I’ve posted before about Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour antisemitism problem. It's about a month since the 2019 general election in which Corbyn went down in flames, Labour's worst Parliamentary result since 1935. One of the issues of the election was Labour’s inability to get the antisemitism issue behind it. I thought I’d take a little time to spell out what the Corbyn/Labour antisemitism fuss was about, now that Corbyn’s leadership is effectively at its end.
Let me stress that this is not an attempt to use Corbyn’s disaster to say anything at all about the Democratic primary or the fall election, and I hope you won’t read it in that way or use it as a springboard for proxy shots at the US candidates, because that’s not my intent.
Jeremy Corbyn
I’d like to like Jeremy Corbyn. But I can’t. Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-racist with an asterisk. He calls out and opposes racism when he sees it. But "when he sees it" turns out to be a significant qualifier. Like some parts of the hard left, he loses the ability to spot antisemitism when that antisemitism is expressed in the language of anti-imperialism or anti-capitalism. It's a blind spot, and it's meant he spent a good chunk of the last four years apologizing for having supported or shared the podium with people he only belatedly learned were antisemites — learned from others because he couldn't figure it out himself.
The first major example covered in the press, in 2015, appearing just before the leadership election that brought him to power, is typical. He had until 2013 attended presentations by an organization calling itself Deir Yassin Remembered— an anti-Zionist organization run by a couple of Holocaust deniers, one in the US and one in the UK. When the news broke, Corbyn said he didn't know, disassociated himself, and went on to business as usual.
I could give a list of other similar examples. The problem wasn’t that he had an incident like that, but that he had a pattern of incidents like that. He couldn’t spot the antisemitism of others, and — more unfortunately — he couldn’t keep from using antisemitic imagery himself in the context of anti-imperialism. So there was blow-up after blow-up. It was the fundamental paradox of Jeremy Corbyn, the anti-racist patron of racism.
But that blind-spot pattern alone, while a necessary prerequisite for the crisis that followed, wasn't enough to set the issue on fire. The full cataclysm also required the contribution of arguably the single worst person in the Labour Party.
Seumas Milne
That is, it required Seumas Milne, Director of Communications and Strategy, Gríma Wormtongue to Corbyn's blind King Théoden. If you don’t know his name, it’s because he preferred to keep his name out of the press, so as to avoid personal scrutiny.
The problem with trying to say "all better now" after a blind-spot incident is that, while an incident is an incident, a pattern of incidents is a pattern. It was clear that Corbyn wasn’t learning from his mistakes. We all have our blind spots, of course, and as Corbyn’s chief advisor, Milne should have taken it upon himself to instruct Corbyn: “Jeremy, here’s how to stop yourself from falling into the same hole over and over.”
Milne set the tone and the direction party’s response to the antisemitism issue. The problem is, Seumas Milne is simply not a nice man. He is, to be more precise, a five-star, five-ton sack of mendacious, unprincipled shit. And so the guidance he gave, in his position as Corbyn’s chief advisor, was catastrophically bad.
Because his tack was this: raw denial and counterattack. Jeremy, we were told, was a flawless, gut-level antiracist, he hasn’t got a racist bone in his body, and there couldn’t possibly be any reason for a rational person to think he might have a problem with blindness about antisemitism in anti-imperialist garb. Therefore, to be loyal to Corbyn and all things that are good, you must be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN to declare that this is merely a disingenuous plot by the right-wing Jewish Zionist powers that be trying to take down Our Holy Saint Jeremy, and if you see any case of a Jew being concerned about Labour antisemitism, no matter how clear their leftist credentials or their decades of support for Labour, you should know that they’re faking it, they’re lying, it’s crocodile tears, it’s a plot, it’s a plot, it’s all a plot.
That was Labour’s consistent messaging. As you can see, it’s not very helpful.
Around this time, Milne also developed the technique of releasing any news regarding Labour antisemitism after sunset on a Friday to guarantee that Jewish organizations that close for Shabbat — e.g. all of them — couldn’t respond for another twenty-four hours.
