We are the real Conservatives. Keir Starmer, 12th May 2023
We’re all Thatcherites now. Peter Mandelson
I try to undermine Jeremy Corbyn every single day. Peter Mandelson
It is 27 June 2016, nine and a half months since Corbyn addressed his first Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) meeting as leader. MPs are determined to ensure this will be his last. There are so many of them crammed into Committee Room 14 in parliament this evening that Corbyn’s staff have to wait outside in the corridor. In the room it is hot and cramped. The MP Stephen Kinnock says it is ‘like being in a pressure cooker.’ He is not just referring to the temperature.
The long-anticipated coup against Corbyn is in full swing. MP after MP stands up to attack their leader in ‘the most contemptuous terms possible, pausing only to text their abuse to journalists waiting outside,’ according to Abbott.
‘You are not fit to be prime minister,’ the widely unknown Bridget Phillipson tells Corbyn.
‘It’s time to be honest with yourself. You’re not a leader. You need to go for the sake of the party,’ remarks Ivan Lewis.
‘You are a critical threat to the future of the Labour Party,’ chimes in Jamie Reed.
You’re not uniting the party. You’ve got no vision. The only person who can break this logjam is you by resigning,’ pronounces Chris Bryant.
You’re not just letting the party down, but the whole country,” declares Labour’s only Scottish representative, Ian Murray. When he claims — without evidence — that his staff in Edinburgh have been ‘intimidated’ by members of Momentum, another MP shouts ‘Scumbags!’, Murray tells Corbyn to ‘call off the dogs.’
The branding of party members as dogs is echoed by Jess Phillips, who characteristically finds a way to make it all about her. ‘On social media I’ve been accused of taking Zionist money and other things,’ she says. ‘These are your people. Ian’s asked you to call off your dogs. Yet you won’t do anything, you won’t resign.’
The tirade continues for over an hour. Nobody talks about Corbyn’s politics; everything is focused on his person. It is ‘a bloodbath, the worst I’ve ever seen,’ comments one parliamentarian; ‘brutal,’ says another. A non-Corbyn supporting MP has ‘never seen anything so horrible’ and feels ‘reduced to tears.’ Peter Mandelson, at the scene of the crime as ever, says there has been no meeting like it ‘in the history of the Labour Party.’
As the finale, Margaret Hodge and Ann Coffey propose a motion of no confidence in the leader, to be conducted the following day. ‘This is not just about the party members who gave you a mandate a year ago,’ Hodge says. Indeed, MPs do not want it to be about them at all. Hodge explicitly belittles them, saying the number of members is dwarfed by the 9.3 million Labour voters whose interests MPs alone appear able to interpret. ‘I would urge you Jeremy to show the basic decency I know you have and step down,” she says. “By that simple act you will have made the most important contribution you can make to the Labour Party.’ Hodge receives rousing applause.
With the meeting finally at an end, Corbyn leaves the claustrophobic environment of Committee Room 14, navigates the dark, Gothic corridors of parliament, and emerges into the mid-summer evening sun. He can hear the roars and chants of a crowd across the road in Parliament Square. From one centre of power, a private gathering of a couple of hundred people in a closed room, he is heading to another, a public rally of thousands under the open skies. Alex Nunns, The Candidate
In 2015, something strange happened in British politics. A movement no-one expected. With a leader no-one predicted. And the start of the biggest political witch-hunt of the 21st century. Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie *****, Platform Films 2023
‘Antisemitic and a racist.’ ibid. The Jewish Chronicle front page
Nobody can fail to see that this was a concerted, orchestrated campaign. ibid. Moshe Machover
Senior officials in headquarters were actively working against Labour. ibid. Ken Loach
Starmer: A dangerous deceitful man who will do anything. ibid. woman
In 2017 the supporters of Jeremy Corbyn came close to putting him into Number 10. But within three years his party had been crushed at the polls, and Jeremy and his grass-roots movement apparently dumped in the wastebin of history. What happened? And what destroyed the Corbyn project? And has it been destroyed? ibid. Alexei Sayle
This is a story of injustice and the destruction of democracy. And deception on an industrial scale. ibid. caption
But for the establishment the sudden rise of Corbyn was terrifying. ibid. Sayle
But from the start Jeremy Corbyn’s biggest threat was from his own MPs. ibid.
Corbyn didn’t win the election but he got the largest increase in the share of the vote of any Labour leader since Clement Attlee in 1945. ibid.
The Smear that Stuck: ‘There is a big lie everywhere and one of the big lies of our time is the Labour Party being infested with Anti-Semitism.’ ibid. Machover
The Anti-Semitic smear hurt Corbyn but it didn’t take him down. ibid. Sayle
10th July 2019 BBC Panorama transmitted, ‘Is Labour Anti-Semitic? reporter John Ware. ibid. caption
‘Instead of that we went on the defensive. We tried to say we’re sorry.’ ibid. man
Behind closed doors, there was a secret war against him, being fought by his party’s own paid officials. ibid. Sayle
In London’s Ergon House a secret team were channelling thousands of pounds of campaign funds to the right-wing MPs of their choice. ibid.
In the end it was not paid officials who brought Corbyn down, but an MP [Starmer] who said he was on his [Corbyn’s] side. ibid.
I want to pay tribute to Jeremy Corbyn who led our party through some really difficult times. ibid. Starmer
Peter Mandelson, the architect of New Labour, has said he is working every day to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. ibid. caption
Was the colourless Starmer really an undercover saboteur? A sort of establishment spycop who infiltrated the Corbyn Project just to bring him down? ibid. Sayle
When Starmer became Labour leader in April 2020, many believed his pledges to continue Corbyn’s policies and united the Party. Starmer set out to wipe every trace of Corbyn from the Party. ibid.
Thousands of Labour Party members were witchhunted. ibid.
When QC Martin Forde at last published his findings in July 2022 it was by no means the total whitewash. ibid.
The Labour Party under Starmer will abandon its core idealism and principles, and it won’t even gain tactical advantage. It will be a party which gives no-one a reason to vote for it, and no-one will. In fact. Vote for it. David Graeber, 2nd April 2020
The right of the labour movement, to be honest, has no ideas of any compelling quality, except the instinct for short-term political survival. It would not know an ideological struggle if it stumbled across one in the dark. The only struggle it engages with with any trace of conviction is the one against the left. Stuart Hall
Pious references to the Labour Party being a ‘broad church’ which has always incorporated many different strands of thought fail to take account of a crucial fact, namely that the ‘broad church’ of Labour only functioned effectively in the past because one side – the Right and Centre – determined the nature of the services that were to he held, and excluded or threatened with exclusion any clergy too deviant in its dissent. Ralph Miliband: Class War Conservatism & Other Essays