Labour: Let Corbyn stand! Labour left: Stay in there!

Keir Starmer used a speech welcoming the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s (EHRC) end to its monitoring of the Labour Party for antisemitism to rule out Jeremy Corbyn standing as a Labour candidate in the next election.

In Labour’s rules, Starmer has no power to making that ruling. But selections in the last 18 months have shown the right-controlled National Executive (NEC) doing effectively whatever it likes. Previous guarantees that candidates with enough branch or union backing would automatically make longlists or shortlists have vanished. Former MPs have been prevented from standing. Some candidates who have shared just one social media post deemed problematic have been excluded.

So the NEC will exclude Corbyn from the Islington North shortlist, and members won’t be allowed to choose him as the Labour candidate. Corbyn indicated in his statement following Starmer’s speech that he will at least attempt to seek the nomination. Some say he will run as an independent if he is barred from nomination.

Corbyn is right to say that the decision should be down to Islington North Labour party members, and that he is entitled to stand. Corbyn should be reinstated as a Labour MP.

Whether he should stand as an independent, and what he would represent by doing so, demands more consideration. His statement after the publication of the EHRC report was crass, wrong, and as if calculated to get the whip removed. He should and could still apologise for it.

Torn

Islington North Labour Party being torn apart by its members being expelled for backing Corbyn against an imposed Labour candidate would not be a good coda to the Corbyn years. The left must move on from Jeremy Corbyn.

Momentum has signalled that it will not back Corbyn against Labour, but organisations including Momentum, CLPD and others, have made the reinstatement of Corbyn a shibboleth. For them, over the two and a half years since the EHRC report, it has become a red-line for whether Labour remains an organisation for socialists to be members of.

That misses the point. We should fight the bureaucratic exclusion of Corbyn and thousands of other members. But individuals, or even large constituency groups, quitting the Labour party in this political down-phase, as some tens of thousands have already quit and dispersed, only helps the clique of Blairite revivalists standing behind Starmer. That Labour remains the party with formal ties to the wider labour movement, and that we can win space to fight within it, is decisive.

The EHRC report published on 29 October 2020 had institutional weight to push the Labour party into dealing with a genuine problem of antisemitism. But a focus on disciplinary matters and structures could never resolve the political problem of antisemitism on the left. Workers’ Liberty has long argued that education, free debate, and discussion is the way to overcome the simmering antisemitism which has been widespread in parts of the left since the 1980s and flooded into Labour with the Corbyn-era “returners”. Neither the adoption of the IHRA definition nor the conclusions of the EHRC report could be the final word on the matter. And Labour’s continued focus now on “training” rather than education continues to hamper efforts to get political clarity on the issue of antisemitism.

Happy

The EHRC is now happy that Labour has taken the steps it recommended, particularly to have an independent complaints system walled off from the Leader’s Office and with third party legal advice. For individual members the new processes continue to mean many summary expulsions, at times just for social media likes, without due process.

For Starmer and the Blairites around him, expelling or losing thousands of members is positively desirable if it remodels the party away from the Corbyn years. The expulsions and proscriptions include Workers’ Liberty and others vocal against antisemitism long before Corbyn became leader or Starmer became prominent, but the “disciplinary” focus in dealing with antisemitism fits neatly into the general purge.

As we said when the EHRC report was published in 2022, “the issue of antisemitism cannot be tackled without also having a sustained drive to educate the left on the actual history and politics of the region. The Labour Party policy is (rightly) for a democratic ‘two states’ settlement in Israel-Palestine, and despite all the noise and fury no section of the post-1980s left in the Labour Party ever tried to challenge that. We need to nail the argument down”.