The enemy within

Phil Hearse writes

Earlier this month Harold Wilson’s former press secretary Joe Haines wrote a poison pen letter to Labour MPs in the form of an article in the New Statesman. Accusing some Labour MPs of a ‘Micawber syndrome’ – waiting for ‘something to turn up’ – Joe Haines argues that Jeremy Corbyn must be removed as soon as possible:
“Labour will lose the next general election if Jeremy Corbyn is still its leader, and lose it by a substantial margin…Those who believe otherwise are the Flat Earthers of British politics”.
The article reveals a lot about what the Blairite right wing are thinking. Coming just days after Peter Mandelson’s article attacking Jeremy Corbyn in The Guardian, Haines’ article looks like part of a concerted campaign by the Labour right on one central theme: Labour cannot win an election with Corbyn as leader, so we must get rid of him ASAP.

Joe Haines’ position finally comes down to this: if we cannot remove Corbyn by an election of the whole membership, then Labour MPs should choose their own leader – the PLP, according to Haines, cannot be dictated to by the Labour Party membership. “‘It is the Parliamentary Labour Party,’ he says, ‘that represents the Labour vote in Britain, not the 423,000 people, including the ragbag of “registered supporters” who voted in the leadership contest.’”
In fact Joe Haines is advocating what amounts to a right wing split – of course as a last resort, but not in the distant future either. He admits there might be a few procedural difficulties – who would the Speaker recognise as the ‘real’ Labour leader? – but insists it might be necessary nonetheless.
The Blairite right is stoking up the pressure for an early attempt to remove Jeremy Corbyn. There are two central techniques in this campaign. First they launch ceaseless attacks on Corbyn and his team, and then turn round and claim there is ‘chaos’, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Second there is a de facto alliance of the Labour right and the Tory newspapers which are egging one another on to step up and accelerate the anti-Corbyn attacks, and they can be sure their attacks will be faithfully relayed by right wing TV journalists like Laura Kuenssberg at Newsnight.
Peter Oborne in the Daily Mail picked up the Haines article and claimed, “Labour MPs have been handed the knife to assassinate Corbyn”. In fact what Oborne sees as ‘razor sharp’ analysis going to the heart of the matter really amounts to little more than abuse. For example Joe Haines says:
“The fact is that Corbyn, whatever views he holds, is not up to the job. I heard some of his first speeches when he entered the House of Commons in the early 1980s. They were empty then and they are empty now. He is not a Bennite, because Tony Benn would never have been so rigid in his thinking; his speeches were beautifully constructed, even when they were idiotic, and they did not consist of treadmill recyclings of Marx and Trotsky…Corbyn has no vision for the future of Britain. He offers no beacon to light the way. Politically, he has the candlepower of a glow-worm. He might once have fitted the role of a deputy manager of a northern friendly society, kind, polite and compassionate yet unable to help his client, but he is intellectually unsuited to be a minister of any kind, let alone a prime minister.”
And so on and so forth. There is no concerted attempt to analyse the policy positions of Corbyn and his team because “these are little more than the outmoded slogans of the statist era”. That means things like subsidising the steel industry, making huge companies pay their taxes, building hundreds of thousands of social housing homes, funding the NHS, nationalising British Rail, financing social security, forcing companies to pay a living wage – these for the Labour right wing are the ’outmoded slogans of the statist era’. With this single phrase Joe Haines illustrates the total prostration to neoliberalism and the ideology of the ‘free’ market of the Blairite right.

Recent data is showing in the US a massive growth of poverty and an increasing gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else. The same trends have been shown for the UK aided by Tory policies on welfare and housing particularly. When Peter Mandelson said he was relaxed about people becoming ‘filthy rich’ he forgot to mention that a few are filthy rich because millions are dirt poor. But none of this enters Joe Haines’ calculations, it’s all just the ‘outmoded slogans of the statist era’.
While ditching policy for tendentious and unproven electoral calculation, Joe Haines reveals something else in the Labour right’s attitude: a total contempt for the members of the Labour Party and the registered supporters, who are after all just a ‘rag bag’. However, never mind if actual Labour members are a bit loopy, we have in the past been able to contain this:
“Year after year, back in Harold Wilson’s time and beyond, the full members returned left-wing candidates to the National Executive, ranging from the dissolute Tom Driberg – whose publicly proclaimed left-leaning views blanketed the excesses in his private life – to “useful idiots” such as Ian Mikardo and Frank Allaun. They were always out of step with the parliamentary leadership, even Aneurin Bevan in his last years.”
The implication of this is very clear: it was OK to have a few left wing nutters on the Labour NEC provided they were in a minority, and when the right wing unions’ block vote was able to back us up. But this is something different. The left is now in control. The lunatics have taken over the asylum, the leadership is advocating the very left wing policies that so offend the capitalist class in Britain and internationally.

In a previous article Peter Oborne (a maverick right winger who opposed both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) accurately described Corbyn’s main enemies:
“Every rich and powerful person in Britain desperately hopes that Jeremy Corbyn will fail…The bankers want him to fail, as do the businessmen who finance the modern Labour Party. The mass media are enemies. The BBC has abandoned its traditional neutrality over what it calls ‘Left-wing Jeremy Corbyn’ (why doesn’t it refer to ‘Right-wing David Cameron’?)

“Tony Blair and his supporters hate Corbyn. Having failed to prevent his meteoric rise, they and their apologists in the London media establishment are now plotting his downfall. Britain’s morally bankrupt security establishment — the very same that duped the Blair government into an insane war against Iraq — despises Corbyn. One serving British Army general disgracefully talks of disobeying his commands if he becomes Prime Minister, raising the dreadful spectre of a military coup.”
Never mind speculation about a military coup, the coup being advocated by Joe Haines could come much more quickly. Peter Oborne says of Haines:
“He knows how hard it is to dislodge a sitting leader. But he also knows it is not impossible. Now, thanks to the Machiavellian masterplan of Harold Wilson’s spin doctor, a notorious expert of the black arts, Labour MPs have been handed the weapon. I predict that in due course, Uncle Joe’s plan will turn into brutal political reality.”

No one can predict when and how the challenge to Corbyn will come. But certainly bad results in the May elections will be massively talked up by Corbyn opponents. Labour councils complicit in welfare cuts are likely to fare badly. In London the Tories’ Zac Goldsmith may well come in ahead of Sadiq Khan in the mayoral race, playing his ‘green’ credential for all they are worth. And given Labour’s immobility on the national question, Labour is not likely to get much joy in Scotland. Which will all be laid at Jeremy Corbyn’s feet.

Likely divisions with some union leaders over Trident will also be used to demonstrate Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘chaos’ and alleged lack of authority

Certainly an attempt of the parliamentary Labour Party to declare UDI from the party in the country and choose its own leader would be a drastic and probably last resort. But the fight to remove Jeremy Corbyn has begun. It is absolutely out of the question that the Labour and trade union right wing or the representatives of the capitalist ruling class listed by Peter Oborne could accept a long-term left wing leadership of the Labour Party.

The two basic choices remain: either Corbyn will be defeated and removed as leader, or the party will split. The best preparation for the coming decisive events is for the left outside the Labour Party to maintain its organisation, but also to do everything to strengthen the mass campaigns against austerity and war. Starting with a massive turnout on CND’s anti-Trident demonstration on 27 February in London.