09.02.2023

A pack of knaves

Kim Johnson stood up for Palestinian rights, only to recant a few hours later. Kevin Bean rounds on the cowardly official Labour left

For just a very brief moment it was almost possible to understand the scrape in which Kim Johnson MP found herself last week. After all, we have all been there: we did not read the management’s latest email or keep up with the most recent circular from head office, and then we put our foot in it, said the wrong thing at the wrong time, and the boss came down on us like a ton of bricks! You just learn to live with it: it’s all part of the rich tapestry of modern working life!

But don’t waste your sympathy. Kim Johnson is not some hapless junior employee being hauled over the coals by a bullying manager. She is the Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, and a member of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs, no less, whilst the boss throwing his weight around in this farce is not some latter-day David Brent, but Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer. While for Johnson it might be just another bad day at the office which she will quickly want to put behind her, what she said in the House of Commons on February 1 (and why she said it) is far too important to overlook or forget in a hurry.

Apartheid

Johnson’s dies horribilis began with an intervention in the Commons in which she described the Israeli government as “fascist” and referred to the “increase in human rights violations against Palestinian civilians, including children”. She followed up on this with a question to prime minister Rishi Sunak, asking how he is “challenging what Amnesty and other human rights organisations are referring to as an ‘apartheid state’”.¹ Although Marxists will cavil at the sloppy and inaccurate use of the term ‘fascist’, this was a strong and welcome attack on Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people and, moreover, one that we never usually hear from Labour MPs in the Commons chamber. Hats off to Kim! At last, many activists thought, someone was breaking the silence and making a stand against the occupation.

What a difference a few hours makes. The official parliamentary record tells the story all too well. Following Johnson’s earlier challenge, the next entry in her name a little later on that day is very different indeed. Instead of an attack, we get a surrender and a grovelling apology. The Hansard account records her apologising “unreservedly for the intemperate language I used”, before going on to say she was wrong to use the term ‘fascist’ in relation to the Israeli government. She added that this description was “particularly insensitive, given the history of the state of Israel”. The penitent concluded her recantation with a final apology for using the term “apartheid state”, which she withdrew because it was deemed “insensitive”.² Thus Kim Johnson was brought to heel and we were all reminded of the place of the official left in the Labour Party.

Ms Johnson’s outburst was the first real test for the Labour left following Sir Keir Starmer’s speech at the London Labour conference, when he threatened to continue his crackdown on the left. Using the so-called ‘fight against discrimination’ and repeating the lies about anti-Semitism in the party, Sir Keir made it plain that the witch-hunt against the left would continue.³ He was as good as his word, and when Kim Johnson made her distinctly off-message intervention at prime minister’s questions, Starmer took his chance to reassert control and further humiliate the already neutered parliamentary ‘left’.

The gleeful reaction to Johnson’s climbdown by cheerleaders for the witch-hunt, such as Dame Margaret Hodge and The Jewish Chronicle, was all too predictable, as was the shameful silence of the official left in response to Starmer’s latest crack of the whip.⁴ Where were Kim’s comrades in the SCG? Why didn’t her fellow ‘left’ Merseyside MPs not rally to her defence? Where was the chorus of outrage from Labour left activists at this latest attack on party democracy? Apart from the now rather standard groans from Momentum about Starmer’s “abuse of power”, we have heard nothing at all about the Kim Johnson case from groups like the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy or the Labour Representation Committee.⁵

We do not have to support her rather loose definition of ‘fascism’ when it comes to supporting someone making a completely justified attack on the Israeli state’s brutal suppression of the Palestinian opposition. All we have to do is defend the right to free speech and open democratic debate, both in the Labour Party and the wider public sphere. However, it seems that is too much to ask, for both Sir Keir and the house-trained official left: whilst Starmer and the pro-capitalist Labour right want to close down even the mildest opposition voices, for its part the cowed left remains silent - too scared and demoralised to step out of line.

Groucho and Karl

Kim Johnson’s 15 minutes of infamy will soon fade and just be added to the long list of shabby compromises and retreats by the SCG and what remains of the licensed official left. Many left activists, both on Merseyside and beyond, must surely have shrugged their shoulders when hearing about her volte-face, thinking it was just what they had come to expect - who is now surprised by the capitulation of a supposedly left MP in face of leadership threats?

Kim Johnson is not the first and she certainly will not be the last on the Labour left to bend the knee to the pro-capitalist right. Many have trodden this path and we can be certain that there are plenty more who will make the same journey as Ms Johnson. In doing so these fake leftists will take their place beside Groucho rather than Karl, as they loyally declare to the Labour leadership, ‘These are my principles, but, if you don’t like them, I have others.’

Even so it is still important for the real militant left - whether members of the Labour Party or not - to go beyond mere cynicism about the opportunism and compromises of Johnson and her ilk. The original sin of the authorised left is not simply careerism and personal advancement. Obviously SCG MPs do not expect to be part of Sir Keir’s team when he enters No10, but they live in hope.

Such focus on their own individual career path is easy to spot. But it is far from the whole story and, although despicable enough, it is not the most grievous betrayal committed by the official left. Betrayal is inherent in the politics of Labourism - which, irrespective of the radical phraseology, underpins the strategy of the Labour left.

If your conception of ‘socialism’ is a series of reforms and modifications to the harsher facets of capitalism through the welfare state, and reducing levels of social and economic inequality, then the election of Labour into government is the absolute sine qua non of your politics. In its most uninspiring form this ‘strategy’ involves a long, patient march though the bureaucratic structures of the labour movement and the winning of positions and the adoption of policies to secure this objective. Get enough left MPs and secure a radical manifesto and, at last, it’s a socialist Labour government.

The whole history of the Labour Party as a bourgeois workers’ party, along with the more recent experience of the Corbyn movement, shows how well this type of strategic patience has actually worked in practice. More than individual weakness or careerism, the original sin of the Labour left is its fundamental commitment to preserving the party in its current form, in the belief that it will be some kind of an instrument for socialist advance. This means, by its very essence, unconditional surrender to the pro-capitalist Labour right as the price for that oh-so-much prized ‘unity’ and the long-hoped-for Labour government. Even when phrased in terms of ‘staying and fighting’, it really means ‘holding on and keeping your head down’.

This ‘strategy’ of waiting for better days ahead is worse than useless: as we have seen with the disintegration and demoralisation of the Corbyn movement, it only produces worthless compromises and defeat.