How I became a Corbynista
It is the end of an era. Jeremy Corbyn’s time has come and gone. Despite all of the fire and fury, the optimism and exuberance, the tumult and turmoil, the Corbyn movement appears to have collapsed as quickly as it began. That is not to say that the Corbyn movement has completely passed into history. It is still very much a part of the present, a long-term feature of our political landscape. The discredited army of Corbyn loyalists fights on, albeit in an increasingly desperate rearguard action, to save what they can of their political influence in a Labour Party that has become distinctly chilly towards their firebrand, quasi-insurrectionary brand of politics. The man who promised a shake-up of British politics accomplished exactly that – but for the other side, leading his party to a historic, landslide defeat in the elections of December 2019, from which it may never recover.
I think I should take this opportunity to remind everyone that, in the immortal words of Spike Milligan, ‘I was there too, you know!’ Yes, dear reader, I was a part – albeit a small part – of the short-lived Corbyn revolution. And yet I was someone who used to despise Corbyn with every fibre of his being.
As a Sixth Form student, I witnessed the rise of Jeremy Corbyn with a mixture of disgust and excitement. I was a staunch Tory supporter, unlike my peers (indeed, unlike most black people in this country). I had openly supported Brexit, marking myself out among all my classmates and teachers. I had considered myself to be pretty right-wing since I was at least fourteen, and my politics had evolved from an early fascination with right-wing libertarianism to a more mainstream neoconservatism. I considered myself a patriotic Briton, and couldn’t understand why these leftists loathed our country so much. I defended the Iraq War. My favourite historian was Andrew Roberts. I listened to talks by people like Christopher Hitchens and Roger Scruton on YouTube and I read The Telegraph and the National Review with quasi-religious devotion. I hated Marxism, post-colonialism, identity politics and third-wave feminism. Even after my conversion to Marxism, I continued to hate all of the other stuff (classical Marxism having a difficult relationship with other strands of left-wing intellectual thought). My favourite political figures were Oliver Cromwell, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt. I was the last person on earth who would have thought of joining a Marxist organisation. When Corbyn – the friend of terrorists, apologist for anti-Western dictatorships and lifelong agitator for hard-left politics – was elected leader, Labour could not have chosen a figurehead more repulsive to my brand of politics. And yet, I also welcomed Corbyn’s election. I thought that with him at its head, Labour was doomed to generations in the political wilderness. Events have proved me right.
So how the hell did I end up a raving Trotskyist, joining the Labour Party and promoting Corbyn for Prime Minister of this green and pleasant land? Perhaps my ex-comrades will say that I was never really a Marxist – that I was some sort of Tory plant, or something along those lines. But the truth is that for a time, I did genuinely believe in all sorts of monstrous and reprehensible things – things which my old self would have loudly and emphatically rejected. I ended up believing those things because I had been manipulated into joining a cult.
I would probably say that my second year in Sixth Form saw my politics shift. I became cooler on the issue of Brexit. I had little to no interest in the tribal warfare that raged on even after the referendum result. I was happy with Theresa May’s ascension to office, and liked the idea of bringing the country together after the division that had been sown. The fact that she had been a Remainer did not bother me too much. I was put off by the fanaticism of some Brexiteers, and was particularly disgusted with the Sun’s infamous ‘Enemies of the People’ headline attacking the Supreme Court judges in November 2016. I did not associate Brexit with such ugly demagoguery, and inwardly distanced myself from the ‘movement’. I did not follow the details of the negotiations with Brussels terribly closely, but by spring 2017, I would say that I had come round to the view that perhaps the Remainers had been right after all. The more I read about the EU’s inner workings and its relationship with Britain, and the fibs that the Brexit campaign had told, the more I realised that leaving was a terrible mistake. That is also my view now, though when I was in the IMT I obviously held to the IMT’s position – which was a ludicrous one – that whether we were in or out did not matter, because either way, we were still going to be oppressed by the capitalist class. None of this is to say that there is not a certain class of snobbish, self-satisfied Remainer that is just as repulsive as the extreme Brexiteers. I have never really bought into the idea that Britain is some uniquely racist, reactionary country, in contrast to our superior, progressive cousins over the sea. After all, race relations in our country are much better than in any EU country – France being a case in point. We are, for the most part, welcoming to immigrants. Our politicians are more diverse than in any European country. I doubt anyone with a black or Asian background would get very far in German or Italian politics, whereas the opposite has been true for Britain. Ok, so our welfare state is not quite as generous as France’s or Germany’s, and sure, British workers are somewhat hard-done by due to the legacy of Thatcherism. But in spite of its flaws, I have never been ashamed to be British.
