Some thoughts on the anti-Semitism furore

In a context in which anti-Corbynite MPs recently joined in a demonstration against Corbyn's supposed softeness on anti-Semitism, shoulder to shoulder with members of the DUP, it seems in order to suggest that their motivation might be something other than a principled commitment to anti-racism. Protesting against hatred for a particular enthno-religious group alongside Ulster loyalists is rather like protesting against unusual clothing arm-in-arm with Lady Gaga.



And indeed, be in no doubt: the point of the furore over anti-Semitism and Labour is to weaken Corbyn, to sew doubt in his supporters, and to damage Labour's prospects in the coming local elections, providing the context for another leadership bid by this year's Owen Smith equivalent. The right in the Party have been in stasis since the unexpectedly good results in the last General Election. There is no way, however, that they will sit by and let Corbyn fight another General Election (a Corbyn government is, for many of the Old Believers from the Blair years, a worse prospect than a Tory government). This is their chance to stop that, and they have pounced.

Whatever else we say about Labour and anti-Semitism it is vital that we understand that this is what is going on, and that we support the leadership. On top of that, four points:

1. Anti-Semitism around the left is real

Defending Corbyn is not the same thing as being defensive. Some on the left have been unhelpful in denying that anti-Semitism around the left is a thing. Whereas anyone who looks honestly at the trajectory of anti-capitalist protest (and, to an extent, of Palestine solidarity politics) since the 2007/8 financial crisis will know differently. A crisis of capitalism focused in the financial sector, happening at a time when left ideas and organisations were weak, provided the opportunity for every vile caricature of Jewish people, every obsession with the Rothschilds and the Illuminati to work its way out of the woodwork. That mural is a case in point. So are the weirdoes with home made signs featuring the Star of David, one sees on the fringes of demonstrations. To the extent that these people have found their way into the Labour Party (and inevitably some have), they should be expelled. It is no use denying any of this.

Far from being a sign that the left has gone too far, however, the persistence of what August Bebel called 'the socialism of fools', shows that we need a stronger, more disciplined, left with better political education, capable of offering an account of the world persuasive enough to draw people away from the simplicities of bigotry. The Corbyn movement provides the best opportunity for that in this country for a generation. Anyone who is genuinely concerned about anti-Semitism ought not to try to undermine that movement.

2. Anti-Semitism within the Labour leadership is not a thing

This shouldn't need saying. Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong campaigner against racism of all kinds is not an anti-Semite. Nor is John McDonnell. Nor is Christine Shawcroft (who is something far less politically exciting: an overworked official trying to deal with a mountain of complaints, many of them spurious. We would do well to reflect on the story of the boy who cried wolf). The injustice of good people, who have dedicated their lives to the cause of a more equal and just world, being cynically accused of racism (or at least of turning a blind eye to racism) is palpable. They deserve our absolute support and solidarity.

3. The politics of cultural and religious belonging is complicated

A problem in left of centre politics at the moment is the lack of sophistication in understanding the politics of cultural and religious belonging. This criticism applies equally to Corbyn's attackers and to many of his defenders. Ethno-religious groups are not politically uniform: differences of theology and tradition run through them and intersect with divisions along lines of class, gender, and sexuality. Speaking about the group I'm most familiar with: a certain type of conservative Catholic will accuse people of 'anti-Catholicism' in the context, say, of debates about legal abortion or same-sex marriage. These accusations are spurious and are made for political effect. This does not mean for one moment that anti-Catholic bigotry is not a real thing. It's just that this isn't it: and, crucially, plenty of Catholics (myself included) will argue against the conservatives, and will do so on grounds internal to Catholicism itself.

The danger is that people unfamiliar with the texture of ethno-religious groups treat them as undifferentiated unity. They see a subgroup taking offense at something and assume that the offense is warranted, proportionate, and directed at the right people. Thus the Board of Deputies of British Jews, a conservative organisation politically opposed to Corbyn over the Middle East is not the voice of all Jews in Britain. It does not speak from a political vacuum. The voices of Jews who support Corbyn cannot be allowed to be silenced.

4. Corbyn will never be able to give enough to satisfy his critics

Ian Austin, Stella Creasy and John Mann do not want a slightly more muted, or somewhat more woke Corbyn. They want no Corbyn. They want the Labour Party to be led by somebody else. Concessions to them - Shawcroft's resignation, committees, enquiries - none of this will satisfy them. So, whilst absolutely fighting anti-Semitism, those concessions ought not to be made. This battle, and that's what it is, is not about anti-Semitism (indeed, I'm tempted to say that using British Jews as pawns in intra-Labour wrangles is itself anti-Semitic) it is about the direction of the Labour Party. Only a resolutely socialist direction will secure proper action against all racism and against the capitalism that fuels it.

Incidentally, if we're now being merciless towards MPs who fail to notice racism, I do think that Stella Creasy might want to ask herself whether she is in a position to cast the first stone.

Against the Single Market, for internationalism

So I advocated voting to leave the EU. In some left-wing circles this admission is rather like owning up to necrophilia, but for all that I stand by it. In particular I stand by my judgement that the Leave vote would have caused major upset in the Tory government, possibly bringing it down, were it not for the fact that the Parliamentary Labour Party decided to buy a reprieve for the Tories, deflecting attention from them by attacking the Corbyn leadership and forcing a second election.

Be that as it may, we're now on track for, what people insist on calling, Brexit. Much left-of-centre opinion is now advocating a 'soft Brexit'. This is often taken to involve ongoing membership of the Single Market and Customs Union. To this end the SNP have invited Corbyn to a 'summit' apparently intended to focus the fight for Single Market membership.

It is certain that some Labour members will be tempted to advocate Corbyn's taking up the invitation. They are wrong for at least two reasons.

First, the invitation is a trap, intended to put Corbyn in an impossible position, trapped between Leave and Remain supporters in his own electorate. The proper response to it is to say that Labour are the largest opposition party and don't need invitations from anyone.

Second, the Single Market is not a good thing. Leave aside discussions about free trade and protectionism. Built into the rules governing the Single Market are a barrage of neo-liberal measures which would tie the hands of a future radical Labour government. In particular they would prevent it from seriously reversing the privatisations of the past three decades (the lazy response here, that plenty of EU countries have nationalised railways (say) is beside the point - the issue is about returning railways to public ownership, outside of exceptional - East Coast -circumstances once they have been privatised, as they have in Britain). It is unconscianable that the Labour front bench would want to frustrate its own programme by lining up behind the Single Market.

So far, so good. And Corbyn agrees. But does this mean that Labour should simply line up behind the right-wing Brexiteers? So, and for a tediously left-wing reason, class. For whilst we - the great majority of people - have nothing to gain from the neo-liberal regime of the single market, large sections of British capital, including crucially the City of London, do. And whilst we shouldn't place too much faith in those mainstream economic forecasters who failed to predict the 2008 financial crisis, the 'experts' the British electorate were chided for ignoring at the referendum, we have to realise that disinvestment on a massive scale is likely to be the default result of the UK exiting the Single Market. The consequences of this for working class people would be catastrophic.

