anti-Semitic.
By the end of the day, 26 April, their studied nonchalance fell away. Bowing to pressure from MPs, McNicol suspended Shah from the party ‘pending an investigation’. Then, to Corbyn’s irritation, the Jewish problem resurfaced. In another Facebook message, Malia Bouattia, the new president of the National Union of Students, described Birmingham University as a ‘Zionist outpost’ because it hosted ‘the largest [number of Jews] in the country whose leadership is dominated by Zionist activists’. Bouattia, a Muslim whose parents were born in Algeria, would be criticised by an all-party committee of MPs for her ‘smack of outright anti-Semitism’, but as usual, Corbyn said nothing.
His silence was filled by Ken Livingstone. London’s former mayor spoke as a member of the NEC and as a close ally of Corbyn, who, he knew, agreed with him about Israel and the Jews. The only difference was that Livingstone’s anti-Semitism was undisguised. Before 1987 he had waged a bitter campaign against Reg Freeson, the Jewish Labour Member for Brent East. Livingstone wanted Freeson’s seat, and did finally end the MP’s twenty-three-year parliamentary career. In February 2005 his anti-Semitism had resurfaced when an Evening Standard journalist asked him an innocuous question after an evening event. ‘Actually,’ replied Livingstone, ‘you’re just like a concentration camp guard. You’re just doing it because you’re paid to, aren’t you?’ Oliver Feingold, the reporter, replied that he was Jewish. Two days later the Standard’s editor exposed Livingstone’s racism. After he refused to apologise, he was suspended as mayor for one month.
Soon after, he cursed two Jewish property developers and suggested that they ‘return to where they came from’, which happened to be India; but that was not considered by an adjudicator to be anti-Semitic, just insulting. He survived to defend Naz Shah. ‘I don’t think her comments were anti-Semitic,’ he said on radio on the day she apologised. ‘This is an over-the-top comment about a horrendous conflict,’ he added, referring to the Israeli-Palestinian war. Shah was the victim of a ‘well-orchestrated campaign’ by the ‘Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as anti-Semitic’. He went on: ‘Let’s remember, when Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad a
nd ended up killing six million Jews.’ Livingstone was suggesting that Hitler was in favour of a Jewish state in Israel, and that the Jews were contaminated by their preparedness to work with him, complicit in their own genocide. Not only was that wholly untrue – the fabrication of Lenni Brenner, an anti-Semitic American Trotskyist – but Livingstone ignored Hitler’s explicit anti-Semitism in Mein Kampf, published in 1925, as well as all his speeches promoting hatred of Jews before 1932. He also distorted an act of desperation in 1933: to escape the doom they foresaw, representatives of Germany’s 522,000 Jews did negotiate with the Nazi government for some of them to be allowed to emigrate with their possessions rather than depart penniless. That limited agreement was irrelevant to Zionism, but was twisted by anti-Semites to portray Jews as collaborators in their own destruction.
Livingstone not only also distorted this narrative, he went further, claiming that anti-Semitism did not exist in the Labour Party, and was instead a Jewish invention to mobilise support for Zionism. As ‘progressive anti-racists’, he argued, those on the far left could not be accused of anti-Semitism. He was following Corbyn’s line that the champions of ‘progressiveness’ possessed the authority to declare that their anti-Zionism was not anti-Semitic.
On the day of Livingstone’s broadcast, 28 April, Corbyn was on a train to Grimsby. As he posed with other passengers for selfies, his press secretary Kevin Slocombe whispered, ‘Ken’s said something on the radio.’ It was soon clear what had been broadcast. After getting off the train, Corbyn called Milne. ‘We need to talk to Ken,’ he said before heading off to meet supporters. ‘Ken must be suspended,’ Slocombe told Milne. ‘This is madness,’ he added. Milne was immovable: Livingstone had to be protected.