As 2017 wore on, I began reading left-wing literature for the first time. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Proudhon, Wilde, Stirner, Bakunin, Rubin and Mandel were among the different thinkers I read. I discovered criticisms of neoliberal capitalism that punctured my illusions in the virtues of the free-market. I began thinking about how to reconcile my passionate belief in individualism with a desire to improve the lot of society as a whole. I had come round to rejecting Nietzsche’s belief that the two were incompatible – that the striving of the individual had to come at the expense of society and its inherited customs, traditions and morals. After all, man was a social being, and could only fully realise himself through society. Marx seemed to provide an answer that I could reconcile with my lingering Nietzschean beliefs. Both Marx and Nietzsche had a hatred of bourgeois society – its conformism, its utilitarianism, its elevation of money-making above art and culture, its promotion of the most base individuals purely because they were lucky enough to enjoy wealth. But Marx’s analysis seemed more scientific and gave more reason for optimism.
In the election of June 2017, I failed to vote as I had misplaced my national insurance number. When I applied for it to be sent to me, it arrived a day after the election – which, incidentally, happened on my birthday. I would have voted Labour, having come round to a more social-democratic point of view and been disappointed in May’s lacklustre campaign. My MP, Wes Streeting, was on the right of the party and an open critic of Corbyn, so I convinced myself that I was not in fact voting for that Corbyn, whom I still found objectionable, but for a good social democrat who would hold the Tories to account for their increasingly disconcerting extremism. I attended a hustings during the campaign and the Tory candidate (former MP Lee Scott) performed poorly – he was irritable, flustered and out-of-touch. It confirmed my decision to vote for Streeting if I got the chance. Would I have done so if I had known that Scott had been subjected to vicious anti-Semitic abuse by Corbyn supporters? I don’t know, but it certainly weighs heavily on my conscience. In my defence, Streeting has been quite firm in calling out anti-Semitism in the party, and Corbyn’s failure to tackle it. Indeed, his challenging of Ken Livingstone on television for his outrageous comments about Zionism and Nazism won him my respect. I had no idea it was so close to my own doorstep, and that the people who would go on to form the local Momentum group were behind it.
Of course, I would soon go from being a Corbyn-sceptic social democrat to a fervent Corbyn supporter myself. Indeed, just a few months later, I had arrived at Warwick University and thrown myself into the activities of Socialist Appeal on campus. Not only did I join the IMT, but I signed up for Labour Party membership as part of the entrist mission. From the moment I discovered their website in July or August of 2017, I had always wanted to join the IMT specifically, at least in part because of what I felt to be their sensible position vis-a-vis the Labour Party. The other far-left sects imagined that they could build an entirely separate party to replace the established party of the working-class. I considered their efforts hopeless. As for the SWP, I knew better than to throw in my lot with those loathsome rape apologists and terrorist supporters. So Socialist Appeal it was.
I cannot place the moment when I went from hating (or at least strongly disliking) Corbyn to becoming a partisan of his. At some point in the indoctrination process (probably as early as when I discovered the IMT’s articles about Corbyn on the Internet), I allowed myself to be convinced that Corbyn wasn’t a bad guy after all. He wasn’t perfect, but he was at least fighting for the working-class and challenging the corrupt Thatcherite consensus that had governed this country for forty years. I still had reservations about him for some time even after I joined the IMT, but at some point these reservations obviously vanished from my mind. Some would call it brainwashing, though some academics disagree with the use of the term.
