Corbynism acts against antisemitism. And trips over its own feet

Many Brexiters believe that the world is watching Britain, expecting it once more to roar so the whole world not only hears it, but heeds it.

My own view is that there may be people out there who don’t follow every detail of British political news. For their sake, here’s a little context.

The Conservative Party, which tends to be in power most of the time, is in power right now. Just. Clinging on by its fingernails as it tries to prepare for Brexit. Since there’s no formula for Brexit that finds favour even across the Conservative Party, let alone the nation, the government is one of the most unpopular for decades.

In Opposition is my own party, Labour. It ought to be 15 or 20 points ahead in the polls. Instead it languishes stubbornly two points behind. Why?

Two years ago Labour elected one Jeremy Corbyn to the office of leader. It was then flooded by new members principally committed to keeping him in that role. It’s all ‘Jeremy for Prime Minister’, ‘Jeremy, man of integrity’, ‘Jeremy: the second coming of JC’, and so on.

I may have made up that last one, but you get the drift.

These new members, or Corbynistas as they are technically known, are turning Labour from a party into a cult, in which they can follow not a leader but a guru, offering him not so much support as worship.

They may not have noticed how lamentable our position is in the polls. So they certainly aren’t asking the obvious question, ‘why?’

The answer is the same as the explanation for why the Conservatives tend to be in power most of the time. Conservatism is deeply anchored in Britain. It is strongly helped by a firmly right-wing press that looks for any stick with which to beat Labour. That means Labour leaders start off at a disadvantage, so where a Conservative merely needs to be competent, a Labourite has to be brilliant.

Sadly, only a worshipping Corbynista could be persuaded that the blessed Jeremy displays such brilliance.

Corbyn: out of his depth

The current stick with which the media are beating Labour is an accusation of antisemitism. The revered Jeremy promised to do something about it as soon as it was advanced. And then did practically nothing.

The leading instance of the party, the National Executive Committee or NEC, did adopt the definition antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). It wouldn’t, however, adopt all eleven the examples of antisemitism that accompany that definition. It balked at four, which it felt would stifle legitimate criticism of Israel.

This was a matter of principle. Corbynism could not tolerate this limitation on its freedom of speech. There was no way those four examples could be endorsed.

Suddenly the stick got far bigger and far more hands came forward to wield it. So Corbynism gave way. ‘Well, OK, we’ll accept three more of the examples. But not the fourth. Oh, no, that would be a step too far, a red line crossed, that we will die in the trenches to oppose.’

Then came 4 September 2018. On that date, the Corbynist NEC decided that, well, after all, on mature reflection, it could accept that final example too. Though it has come up with a little statement about how it still asserts its right to free speech about Israel, which, funnily enough, no one had challenged in any case.

Margaret Hodge, who is both a Labour MP and Jewish, summed up the problem just two days earlier. Had Labour adopted the entire IHRA definition with all the examples immediately, it would have defused the attack from the outset. Now it’s too late, and the dispute will fester on. In my view, an incompetent leadership has made it look as though Labour was unwilling to confront antisemitism seriously until forced to do so. By only caving in under pressure, it appears nasty, curmudgeonly and at the same time spineless – the worst of all possible worlds.

That’s not to say that early adoption of the full IHRA definition would have won the wholehearted support of the entire Jewish community. Many British Jews support the Conservatives. Many are more than happy to work with the right-wing press to hammer Labour. All we could have hoped for was to win the argument with the non-aligned and detoxify the accusation. But to do that would have required political professionalism, not at all the hallmark of the Corbynista.

Outside the NEC meeting where the IHRA definition was finally adopted in full but far too late, were protestors with placards proclaiming ‘for the many, not the Jew’. That’s a neat riff on the Corbynist slogan, ‘for the many, not the few’.

In reply to a recent tweet of mine, expressing my annoyance over some new Corbynist cockup or other, I was offered an even better riff: ‘for the many sheep, not the thoughtful ewe’. I liked the reference to thoughtfulness, because a failure to think things through is the central characteristic of Corbynism. As it wends its way from blunder to blunder, making our party look nasty and incompetent.

Leaving us adrift in the polls, behind a deeply unpopular government that should be trailing in our wake.

A modest proposal: solving the problem of corporate greed

Now here’s an idea I think has mileage, but not the slightest chance of being adopted.

There’s a lot of talk, especially in Britain at the moment, of tax evasion, in particular by large corporations. Amazon made £4.3 billion in this country last year and managed to pay just £2.4m in corporation tax, less than the £2.5m it collected in government grants. Meanwhile, Margaret Hodge, Labour chair of the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons the other day called Google ‘evil’ for taking £3.2b from UK customers, and paying £6m in tax.

Margaret Hodge
Do you get the impression she wasn't entirely pleased
with what she was hearing?

At the same time, we all get a bit sick of those characters who precipitated the present economic misery continuing to reward themselves handsomely, as often as not for failure, as often as not for failure for which the rest of us, as taxpayers, have to carry the can. Bankers, in particular, continue to take salaries that dwarf those of people who actually do some good (like teachers or nurses), sometimes by multiples of 10, 20 or more. They help themselves to bonuses, though their banks continue to lose value and several of them can only pay out because they’re being kept afloat by the compulsory generosity of the taxpayer. 

