The Morning Star, the Greens... and Lib-Dems

Earlier this year the Communist Party of Britain issued a statement calling for tactical voting against Reform. This, they explained, could involve a Labour vote but only where the candidate is "left". The criteria by which the CPB would bestow the title "left" upon a Labour hopeful was not specified.

The statement was clear, however, that Labour candidates "who have backed Starmer's most reactionary policies can expect no support from the Communist Party" - effectively ruling out a Labour vote in many situations.

Support for non-Labour candidates would be "considered" where they advocate "progressive taxation, public ownership of the utilities, wealth redistribution, radical curbs on carbon emissions and the unconditional abolition of Britain's nuclear weapons", which reads very much like a set of criteria designed to allow support for the Greens and, in Wales, Plaid Cymru.

And, indeed, the CPB-controlled Morning Star hailed both Plaid's victory in the Caerphilly by election and the Greens' success in Gorton and Denton.

So it was no surprise that on 7 May, the editorial declared: "Where elections are cast as a choice between voting Reform UK or a credible alternative, voters are showing an acute sense of responsibility" [i.e. vote tactically to keep Reform out].

Perhaps more surprising was the practical conclusion they drew, with apparent approval:

"this means variously a vote for the Greens, for Plaid Cymru or the Scottish Nationalists, and occasionally for Labour or Lib Dems."

Voting for the radical petty-bourgeois Green Party may be just about understandable for socialists frustrated by Starmer's right wing agenda. But the bourgeois nationalists of Plaid and the SNP (especially as the CPB has always opposed nationalism in Wales and Scotland)? And the Lib Dems? The incoherence and opportunism of the Morning Star and its political masters the CPB at election time continues unabated.

The Greens and antisemitism

Perhaps surprisingly, the Morning Star took a thinly-veiled swipe at Zack Polanski's (literally) unbalanced response to the antisemitic stabbings in Golders Green in its editorial (1st May): "Swift police action to apprehend and overpower the attacker was clearly necessary. An online row over whether this involved excessive use of force has, at times, exposed a worrying indifference to the fact that the suspect had just seriously injured two people and was still armed, with the worrying implication that the attempted killing of two Jewish men was not after all that serious."

In another sign that the paper is now taking antisemitism seriously (in contrast to its record in the past), it has not so far given any coverage to Paul Holden's Double Down News broadcast Zack Polanski & The Weaponisation of Antisemitism: Same Tactics, Different Target.

Holden's book The Fraud was given extensive and very positive coverage earlier this year. It was in some ways a useful book, exposing the machinations of Morgan McSweeney and the Labour Together clique in undermining Jeremy Corbyn and replacing him with Keir Starmer on a false prospectus. But the book's central weakness was its dismissal of the extensive evidence of antisemitism in Labour under Corbyn as simply a plot by Labour Together and pro-Israel groups like the Jewish Labour Movement against Corbyn and to prevent criticism of Israel. The Fraud contains very little real evidence for this claim.

Now Holden has gone further in his Double Down News broadcast and claimed that allegations of antisemitism in the Greens under Polanski are simply the same "contentious" (he never quite says false) allegations that Labour Together and pro-Israel forces "hatched" (he never quite says fabricated) against Corbyn.

Holden, once again, fails to discuss or even describe, the actual contents of the alleged antisemitism. He ignores, for instance, several widely-reported posts from Green candidates, including these (which have earned some of them official disavowal by the Green Party):

Sabine Mairey (Lambeth): "ramming a synagogue isn't antisemitism, it's revenge";

Saiqa Ali (Streatham): over a picture of a Hamas attacker presumably on 7 October 2023: "Resistance is freedom";

Feda Shahin (Bournemouth): Jeffrey Epstein's island "is a symbol of the headquarters of the Zionists who are trying to control the world";

Tina Ion (Blakelaw & Cowgate): called for "the killing of every Zionist".