I was not prepared for the reality of life in the Labour Party. After all, I was a complete outsider who only months ago had wanted nothing to do with it. Now I was a born-again class warrior – or so I thought. The truth was, I couldn’t help but feel like an imposter. Was I really cut out for this activist business? But I had made the commitment and I was determined to see it through. I had a mission, you see. I soon found myself attending meetings of the Labour Club on campus. It was a bizarre grouping – a small clique of bureaucrats and activists obsessed with identity politics, ‘occupations’ of buildings on campus and running for positions. Our organisation was at odds with them due to the serious political differences between us. I did not particularly enjoy myself at these meetings, but I always sought to intervene forcefully with the organisation’s political line. Needless to say, we never recruited anyone. They rightly kept us at arm’s length.
In the IMT, we were indoctrinated to see the Corbyn movement primarily as a means to an end. In private, we strongly criticised Corbyn – his reformism, his political ineptitude – but publicly we praised him for being a principled standard-bearer of the left. We argued that it was the job of our organisation to appeal to the most radical workers and youth who had been radicalised by the Corbyn movement, instead of lecturing them from the sidelines like the other Trotskyist sects. We anticipated that if Corbyn came to power, he would immediately face capitalist sabotage and a possible coup, and that the response of any Corbyn-led government should be to mobilise the working-class to defend the regime, and nationalise the top 200-300 monopolies that were the basis of private industry in the UK. In private, we said that Corbyn would fail to do this, and when he failed, we would have a chance to ‘expose’ the failures of reformism. This would see the working-class rallying to Marxism in their thousands, turning to our organisation for leadership. The British Revolution would then begin.
We often fooled ourselves into believing that our organisation had more influence than it actually did, boasting in internal meetings of having an audience far beyond our numbers. True, we sold a lot of papers and got lots of traffic to our website, but in terms of effective influence on the Corbyn movement, we were drop in the ocean, constituting a tiny group of a few hundred fanatics out of a party membership of more
than half a million. John McDonnell was actually the honorary President of our front group, Hands Off Venezuela, set up by Alan Woods and others on the far-left to defend the so-called Bolivarian Revolution and the government of Chavez from a hostile West. Indeed, both Corbyn and McDonnell attended a Hands Off Venezuela meeting in 2004. Corbyn and McDonnell spent years moving in hard-left circles, so it is not surprising that they have the personal acquaintance of people such as Alan Woods and Rob Sewell. Of course this is meaningless, since they associate with any Tom, Dick and Harry who shares their extremist politics – including vicious anti-Semites and supporters of terrorism. Clearly Woods, Sewell and their cronies have no problem belonging to the same category as such unsavoury lunatics, despite themselves not being anti-Semites or supporters of terrorism – which might possibly be worse.
Anti-Semitism
Indeed, when the anti-Semitism crisis first emerged shortly after Corbyn’s election, Socialist Appeal, like the rest of the far-left, consistently defended Corbyn and his allies from accusations of anti-Semitism. We argued that they were Blairite smears being used to discredit Corbyn and derail the socialist project. Initially, I was on the fence about whether there was genuine anti-Semitism in Labour or not, having read little about the issue. I knew there was anti-Semitism on the left and I didn’t want to end up supporting it – even though in the end I did end up an apologist for some of the worst culprits in the party. The more IMT propaganda I read, the more I fell in line behind the Corbynite narrative – that it was being weaponised by the right of the party to demonise Corbyn. What mattered was that Corbyn was on the left, and needed to be defended at all costs, regardless of whether there was any merit in the accusations. Tribalism took the place of critical thinking. I even defended the awful Chris Williamson, as well as other figures who were targeted in what we called the ‘witch-hunt’. Every other week, myself and other Socialist Appeal members would share articles from our website denouncing the ‘witch-hunt’ and defending Jackie Walker, Chris Williamson and other ‘victims’ of Blairite aggression.
