Corbyn may help bring the far right to power
The Sunday column: Muslim communalist politics will backfire
The German communist leader Ernst Thälmann attacks the moderate left rather than the Nazis in 1931. The Nazis took power in 1933 and, on Hitler’s orders, he was shot dead.
As is traditional for the British left, the launch of a new “socialist” party last week was a shambles. The co-leaders, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s former leader who was expelled for refusing to accept responsibility for antisemitism, and Zara Sultana, who also lost the Labour whip, are not what you would call “comrades” – or even mere “allies”.
Indeed, one wonders whether they are friends at all.
In early July, Sultana announced that she would be co-leading the new party. Despite being leftists, who say they loathe the Murdoch press, Corbyn’s supporters leaked to Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times that he was “furious” with Sultana for trying to hustle him into promoting her.
But hustle she did, and on Friday Corbyn agreed that she could be a co-leader. Their party appeared from its website to be called “Your Party”. But when journalists called it “Your Party” Sultana snapped that it had no name yet.
If you want to laugh at them – please don’t.
We are not seeing a comic attempt to revive the dead ideology of socialism, but a thoroughly modern example of the power of communalism.
The Party with no Name will be a communalist Muslim party with Corbyn’s white far left attached. “Communalism” is usually a racially charged label. People talk disparagingly of Muslim communalism or Hindu communalism. But be under no illusions: the communalism with real power in the West is the white communalism that Trump and Farage represent.
And Corbyn and his bickering friends will boost its reach in the UK
Let me explain how.
First, I need to acknowledge that the Hamas massacres and Israel’s destruction of Gaza have created the UK’s first authentically Muslim political movement in Westminster.
It’s been coming for a while. I wrote a book about how, at the millennium, there was no better vindication of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis than the dismal fate of the radical left. Abroad, people who once believed in socialism, worked for the homophobic and misogynist clerical regime in Iran, as Corbyn did. Meanwhile, having lost faith in the white working class at home, the radical left would go along with any Muslim movement however right-wing or obscurantist as long as it was anti-West.
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This strategy helped George Galloway win seats from Labour as early as 2005. But he was still a “white saviour” who collected Muslim votes.
All that changed at the 2024 general election. Buried amid the fluke landslide the British electoral system gave the Labour party were results that exposed the strains on the left.
When Corbyn was Labour he excused Hamas and Hezbollah, and his equivocal attitude helped lead to the left’s appalling defeat in the 2019 election. Appealing to hardline Muslim voters was not a great tactic.
OK, said Starmer and the new Labour leadership, we will stand firm against antisemitism – as Labour always should have done – and we will also assert Israel’s right to defend itself after the Hamas massacres.
That was fine in theory, but for too long in practice it looked as if Starmer was giving Benjamin Netanyahu and the extreme right in Israel a free pass.
In Leicester, Blackburn, Dewsbury and Birmingham, “Gaza independent” Muslim candidates took safe Labour seats. Politicians like Jonathan Ashworth, who would have played a leading role in the Labour government were out of Parliament. Other leading Labour figures most notably Wes Streeting and Jess Phillips survived, but only just.
The left and the Muslim vote: Can’t win with it, can’t win without it.
In Parliament Gaza independents are leftish on economics but – to no one’s surprise –right wing elsewhere. The MPs who supposedly represent the basis for a new left opposed Labour’s plans to charge Value Added Tax to private schools because they hit Muslim schools.
Leftists for private schools? So it seems. Meanwhile, I would pay good money to listen in to the new party’s debates on the trans issue.
Assuming the new party holds together, it can only help the radical right.
Indeed, one way of seeing Corbyn’s career is as the right’s best friend.
He and his faction opposed the EU, so as Labour leader he did not campaign hard against Brexit during the 2016 referendum. The right won, in part because of his negligence, and began pushing this country towards the anti-migrant sentiment which dominates politics today. Not content with that, Corbyn handed Boris Johnson, of all people, a near landslide in the 2019 general election.
The various factions that supported Corbyn have never held him to account for his multiple failures. To them he is a living saint, and his supposed virtue held wildly different interest groups together.
That act is tiring now. But the political scientists Matthew Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts plausibly argue that hatred of Israel could replace the Corbyn personality cult as the motivating force for a new party
Just as the mythology of Corbyn’s career had political utility in the past, so does the Left’s enchanted image of Palestine bring shape to the same chaos of incompatible interests today — ranging from religious sectarians to social justice campaigners. Zarah Sultana’s gamble seems to be that “Gaza” might replace “Jezza” as the conceptual glue of the Left’s coming political coalition, with Sultana becoming the new bearer of the “right side of history”. Instead of vague homilies to peace and justice, Sultana offers a more precise and direct appeal: “We are all Palestine Action”.
I can see it happening. And I can see the consequences,
For the first time in history the right-wing vote in the UK is split. The battle between the Conservatives and Farage’s Reform presents a huge opportunity for the centre-left to retain power into the 2030s.
Corbyn and Sultana aim to destroy that chance. As they have made clear, Keir Starmer is their enemy. They and their allies in the Green party want to take seats from Labour or split the vote and let Farage win.
I could point to the example of the German communists, who on Stalin’s orders fought the moderate left in Germany rather than the Nazi party, and thus helped Hitler to power in 1933.
But I expect too little of the far left to blame it for anything.
It’s better to hold Keir Stamer to account.
He expelled Corbyn and other far leftists from Labour and can hardly blame them for starting a new party. The accusation that he gave Israel a free pass is not wholly fair, but he certainly gave that impression. In politics impressions are all and in this case they produced a Muslim backlash.
But that is not the most important criticism of Starmer.
Labour ought to be able to make a positive case for supporting this government. And for now, Starmer cannot do that. Unless that miserable position changes, we are heading, not to a future of Corbynist leftism, but to the white communalism of Nigel Farage.
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