27.10.2022

Give up on Starmer’s party

Dave Vincent reviews Ten years hard Labour by Chris Williamson (Lola Books, 2022, pp406)

As Chris Williamson himself states, this book covers the period in his life from when he was elected as a Labour MP in 2010 until his suspension over absurd allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ and eventual resignation from the party in 2019. It carries plenty of notes of his sources, so what he asserts is completely checkable.

Regular readers of the Weekly Worker have been given continual updates on the Labour Party witch-hunts, including their victims and lots of analysis. Readers will have read, in detail, all about the victimisation not only of Chris Williamson, but Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Tony Greenstein and then the star prize, Jeremy Corbyn.

That said, the project was not intended to end with the expulsion of Jeremy. As the Weekly Worker has frequently pointed out, the project was and remains to make the Labour Party a safe party for capitalism. Occasional readers will have missed a lot of this coverage, so it is useful for them to be able to read so much about it in one book. And I do not recall Chris saying anything substantially different from the contributors to this paper.

Thanks to his testimony, readers of the book can see what it is like to be caught up in such a process and how prejudged the disciplinary process is. No matter how well you argue your case, no matter what evidence you provide, no matter how distorted you can show the allegations to be - you are out and that’s it! As a result, we know that plenty of those accused were either expelled without due process or gave up themselves, deciding not to waste their time with all this ‘disciplinary process’ nonsense. However, it does need to be stressed yet again how absurdly unfair it all is.

Chris provides chapter and verse on the drivers behind most of this, including the various Zionist organisations and their funding, and he details how many Labour MPs have links with these groups. He names a lot of such MPs and Labour employees involved in the witch-hunting process, while Jenny Formby’s role is detailed, as is Owen Jones’s move to the right.

Because Chris was one of the staunchest allies and defenders of Jeremy Corbyn and his project, he was especially singled out and condemned - in the media and by various Labour MPs. Chris reports how he often contacted his critics, offering to meet them to discuss the inaccuracies of their allegations, but it was very rare for any of them to agree to do that. What especially hurt Chris (and I’m sure the same goes for Jackie, Marc, Tony, Jeremy and others) was that people he had respect for, thought were his friends and had worked closely with joined in the attacks and said things they must have known were not true.

What happened to him must be what happens in all witch-hunts - most people who know you, and know it is all nonsense, will shun you, sit in silence and not come to your defence. Some of this is out of fear - they know what is happening, but do not want to be next, while sometimes we are talking about plain careerists - let’s see which way the wind is blowing and make sure we’re on the ‘right’ side.

Chris mentions the McCarthyism of the 1950s - today everyone says it was appalling and condemns those who shopped their friends to save their own necks, as if they themselves would never do such a thing. Well, depressingly, as Chris’s own experience demonstrates, many will cave in to a witch-hunt and either watch from the sidelines in silence or - worse - will actually join the ranks of the accusers. Many of the accusers, the back-stabbers, the cowards were supposedly leftwingers, but they aided and abetted the witch-hunt.

A major enabler was, of course, the ‘redefinition’ of ‘anti-Semitism’ by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance to now include many criticisms of Israel. Chris attacks these so-called IHRA ‘examples’ and rightly condemns the lameness of the so-called ‘Socialist Campaign Group’ of Labour MPs - including their backing down over signing a statement drawn up by the Stop the War Coalition. He asks: “What is the point of the SCG? Whenever their support is needed, they are nowhere to be seen.”

Future

On Sir Keir Starmer, Chris says:

Whilst he flaunted his desire to crush the last vestiges of socialism and anti-imperialism inside the Labour Party, the Labour left was impotent to respond. Their ‘stay and fight’ mantra quickly turned into ‘stay and keep your head down’.

And now we have seen an utterly compliant Labour Party conference. You would never know Jeremy Corbyn and his messianic campaign ever existed. Yet still, various contributors to the Weekly Worker urge us to stay in the Labour Party and help pull it left. (I agree we need a Marxist Party, but it will not emerge from a struggle within today’s Labour Party.) This was a conference which voted to stop Jeremy Corbyn from being able to stand as a Labour MP by 59% to 41%. This was a conference that sang the national anthem, bowing to the new king (instead of the usual ‘We’ll keep the red flag flying here’). So much for staying in Labour and pulling it left.

As I write, Labour is way ahead of the Tories in the polls. This lead - said to be the largest since 2001 - will, of course, be used by the Weekly Worker and others to attack the growing feeling that workers need a new party. Chris was/is a principled socialist and, in detailing a lot of campaigns he was involved in during his 10 years, makes many such points in the book.

So it is not all about the witch-hunt - a lot of it covers what he did as a Labour member, including as an MP. Chris covers Corbyn’s leadership challenges, the coups, the general elections he stood in and his take on the results. He covers his suspensions and his decision to stand as an independent (and the fact that he lost, as he expected).

Chris was aghast to see Jeremy cave in to the PLP and the right of the party - especially in accepting that there was a problem of anti-Semitism - to the extent that his own supporters were traduced, while Corbyn said nothing. Chris condemns the ex-leader’s “rich kid” advisors in his office. He goes into detail about ‘that speech’, when he said that Labour was “too apologetic” over ‘anti-Semitism’ - selected bits of which were used to attack him. Prior to that he had clearly made a lot of enemies within the Parliamentary Labour Party in his support for the campaign for the mandatory reselection of standing Labour MPs for future general elections.

This book is very useful in showing what so many inside the Labour Party have been subjected to - a witch-hunt - and what a total sham this is and how alone you usually are. It shows the lengths to which the PLP will go to preserve their dominance and careers. For me, Chris’s experience (including over 44 years’ Labour Party membership) shows what a waste of time it is putting your life and energies into what is now such an anti-working class party - although I have to concede that, with the current polls, it will be harder than ever to establish a decent alternative party for workers.

However, in the final chapter, entitled ‘Making the revolution’, he makes his arguments for the creation of an alternative to the Labour Party, stating that Labour cannot be reformed. Personally, I think if people like George Galloway and Chris Williamson had expounded such principles long before they ended up getting expelled it would have been far better.

Dave Vincent