Naturally one might have certain questions to ask about a man who has consistently shared platforms with anti-Semites, and even called Hamas and Hezbollah ‘friends’. But we never bothered to address this, and I swallowed my own reservations and stuck behind Corbyn. He was ‘our guy’ after all. Of course, the truth is I didn’t know the half of it. Until I left the cult, that is. Escaping the echo-chamber of pro-Corbyn propaganda I was trapped in, I have finally been able to read more widely about the issue. In the last few months I have been reading the ‘other side’, and what I have discovered is…pretty damning. And yet I shamefully supported this.
You see, Corbyn has this bad habit of ‘accidentally’ falling into the same circles as rabid anti-Semites. I shamefully overlooked my past reservations about the man, convincing myself that he was guilty of nothing more than naivety and foolishness in associating with people that even our own organisation considered reactionary. (Indeed, the IMT forced out its Israeli section many years ago because it took the position that the Israeli Jewish working-class was inherently reactionary and that Marxists should support groups like Hamas who are resisting Zionism.) But what I now know suggests that Corbyn himself shares anti-Semitic sentiments. Antisemitism.org has collated many of Corbyn’s anti-Semitic outrages over the years. What shocked me the most (although perhaps it shouldn’t) is that it turns out that he was in at least three Facebook groups in which anti-Semitic material was posted, and that at least one of them, he joined himself, and was not invited by another member. His claim that he did not see any anti-Semitic posts is frankly risible. At no point did he challenge any of the racist posts that were being made. Is this the behaviour of a principled anti-racist? How could we have had such cult-like devotion to someone this spineless? The fact that anyone saw fit to invite a sitting MP to a group so horrendous suggests that they thought of Corbyn as someone who would be sympathetic to their anti-Semitic point of view.
Here is the thing. If Corbyn is genuinely naive enough to constantly fall into bed with anti-Semites despite not himself being one, or is not able to recognise that something is anti-Semitic when he sees it, then he was too stupid and incompetent to be Labour Party leader or Prime Minister. If, on the other hand, he either shared their views, or was cynically willing to overlook their problematic views because they were fellow leftists, then he was too wicked to be Labour leader or Prime Minister. Or a third option – he wanted to challenge them but was afraid of backlash from people he otherwise liked and respected, in which case, he was too cowardly to be Labour leader or Prime Minister. And we were all complicit in covering for him and promoting him as a man of principle and worthy to lead our country. Tony Benn had a similar blind spot. Never would he criticise those to the left of him, for fear of damaging the unity that was needed to fight the people he considered the real enemies – people on the right, including those to the right of him in his party. But how can you call yourself a ‘man of principle’ and then ignore the people ostensibly on your own side who have repugnant views that you would surely denounce if it came from the other side? After all, no Tory would get away with being in a group in which racist, far-right material was posted, day in, day out.
The fact that the IMT forced out a group of Israeli members for supporting Hamas, yet gave passionate support to a man who called them ‘friends’ and has spent his entire life campaigning alongside such vermin, speaks volumes. The hypocrisy is something I cannot quite wrap my head around. What is the difference between the two things? Here is the thing. Corbyn had a mass movement which we were eager to exploit and recruit members from. Yossi Schwartz and his groupuscule were a handful of people with no influence, and therefore we had nothing to lose in bullying them out of our organisation to retain our ideological purity. When we saw that we had something to gain from the Corbyn movement, we put our anti-racist principles aside. After all, to stand aside from the Corbyn movement because it was imperfect would be ‘sectarianism’.
I uncritically went along with the uncritical defence of Corbyn and those associated with him. We defended Ken Livingstone, who made the idiotic argument that Hitler supported Zionism and was suspended for it. (This article in the Independent explains the crudeness of his remarks.) We defended Jackie Walker, a woman who libelled Jews by saying that they were the chief financiers of the slave trade, an utterly false claim that has been debunked by historians. For this, she was suspended, only to be readmitted, then suspended again when she attacked Holocaust Memorial Day. She falsely claimed that she had been denied a chance to defend herself at the hearing that expelled her, and we repeated her bogus charges. We defended Chris Williamson, a man who has a history of baiting Jews and promoting conspiracy theories, all because he was Corbyn’s strongest supporter in the parliamentary Labour Party. (Here is an excellent blog post taking him down.)