This means that the parliamentary left can't afford to be passive spectators in an EU exit process steered by the right. There needs to be an alternative programme, and it has to tackle questions of ownership and control, particularly in the financial sector. This, to my mind, is the only way a Labour government could secure a decent basis for a radical programme and protect the living standards of ordinary people in the next few years.

Nor ought Labour to buy into the lie, which I'm afraid has been encouraged by some on the front bench, that the Single Market and free movement stand or fall together. There is no reason that a UK outside of the Single Market couldn't open its borders to EU migrants and negotiate free movement for British citizens throughout the EU. The Labour Campaign for Free Movement is necessary.

Anthem for a Lost Cause

The papers, fired up by Tom Watson, have been speculating feverishly about Momentum and plots to take over the Labour Party. Such is its commitment to finding reds under the bed that the Independent dispatched a reporter to the organisation's official conference yesterday. Exciting though the tales of revolutionary schemes might be, the truth is pedestrian: Momentum is no longer a threat to anything worth threatening. Destined to become an organising hub for speaker-rallies and phonebanks it is now indistinguishable at any level beyond superficial culture from the great bulk of Labour Party affiliates.

The process by which this has come about has been, for me at least, upsetting on several levels. The best opportunity for the British left in decades has been squandered. In the course of this, people who worked well together at local group level have become enemies: friendships have been broken, bonds of solidarity challenged. The experience has been uniquely unpleasant.

The failure of Momentum both reflects and feeds into a deeper and altogether more catastrophic defeat, namely that of the Corbyn leadership. Weak, and opposed by the greater number of his own MPs, Corbyn strikes a lonely figure on the political stage, undoubtedly making useful contributions, but unable to be effective or command convincing levels of electoral support. The foremost barrier to his leadership was always going to be the PLP, and the best hope of counteracting that effective grassroots pressure on MPs backed up by the threat of deselection. Now that Momentum has turned decisively away from that path, all that remains are appeals to party 'unity' - the brutal truth is that the right don't want unity, but the majority of the left are in danger of humiliating themselves by tacking right in an attempt to achieve it.

If Corbyn is to last and not to be humiliated electorally, the best hope remains with movements outside of parliament shifting political common-sense some way to the left. Perhaps some of the organisation around opposition to Trump's visit could go some way towards this. In any case, I think it is now time for the left to take stock and make a deliberate attempt to learn from its having lost. As I've said before, the things in which we are most lacking are organisation and ideas. If any good comes out the present situation, it will be a renewed attention to these cornerstones of socialist politics.

The brakes of ideology

In almost any situation the odds are massively against any radical political movement preserving its radicalism. History is more littered with stories of revolutionaries turned bureaucrats than is a Saturday night high street with beer cans and vomit. The reason for this downbeat truth is remarkably simple: those who join radical movements are products of the very society against which they are fighting, and the dominant ideas in that society are anything but radical. It couldn't be otherwise if society is to persist. No ruler ever ruled without ruling the minds of his subjects. We rage against our reduced pay packets, our closed hospitals, the deportation of our neighbour, and in doing so we catch a glimpse of how the world could be different. Nevertheless, the news we consume (and what gets to count as news in the first place), the jobs we do, the way we understand politics, the way our political organisations are structured, the very language we speak - all of these constrain our idea of what is possible and push us back towards the old world.

So it is with Momentum. The interesting question about this organisation is not so much why Jon Lansman and his cronies launched their power-grab; the answer is one part preservation of left labourism and one part ego, although in the case of a man who has built his career and reputation around left labourism these are not neatly separable. More deserving of attention is why a significant number of people within the organisation have gone along with him. Thinking back a year to some of the events I attended during Momentum's infancy, it seems difficult to imagine the participants meekly doing the bidding of a white male political hack tucked up in a London office. Demonstrations bursting at the seams, discussions full of energy, political campaigns whose participants were diverse in a way that the left had previously failed to be: these did not look like the beginnings of an organisation of passive doorstep-fodder. The students, BAME campaigners, single issue activists, and many others who joined Momentum groups were acutely aware of the corrosive effects of hierarchy. Why didn't they fight against it in greater numbers when it began to manifest itself in their own organisation?

It is tempting to reply that the absence of political education or a culture of ideas in Momentum was to blame. But this is not a real answer, it just pushes the question back one stage - why did people put up with that? At the start so many of them would sign up to slogans about transforming the world, rejecting capitalism, and much else besides. Now a good number of them won't even demand democracy in their own organisation. In saying this I'm not blaming them, I'm posing a puzzle.

The question how the instinct to resist can be transformed into a force for change is the question of left-wing politics, the rest is detail. It is the question of political organisation, and has pretty much been ignored within the British Labour left. Famously averse to the continental affectation that is theory, many members of the labour movement in this country would respond to the suggestion that they give some thought to the relationship between ideas and organisation as though they were Nigel Farage being offered a croque monsieur. In Britain socialists prefer to get on with things and campaign, rather then spend endless hours with books and debates. In the present context this is akin to complaining that the advice to stop and look at a map is a distraction from driving at precisely the moment your car plunges over a cliff.

The problem of organisation would be especially pressing because of the situation of many of Momentum's members even if the tragic rupture of the most inspiring and popular left-wing movements for a generation didn't deserve analysis. Quite apart from the general pressure towards the status quo I was talking about above, millennials aligned to the political left are pulled in two directions. Faced on the one hand with material attacks and uncertainty on a scale unseen since the end of the Second World War, they nonetheless have grown up under Blairism with a model of politics as a consumer choice between particular brands. To join a political party or a campaigning group is, on this model, to be a brand evangelist. The thought of remaining a member of a party whilst seriously dissenting from its public face doesn't enter into the picture - hence Corbyn's backtracking on freedom of movement  is likely to lead to a small exodus. Nor does the prospect of serious debate within a group like Momentum make sense, still less the suggestion that Momentum act as a source of pressure on Corbyn. The retreat of trade unionism and of any meaningful profile for left-wing ideas makes things worse. There appears to be no alternative to the unstable oscillation between effusive radicalism and conformist politics that can be seen all too clearly within Momentum.

Precisely because it's difficult to see how things could have gone differently, it is important that 'we' - by which I mean the left opposition to the imposed constitution - continue to work with people who don't share our opposition. In the short-term, it is only through showing in practice that a reflective commitment to democratic organisation is not only compatible with practical politics, but feeds into it, that we are going to win anyone over. I don't mean - please don't misunderstand me - that we should accept the coup de facto: my position is that the coup is illegitimate, as are the institutions it has established, and that we should continue to look to the NC and CAC for leadership. But our comrades in local groups are not Jon Lansman. We cannot allow the unity, the energy, and the potential of the past couple of years to be entirely wasted.

That is for the short-term. In the long-term serious thought is required about political organisation, ideology, and education. This means that the Labour left has to do something it doesn't like: think.

The ego of Peter Tatchell

My most persisting memory of Peter Tatchell is from a counter-demonstration against the EDL, who at the height of their strength were trying to march past the East London Mosque. Tatchell's helpful contribution to this was to turn up with a placard denouncing 'far right Islamists'. I thought he was a twat.

