Jeremy Corbyn announced his Peace and Justice Project (PJP) in December 2020, with a mission statement that included: “To bring people together for social and economic justice, peace, and human rights, in Britain and across the world… [It] will work with labour and social movements and provide platforms to those campaigning for change for the many, not the few.”
Corbyn’s more cultish supporters expressed disappointment that (in the words of the Canary website) he “hasn’t launched a new political party in the face of the continuing demise of the Labour Party. But what this new project will hopefully do is work beyond political party lines and foster cooperation and change outside of established democratic processes. And that surely must be a good thing.”
The PJP officially launched in January 2021, and since then… nothing. Until Saturday 18 November when the Project held its first international conference.
According to the Morning Star ’s Roger McKenzie this “important conference… covered some of the key challenges facing socialists… in a time of more than 30 armed conflicts across the globe that have been largely been sponsored or have at their core the promotion of the interests of multinational capitalism and its lap dogs… when we are essentially already in a new cold war”
McKenzie’s somewhat Mao-oid phraseology is highly appropriate: to judge by his roll-call of the “amazing array of speakers” a “campist” view of the world in the tradition of Maoism and Stalinism (Stalinism in the broader sense, as distinct from the personal cult of Stalin) was bound to predominate — together with a distinct whiff of antisemitism.
Truth be told, Corbyn has never had a firm grasp of international matters. He was more Trotskisant, shall we say, from the 1970s to the early 1990s, but since 2005, when he started writing a weekly column for the Morning Star , he has mostly been content to follow the lead of the campists of the Stop the War Coalition and the various Stalinists or Stalinoids he surrounded himself with while he was Labour leader (who bear at least some of the responsibility for his floundering incoherence on both antisemitism and Brexit).
Some of the speakers on 18 November were unobjectionable and at least one — Chris Smalls of the US Amazon Labor Union — well worth listening to.
But let’s look at some of the others:
• Len McCluskey, the former Unite leader who claims never to have witnessed antisemitism in the labour movement and who has suggested that Mossad may have known about and turned a blind eye to Hamas’s 7 October pogrom
• Sevim Dagdelen, one of the ten German MPs supporting Sahra Wagenknecht’s new anti-immigrant, pro-Putin “red-brown” split from the German Left party
• Lowkey, the “rapper and activist” whose song’s lyrics include “the Zionist lobby... nothing is more anti-semitic than Zionism... Israel is a terror state, they’re terrorists that terrorise... It’s about time we globalised the intifada... Israel equals misplacement and ethnic cleansing... curse every Zionist... Shame on Rothschild/ Between them the monster they created has gone wild... ”
• Ken Loach, who has made some fine films but in 1987 directed Jim Allen’s antisemitic play Perdition (which he continues to defend) and in 2017 failed to give a straight answer to a question about whether holocaust denial was acceptable (“history is for all of us to discuss”).
Perhaps the most worrying and certainly the most significant speaker was Vijay Prashad, founder of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and chief correspondent at the media outlets Globetrotter and Peoples Dispatch , all of which are funded by Neville Roy Singham, a millionaire tech magnate now based in Shanghai who controls a network of campaigning groups, news organisations and supposed “charities”dedicated to spreading Chinese government (i.e. Chinese Communist Party) propaganda and denying reports of Chinese human rights abuses.
Ukraine
In a November 2022 report, Intelligence Online revealed Singham was discretely funnelling money to various groups aimed at lobbying against any western support to Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, under the guise of anti-war efforts.
Prashad, whose Globetrotter and Peoples Dispatch articles are frequently republished in the Morning Star , is a central part of Singham’s operation and clearly has a fan in Roger McKenzie who describes him (in the paper’s PJP report) as “the great Vijay Prashad”.
Could it be that Jeremy Corbyn, the PJP, and perhaps even the Morning Star , are now the “useful idiots” of Neville Roy Singham?