We also promoted the whitewashed Chakrabarti report, which has been taken apart and exposed for the guff that it was. It is clear that Chakrabarti did not even include many of the submissions she had received from party members as part of the report. Yet she still was able to claim that Labour was not institutionally anti-Semitic. Indeed, the figures given by Jennie Formby (which we often parroted in the organisation) are questionable, given the claim that Labour had no proper procedure for dealing with it until Formby became General Secretary in 2018, and the fact that Labour’s methodology for calculating anti-Semitism cases remains unclear. We also know from the Panorama documentary (which we dismissed as Blairite smears) that many of the staff working on the anti-Semitism cases were driven to despair and resigned when Formby began making changes to the way in which anti-Semitism was handled and interfering on behalf of the leader’s office.
For promoting this bilge on social media and elsewhere, the Warwick Marxist Society was attacked by the rest of the left on campus for engaging in anti-Semitism denial. Indeed, myself and Thomas, the head of the Warwick Marxist Society, were reported to the university’s student union for precisely this. At the time I thought I was making a great stand for socialism, defending Chris Williamson from the evil Blairites. I now realise that I was defending a loathsome anti-Semite (or at least someone who was willing to defend anti-Semites just to wind up the right of the party, which might be worse). Indeed, I would like to take the opportunity to apologise to any Jewish people reading this, for having gotten involved in this disgusting ‘movement’ and defended such disgusting people. It was the biggest mistake of my entire life, and I am truly sorry. I doubt any such apology will be forthcoming from Thomas though.
Throughout the anti-Semitism saga, we claimed that Corbyn wasn’t pushing back hard enough against the accusations. He needed to stand by the likes of Williamson and Livingstone and expel the Blairites from Labour, we argued. Only then would the party be united and able to fight effectively for socialist policies. We ignored the fact that doing this would split the party and guarantee Tory governments for generations. Moreover, it was an act of rank hypocrisy. We cried foul when people on the left were expelled, arguing that this was a ‘bureaucratic’ maneuver to avoid political arguments, but we happily supported the expulsion of Blairites for their ‘anti-socialist’ political ideas. Of course, our ideal was a Labour Party cleansed of the impure taint of reformism, an organisation in which everyone had the ‘correct ideas’, given to them by the Central Committee, just like in our sect, which had no meaningful democracy whatsoever.
We often claimed that if Corbyn adopted our positions on these issues, the party would be doing better. If anything, his association with cranks like us guaranteed his defeat. In that sense, I can say that I played a part in Jeremy Corbyn’s downfall.
Israel
The IMT’s position on Israel was, compared to other far-left sects at least, measured. We defended the right of Jews to live in Palestine and enjoy self-determination, but argued that the Arabs should have equal status. Effectively we supported a one-state solution – a Socialist Federation of Israel-Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would live side by side, enjoying cultural autonomy. We argued that this was only possible on a socialist basis. On a capitalist basis, we argued that a one-state solution was impossible as Arabs would always be discriminated against. Likewise, we rejected the two-state solution because we argued that the potential Arab ‘state’ would be little more than a set of disconnected Bantustans, enclaves surrounded by a hostile Israel, which would continue to have effective domination over the Arabs and use them as cheap labour. We were also vociferous in our opposition to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, whom we labelled reactionary, which led to Yossi Schwartz and his gang of Hamas enthusiasts being given the boot. We also rejected BDS as a counter-productive strategy which would not help to win over Israeli workers.
