24.05.2018
A black day for Labour
There are few silver linings to Ken Livingstone’s resignation, reckons Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists
Oh Ken, what have you done?
The resignation from the Labour Party of Ken Livingstone - bête noire of the Tory press in the 1980s, humiliator of Blair’s Labour in the 2000 mayorals, and Labour left attack dog - puts an end, we assume, to one of the most ignoble episodes in the recent history of the party in which he played such an outsized role in these last few decades.
Livingstone’s basically correct comments on the collaboration between the Zionist movement and the Nazi regime - a date or two wrong, sure, as is to be expected in off-the-cuff remarks to a journalist - led to his suspension, and since then to his emergence as a totemic figure for the witch-hunters, the Zionists and the rightwing media. In almost his last move as general secretary, Iain McNicol - soon to be Lord Iain of McNicol, to nobody’s surprise - renewed Livingstone’s suspension, on the grounds that he had not apologised or shown any intention of being nicer in future. It was a typically spiteful gesture, and Livingstone continued, to all appearances, to brass it out.
Why resign now? We hear rumours that Livingstone has found all this personally difficult, and is quite depressed, and has maybe lost the will to fight on. It does not accord with the popular image of the man whose autobiography is called You can’t say that!, but who knows what is going on in people’s heads? Bullish gobbiness is no guarantee of limitless self confidence.
Regardless, we must treat this as a political rather than a personal act, not least because that is how Ken himself has put it. He provides a political rationale for his decision, saying that he does not want the endless saga of his case to become a “distraction” from turfing out the Tories and getting Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party into government.1 This is a refrain we hear a lot. And the difficulty, in the first instance is that it will not work, and never has. How many times has a line been drawn under the matter? Was not the Chakrabarti report supposed to satisfy this problem, and the Royall inquiry before that? As long as there is any Labour member left with any sympathy at all for the Palestinians, demagogues and liars will promote the idea that the party is full of anti-Semites. Ken handing himself over to these hyenas will not shut them up, but embolden them.
Livingstone’s statement stands by his original comment, though contains the usual ‘sorry/not sorry’ apology for “giving offence” we expect in these situations - such empty words spring forth from politicians as involuntarily as hiccups, and Ken is no exception, it seems. Yet actions speak louder than press releases. By resigning, he concedes that the friends of Bibi’s Likudniks, the abettors and apologists for terroristic massacres in Gaza, the warmongers and the cynical journos for whom no calumny is too base to throw at the Labour Party - all of them were right from the start. In return, he will get nothing in the way of de-escalation of the anti-Semitism witch-hunt. You do not have to be Donald Trump to see that this is a bad deal.
As a political act, of course, it is hardly out of character. Livingstone is a political ‘hard’, to be sure, a man who, while mayor of London, was still breezily happy to tell journalists he looked forward to seeing the Saudi royals swinging from lampposts. His instinct is to get in people’s faces. His political project, however, is Labourite to its very core. One of Tony Benn’s favourite anecdotes had a constituent writing to him in the 50s: “Dear Mr Benn, I see the Russians have just put a man into space. Is there any chance of a decent bus service in Bristol?”
Such was Livingstone’s approach as well - ruthless pragmatism on the domestic or municipal scale allowed him, he thought, the freedom to sound off on the international issues on which he was such a bruiser. His London mayoralty was, in reality, developer- and city-friendly; his lasting legacy was the regressive congestion charge (which, alas, seems to have done precious little to improve London’s awful air quality in the long run). In 2010, he supported Ed Balls’ candidacy for the Labour leadership, on the basis of a few weak-tea Keynesian nuggets. His vigorous aggression against anti-Corbyn saboteurs was almost a break from this pattern of ‘sensible’ alliance-building in Labour Party politics. The fundamental contours of Ken’s project, however, have ultimately given rise to this week’s capitulation.
Friends like these
On some level, of course, we can hardly blame him, and no account of this story would be complete without a few words on the shameful failures of solidarity that have dogged the Livingstone case from the get-go.
We might start with the Labour leader himself, whose immediate reaction to Livingstone’s resignation was to say he had made the right decision. Given that the justification for the decision was to increase the chances of one J Corbyn becoming prime minister, this is a bizarrely ungracious statement, amounting almost to ‘Ken is right - I am more important to the movement than he is.’ But, of course, that is not the point being made: rather, we are supposed to take away the lesson that Ken did a Very Bad Thing and it is proper to make a show of penitence under such circumstances. Ken insisted on May 22 that he had not been asked to resign by Jeremy, which may well be true, but the fact that it even had to be said tells us a great deal.
