08.12.2022

End of a chapter

The lame reaction to the latest expulsion exposes the bankruptcy of the official Labour left, says Kevin Bean

So the Labour Party has finally bid farewell to Peter Willsman. After decades of Labour Party membership, one of the left’s leading activists has been expelled. As a leading member of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) since the 1970s and a long-serving member of Labour’s national executive committee, comrade Willsman has been a key figure at the heart of the organised left for over 40 years. Like many other leftwingers, he was falsely accused of anti-Semitism and initially suspended from party membership and removed from the NEC in 2019. Finally, following an ‘investigation’, his expulsion was confirmed late last month.¹

It is worth recalling the circumstances that led to his suspension. In July 2018 comrade Willsman said at an NEC meeting that he had never come across anti-Semitism in the Labour Party and that those making such accusations were simply trying to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.² Immediately a concerted campaign was launched against Willsman and, as usual, The Jewish Chronicle was in the vanguard, closely followed by The Guardian. Not only Johanthan Freedland, the paper’s in-house Zionist, but it’s tame ‘leftwing’ Owen Jones, were baying for his blood. The fact that Willsman’s suspension was supported by the likes of Labour’s Margaret Hodge, Tom Watson and Luciana Berger came as no surprise to rank-and-file activists. But what was really horrific was the cowardly response of the leaders of the official left, first and foremost Jeremy Corbyn. The party’s supposedly leftwing general secretary, Jennie Formby, threatened disciplinary action if Willsman repeated his offence, while in the background John McDonnell was urging the left to pull back and be conciliatory in the face of this onslaught.

To his eternal shame, Willsman himself took that advice and retracted his position, by apologising and saying that there were indeed “appalling instances of anti-Semitism in the party”, that he was “wholly determined to rooting it out of our movement” and that he would undertake equalities training.³

However, this grovelling apology was not enough for some of his old comrades on the ‘left’. Momentum took its lead from Jon Lansman, who had been a close comrade of Willsman in the CLPD and the Bennite left in the 1970s and 1980s. Lansman in effect joined in the Labour right’s witch-hunt, claiming that Willsman’s remarks had angered many in the Jewish community: Willsman was duly removed from the Lansman-approved list of Momentum’s candidates for the 2018 NEC elections.⁴ Even so, despite that stab in the back, Willsman was re-elected as part of a strong showing by the left that year. Despite - or perhaps because of - the strength of the left amongst the party’s membership, the Labour right in the PLP redoubled their attacks on Corbyn and leftwingers at all levels of the party.

The strategy of conceding to the right on the issue of so-called anti-Semitism was presumably hatched by Corbyn’s two former Straight Leftist advisors, Andrew Murray and Seumas Milne and it played into the hands of the PLP right, which continually demanded further suspensions and expulsions.

So, having been thrown under the bus by the Momentum leadership in 2018, Pete Willsman was living on borrowed time and was too good a target for the Labour right to resist. They made their move in May 2019, when another recording was leaked to the media. In an ‘off-the-record’ conversation with a journalist, Willsman was recorded saying that “it’s almost certain who is behind all this anti-Semitism against Jeremy Corbyn: it’s almost certainly the Israeli embassy”.⁵ As before, the inevitable media campaign ensued, stoked up by the usual suspects from the Labour right, and resulted in Willsman’s suspension and an ‘investigation’ into his alleged anti-Semitism.⁶ Presumably this ‘investigation’ has now concluded after over three years and Pete Willsman now joins thousands of other leftwingers who have been expelled.

However typical this experience has been, comrade Willsman’s long political history gives his expulsion a particular significance. Paradoxically, the muted reaction to his outrageous treatment says it all.

No mention

The news received little coverage in the mainstream media and the response of the left was similarly understated. For example, just days after the expulsion was announced, Rachel Garnham, vice-chair of the CLPD, could write in the Morning Star about Keir Starmer’s continuing attacks on party democracy and the purge of the left without once mentioning the fate of the CLPD’s former, long-serving secretary, Pete Willsman.⁷ The silence of what remains of the official left is not an accident or simple embarrassment about the way that Willsman was hung out to dry by his own comrades in Momentum or the CLPD. It is true that the betrayal by his old friend, Jon Lansman, gives the whole saga a personal twist worthy of a political drama. But, as interesting as these individual considerations may be, it is the political and strategic factors that determined Pete Willsman’s fate.

The politics of the Labour left are historically tied to the Labour right. No matter how ‘left’ the demands made for a transfer of wealth and power are, and despite the occasional toying with extra-parliamentary action, for the Labour left the absolute essential precondition for the achievement of ‘socialism’ is the election of a Labour government. The idea is that though dominated by the right such a government is easier to pressurise than a Tory government. Instead of a rightwing Labour government attacking and demobilising the working class and therefore preparing the ground for a Tory comeback, it is pictured as a prelude for ever more left Labour governments. A delusion - also held by ‘official communism’ and its Britain’s road to socialism - which keeps old leftwingers on board and brings into the ranks one generation after another of young activists, militants and radicals.

Thus, the Labour Party, as presently constituted, is considered an instrument that is potently capable of making inroads into capitalism and thus carrying out the socialist transformation of society. Even when this ‘grand strategy’ seems unlikely given the balance of forces within the party, the Labour left still clings to the rationale that any Labour government is better than a Tory government.

This means in practice that the left is politically subordinated to the pro-capitalist leadership in the name of beating the Tories. So, despite the endemic conflict between the Labour left and right, what it amounts to is a division of labour. The Labour right is about realism, the serious business of winning general elections and forming governments. The Labour left generates hopes, pipe dreams and wish lists.

When we factor in the inevitable personal opportunism and careerism that bourgeois politics produces in the ranks of the workers’ movement, and the specific dynamics that shape the politics and practice of the left, it becomes clear that the Labour left is also a career ladder for a not inconsiderable few. That certainly explains the failure of the Corbynistas, Momentum, CLPD, LRC, etc, to actually go to war with the Labour right. It also explains the willingness to sacrifice even their closest and oldest comrades, such as Pete Willsman himself, as the mainstream media and the Labour right demanded. In the interests of placating the Labour right and thus ultimately the ruling class, there was no room for sentimentality - which meant that during the witch-hunt the Corbyn leadership stood aside and effectively threw leftwing members to the wolves.

While Willsman was just one such victim, his prominence in the politics of the Labour left, especially his role in the CLPD, does not make him blameless in the way that events unfolded during the Corbyn moment. The politics of the CLPD from the first in 1973 were founded on the big idea of reaching out to the largely phantom centre in order to change policy and rules. And there were what passed for successes: eg, reselection of MPs, Labour’s 1983 manifesto, black sections, all-women short-lists. Ideological disputes were dismissed as being for the birds. What mattered was winning CLP, trade union and annual conference votes. The ‘theorist’ of this strategy was, of course, Vladimir Derer, and his chosen heir and successor was Peter Willsman. He knows the Labour rule book backwards and all the ins and outs of committees and procedures.

However, the Labour left’s conference victories did not translate into government; and that is what the Labour right is really interested in. One general election after another was lost, paving the way for the counterrevolution initiated by Neil Kinnock and completed by Tony Blair. Even when, surprisingly, Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader - to get onto the ballot he had to get the votes of the ‘morons’ - two general election defeats followed, which paved the way for Sir Keir Starmer, a former Socialist Alternatives Pabloite, and the distinct possibility of the most rightwing Labour government ever.