The SWP, by contrast, supports groups like Hamas and Hezbollah as a legitimate part of the ‘resistance’ to Israel. They also write off the entire Israeli working-class as corrupted by capitalism and benefiting from the exploitation of Arabs. They therefore believe that the Arabs must play the leading role in any revolution, though Israeli ‘renegades’ are presumably welcome. I think we all know what fate will befall the Jewish population of Israel if the SWP gargoyles get their wish. The SWP position may be anti-Semitic and morally reprehensible, but it is arguably more honest than the IMT position. We held on to the fantasy that Israeli workers would join with Arabs to bring down the Israeli state, and supported the Palestinian resistance in general whilst avoiding support for specific organisations which we deemed ‘reactionary’ or Islamist. The SWP, realising that the Israelis are not going to rise up and overthrow their own state, have settled for giving support to the only organisations that can claim to represent the ‘liberation struggle’, instead of waiting for some imagined Marxist party to be formed. This means supporting groups that Marxists would usually find objectionable, like Hamas or Hezbollah. In practice, the differences between the IMT and SWP positions on Israel, like all of the differences that exist on the far-left, appear less significant when looked at more closely. If you say you are supporting the Palestinian ‘resistance’, then whether you like it or not, you are, in practice, supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, because there is no morally pure Palestinian resistance waiting to be formed, and most Palestinians support Islamism and terrorism. In the same way, Trotsky pointed out to his followers that there was no ‘Third Camp’ between the capitalist West and the USSR. Since there was no morally pure workers’ state in existence, the only choice for a consistent Marxist was to give ‘critical support’ to the USSR despite Stalin. Using similar reasoning, we gave ‘critical support’ to the ‘reformist’ Corbyn, believing that we had no choice but to participate in the mass movement if we wanted to have any influence. Likewise, on the issue of Israel-Palestine, the SWP are taking their Marxism to its logical conclusion, which is support for a ‘lesser evil’ which is fighting against an oppressive capitalist state. If the IMT believes that there is a ‘Third Camp’ in between the ‘reactionary’ Israeli state and the reactionary Palestinian Islamists, I would like to know what groups it constitutes and how much support they have among the Palestinian and Israeli people at large. As of now, the IMT doesn’t even have a section in Israel – not since Schwartz and his crew were shown the door.
I had to confront this thorny issue myself when I went on my first (and hopefully last) Nakba Day demonstration in London with other Socialist Appeal comrades in the summer of 2019. When a reporter (whom I believe was Israeli) interviewed me about the demonstrations and my whether I supported terrorism, I calmly explained our organisation’s position, insisting that Hamas and Hezbollah were reactionary and that peace was only possible if the Israeli and Arab workers united. He seemed relieved that I wasn’t a Hamas-supporting nutjob. I can imagine that the others at the demonstration would not have felt the same way. Undoubtedly, there were people at the demo who were anti-Semitic and want to drive all the Jews into the sea as Hamas has vowed repeatedly. At the time I could comfort myself with the knowledge that I did not share their unsavoury views. But in participating in the whole sordid affair, I now see that I was giving tacit approval to such individuals.
The General Election of 2019
All along, the IMT/Socialist Appeal had been calling for a general election to resolve the Brexit deadlock. Labour backbenchers rightly saw this as suicidal. They knew Labour was in no position to fight an election. But Corbyn was adamant, given a helping hand by Jo Swinson’s Lib Dems, who combined to give Boris the election he wanted. In our delusive bullishness, we were convinced that if Labour ran on a ‘radical’ manifesto, they would win the election. Thomas boasted that Labour would win a crushing majority. (He did not give in to doubt on any question.) Insofar as we played any role at all, it was in pushing Labour closer towards its doom.
At university my constituency was Coventry South, where the now infamous Zarah Sultana was standing to be MP. I was at the constituency event at which she was elected, and among those who voted for her. The process by which she was selected was controversial, as it was for a great many Labour candidates in those chaotic months. I was aware that certain comments she had made about Blair and Netanyahu years ago on social media had been uncovered, but being a good leftist, I saw no problem in her remarks. I did not know that she had also made comments insinuating that Jews, being white, could not truly represent ethnic minorities, or her other ugly remarks (documented here and here) from her time as a student. Would I still have supported her if I had known about them? I am ashamed to say that I might well have. In all likelihood, I would have swallowed my reservations about her bigoted identity politics, dismissed them as youthful errors, and voted for her in the name of supporting the left.
We took every opportunity we could to hijack the campaign to promote our sect. On a canvassing session in Warwick and Leamington, myself and another comrade ostentatiously carried copies of the paper and tried to sell them. When we refused to put our papers away, the other Labour activists kicked us off the session. After this, we cried foul about bureaucratic persecution. (We did far worse to people in our organisation who broke ‘discipline’.)