Now, 'Islamist' is a worse than useless political description, but I no doubt agree with Tatchell that the people who I presume are his targets - fundamentalist, patriarchal, homophobes - need to be stopped. Politics, however, isn't simply about having the right ideas and saying the right thing. It's about doing this in a concrete political situations with due attention to context. In other words, it's about doing this as recognising that your fellow participants are human beings rather than robots. The importance of this is easy to forget if you are, say, a white man with ready access to the media.

If you're a member of a besieged community under immediate attack from fascists, on the other hand, you might wonder why on earth Tatchell felt the need to do something that might look like qualifying or nuancing his support for you. Perhaps you yourself have some ideas, on homosexuality say, that would fall within the remit of Tatchell's condemnation - plenty of people do (or all faiths and none). Or perhaps you have some sympathy for Islamist politics; given the slipperiness of the term it's easy enough. What might move you more towards Tatchell's type of politics would be a display of unconditional solidarity against the immediate threat, leading to conversations based on the relationship of trust this kind of solidarity can create. The intervention picture above would, if anything, push you in the other direction.

Fast forward to today. Jeremy Corbyn was giving a speech on violence against women. And then this happened:

Now, I think the left needs to be able to criticise Corbyn, and I think the cult of personality that some have for him actually undermines his leadership. I also think Corbyn has been naive on Syria - calling for 'diplomatic' responses, for instance (as though either Assad or Daesh would engage in meaningful diplomacy), and being insufficiently strong in his condemnation of Russian attacks in the region. This is the legacy of the dual influence of pacifism and Stalinism on the Labour left, and needs addressing. But once again, it's not simply a question of what one says, there remains the matters of how and where one one says it.

Questions might reasonably be asked about attacking Corbyn at such a vulnerable time, with his leadership under renewed attack in the wake of the Sleaford by-election result. Admittedly Green supporter Tatchell might not care too much about this: one way the heckling could have been reported is 'Politician heckled by member of rival party'. But above all else, whatever you have to say, is heckling a speech against violence against women the way to do it?

One thing the Corbyn leadership has undoubtedly been good at is giving prominence to issues that are forgotten by mainstream politics. Mental health is one example. Women's liberation is another. I don't know what he was saying about violence against women, since it hasn't been reported, nor whether I agree with it (or whether, for instance, his approach was carceral). But at least he was talking about the issue. Here was a politician for once talking about an issue that affects millions of lives worldwide. And it is being ignored because of Peter Tatchell.

A working hypothesis: what Peter Tatchell cares about is getting Peter Tatchell in the newspapers. And being a contrarian is a good way to do that. Hey, I'm even writing a blog about him.

Lies of the Labour leadership contest 7: There is mass Trotskyist arm twisting

Lie 7:

Trotsky entryists (sic) are twisting young arms in the Corbynite cause.

Bollocks because:

Look, I'll level with you. I'm happy to describe myself as a Trotskyist. For me this has more to do with the necessarily international nature of socialism and the centrality of working class agency to political change than, say, selling papers in a room above a pub. There is, you see, a bit of ambiguity as to what the word "Trotskyist" means. For a certain kind of Labour right-winger, schooled in the ways of NOLS, it means simply "someone a bit more left-wing than me". On this perspective, Trotskyism is more a matter of opposing academies than storming the Winter Palace.

But, on any reasonable understanding of the word, there are not many Trotskyists in Britain. We're talking the low thousands at most. The idea that they are in a position to enter the Labour Party and swing the result of a leadership election is either scaremongering or utopianism, depending on your view on these matters. On a bad day the combined ranks of British revolutionaries-from-below are not in a position to twist a lemon, let alone the arms of hundreds of thousands of impressionable youngsters. This, as I see it, is actually a problem. But Tom Watson really doesn't need to worry.

The idea that Trotskyists are not interested in winning elections is, by the way, absurd. And it is certainly the case that the mass of Corbyn supporters want Labour to win the next General Election, however unlikely the more clear sighted of us might acknowledge that to be. For many of these the aim of such a victory would be the rolling out of policies not out of place in the mouths of Roy Hattersley or John Smith. The Corbyn surge is a product not so much of popular conversion to the doctrine of Combined and Uneven Development as of the relentless rightward shift in Labour Policy since the mid-90s. Others amongst the surgers are products of a younger, more environmentally conscious, libertarian egalitarianism. Again, they have not reached this position as a result of reading The Revolution Betrayed.

Tom Watson is right about one thing. Arms are being twisted in this leadership election. To see this in action, however, you need to look not to dingy meetings on the state capitalism hypothesis but to the columns of the Guardian and the actions of PLP members. Corbyn is not the beneficiary.

Curb your moderation

My previous post, the first in a series, pointed to what I see to be a serious lack on the British Left, an absence of sustained thought. One promising counterbalance to this is the excellent journal Salvage, which I commend to readers as deserving your support.

I say this because what follows was an article written for Salvage. It would need updating in the light of the NEC election results, and the limited time I have available for political writing makes prevents this. In any case, they have far better and deeper reflections than mine to offer. Still I post it here just in case anyone finds it interesting.

Curb your moderation

It is often claimed that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but this is nonsense. The infernal highway is, rather, tarmacked with moderation. If ever a term was ideological in its innocent everydayness it is 'moderation'. There is nothing wrong with asking for a moderate helping of pudding, although even moderate exposure to the oeuvre of Coldplay might prove too much. Support for a football team can be moderate, just as one's drinking at the office Christmas party inevitably turns out to be immoderate. The tempo of a musical performance might be moderate, as might the incline of a hill or the difficulty of an exam question. Then, of course, politics might be moderate. It is, we are left in no doubt, good for politics for be moderate. The moderate shall inherit the earth, although when they do so their plans will be as consistently moderate as their expectations.

Moderation is something for which we should aim. This is particularly the case now that 'extremism' has been appointed as the folk devil de nos jours. Like many a brick in linguistic hegemony it is helpfully imprecise in its application, caring nothing for conventional political distinctions. Daesh are extremists; so are Britain First and Jeremy Corbyn. To this last extremist I will return in due course. Fortunately for the hard-working families of Middle England, the extremist menace does not terrorise our streets and polling booths unopposed. Enter the moderates. These champions of civilisation and rationality are the opposite to extremists, as celestial in their virtue as the latter are diabolical in their vice: contemporary ideology is nothing if not manichean.

To be moderate is to be reasonable, a concept which political philosopher Lorna Finlayson has keenly subjected to critical biopsy in her The Political is Political. The moderates are realistic, prepared to compromise, accepting of the parameters of the possible, and sensitive – within limits – to public opinion. Most schools of thought are blessed with their moderates. Since 2001 moderate Muslims have been much courted by politicians. Meanwhile David Cameron successfully, if somewhat improbably, branded his version of conservatism as moderate. One can also be a moderate Corbynite, supporting the elected leader of the Labour Party, but not in a way that ruffles too many feathers. That, at least is the plan; it turns out that some feathers in the Parliamentary Labour Party are as easily ruffled as Boris Johnson's hair. Those content to rain bombs on the Middle East are, it seems, uncommonly fragile beasts.

