A Very British Coup – By West Wales Chronicle’s Political Columnist Tim Evans

A Very British Coup

In last week’s column, I looked at the political similarities between today and the 1930s. Both the economic crash of 2007/8 and that of 1929 made life harder for millions of people. This caused political polarisation – in some cases towards the left, but in the 1930s, in Spain, Italy, and, crucially, in Germany, towards fascism and all the horrors it brought. We can see something not dissimilar working its way through world politics today. Last week I looked at Greece, other European countries and the USA. Today, I want to look at what’s happening in Britain.

The thing that’s clearest to the most casual observer is that both of the main U.K. parties are in severe crisis, but for very different reasons. Theresa May (possibly the most inept PM in living memory) continues to create a ‘hostile environment’ for not only immigrants, but the vast majority of working people. The utter contempt the Tories have for the poorest and most vulnerable in our society is seen in the Grenfell Tower and Windrush scandals, in the removal of benefits from dying people and in the persecution of the homeless.

Meanwhile the party the wretched May ‘leads’, but has no control over, proceeds to tear itself apart over Brexit. As I write, after her Salzburg humiliation, her continued leadership seems more absurd than ever. It is painful to watch someone who is already politically dead, zombie-like, going through the motions of ‘negotiating’ an increasingly chaotic Brexit. By the time this article is published she may conceivably have gone. All that is keeping her hanging on is the fact that other potential leaders like Boris Johnson are pro-Brexit and their accession to the leadership would cause seriously damaging rifts in the party.

Labour, meanwhile, is undergoing an internal polarisation all of its own. Its membership has grown enormously, with people of all ages, including young people new to politics, and previously sneered at by the media as being ‘apathetic’, being attracted to the policies of Jeremy Corbyn and his team. One would have thought this would be seen as good news all round. However, the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) is hostile to Corbyn, and is determined to sabotage what it sees as a dramatic shift away from the free-market Blairism it has embraced for the last 20 years.

This hatred of Corbyn and his politics is shared by the whole British political establishment, including, disgracefully, the current leadership of Welsh Labour. The national media, the Tories, and most of the PLP are working together to use any means possible, legal or otherwise, to destroy him. It is a disgusting spectacle, as the wretched Blair rises like an apparition from the dustbin of history to unite with the ghastly Margaret Hodge and the quasi-Tory Frank Field (who now describes himself as an ‘independent’ Labour MP) as they attempt to expel genuine, committed socialists from the Labour Party, with the BBC, the Mail, the Express and even the Guardian uniting to amplify such ‘red scare’ smears.

The constant accusations that Corbyn is a racist and an anti-Semite are so preposterous as to be laughable, if the implications were not so serious. Labour’s National Executive Committee has endorsed a definition of anti-Semitism which means that accusing the Israeli state of racism would be itself racist. Thus any Labour Party member making such an accusation could be expelled from the Labour Party. This, despite the fact that an United Nations report has characterised the Israeli state as being racist. And despite the fact that its army, the laughably-named Israeli Defence Force, has been responsible for the slaughter since March this year of over 174 unarmed Palestinians, including children, and the wounding of over 18,000.

To call criticism of the Israeli state anti-Semitic is as nonsensical as calling criticism of Saudi Arabia’s slaughter in Yemen Islamophobic. But this is not really about anti-Semitism at all. It is about attacking the left and bringing down Corbyn.

As I write this, the Labour Party gathers in Liverpool for its annual conference. While many of the grassroots members support Jeremy Corbyn and his team, the PLP is openly hostile and many trade union leaders, such as Dave Prentis of Unison and Tim Roache of the GMB, have attacked Corbyn savagely in the past. Over the next few days we will see whether the forces gathered in support of him can overcome the hostility of those MPs and trade union leaders who are determined to pursue the neoliberal politics which made so-called New Labour indistinguishable from the Tories. In the next column I’ll report on the Labour conference. After that of course comes the Tory Party conference. Now that really should be a treat.