We got in our excuses early. If Corbyn won, it was because his bold, left-wing manifesto had managed to cut through the divisions caused by Brexit. If, on the other hand, he lost, it would be because of Blairite sabotage and the right-wing media campaign of smears against him. Whatever happened, we could claim that we predicted it in advance. In the event, Labour went down to a landslide defeat.
As Labour Officer of the Coventry branch, I was briefed along with all the other Labour Officers that we should stiffen the resolve of the rest of the branch members, explaining to them that this was not the end of the class struggle, but that it would actually intensify. We were also prepared to double down on entrism, anticipating that the defeat would actually radicalise some members. ‘Remember dialectics!’ we were told. Of course, it was all bluster. If Socialist Appeal could not make itself significant when the Corbyn movement was at its height, it is unclear how it will do so now.
Of course, I ended up leaving the sect a few months after the election, but their tactics appear to be more or less the same – remain in Labour, conducting a rearguard action against the leadership of Keir Starmer, whom we compared to Kinnock and accused of seeking to squeeze out the left. When the Corbynites leaked a dodgy dossier in April 2020 claiming that it proved Blairite sabotage, Socialist Appeal brandished it as ‘proof’ of their claims that Corbyn was defeated by a fifth column. These claims have been utterly debunked by the Jewish Chronicle among others. Indeed, one critical analysis of the report suggests that if anything, the supposed diversion of funds from Corbyn’s extravagant, rally-centric campaign (portrayed by us as a Blairite conspiracy to sabotage Corbyn’s chances of winning) actually saved Labour from a worse defeat.
The problem is that when you are in a cult, or an extremist political faction of any kind, all your time and energy is spent reading material only from your side. The average IMT member has not bothered to read any of the ‘bourgeois propaganda’ that actually takes apart a lot of this Corbynite nonsense. Confirmation bias and blind faith took the place of using one’s critical faculties. I was just as guilty as everyone else. All I knew was that the ‘left’ was under attack, and that we had to stand by our comrades. This meant defending some pretty awful people. Indeed, I do not think it would be a stretch to extend my cult analysis of the IMT to the Corbyn movement as a whole. I do not think that the Corbyn movement is a full-blown cult in the way that the IMT is, but it certainly has cultic aspects to it. In that sense, I was part of a cult within a cult. The broader Corbyn movement uncritically supported Saint Jeremy and his allies, and within our sect, we supported Corbyn more critically in private, but almost as uncritically in public. This was combined with a totalistic political doctrine which claimed that it could explain everything about the world and solve all of humanity’s problems. Indeed, we boasted that we were Corbyn’s ‘real’ friends, because we alone were willing to back him to the hilt even when others on the left were wobbling. Look at Owen Jones’ infamous flip-flop on the matter of Corbyn’s resignation, or the way in which even people like John McDonnell sought to acknowledge the charges of anti-Semitism. By contrast, we dismissed this as appeasement and cowardice.
It is perhaps just as well that we didn’t have any more influence than we had. If we had had anywhere near as much as we liked to think, Labour would have gone down to an even worse defeat. Carrying out ‘entrism’ in a party which is supposedly ‘reformist’ and corrupt is in itself an admission that people are repulsed by open communists – better to cloak oneself in the camouflage of Labour membership and stick to ‘transitional demands’. At least I can content myself in the knowledge that I inadvertently helped save Britain from a Corbyn government.
The Afterlife of Corbyn
Corbyn has not done himself any favours since the election defeat. Indeed, he was recently suspended for claiming that anti-Semitism claims were politically motivated to bring down his leadership, and, sure enough, Socialist Appeal defended him, just as they defended Rebecca Long-Bailey when she was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet by Keir Starmer for sharing an interview by Maxine Peake in which she alleged that the hand of Israel was behind George Floyd’s murder. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it has come to light that in June 2020, Corbyn, in a Zoom session with other leftists, listened politely as the far-left demagogue, terrorist supporter and eternal adolescent, Tariq Ali, repeated the claim that got Peake into hot water. Looks like Street Fighting Man has become Jew-Baiting Man.