For moderate Corbynites the leadership is to be supported and popular policies developed on a broadly social democratic basis. Alliances are to be formed with the centre and old-right in order to secure Jeremy's position, especially given the current composition of the PLP. More generally, however, the gains of the Corbyn surge can only be secured by a gentle approach, reaching out across the breadth of the Labour Party, reassuring centrists at constituency level. Jeremy's tent is to be a big one indeed.

The soft-left

The soft-left, to give the moderate Corbynites another more familiar name, are a force to be reckoned with. Key positions within the Momentum organisation are filled by moderates, including crucially founder Jon Lansman. The general thrust of Momentum, whilst bringing welcome demographic breadth and cultural and aesthetic imagination to the left, has been a cautious one, reinforced at the level of many local groups, and supported by influential organisations like Socialist Action. The case for moderation, however, can also get a serious hearing within parts of Labour customarily thought of as hard-left – the present author's home territory. Here the refrain weaves together the celebratory and the weary in a curious harmony: we have done well, things are immeasurably better, but let's not do too much – we don't want to alienate the centre. Father Dougal McGuire once summed up this outlook in a memorable slogan, 'Careful Now'. As I'll have cause to remark again in a moment, upon analysis the view turns out to be suggesting that we carry on doing what we have been doing for the past two decades. Thus a significant proportion of Britain's organised anti-capitalists at one of the most crucial political junctures for years.

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the case of Ann Black. A veteran of Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC), and frequently topping the poll of constituency members, she has consistently enjoyed the support of the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA), which has been backed by the Party's left. This might seem surprising given Black's less than impressive voting record. At important points, the suspension of Lutfur Rahman in Tower Hamlets and subsequent expulsions of his supporters being a key example, Black did not act as might be expected from a left-winger.

In the interests of fairness it should be frankly admitted at this stage that Black has never claimed to be a left-winger. Her politics are those of a social democratic centre that would have been thought right-wing in the Labour Party of the 1980s: Roy Hattersley is an exemplar of the genre. The left formed an alliance with this current in the early 2000s context of Blairism, from a position of weakness, the cause of defending the basics of party democracy, the welfare state, and trade unionism. It was, however, an alliance born of circumstance rather than deep shared conviction. And so, when Labour's NEC voted in late July to disenfranchise new members of the Labour Party in the coming leadership election, Black supported the move, and subsequently oversaw the suspension of Brighton and Hove District Labour Party. This was too much for the hard-left Labour Representation Committee (LRC), which put out a statement saying that it would never again support Black for the NEC.

Less surprising than the LRC's response was the reaction of some on the Labour left to that response. This has ranged from discomfort to anger; I have witnessed some of it myself. The LRC is putting the election of the CLGA slate at risk, perhaps it is even undermining the Corbyn leadership. Certainly, in order to improve its position on the NEC, the left needs to win the hearts and minds of people who think like Ann Black, and of those who are attached to her as a representative . On the face of it this is odd, given that the majority of those voting in the 2016 NEC election are new to Labour and have probably never heard of Ann Black. However much the flame of social democracy might still burn in terms of widespread affection for the NHS, this passion for Bevanism doesn't generally extend to memorising the names of the doctrine's current proponents. One explanation of the soft-left discomfort would be that people have not come to terms with the new reality and that, when they think of the Labour Party, they still think of the people who went to their CLP bingo evening five years ago.

To grasp why the appeal for moderation over matters like the Black case found receptive ears on the left, we need to understand the Labour left's recent history. To grasp why the appeal was misplaced, we need to understand its present reality.

Politics in an age of waiting

From the mid-80s onwards Labour's left was in decline from the high point of Tony Benn's 1981 challenge for the deputy leadership. Demoralised by the defeat of the Miners' Strike and of left-wing local authorities by Thatcher, it was weakened by the expulsions around Militant and undermined by policy shifts in a right-wing direction. Matters were not helped by the fact that the retreat from Bennism was led by a man who had once been in the left's own ambit. Neil Kinnock was the soft-left candidate to replace Michael Foot. On his shift right, he took a number of left-wing MPs, and rather more party members with him. All of this happened, moreover, in a context of rampant privatisation and marketisation and of the global dominance of neo-liberalism. The left's defeat was finalised and given governmental expression by Tony Blair.

What was the Labour left to do in these circumstances? It was weak, defensive, and without the capacity to act as a significant force in Labour's internal politics. Such circumstances are ripe for alliance-building, and so the CLGA was born. During this period, from the mid-90s onwards, much of the Labour left (outside organised Trotskyist groups, at least) occupied tactically the ground vacated by the former soft-left, hoping to defend the gains of the post-war period, retain Labour's status as a trade-union forces, and rally the remnant forces of labourism. Where Labour Briefing once carried a column called 'Class Traitor of the Month' it now ran defences of the NHS and council housing that would not have been out of place in a Fabian Society publication a decade previously.

This shift in position was perfectly reasonable and, as far as I can judge, correct. Now, Keynes probably didn't ever ask “When the facts change, I change my mind; what do you do?”, but it is a good question, and the problem with the stance of much of the Labour left is that the facts have changed. From the post-Blairite ashes of the Labour Party a phoenix of sorts has risen. New members in their tens of thousands have joined to support Corbyn. Salvage is hardly the place for displays of unqualified optimism, and its certainly true that the new support is politically uneven and fragile. What it is not, however, is full of Ann Black clones. It is culturally disjoint from much of the Labour Party, younger and more ethnically diverse than the standing Labour left. The tactics that kept the flame burning throughout the 90s and 00s should now be cosigned to history. Worrying about how the Corbyn movement relates to the old Labour centre in the context of present Labour politics is rather like obsessing about alliances with Andorra when planning a geopolitical strategy.

The issue is that the moderate-tempered part of the Labour left doesn't see things like this. Whether it is constituency left activists who continue concerned, as they have been for much of their political adulthood, with winning over the wobbly moderates, talking them round over real ale and folk music; or whether it is the slicker, more digitally competent and Zeitgeist sensitive Momentum leadership, many of the people most active in doing left-wing politics in the Labour Party have been formed in the habit of guarding against steering left, for fear of upsetting the moderates and losing them to the Blairites. They have grown used to compromises of a certain sort. Their learned impulse is to suppress their inner socialist at key moments. Old habits die hard in this respect, and it certainly must be difficult to start talking about ownership of the means of production when you've spent the past twenty years talking about footpaths. In any case, it might be the case that some Labour leftists have come to like this way of doing politics. Perhaps the constituency activist enjoys his regular pint with the Gatiskellites; it seems probable that the Momentum leadership like their new found position, even if they political compass has changed surprisingly little. In practice, certainly, it directs them to triangulate centrewards, appeasing parliamentary opinion in the hope of winning reforms.

Unfortunately, accommodating the centre looks like a bad tactic, even in terms of the minimal aim of sustaining Corbyn's position. The Labour centre is irrelevant; what matters is keeping the support and enthusiasm of those of have flocked to Labour to support Corbyn. Often politically inexperienced and idealistic, it is difficult to imagine a thing less likely to appeal to this constituency than buckling under pressure and perceived sell-outs. Still worse are non-instrumental appeals to 'the unity of the Labour Party'. The unity of the Labour Party is as real as the Loch Ness Monster, and were this not the case Jeremy Corbyn would not have been elected in the first place. The Corbyn moment was born of crisis, a political crisis both of working class representation and relatedly of labourism, in Ralph Miliband's sense of that term. There is no possibility of going back to before the crisis.

