Still Going Down A Storm

Many of those who are outraged at the storming of the Capitol said no such thing about Ukraine. But nor did they about Venezuela or Bolivia, and no one is mentioning those. Yet those, too, involved genuine, flag-waving Nazis. We are oddly blind to Latin America, with which we have longstanding ties, and which is the continent of origin of sizeable and growing communities in Britain. Those two connected facts have been crucial to the emergence of an autonomous Left, initially in London and increasingly throughout the country.

Today was a big day in the rise of the autonomous Left, with the launch of Jeremy Corbyn's Project for Peace and Justice. It has made a very good start; only satirically could one attempt to imagine that either Boris Johnson or Keir Starmer might address tens of thousands of people, or be supported in so doing by figures of the weight of Ronnie Kasrils, Yanis Varoufakis, and the real, live, actual Noam Chomsky.

It is mildly Greeny, but we can work on that; Corbyn has been a friend of the coalfields a lot longer than he has been a friend of the well-meaning posh kiddies. The rest is excellent. Except that it is wrong to campaign against News UK TV and against GB News. Instead, you should be trying to get on them. It is not as if you get on Sky, or ITN, or the BBC. If you did not want the gigs, then others of us on the Left would gladly take them.

Corbyn has a more sophisticated appreciation of Latin America than any other member of the House of Commons, just as he has a longer record of support for communities of colour than any other MP of any colour, and just as he has a standing within the liberation struggle of the Global South that is unmatched by any other British politician, living or dead. That was why race was central to his first defenestration, and will be central to the attempt at his second defenestration.

The Labour Party was founded to ensure that the spoils of the British Empire were dispersed among certain inhabitants of Great Britain. Once, at least in theory, that was the working class, especially the industrial working class. Today, it is the public sector middle class. And today, the Empire means the practically unregulated state within the state that is the City of London, together with its network of tax havens under a decidedly hands off version of British sovereignty, laundering the money of all the worst people in the world.

Corporations that are clearly American to the naked eye prefer those arrangements to the relatively robust regulatory regime on Wall Street. Out of the savings, they make eye-watering donations to both of the main political parties in the United States, thereby guaranteeing themselves the use of the military force for which they do not condescend to pay by paying their taxes in full, if at all. Labour therefore supports the projection of that force in those interests, including tag-along British participation in that projection.

But in the present century, Britain has become unique in its superdiversity, with people from everywhere, found everywhere. People living permanently in Britain have roots in every inhabited territory on the planet, and such people are found in every village in Britain. Every ward contains voters with political ties to the liberation struggle of the Global South, that liberation being from the regime to which the City and its tax havens are fundamental. Though old, white and upper-middle-class, Corbyn has brought those concerns into anything like the political mainstream for the first time.

The only thing that has frightened the powers that be as much as that has been Corbyn's popularity among young men. Alongside a collapse in male employment that had in any case largely happened by the time that they came along, the defining experience of their own politics has been to have grown up under Governments, of all three parties, that have harvested young men in wars with a sheer pointlessness that had not been since 1918. Hence their attraction and attachment to a politician who has opposed every single one of those wars, just as he had opposed the collapse in that employment.

To put a stop to all of this, we were harangued for five years that the principal form of racism in this country, a form with which this country was apparently awash, was directed at a tiny number of mostly affluent white people who either adhered to a religion to which anyone might convert, or were descended from practitioners of that religion.

They were not stopped and searched. They were not trapped in substandard housing. They did not have horrendous health outcomes. They were not far more likely to be remanded, even as children. They were not far more likely to be arrested, to be charged, to be convicted, and to receive much stiffer sentences, for the same offences as their peers. Their examination grades were not scandalously under-predicted on an colossal scale. And so on. Yet somehow, racism was all about them. And somehow, it was all Corbyn's fault.

Corbyn did far too little to counteract this rubbish. But he is still here. In the end, what did for him was not any of that, but his capitulation to Starmer over Brexit, a capitulation that, enthroned as Leader, Starmer himself has now reversed. If Corbyn were to turn the Project for Peace and Justice into a membership organisation at a rate of, say, one pound per year, or even one pound per month, then within two weeks it would have more members than the Labour Party.

And Johnson is reduced to suggesting that if Conservative MPs did not abstain on tomorrow's motion about the proposed cut to Universal Credit, then Corbyn's supporters might storm the Palace of Westminster as Trump's had stormed the Capitol. They have never done anything remotely like that, but the view that they were of that stripe has been assiduously cultivated since the summer of 2015 by the people who are now back in control of the Labour Party. In reality, of course, Corbyn has not only condemned the storming of the Capitol, but he also condemned much the same actions, by much the same people, in Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ukraine. Did Johnson? Did Starmer? Well, there you are, then.