Milne’s spin didn’t go over very well in the Jewish community, obviously, and didn’t go over well among most Jews in Labour. But those Jews in Labour who dared to say they considered the Milne approach — denial and counterattack — inadequate and counterproductive were simply hounded out of the party in the guise of “you’re disloyal, you’re not with the program, you’re attacking our Holy Saint Jeremy.” Some of those Jews driven from the party, incidentally, were members of Parliament. It was a moral issue, but Milne instead treated it like a mere bit of PR awkwardness to be silenced by better PR devices.
Milne’s main PR device on the topic was the creation from whole cloth of a Blacks for Trump-like group called Jewish Voice for Labour. They suddenly sprang into existence in late 2017, and their job was to do two things: be Jewish, and to be available for countless media placements, acting as token Labour Jews Untroubled By Corbyn.” This was, you might remember, literally Stalin’s strategy on countering claims of antisemitism, the Yevsektsiya, a group with only two jobs: to be Jewish, and to visibly agree on every point with whatever the party told them to visibly agree with.
The Jewish mainstream community of the UK knew that Jewish Voice for Labour was basically a tiny gang of cranks, but the exercise wasn’t really meant for them. The Labour community as a whole didn’t know — or pretended not to know — that JVL was astroturf, especially when Milne hammered home at every opportunity that JVL was A REAL BOY NOT A VENTRILOQUIST DUMMY, that it was just as important as every other Jewish group in the UK, and that it was actually was effectively the main Jewish affiliate to the Labour Party now.
Hint: reader, it wasn’t. What was the main Jewish affiliate to the Labour Party? A mainstream Jewish organization called Jewish Labour Movement. Unlike JVL, the JLM weren’t cobbled together from whole cloth thirty months ago as a PR dodge. In fact, this year marks their centennial, and they are literally Labour’s most long-standing affiliation. But Milne gleefully stiff-armed them at every opportunity in favor of his own pet organization.
The Other Labour Antisemitism Problem
As he was doing this, though, another problem was festering. The same blind spot to antisemitism in the language of anti-imperialism was starting to affect the party, and it started to be clear that there was a pattern of inexplicably lenient disciplinary procedures. People were posting Holocaust denial stuff to their Facebook timelines while running for local office and getting a slap on the wrist for it. Being an antisemite in Labour no longer carried a significant penalty, unless it hit the papers. Because the true crime, to Milne, wasn’t being an antisemite, but damaging Labour’s “anti-racist” image.
There were high-profile cases — Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker — and low-profile cases, and what they had in common was that Labour staff was clearly hesitating to punish those antisemites it considered friendly to or valuable to Jeremy Corbyn. Action only seemed to happen if the antisemitism scandal hit the newspapers, soemthing which happened like clockwork. So Jews were being driven out by antisemites but antisemites were being protected by the party mechanisms.
Milne, of course, continued with the line that there was no antisemitism crisis, it was a sham, it was a right-wing media conspiracy, it was a plot to get Jeremy, it was The Zionists, just look at my good Jews over here in the JVL, they agree with me totally.
By September of 2018, by the way, a poll showed 87% of the Jews of the UK considered Corbyn an antisemite. Subsequent polls come to about the same figure. How bad is that? It beats the 80% of African-Americans who consider Trump racist.
But then two very significant things happened, and it became impossible to reasonably support the “nothing to see here folks” narrative.
Two Disasters for Labour
In late 2018, Jewish members of Labour put together a submission of evidence to the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, asking them to consider an official investigation. The EHRC is a governmental commission with legal powers to compel testimony and — very significantly — nullify NDAs if doing so will expose legal wrongdoing. Considering the submission, the EHRC had a threshold decision to make: was the evidence supplied sufficient to open a formal case? It was. They offered Labour the right to reply, but the reply was just another barf bag of denial from Milne. Armed with the evidence and the Labour reply, the EHRC had another threshold decision to make: in the light of Labour’s response, was there still enough meat on the bone of the accusation to justify a full investigation, using the EHRC’s full powers to legally compel testimony, legally compel the opening of internal correspondence and records, and spring open NDAs? It was. That was announced last May.
And with that decision, it was simply no longer possible to make vague waving dismissive gestures about “right-wing Zionists” or say “but where’s the evidence?”— a response Milne had encouraged. You could no longer make a coherent argument that Labour’s antisemitism problem wasn’t every bit as real and terrible as the Jewish community had been saying. (The only other political party the EHRC had ever opened a racism case on — the British National Party — was overtly white-power neo-fash, so this is the company Labour is keeping.)
In July, BBC aired a Panorama documentary about Labour staffers who were being forced to act against their own consciences to cover up cases of Labour antisemitism and let egregious racists off the hook, all while pretending to the public that the disciplinary rules were being objectively enforced. Whistleblower after whistleblower condemned the secret pressure to let Jeremy’s supporters off the hook, no matter how antisemitic. It was titled, simply enough, Is Labour Anti-Semitic? and it painted a searing picture of organizational malfeasance, organizational cover-up, being led by the highest officers in the party. Milne pounded the desk and said “we’ll sue, we’ll sue.” And then he didn’t.
Through all this, of course, Labour’s position remained one of complete denial.
Kerblam
I don’t have to tell you that Corbyn — as guided by Milne’s strategy — proved exceptionally unpopular during the 2019 general election, where he led his party to the smallest Parliamentary delegation since 1935. In fact, polls show that “Corbyn / Labour leadership” was the number one reason 2017 Labour voters had abandoned the party in 2019. Lifelong Labour members who liked the manifesto just couldn’t bring themselves to make Corbyn PM.
The antisemitism issue, while not pivotal, got traction too. In 2017 Corbyn was able to say “oh yes we’re handling it very nicely.” In 2019 he was also saying “oh yes we’re handling it very nicely” but that was after a couple of years of ugly revelation after ugly revelation about how poorly it was being handled. That is, it wasn’t the antisemitism that cost him votes directly, but the inadequacy and ineffectiveness of his response to a hugely damaging, purely internal matter tapped into the more general sense that Jeremy Corbyn can handle rallies but not crises.
Breaking the tradition in which the leader of a party resigns immediately after a crushing defeat, Corbyn quit-but-stayed. With characteristic Schrödinger style, he didn’t resign so much as “resign,” giving as his last day an unspecified date somewhere in the future. He is still somehow simultaneously-here-and-not-here as Labour’s leader, and will be until April, meaning that Labour is rudderless and missing in action during the last round of actions before Brexit. Seumas Milne, astoundingly and revoltingly, didn’t quit, and remains on the job, earning a mere £104,000 per annum as if he were a brilliant success.
Reader, he was not a brilliant success.
With the popping of the Corbyn balloon, suddenly lots of MPs are (to quote the Epstein brothers) shocked, shocked, to discover that there were significant antisemitism problems in Labour. Candidates to succeed Corbyn are all having to address the antisemitism issue, and it’s good to see that for every “something mumble mumble about antisemitism but Corbyn was a ten out of ten” there are several “Corbyn failed us outright on the antisemitism issue, and it will take years if not decades to undo the damage and regain the trust of the Jewish community.”
We will know Labour finally got the message and intends to fix the problem the moment they wrap Seumas Milne in a metal cone and fire him at the moon.
The EHRC is now in the process of getting compelled testimony from Labour leaders, on the basis of the testimony of the Panorama whistleblowers and the other submissions, and is expected to give its full report later this year. It’s generally expected to be cataclysmic, and — worse — it is expected to leave Labour defenseless to civil suits by the whistleblowers and others driven out of the party by the antisemitism crisis. At best Labour is facing vast legal bills; at worst, it’s also facing mammoth monetary damages from its former employees.
That is to say, Labour hasn’t finished paying for their antisemitism crisis yet, and the wound is entirely self-inflicted.