The phenomenon of Corbynism, which is the closest Britain (or, more accurately, England) will get to a Podemos or Syriza any time soon, far from being a sign of the revival of labourism is a manifestation of its death throes. The old coalition that was the Labour Party, grouped together in the hope of securing reforms favouring the working class, and of winning a mass of their votes on that basis is in secular decline now that capitalism can no longer afford social democracy. The value of the Corbyn leadership is precisely not that he makes possible a return to the post-war consensus like some kind of political TARDIS. This is not a bad thing: the rose tinted spectacles of enthusiasts for social democracy tend not to notice the signs on doors reading 'No dogs, no blacks, no Irish', nor the housewife holding back the tears with valium. Corbyn, however partially and inadequately, realises that some kind of change is needed. He represents a break with the neo-liberal consensus and opens up a space in which people can dream again. This is, of course, threatening to those who see in dreams only a threat to a good night's sleep.

Moderate compromise

The point is not that compromise is not possible, still less that it is not needed. Any politics grounded in reality requires prioritisation, alliance building, and negotiation. This is surely particularly true of socialist engagement with electoral politics under capitalism. The demand that left politicians never compromise, that nothing short of their full programme (whatever that might consist in) will suffice, deserves Lenin's sobriquet 'an infantile disorder' if anything does. The question to be asked is not whether we compromise but to which ends we compromise.

Power at any cost is not a price worth paying. This is as true if the power in question is wielded by Jeremy Corbyn as it is when some Blairite nonentity is justifying their betrayals by appeal to 'keeping Labour in power'. Socialists presented with governmental or party-political power use it, at least in theory, only in order to transform it and so to further the transformation of society itself. They use their platform to promote their own ideas and challenge those which cement the present order. Crucially, they consider their own position a lever with which to strengthen those of the working class and oppressed groups. Attempts to cling to power, moves to compromise, and the formation of alliances are judged by these criteria, and only entered into if they succeed by them. The radical left, unlike the moderates – whether by conviction or habit, does not understand these things as goods-in-themselves, the sign of a mature politics, but as tactics towards the end of a human future.

If the moderate ever do inherit the earth, a prospect which even by the pollyannaish criteria of liberals looks unlikely in the age of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, it might not turn out to be worth inheriting. For here is the ultimate irony: whatever else moderation in its soft-left form might be, it is not realistic. Eagleton has more than once remarked that it is not revolutionaries who are dewy eyed utopians, but those who believe that capitalism can be made to work for the majority of the world's population. We live in a world in which the demand that every child have enough food to nourish them is an extreme one, which cannot be realised within the constraints of the present economic system

In such a world there is an imperative to be an extremist. In Britain, that means to be an extreme Corbynite.  

Alas piffle Jones

The mere fact that something is a truism does not imply that it is true. One example is "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger", a thesis it would be interesting to test out on Polio victims. Another is "the pen is mightier than the sword". I'm not actually aware of any historical instance of a writer taking on a fencing master armed only with a Parker fountain pen, but if this did happen, I suspect it did not end well.

The point is, of course, supposed to be about the power of ideas, and to that extent there is a certain truth in it, which is a comfort to those of us who are far more comfortable inserting semi-colons into sentences than we would be thrusting rapiers into a foe. Amongst this legion of geeks I count myself. Still the kind of ideas with which I am concerned here, political ideas, are powerless in the absence of a political movement, and are only formed reliably in close critical relationship with such a movement. This is, understandably in the wake of the SWP rape crisis, the kind of talk which evokes nervousness on much of the left; yet it is often the most vital maxims that require the most careful handling. Whatever is meant by 'a movement', it has to be more than the whims of some central committee. But that is a matter for another day. When ideas come apart from a movement which they can inspire, and which can test them in the crucible of daily life, then they become lifeless things, phantoms and illusions.

Which brings me to Owen Jones. I am, I should say, angry about his intervention in the Labour leadership contest. The Labour left which gave rise to Jeremy Corbyn, and which is currently being tried in his person, also provided Owen with a hand up to his career as a commentator. I remember well him cutting his teeth in the pages of Labour Briefing and his early political days as a co-chair of the LRC's youth wing. He was born of the movement to which he has delivered a timed slap in the face. It is sometimes said that the Left speaks too easily of betrayal, and there may be something to this. Yet a sensitivity to treachery is the flip-side of valuing comradeship. If you are prepared to show solidarity with me, I should be similarly prepared to take you into account in making my own decisions. This might be uncomfortable talk for those for whom individual freedom, or career, or whatever else is the highest conceivable good. Others of us think that the freedom to shout lonely in the desert is no freedom worth having.

In what does the betrayal consist here? A political writer who views their writing as an intervention, as opposed to, say, a means to a better CV has to consider not only what they want to say but whether this is the right time to say it. There is much that could be said and asked about Corbyn and the movement around him; I have myself been far from uncritical. The time for articulating that is not, however, when the man is seeking re-election as leader of the Labour Party in the wake of a concerted attempt to wrestle the Party back into the hands of the Blairite cabal. There is a question we should ask ourselves before we ask questions of others. That is the question implicit in every picket line, "which side are you on?"; and the answer we give to that provides the context for our subsequent questioning.

Owen has chosen to lay bare his soul on the internet; that is his decision. I have nothing to say about it. Of more interest are the nine questions he asks at the end of his piece - without, one notes, offering much in the way of answers. Marx said that each age asks only the questions which it can answer. He might have added that the way those questions are understood, and for that matter framed, constrains the answers that are considered admissible. Nowhere is Jones' descent into a bland safe parliamentariansim more apparent than here, the sense he gives of what an acceptable answer to each of his questions would look like. I do not consider myself similarly bound by the norms of Westminster nicety, and for what it's worth I think that the primary reason the inhabitants of Westminster's famed bubble (amongst whom Owen must now be numbered) are disturbed by the member for Islington North is that he has refused to play the game of Westminster politics as normal. For all that, Corbyn is still a reformist, and some kind of answer to Owen's questions is probably needed, given that they have now been asked.

Here, off the top of my head, is a first attempt. 

1. How can the disastrous polling be turned around? Well, a few of us have been expressing concern about the polls for a good while. There's a lot that I would want to say about the need for forming a movement that works at community level to form 'public opinion', rather than receive it as a passive given. It is the model of politics as an exercise in customer relations, rather than social transformation that needs to be challenged above all else by any Left movement that takes contesting elections seriously. The point is not that we should not want to win elections, but that we need a new approach to how we win elections.

All of this said, Labour's polling really warrants the term 'disastrous' during the period since the EU referendum and the beginning of the relentless attacks on Corbyn from within the PLP. Outlandish though this idea might seem, perhaps Labour might do somewhat better in the polls if those attacks were to stop.