We could scarcely expect any better from an opposition leader, and a shadow cabinet, so obsessively targeted on getting into government at any cost on the single issue of austerity. The larger disappointment is with the rest of us. This whole sorry episode has been a snapshot of the intellectual decay of the left. Almost as soon as Livingstone had let fly with the comments that caused him so much difficulty, leftists were scrambling over each other to distance themselves from him. The example of Liz Davies and Sue Lukes accusing Livingstone, in the Morning Star, of “victim blaming” springs to mind, mainly because it is spectacularly false and quite as slanderous as anything Nick Cohen or the Daily Mail could come up with.2 Yet the examples have regrettably multiplied since. Innumerable are the comrades who object in principle to witch-hunting friends of the Palestinian cause, but cringe from combat in the form in which it actually presents itself.
Implicated here is the general capitulation of the left to identity politics, which has paradoxically left it extremely vulnerable to accusations of racism. Denouncing allegations against Livingstone for what they were would be to state publicly that false accusations of racism have been made, when it is an article of faith that such allegations must always be taken oh-so-very seriously.
It should surprise nobody to find the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty playing a particularly devious game here. The British left’s in-house pro-imperialist scab outfit pulled its usual trick of claiming to take a particular political line, while actually doing everything in its power to minimise the chance of success - ‘of course, we oppose the Iraq war, but all those who actually campaign for troops to withdraw from Iraq are heartless baby-eaters … ’ Thus the AWL resentfully conceded that it was opposed to Livingstone’s expulsion, but its writers used the opportunity to rehearse all the grudges they have ever borne against him at length and point out that they had for many years accused him of making anti-Semitic statements - a hobby they are in no way inclined to give up now.3 Yet another reason for AWL members to think very carefully about where their organisation is going, and for the rest of us to consider whether these scoundrels should be let within a mile of any elected positions in the wider movement.
Canary
If Livingstone’s case were isolated, we could survive it - we will have to survive his loss anyway, as he is not getting any younger. The old saying about unity being strength is proven true in the positive and the negative, however. The failure to defend the most prominent victim of the witch-hunt only emboldens those spreading lies and innuendo. It is not an image that springs quickly to mind when his name is mentioned, but Ken is the canary in the coal mine.
The list of people caught up in this witch-hunt gets ever longer; we will mention only one close to home. Readers of this paper may know that Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists was suspended from his job after he was filmed discussing Zionist-Nazi collaboration with a Zionist partisan on the Parliament Square ‘Enough is enough’ protest and counterprotest. The discussion was heated, but ultimately amiable, but was recorded by a BBC2 Newsnight editor who then put it up on social media. Following an outraged complaint by the local Tory MP his Labour council employer suspended him from work. He has now been sacked. This is on top of waves of expulsions from the party, notably in the recent case of anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth, who was found guilty of saying something mean about the rightwing MP, Ruth Smeeth.
In this atmosphere, it is hardly surprising that the right can still make gains. Machine politics in Lewisham East got a rightwinger, Janet Daby, selected as candidate for an upcoming by-election; in a place like that, she would have to be hit by a bus or struck by lightning to avoid joining the Labour benches in parliament. This follows on from the selection of greasy Blairite Damian Egan as candidate for mayor (and the same stipulation about buses and lightning applies in his case). Alas, the relentless exploitation of identitarian offence-taking does not always go the ‘right’ way, even in Lewisham - Lewisham East’s constituency chair, Ian McKenzie was suspended on Tuesday for crass, allegedly sexist tweets about Emily Thornberry.
What must be done now? Only what ought to have been done from the get-go - the anti-Semitism witch-hunt must be denounced as a fraud, not only by a few small voices like ours, but by people who have allowed themselves to be imprisoned by their enemies. As for Ken Livingstone, we hope he will stick around long enough that he will receive a full apology from a reformed national executive committee for the disgraceful treatment he has received - and an invitation to rejoin.
Notes
1. www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/may/21/ken-livingstone-resignation-labour-party-statement-antisemitism.
2. https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-8995-unravelling-the-charge-of-labour-party-anti-semitism-1.
3. The AWL’s dodgy dossier is helpfully compiled here: www.workersliberty.org/node/31045. Note the headline, ‘Dealing with Livingstone’; it is Livingstone that needs to be ‘dealt with’, not the right or Zionist ideologues. Hardly surprising, since among the latter group are ... all the leading members of the AWL.