Why Labour Never Learns

And my experience of expulsion

Manchester Cotton Mill Workers, 1862

Sep 29, 2021

What’s happening in the Labour Party should concern us all. The film director Ken Loach has written about the collapse of democracy as Keir Starmer strengthens his grip. [1]

I am not captivated by the minutiae of Labour in-fighting except this feature: leftwing Jewish members are being persecuted — this following the ousting of Jeremy Corbyn for supposedly running an antisemitic party.

So what’s going on? Even if the accusations were politicised or fabricated, how can a group called Jewish Voice For Labour now be purged? [2]

It is because the Jewish left embarrasses the leadership by its mere existence. They are living proof that the charge of antisemitism — in a party that has always had a powerful Jewish component — is used as a lever to enforce conformity by globalist, not internationalist, forces.

During Event Covid it is notable that the left has been subdued, even as workers see their livelihoods torn from them and are forced to accept invasive, experimental genetic treatments on pain of unemployment or exclusion. Instead of providing criticism of lockdown and vaccine passports, Labour’s leadership has urged the government to crackdown harder and faster.

In short, Starmer is part of that strange synchronized voice that appeared in almost every country in spring 2020, pursuing the same measures, errors and reversals in lockstep. It is becoming clear that the issue is not the influence of the Zionist lobby except in so far as those who control Israel are part of a trans-national, globalist elite.

Starmer’s membership of the Rockefeller Trilateral Commission is only the tip of the iceberg.

The mere fact that he is a former Director of Public Prosecutions makes him part of the same Mi5-vetted security apparatus that brought Theresa May to the prime ministership. Not a problem in itself but it depends what you are trying to do.

Anyone proposing a radical reshaping of the British political and economic status quo should have walked out of the party the moment Starmer was proposed as a candidate. You might as well have made Theresa party leader.

Then there’s his DPP tenure which covered some appalling decisions or failures to act involving Jean Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson, Julian Assange and Jimmy Savile.

How can Jewish lefties now find themselves accused of antisemitism and far more likely to face investigation, discipline or expulsion from the party than non-Jews? They’ve even appealed to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, submitting a document: How Labour’s Claim of Countering Antisemitism Has Resulted in a Purge of Jews. [3]

Infighting? That is a symptom not a cause. Jews were used. By Zionists, by the British political and security establishment, by globalists in preparation for Event Covid to neutralize the party.

Political parties have become an appendage of the state. Their dependency makes them untrustworthy channels for the popular will as they can easily be diverted or manipulated in their desire for power.

Depending on the force of the incoming tide or its ebb, talent is raised up and put down. Every cause or group identity is vulnerable (especially identity) that finds itself in favour (useful for a time) but eventually subjected to retrosynthesis: reduced to its components and neutralized.

Peacetime politics

I have been expelled by the Labour Party NEC and have the framed letter as a sad trophy. I experienced the brick wall of uncommunicative stolidity. The lack of opportunity to explain myself or to get valid answers. I was expelled for failing to expel and disavow the same broad church that the Labour executive claimed to support in the mid-1980s. It was not a lack of political orthodoxy but my lack of obedience.

Many years ago I ran the Labour Club at a prominent British university college. In our student group of more than a hundred were members who flirted with Trotskyite militants and the Revolutionary Communist Party (more statist and spooky than you might think). There were Ashkenazi Zionists and liberal Manchester Jews and the odd member of Opus Dei.

Despite my own firm beliefs I maintained a wide range of contacts — I had contacts in the Conservative Party and, suitably observant, attended the Monday Club one week and a gathering of the Militant Tendency the next — clearly I was too obvious to make a spy. But if you are not interested in people, why politics? Your analysis is petrified and fossilized, however much you ‘go by the book’.

I worked hard to build the membership and, in a strange way, it reflected my own diverse interests — academics flirting with the British stirrings of postmodernism, cultural theorists hooked on world music and the eclectic pop scene of the 1980s. We were Catholics, Jews, atheists, South African communists, internationalists, peace activists, Irish republicans, kibbutzniki and conventional municipal Labourites who would go on to have careers in local government.

It was not all talk — not by any means. I roped colleagues into hours spent designing leaflets and running them off the Gestetner machine so that we could distribute fistfuls on every demonstration. There were many: over Thatcher and the miners, anti-apartheid and Mandela, Reagan-Bush intervention in Latin America, and Trident missiles and CND. I joined the student newspaper and used it to promote those causes. And though I was an execrable speaker back then, I organized audiences with the best: Micheal Foot, Tony Benn and the venerable Fenner Brockway.

Somebody was watching very closely because when the demand came to purge the club they had every i dotted and t crossed — yet the club’s work to build a movement mattered not a jot. As in the corporate world, what mattered were smoke-filled rooms and obedience. Soon after I was called to the dean and threatened with expulsion: Woah… such coordination between Labour Party and a conservative college of war studies.

Just as Americans will wonder how the FBI and CIA could hire as directors former avowed communists (James Comey and John Brennan respectively) I would later marvel at the intelligence agencies’ blindness to politics. Even in the Cold War they had no ideology. What matters is obedience.

Wartime politics

One of the reasons the social democrats and communists were so easily defeated by the national socialists was suspicion of each other’s motives. Starmer and the establishment have not only divided the Labour Party but neutralized its most dedicated activists.

As a secular institution it has a problem, for secularism is not only a matter of religion. The origins of the Labour movement are deeply cultural and spiritual, which is why two of its most powerful currents have been Chrisitian and Jewish socialists seeking to paint the patterns of their own social organization on a bigger canvas. This is true whether you look at the Scottish industrialists, or English Workers’ Institutes or the lessons of solidarity of the Welsh miners or of Irish resistance or look at it from the traditions of scriptural study, praxis and debate that inform Judaism. Today, if Labour was capable, it would be learning from its Indian and Pakistani membership for there is much to be gained.

Instead, Labour is in thrall to social cliques. It battles with a history of paternalist vote-buying among Asian communities — though the evidence of vote rigging by corporate and intelligence interests has put that into context — while the apparent power of the Zionist lobby has brought the party to heel.

Labour did this to itself. It abandoned its origins as a mass movement rooted in diverse communities. It became a Party of the State, submitting to vetting by establishment interests, in which the test of fitness to lead is obedience and compromise. Such a party cannot challenge the status quo. It cannot imagine futures, communicate visions nor appeal to varied yet distinct cultures.

Bureaucracy is not, itself, the problem. The party was always thus. Conferences attract people who like procedure. The technique of beating your opponents is often to bore them into submission. For every inspiring Brockway that lights up the hall there are a dozen lookalikes who would happily name their child Plenary Sessions in fond memory of a turgid conference.

Labour members are left to debate the merits of this versus that potential leader in the comment section of the newspaper Skwawkbox Org, investing their hopes in one individual, only to be disappointed or betrayed, yet forever expecting a different result. The conclusion follows: the party system is the problem.

[1] Ken Loach, The Guardian, Sep 2021 — Democracy is dead in Keir Starmer’s Labour

[2] Jewish Voice for Labour

[3] Skwawkbox, Aug 20201 — New JVL evidence to EHRC – left Jewish leaders over 200 times more likely to be targeted by Labour than other