2. Where is the clear vision? I don't really understand the question. There is a reading of "clear vision" on which the phrase is as oxymoronic as "thoughtful Sun journalist". Vision is the stuff of motivating principles, big ideas, and utopian imagining. Vision is not meant to be clear in the sense that Owen seems to demand. The parable of the Good Samaritan presents a vision of how human beings might live, but it wouldn't necessarily be much use on the doorstep. It would certainly be a brave minister who gave it to a civil servant as indicative of the government's intentions. I think anyone who believes that Jeremy lacks vision in this sense hasn't been listening to him. Much of the British population has a good excuse for this, since much of what Jeremy has said hasn't been reported. If only there was, for example, a left-wing writer with a regular column in a national paper who could help on this front.

Perhaps, though Owen is concerned with policy rather than vision. Some of these have been forthcoming: think about John McDonnell's announcements on matters macroeconomic, providing a clear alternative to the Conservative programme. But there have been relatively few detailed policies, this is true. Is this a bad thing? It depends whether you are happy with what one might call the Thick of It model of policymaking: policies arising ex nihilo from the heads of special advisors and the cars of front bench politicians en route to press conferences. Once upon a time the Left argued that policy should emerge from the labour movement, through its democratic structures. If this is right then it is a good thing that there hasn't currently been much policymaking in Owen's required sense. Here we see the double bind in which Corbyn is being placed: if he doesn't do politics as usual, he is criticised; if he does do politics as usual, what is the point in Corbyn?

3. How are the policies significantly different from the last general election? See answer to previous question. Jones does accidentally touch on the interesting area of economics. Here McDonnell is quite right not concede to pseudo-Keynesian nonsense about the deficit. Yet in the background lurks a more troubling issue: capitalism can no longer afford social democracy. It's not simply a question of "the money being there", as the familiar leftist refrain has it, but rather of whether capital views the money being used for [insert favoured social spending here] is consistent with the reproduction of capital. This was the case during the long (and exceptional) post-war boom; this is in general no longer so. That doesn't mean nothing can be done - here again, I have not been uncritical. McDonnell is not, that criticism aside, not without good ideas - to with redistribution, investment, and productivity. Far more importantly, Corbyn's Labour is committed to setting working people free to fight for themselves, to do what the state can increasingly no longer do. The repeal of the Thatcher era trade union legislation is far, far, more important than anything a Shadow Chancellor can do.

4. What is the media strategy? Once again, the assumption of politics as usual pervades the question. "Most people", that most useful of demographic categories for a columnist with an axe to grind, don't get their news from social media. They get it from the mainstream print and broadcast media. This is probably right. It does not follow that it is written into the grain of the universe that this is so. What if people had more opportunity to talk about politics through the presence in their communities and workplaces of a real mass movement? 

At this point, I feel slightly as though I'm lapsing into John Lennon territory: you may say that I'm a dreamer. So let's allow that what is said in the mainstream media matters. As indeed it does; hence all those books by 80s Marxist sociologists on the press. It is a difficult question what a socialist electoral movement might do to get the best media coverage. Even putting it this way, though, assumes that the traffic between media and politics is one way. The media follow as well as lead; the Scottish Sun at crucial points cannot get away with carrying the same line as its southern cousin - witness the vastly differing attitudes towards the SNP and independence in recent years. Newspapers need to sell in order to survive, and political consciousness determines what they can say and still sell. Allowing even that, there's still some kind of question: how might we get nice things said about Jeremy in the papers? Again I can only express my wish that there was a reasonably well-known left-wing journalist about who could help in this respect.

5. What's the strategy for winning over the over-44s? Well, as the man himself says, pensioner poverty and social care are important issues. And I simply do not believe that the interview Owen describes is the first he has heard from Corbyn on these questions.

6. What's the strategy to win over Scotland? Labour needs a really big rethink on Scotland and the national question. With this proviso, it would be pretty easy to make the ad hominum point that the people who presided over Scotland's reduction to a solitary Labour MP, namely the Labour right are not likely to be the best people to win it back for the party of Keir Hardie. However, it's not clear that Labour needs to win over Scotland. It held a majority in England in 2005.

7. What's the strategy to win over Conservative voters? Liberals can be useful in spite of themselves because, much like stopped clocks, they sometimes tell the truth accidentally. Thus Bill Clinton, "it's the economy stupid". There is good evidence that a good number of swing voters opted for the Tories because they didn't trust Labour on the economy. An economic strategy of the sort McDonnell has in fact crafted is a good start here. The task now is to communicate it, a task from which this leadership contest is an unhelpful distraction.

8. How would we deal with concerns about immigration? It's not because of immigrants that you can't get a hospital bed, a job, a council house... Talk about immigration, but talk about it precisely in terms of its function to deflect attention from the Tories' attacks. To say this is to treat the electorate as agents, who can be engaged politically, rather than as passive consumers to whose "concerns" we need to appeal. I'm terribly sorry, I should say in passing, that Jones' dire liberal baby, the Immigration Dividend, went nowhere, but them's the brakes.

9. How can Labour's mass membership be mobilised? This is the crucial question. I'm not really sure that it's a question for Jeremy Corbyn, though. It's a question for all of us. Over to you, Owen.

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This can't happen again. Support the CLGA slate for the NEC

The events of recent days have made it very clear why it matters that Corbyn supporters get elected to Labour's National Executive Committee. That body very nearly kept the leader off the ballot, and when it voted to include him it did so by means of a secret ballot. It has banned local Labour parties from meeting for the duration of the contest, prevented new members from voting and has introduced a £25 charge, prohibitively high for many, to register as a supporter.

We need a better NEC. So please, if you have a vote, vote for the CLGA slate:

Ann Black

Christine Shawcroft 

Claudia Webbe

Darren Williams

Pete Willsman

Rhea Wolfson

On behalf of the mob

Intimidation in politics is no laughing matter. There are parts of the world where airing your political views will get you thrown in jail, beaten up, or worse. Westminster, it is fair to say, is not normally one of those places.

This makes events in the past 36 hours of Labour politics perplexing. As the most right-wing government in living memory was appointed - Britain now has a Chancellor who holds the general public responsible for the 2008 financial crisis and a Foreign Secretary who wrote a poem about the  Turkish president having sex with a goat* - the theatre of conflict in Labour's civil war moved to the NEC.

The NEC voted to place Corbyn on the ballot without requiring that he seek nominations. This much is good news. What is less fantastic is that this vote was conducted by secret ballot. Corbyn and others voted against having a secret ballot. They were right to do this: NEC members ought to be accountable to those who elect them, and this requires their voting record be public. Accepting this is part of what prominent elected office in a democratic organisation involves: it is not everyone's cup of tea, it inevitably attracts lobbying and criticism. It can be hard. But this is democracy in action: NEC members (or MPs, for that matter) do not hold their position by right. They are put there by members and accountable to members. Lobbying, arguing, disagreeing with representatives is part of healthy democracy. To subscribe to the idea that the people (the demos - those of us NEC right-winger Johanna Baxter called, in solid Burkean conservative tradition, the 'mob') get their input only at election time is not to take seriously what it is for the demos to rule.

This does not mean that anything goes. It hardly need be said that the putting of a brick through Angela Eagle's window is disgraceful, and the sharing of Baxter's own personal mobile number on-line should be condemned. However, there are channels to deal with this kind of behaviour: legal recourses and internal Party procedure. These exceptional cases are being used as cover for a broadening of the understanding of 'intimidation' to block avenues of accountability and undermine the Corbyn campaign. So, the Guardian reports of Baxter:

“A prominent journalist was texting members of the NEC, saying they had to vote for Jeremy, a union general secretary was phoning round members of the NEC telling them they had to vote for Jeremy,” she said. “It is intimidation and he endorsed it.”

