Livingstone let-off betrays Labour values, say 100 MPs
Driven by the hard Left, the party has no chance of power but is still capable of spreading destruction
A HUNDRED Labour MPs attacked their party’s failure to kick out Ken Livingstone yesterday as he gave a series of defiant interviews defending his comments that Adolf Hitler had supported Zionism.
Tom Watson, the deputy leader, and Jon Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, were among senior Labour figures who said they were “ashamed” Mr Livingstone had not been expelled.
Scores of Labour MPs attacked their own disciplinary panel for giving Mr Livingstone a two-year suspension rather than a lifetime ban.
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, attacked his old ally’s “grossly insensitive” comments and backed a second disciplinary hearing into related comments.
However Mr Corbyn faced criticism as he also said Mr Livingstone should “contribute to our party’s work in trying to win elections”.
Theresa May will use a speech kickstarting the Tories’ local election cam- paign today to accuse Labour of “betraying the Jewish community” over the row.
“It could not be clearer that the Labour Party is now a long way away from the common, centre ground of British politics today,” she will say.
The 100 MPs signed a statement which read: “This week the institutions of the Labour Party have betrayed our values. We stand united in making it clear that we will not allow our party to be a home for anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism. This was not done in our name and we will not allow it to go unchecked.”
Labour has developed a unique skill under Jeremy Corbyn. No matter how bad the situation it finds itself in, somehow it contrives to find a way to make things unimaginably worse. Tuesday night’s suspension of Ken Livingstone is a case in point.
The former mayor of London was found guilty as charged on all three counts of bringing the party into disrepute. It’s bad enough for Labour that one of its most emblematic figures should ever have behaved so badly as to have had to face a disciplinary panel. But at least, having found him guilty, the party had the chance to demonstrate the truth of Mr Corbyn’s promise that it would have zero tolerance of anti-Semitism. It chose to do nothing. His “suspension” is a misnomer; he remains a Labour member. He simply cannot run for elected office, which he had long ago forsworn.
Labour somehow managed to find a way to decide that his words and actions had brought the party into disrepute and that at the same time those words and actions were entirely fine for a party member. Mr Corbyn’s subsequent statement yesterday was telling. He doubtless thought he was being clever in announcing that the party’s National Executive Committee will look at Mr Livingstone’s subsequent behaviour. But nowhere will you find any condemnation by the Labour leader of the decision to allow Mr Livingstone to remain. No wonder its deputy leader, Tom Watson, says he is ashamed of his party.
Ashamed but surely not surprised. Because Ken Livingstone’s “nonsuspension suspension” is of a piece with the recent trajectory of the Labour Party and is merely the latest demonstration of how it has, to all intents and purposes, died.
In January, Labour dropped all action against members of Oxford University Labour Club who had been accused of anti-Semitism. The party’s own inquiry under Baroness Royall had recommended disciplinary action. But it decided to ignore her and to rule, in effect, that the right of members to be bigots was more important than the right of the victims of that bigotry to be protected from it. In that context, Tuesday’s decision was to be expected.
Labour has long been a coalition between moderate social democrats and extreme hard-Left elements. The balance between them has never been written in stone – even when, as when Tony Blair was leader, it seemed to be. When the moderates are in charge, Labour is a serious party of government. When the hard Left has its moment, the party faces cataclysm.
In the Eighties, Labour lost its mind and the likes of the Bennite Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and entryist groups such as Militant were in the ascendancy. By a mere whisker, 50.4 per cent to 49.6 per cent, Denis Healey held off Tony Benn in the 1981 contest for deputy leader. Had he lost, the party might well have collapsed – not least when the breakaway SDP offered an alternative vehicle for the mainstream Left.
But under Neil Kinnock that mainstream fought back, defeated the extremists and laid the foundations for Mr Blair to create New Labour. The difference between then and now is that Mr Corbyn won. In the 1980s, instead of Militant et al flooding in, the formal apparatus of the party was used to kick them out.
Today, by contrast, Momentum – the Corbynite Praetorian Guard founded after Mr Corbyn’s victory – is gaining in strength with the active help of the party leader and his henchmen. And they are injecting a poison into Labour’s bloodstream. Moderates are hounded and treated as traitors, while the Corbynites spread their bile.
Ideas which have for decades been confined to the margins – such as the notion that Jews are somehow different – are increasingly part of Labour’s new normal.
Take the hard Left’s obsession with Jews, which could not have been more clearly demonstrated than by Ken Livingstone’s incessant determination over the past year to drag Hitler into interviews at every opportunity.
Usually this is couched in the language of anti-Zionism and supposed pro-Palestinian activism, with the idea that “the Rothschilds” control the world economy or that “Zionists” control the media and refuse to allow the Palestinian cause a say. (This was exactly Mr Livingstone’s point when he blamed the Jewish Chronicle for his woes, by supposedly distorting his words in an attempt to silence him.) In the decades since the defeat of the Bennites, the hard Left has been an irrelevance. You would see them at party conferences with their plastic carrier bags and fliers for obscure fringe meetings. No one gave them a moment’s thought because they were powerless.
But they never went away. They stuck to the revolutionary playbook, plugging away in their tiny coterie, waiting for their moment. That moment came when Ed Miliband changed the rules for the Labour leadership contest and opened up the electorate. Tens of thousands joined… and here we are today, with Jeremy Corbyn as leader and, as a consequence, Labour effectively dead as a party of government.
This is the bigger backdrop to the Livingstone fiasco. The hard Left was given its chance and seized it. And they will not let go, even if that means – especially if it means – protecting their own, such as Mr Livingstone.
Those who think that terrible poll ratings will give the hard Left pause for thought entirely misunderstand the revolutionary mindset. For the hard Left, revolution comes in stages. The first is to seize and then to hold the party. Hence the establishment of Momentum. Then wait, wait and wait until the next moment comes along – as it did over the leadership.
This is, of course, not just about having more Left-wing policies. It is about a wholly different party, which is no longer a coalition between different wings but which is purged until it is totally committed to revolutionary socialism.
The hard Left may be triumphant within the party but in the real world that triumph is a disaster. Labour’s poll ratings are beyond awful and get worse with every passing week. To that extent, Labour is now a zombie party. It is a corpse – it has died as a vehicle for power – but is still capable of wreaking havoc and destruction, as it has done this week to the cause of decency.