It’s not just banks, of course. Board room salaries across industry continue to climb, however bad the economy and however much others suffer. Cuts fall on those same teachers or nurses, and even more severely still on the ill or the unemployed, who are seeing already low living standards slashed still further.

So here’s a solution to the twin problems, of tax evasion and excessive bonuses, simultaneously.

Bonuses to highly-paid staff should be strictly proportional to the corporation tax paid by their companies.

Wouldn’t that be a glorious sight? These are the individuals who take the decisions that keep corporation tax liabilities down. Just imagine how it would be if their bonuses fell with them.

If they wanted to boost their personal pay, they’d have to boost the tax paid by the company by a proportionate amount. That would give a whole new sense to the idea of ‘win-win’.

The big question is, which way would things crack? Would they go on trying to keep tax payments down or would they sacrifice the corporation’s gains for their own?

Having seen how altruistically these characters behave, can anyone have any possible doubt which way they’d go? We might see a long-repeated claim being realised at last: their success would truly be shared by everyone.

Racism: a constant value for our times

Walking the dog the other day, I came across a gate on which someone had scribbled the words ‘No Pakis’.

When I was a child, I used to resent the way many people of my parents’ or grandparents’ generation would tell me that ‘things were very different when we were young’, by which they meant things had been far better. This always struck me as slightly odd, because one of the things they had been doing when they were younger was killing each other in historically unprecedented numbers, in a world war in each of the generations in question.

It appals me how often people of my generation now tell me, and expect me to agree, that things were better when we were younger.

The Vietnam war? The attacks on Civil Rights protesters in the States? Apartheid in South Africa? The Berlin Wall? The assassinations of Kennedy, Luther King and Kennedy?

But of course what they really mean is that at an individual level we were so much nicer. When our parents complained about the drug-taking, foul-mouthed long-haired louts who thought society owed them a living, they were just bigots. When we complain about the violent, drug-taking hooded louts of today, we’re being enlightened upholders of civic values.

It struck me that the sign scribbled on the gate should reassure people who are nostalgic for the sixties and seventies. Even though so much else has declined, at least our fascists are as good as the ones we had when we were younger. They have remained true to the values of brutality and offensiveness that we came to appreciate so much in our teens and twenties.

But then I got to thinking about the words themselves. What is about the ‘Pakistanis’ that these people dislike so much? After all, as I’ve pointed out before, a lot of them aren’t really Pakistani any more at all, but wholly English – and by that token, wonderful individuals. And even if they weren’t, so many members of that community contribute so much to our society.

I mean, I agree with the extreme right that the country is overcrowded – after all, this very morning I had to walk for ten minutes along the Euston Road and, because of the tube strike, even the pavements were almost impassable, forcing me to walk far less quickly than I wanted – which didn’t stop me shooting past the cars, gridlocked on the roadway itself.

Clearly, we could do with having fewer people. But why would we choose to start with the ‘Pakistanis’? As well as their traditional occupations, in corner shops, restaurants and minicab firms, members of this community have branched out into other key services – from running our trains to running huge swaths of the health service. Many are achieving prominence in journalism, politics and the law, but hey, no community is entirely without its flaws.

No, I have a much better idea of how we could set about reducing the numbers living in this country. I saw the other day that the public service cuts this year are set to be around £7bn. Bankers, many of them working for organisations baled out by the taxpayer, are about to award themselves bonuses amounting to – wait for it – £7bn. And, surprise, surprise, the total long-term cost of the bank bale-out (taking into account the sums the public purse is likely to recoup from tax or selling shares) is likely to be getting on for £7bn.

It sounds to me as though we’re suffering major reductions in service and forking out money to the banks that caused the problem in the first place and watching the people who run those banks paying themselves about as much as we put in.

In the meantime, every time someone suggests taxing the leeches, we’re told that if we do that, they’ll all head off to Shanghai or Hong Kong or somewhere.

See where I’m going with this one? Let’s do it. Let’s slap punitive taxes on obscene bonuses in the financial sector. Either these fine gentlemen will stick around and we’ll get some useful funds flowing back into the Exchequer, or they’ll clear off to the Far East, and at least someone else will have to pay for them. 

Another advantage? Most of the plans put forward by the fascists to get rid of the people they regard as unwelcome involve some kind of repatriation plan, for which we’d have to pay. The bankers would pay for themselves. Can you imagine? It’s like having your waste bin emptying itself. Win-win all round, I say.

All these thoughts went through my mind as I stood there by that gate. And then I looked at the slogan again – and noticed that what it actually said was ‘Paki’s out’.

Ah, that misplaced apostrophe. It made all the difference. I could push the gate open and pass through. Because I felt a quite palpable sense of relief (as did Janka, my dog, at finally being on the move again).

Why the relief? Well, obviously a semi-literate fascist can be just as vicious and violent as a literate one. But at least he’s less likely to be any good at getting organised.

At the elections last May, the British National Party was soundly defeated in its stronghold in Barking, with its leader failing to make a significant mark in the parliamentary election which was massively won by the former Labour Minister Margaret Hodge, while also losing every one of the local council seats it had previously held. Wipe out.

Well, if you don’t know how to write a plural, how can you be expected to win a plurality in an election?

My advice to those of my compatriots who some like to think of as ‘Pakistani’: while the fascists can’t raise their game any higher than this, I shouldn’t let them disturb your sleep at night. And in the meantime – thanks for providing such an excellent service at my local GP surgery. And such excellent Bombay Mix in my local shops.