It cannot be stated loudly or often enough: the described behaviour is not intimidation. It is lobbying. And it is legitimate lobbying, as Labour's ruling body preprared to meet to make one of the most important decisions that has ever fallen to it. The fact that an NEC member is seemingly traumatised at the thought of a union leader, in particular, intervening in the politics of a party called, well, the Labour Party, is a timely reminder of why we should elected a better NEC this year.

Lobbying is not intimidation. Nor is anything which makes someone feel intimidated automatically intimidation. Peoples' responses can be unreasonable, and the ruling caste of a Labour bureaucracy that have got used to a professionalised model of politics which isolates them from the concerns and passions of the mass of humanity seem systematically conditioned to respond unreasonably to political pressure. Add to this a culture in which a therapeutic cult of universal victimhood has increasingly substituted itself for proper politics and in which disagreement itself is considered pathological - for which someone's much-vaunted right to their opinion is translated as their right not to have their opinion challenged - and you have a recipe for wrapping New Labour in cotton wool and, absurdly, claiming that the political force which rained bombs down on Iraq is a delicate snowflake, in need of special protection.

You have, moreover, an excuse for the further privatisation of politics. Engaging with the leadership election is to be something that happens in the seclusion of one's living room, on the internet, with a solitary vote. Participation in a mass political organisation turns out to be akin to watching porn. The merits of the candidates cannot be debated at Party meetings, because there will be no Party meetings until the election is over. Members are, in a masterstroke of collective passive aggression, being intimidated into not lobbying representatives or arguing on behalf of a candidate, lest they be thought abusive.

There are victims in this country. They will sleep on the streets tonight, or will be struggling to feed their children on the few coins they have for the rest of the week, or are crying alone in detention centres. They deserve representation, and that is why we, the Left, should not allow ourselves to be intimated.

*A gaffe which, given recent allegations about the former Prime Minister, if nothing else demonstrates an impressive amount of Tory chutzpah.

A tale of two leadership contests

So the waiting is over; Angela Eagle has declared that she will stand for the Labour leadership. Unkind commentators might comment that if one of the problems with Corbyn is supposed to be his lack of charisma, viewing Angela Eagle as the solution is like pushing for Wayne Rooney to host Mastermind on the grounds that John Humphrys lacks intellectual gravitas.

This would be to misunderstand what is going on. Eagle is either a stalking horse or a sacrificial lamb - pick your favourite zoological metaphor. Her function is to instigate a contest. There is no thought amongst those who are presently cheerleading her that she will actually end up being the Labour leader. Instead, the plan is that some equally dull, but better known and supposedly member-friendly figure - Alan Johnson or Tom Watson - will be the benefactor from the coming bloodletting.

All of this is actually pretty boring. There is little to say about it that hasn't already been said. Eagle's statement makes it clear that she doesn't understand the Labour Party as extending beyond the bounds of the PLP. The same can be said about the widespread bluster about 'Party unity' from within the PLP. The present composition of the PLP is a boil that needs lancing for the Corbyn leadership to prosper; but this has always been the case.



More fascinating is the Tory leadership race. The party of Family and Order not only use women to bring about leadership contests, they are even open to having a woman as leader. Whatever one might say about the authoritarian Teresa May or the gibbering idiot Andrea Leadsom, they are undeniably both women.

This was enough to get Guardian columnists excited and have people chattering about 'feminism'. It is good, they argued, to have women in prominent positions. To be indifferent simply because one such position is that of being Tory leader is to be unflinchingly dogmatic, to prioritise other concerns over women's liberation. Similar sentiment lurks behind the insistence that Margaret Thatcher should be admired as a 'strong woman' or campaigns to get more women onto the boards of FTSE100 companies.

Admittedly, the feminist credentials of one of the candidates have taken a bit of a knock since it became clear that she believes having had sex with a man and having functional ovaries makes her better suited to being Prime Minister than her opponent. Yet there are more fundamental reasons to worry about the trend towards seeing examples of liberation amongst the ranks of the powerful. For one thing, it's not clear where the limits lie: would the election of Marine Le Pen as French President be a step forward in the war against sexism? But more fundamentally, whenever you hear that something is 'good for women', you should ask yourself which women?

It is perfectly true that the relative absence of women from the Tory benches and the boardrooms is a product of patriarchy. Tory MPs are disadvantaged because they are women: however that disadvantage expresses itself and is experienced in a way that reflects their typical class, racial, and religious backgrounds, and their prominent position in a right-wing political party. Compare their situation with that of a lone mother, going without food to feed her children on ever-reducing benefits. Would the ascendence of either May or Leadsom - both enthusiasts for austerity - be good news for her? What about a woman who gets paid less for doing the same work as her male colleagues? A black woman facing deportation? A Muslim woman victimised by anti-terror laws? Should a lesbian, bi, or transwoman rejoice at the election of either homophobe?

The power feminism that celebrates the Tory leadership contest allows basically reactionary political ideas to clothe themselves with a bit of post-60s diversity. In this respect it is analogous to campaigns for Muslim leaders or gay CEOs. It provides an easy option for those who want to feel the world is changing for the better without having to exert any energy to make it do so, as well as for those who fear that if the world actually did get better this might not be good news for their bad balance.

This should not be news to anyone vaguely on the left. If anything it is the kind of question which marks out the boundaries of the left. Most people, however, have no fixed politics of any kind. And there is a debate to be had with them about how best issues around gender, race, and sexuality are addressed. And here the argument has to be made and won that the only way to make progress in these areas in a way that actually makes life better for the bulk of the population - rather than holding out the largely illusory hope of 'making it' to a place amongst an elite - is as part of a movement that recognises the way these concerns intersect with class, and which organises and campaigns on the basis of all of them.

Which is why, of course, the battle for the institutions of the labour movement matters.

There are many, many, more of us than you: 172 face thousands

Jess Phillips once remarked that if Corbyn messed up she would stab him, not in the back, but in the front. In spite of Corbyn not having messed up, spin and bluster to the contrary notwithstanding, 172 Labour MPs this evening carried through on that threat.

The battle begins now. It is not over, it has not even begun.

There are, you see, two models of democracy coming head to head. For one, basically a form of quasi-democratic elitism, parliamentarians need to be comfortable above all else. They are the experts, they are the ones who do the hard work, and they need to feel good with their leader. If their confidence goes, then so does the leader. The alternative, a democracy with a meaningful demos, was the motivating thought between those trade unionists who at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th century organised to get working people represented in parliament.

Democracy is nothing more than a hollow slogan, the uninteresting five-yearly choice between identikit media-performers, unless it is grounded in mass movements, connected to workplaces and communities. The direction of communication and accountability within a party, for this model, is from the bottom up. The members of the Labour Party choose the leader of the Labour Party. And, let the 172 think about this as they lie down to sleep tonight, it is the members of the Labour Party who choose Labour MPs.