This sordid and sinister coalition of cranks, conspiracy theorists and self-proclaimed revolutionaries – people like David Miller and Jackie Walker – came to prominence thanks to Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015, and crawled like excitable bugs out of the woodwork. Our sect was just part of the motley crew of far-left radicals to move into the party once the Corbyn movement kicked down the barriers to entry. These people will happily eat the party from the inside out unless Keir Starmer and his colleagues make serious moves to oust them. Thus far, I am pessimistic that he will be able to.
As for where I stand politically, I am pretty much back to where I was before the IMT brainwashed me, with some modifications. I do not intend to vote Labour ever again – unless, by some miracle, it becomes the party of Healey and Jenkins rather than the party of Corbyn and Abbott. Where the ‘culture wars’ are concerned, my politics are diametrically opposed to Labour’s. I loathe and have always loathed identity politics. My Marxist convictions gone, there is little reason for me to remain in the party since I am no longer carrying out entrism. I am fed up of the anti-Israel propaganda, the cancelling of imperfect people from the past, the tearing down of statues and the tribalistic, factionalistic cries on the left to uncritically ‘defend’ people who are legitimately problematic. The right of the party (insofar as there still is one) is not much better, for it too is corrupted with the disease of identity politics, and its metropolitan liberal outlook only serves to guarantee its irrelevance among working-class people. The Tories are not perfect, but they are at least fighting to preserve the things I care about the most – freedom of speech, critical thinking, individualism, free enquiry and the fundamental basis of Western civilisation. I must accept the fact that I am a conservative – not by choice, but because I just am. My attempt to turn myself into a socialist was nothing short of psychologically disastrous, and if I have learned a lesson from this, it is this – that there is little or nothing to be gained by betraying your true self for acceptance from the herd.
I have spent this entire post bashing Corbyn, but I would never have gone from loathing him to supporting him unless he had something which appealed to me. Corbyn and his movement have exposed serious structural flaws in British capitalism that must be addressed. Legitimate criticisms can be made of the neoliberal, Thatcherite model that has existed for several decades, which is increasingly past its sell-by date. There does need to be something of a shake-up – to protect our environment from the ravages of capital, to arrest the decline of arts and culture, to halt the rise in alienation and atomisation in society, and to address the fall in prosperity since 2008. Many people forget that Thatcher wasn’t a conservative in the pure sense, but a Whiggish liberal, whose politics and morality was inherited from the English Dissenting tradition. This is a contrast to the dominant, One-Nation brand of conservatism that was born with Disraeli, and is associated with High Church Anglicanism. Whilst Thatcher definitely made some necessary changes to the British economy and society, we have swung too far towards the free market. A rebalancing is desirable if we are not to create a nation of philistines, consumerists and utilitarian number-crunchers. We need a different kind of society. I just don’t think the left is in a position to create that society. Their preachiness, their bigotry and their negativity just turns working-class people off. Perhaps the crisis of neoliberal capitalism requires a conservative solution, and it is this that I have chosen to put my faith in. As Burke said, we must change in order to conserve. I want to improve things for the working-class and for wider society, but not if that means destroying everything about our heritage and disowning our history, demonising our national heroes (like Churchill and Cromwell) and telling everyone that if they don’t get on board with the radical agenda, they are a racist, sexist or some other horrible word. If socialists cannot reconcile themselves to the defence of Western civilisation from its enemies, whilst holding on to their progressive principles, then socialism is morally bankrupt and has no place anywhere.
I must reckon with the evil I supported. Yes, I was in a cult that made me believe and do things that I otherwise would not have done, but ultimately, I must take responsibility. That is why I reiterate my deep regret and sorrow at having supported Corbyn and his movement, and wholeheartedly apologise to the Jews of this country, and the entire world, for having had anything to do with this evil. I must now work to rectify my mistake – expose anti-Semitism whenever I see it, defend Israel’s right to exist and combat political extremism of all kinds. Our democracy has never needed this more.