Labour saboteurs reveal the dangers of not dealing a decisive blow to the establishment
Photo Credit: (Al Jazeera/Google Images)
Written by: Daniel Xie
Trigger Warning: This article contains disturbing mentions of death threats, ableism, gloating over left leaning Labour activists by labour's establishment.
A leaked report has revealed that the Blairite establishment wing of Labour plotted to undermine Jeremy Corbyn and the party’s electoral chances, during the 2017 general election. The efforts of the Labour establishment to thwart Corbyn and the efforts of various other leftists to realign the party to the left have been well-known. This has been made evident by the coup against Corbyn following the Brexit referendum along with the co-opting of the discourse anti-antisemitism by moderates and Blairites within Labour to shut down leftist and pro-Palestinian voices.
Yet few could predict the extent of establishment sabotage against Corbyn as highlighted by this leaked report, which shows that the labour establishment was perfectly willing to throw the 2017 election in order to undermine Corbyn’s efforts to enact a transformational program for Labour and the United Kingdom. Worst of all, these right-wing saboteurs have been placed back into power following Keir Starmer’s victory in the Labour leadership race.
The leak, an 860 page document, reveals a huge cache of WhatsApp messages and emails from right wing Labour members, whom worked in the party HQ. It reveals that there was an “abnormal intensity” of factional opposition to the party leader which “inhibited the proper functioning of the Labour Party bureaucracy”. This contributed to “a litany of mistakes” in dealing with any efforts to root out actual antisemitism in the party, which the document concedes was a concerning issue.
Anti-Corbyn elements within the Labour party has been exposed as funneling more resources to right wing members of the Labour party in contrast to left wing ones, as well as pretending to work in the campaign office but doing nothing. When the 2017 election resulted not in a conservative majority but a hung parliament, senior officials were reported to express disappointment that the party didn’t suffer the utter defeat that they had hoped for (but would alas get in 2019 with Johnson’s landslide).
The report also exposed a very toxic environment within the Labour bureaucracy. The figures highlighted in the report have been reported to have mocked activists and politicians affiliated with the left wing of the party.
One exchange revealed a senior official exposing an activist’s mental health issues to other right-wingers, with other right-wingers hoping that said activist “dies in a fire”, that they wouldn’t want to waste “piss” to douse the fire if said activist really was burning to death, and there should be a “petrol can” emoji so they can fantasize over leftists in the party dying.
In addition, the leak also described right-wing members making jokes about a left-wing labour member “smelling like a cow”, having a “pube head”, as well as making death threats against Corbyn and seeking to launch a red scare campaign against alleged Trotskyists in the party that they blame for supposedly ensuring Corbyn’s victory in 2015. In fact, during the Labour leadership election that saw Corbyn’s victory, the right wing of Labour was engaged in Trot-busting campaigns to ensure that left-wingers were not able to vote for Corbyn during the leadership election.
In response to these revelations, shadow chancellor John McDonnell has called on current Labour leader Keir Starmer to carry out an investigation on the content of these leaks and suspend anyone associated with the incidents exposed by said leaks. In response, Starmer has offered to investigate the contents of the leaks, though given his ties to the Blairite establishment, it’s much more likely he would use this investigation as cover to protect anyone that may be tied to the revelations exposed by the recent leaks.
Compromising with the establishment is self-sabotage
What these reports ultimately demonstrate is that as leftists, in dealing with the dominant socio-political establishment, must never compromise or simply accept an agreement with them in sharing power. This is because, as the downfall of Jeremy Corbyn has shown, whenever a leftist gets into power in an establishment dominated party, the establishment will pull out every trick in the book to sabotage their efforts for a leftist realignment from within. Throughout his time as leader, the Blairite establishment has pulled out every trick in the book to stop him. The attempted leadership coup in 2016 should have been a golden opportunity for Corbyn to take harsher action against Blairites in the party.
Yet, he stayed his hand, and consequently the Blairites continued to poison the well, sabotaging, with the help of the mainstream media. Every effort he made to move the party leftwards was matched with trumped-up antisemitism charges. They often felt like an attempt to remove pro-Palestinian and left leaning Labour MPs, rather than a genuine effort to tackle antisemitism in the party, along with their sabotage of Corbyn’s 2017 election odds. While no evidence has surfaced yet, it would not be out of the left field if it was revealed in the future through damaging leaks that may yet emerge that Blairites in Labour helped contribute to Corbyn’s final defeat in 2019 through an act of self-sabotage.
Corbyn isn’t the only figure on the left to have his movement sabotaged from within by establishment forces that he has failed to deal with effectively. In the United States, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign was severely undermined by his willingness to undertake a “clean” campaign. Throughout the campaign, Bernie emphasized defeating Trump as a party rather than engage aggressively against any specific democratic candidate, referred to Joe Biden as a friend, and engaged Biden on cordial terms, even as the DNC sought to undermine his campaign at every turn.
Within his campaign staff, his aides wanted him to take a more aggressive approach;
Two of them suggested he confront Biden head-on during the South Carolina debate, and build up Mike Bloomberg as a potential foil by attacking his stop-and-frisk policies, in order to deflect from the onslaught he would no doubt face as the newly anointed front-runner
However, Bernie largely gave Biden a pass and did not attack Bloomberg on that specific issue. As a result, there was discontent on his campaign team that he did not go for the knockout blow, even as the neoliberal and “moderate” elements of the democratic voter base were beginning to coalesce around Biden. In the wake of Bernie’s dropout and subsequent endorsement of Biden, many activists who supported his campaign expressed severe disappointment. They reasonably felt he should have been much more aggressive in his campaign and fought against the establishment rather than trying to play nice. The alternative proposed, was that he saw things from solely a top-down perspective focused on maintaining his senate power and thus defaulted to incrementalist and reformist approaches over more radical grassroots ones.
Ultimately what these incidents regarding the defeats faced by both Sanders and Corbyn indicate is that leftists should not engage in respectability politics with the establishment. The neoliberal establishment is adamantly opposed to socialism as much as right wingers. They will seek to undermine efforts to push for socialism, particularly in their own political parties, using whatever dirty tricks they can muster. While Bernie and Corbyn showed leniency towards elements the political establishment in their respective parties, their enemies on the establishment, along with the mass media constantly sought their destruction.
This led in part to Bernie and Corbyn’s undoing, as the establishment refused to compromise with them, seeking only to destroy them. Looking back at the defeats faced in the past few months, it is clear that, in order to succeed politically, we must not give any quarter to the sociopolitical establishment seeking to undermine socialist ideals or push forward a watered-down version of our ideas just to placate them. Rather, it is essentially that we crush the neoliberal establishment that will seek to destroy us whenever the left attains power in corporatist parties.
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