If a model of democracy that gives the disenfranchised a sense of control over their own lives doesn't win over, in the form of a fighting, organised, growing, locality-based Labour Party, linked to revived trade unions and social movements, there are other supposed solutions on offer. They are from UKIP, and at the fringe Britain First. They don't care very much about democracy of any sort.

So get ready for a fight. I'm no doubt preaching to the choir here, but if you haven't already done it:

• Join Momentum (and go to its events)
• Join Labour (and go to meetings)
• In a few weeks, vote for the CLGA candidates for Labour's NEC

We need to keep our nerves. The strategy will be to dent your confidence. It is not about policy, they will say, but Corbyn can't win. Journalists and academics will be wheeled out to confirm this diagnosis. Commentators will use the word 'realistic' a lot. You will be made to feel like an oddball or a mischief-maker for supporting Jeremy. Do not fall for it. We are right, they are wrong.

This is the fight of our lives. Let's win.

There are weeks when decades happen

There's nothing like a popular vote to remind you where power lies in society; spoiler - not with popular votes. Thus, the hands of any British government wanting to operate within broadly mainstream economic constraints were today tied, not by the electorate, but by the ratings agency Standard and Poor, who cut the UK's credit rating. Expect others to follow. More generally, those most curious of creatures known as 'the markets' have not responded well to Thursday's Leave vote.

It would have been possible for a determined Leave campaign with a co-ordinated economic plan, prepared to stray beyond both mainstream constraints and the interests of capital, to manage a Leave vote in a way that didn't promise widespread poverty and public spending cuts whilst keeping the, uncertainty averse, forces of global credit capital and those irksome markets sufficiently content to spare it the coup de grace. However, that is not the Leave campaign we had: that was a monstrous concotion of xenophobes, British nationalists, economic reactionaries, and oddballs: an assembly of grotesque misfits wrapped in the Union Jack, who could only appeal to anyone on the basis of a widespread discontent, disaffection and desperation in search of an outlet. They had no plan, other than to 'Take Back Our Country' and 'Make Britain Great Again', all the while defending the sectional interests of a narrow part of British capital with no sense of a broader picture.

There is much still to say about the campaign, the EU, and the British economy. There is even more to say about what the referendum result shows about class. And there is still more to say yet about the petulant arrogance of much liberal reaction to the result. A strand of opinion in broadsheets, academia, and the Waitrose-shopping end of social media thinks that what last Thursday showed was that the swinish multitude should not be trusted with big decisions.

I will write about those things at some point. More urgent than any of them is the foul upsurge in open racism that has followed on the referendum campaign and result. Make no mistake, it wasn't that these things caused racism. Britain is, whatever the panglossians who inhabit Guardian columns might imagine, a racist society through and through. However, racism often lies buried - waiting nervous and Gollum-like in the shadows, consumed with self-hatred and unwilling to show its face. That it does is one of the greatest political achievements of recent decades. Yet, it's still there: hidden behind the remark that 'the area has changed', disguised as patriotism (if the two can ever be disentangled), implicit in a choice of friends. Once mainstream political discourse gets racialised, as it was by the immigration-focus of both main referendum campaigns, racists gain confidence. Things usually unsaid are spoken aloud. Combine this with the jingoistic upsurge that followed the result, the general flag-waving feel of Jubilee year, and most noxiously the ever-present threat of the far-right, and you have a toxic mix.

Jo Cox was its victim. There have been others. Since Thursday, racial abuse soared. Eastern Europeans were a particular focus: with cards reading 'go home Polish vermin' distributed outside a Cambridgeshire primary school. In West London, a Polish cultural centre was attacked. In East London two Polish men were beaten unconscious. The list of incidents goes on and horribly on:

But at least there's a political party in Britain, committed to equality and anti-racism, that will make the case strongly against racism, and build a cohesive movement in solidarity with its victims, right? Enter the Labour Party, glorious and ready to do battle against injustice and bigotry. Well, ordinary party members have been doing this. The PLP, however. Well, as the far-right roars and the economy falters, their priority is obviously to try to topple a popular leader who has increased Labour's share of the vote and presided over modest, but real, by-election successes.

The line is, of course, that Jeremy's weak leadership was responsible for the Leave vote. This is nonsense on several levels. Never mind the fact that Corbyn is not a weak leader - although this would not appear obvious to those whose idea of political leadership looks as though it has been cobbled together from a few evenings watching The Thick Of It - but that the bulk of the PLP don't want to be led by him, or by anyone with political ideas remotely similar to his. Never mind the fact that Corbyn was not in a position to persuade key Labour constituencies to vote Remain: one of Blairism's besetting sins is the reduction of politics to campaigns and soundbites, whereas all of those Leave votes in the north-east of England were about decades of feeling forgotten, being stripped of hope, crushed economically, and mocked culturally; not matters that can be set right with a broad grin. Never mind the fact that the only thing that would have been achieved by Corbyn going in all guns blazing on behalf of Remain would have been a Scotland-style meltdown in Labour support in parts of the north of England. None of this matters.

It is irrelevant because the coup is not actually about the referendum campaign or Corbyn's leadership style. It is about politics. A sizeable chuck of the PLP, Blairite clones imposed during the years when Labour had the imagination of Jeffrey Archer and the conscience of Dr Crippen, do not want a left-wing leader. You understand nothing about New Labour until you understand that it is about making the Labour Party permanently safe for capitalism. Most of its warriors, not being the most cerebral of souls, would be a bit hazy about what the word 'capitalism' means, preferring instead to wax lyrical about 'a dynamic, modern, economy'. For sure, New Labour is about winning elections, but not at any cost. Their lord and master Tony Blair let the cat out of the bag in this respect when he said that he would not take the 'route to victory' if it were a left-wing one.

In actual fact, the quisling tendancy in the PLP may not have to choose between power and principles. It is not inconceivable by any means that we will see some kind of National Government on a somehow-managing-to-Remain basis - composed of Tories, Lib Dems, and an SDPesque rump of Blairites - after an autumn election. Whether the split will come before or after this election will depend on the right's tactics, and whether they have the front to let unions and party activists pay in time and money for their election. (Incidentally: this scenario should be anticipated and pre-empted. Bold thinking about Scotland, up to and including the possibility of an electoral pact with the SNP in exchange for the promise of a second independence referendum, should be considered).

We cannot stop the right being right-wing. Nor can we make them loyal to the leadership: the strategy of a 'kinder, newer, politics' has been tried, in good faith, and has failed. The co-ordinated spotaneous resignations of shadow ministers throughout today put that beyond doubt. Now is the time to fight for the Labour Party. This, to be sure, should not be at the expense of defending communities against racism, nor at that of arguing for an alternative strategy on the economy. However, the remaining strangehold of the 1990s on Labour in parliament is a barrier to doing both these things. Words like 'accountability' and 'deselection' have now to be uttered openly. At constituency level the left has to plan so that the Labour Party in parliament in future looks more like the Labour Party at large.

The immediate priority is to support Jeremy. He is under attack, facing a vote of no confidence as I write. See Momentum here for a petition, and keep an eye out for more ways of offering support. These are desperate times within the Labour Party. Yet there is some hope. Here is Parliament Square this evening: