Corbyn’s accidental revolution has put the old Stalinist gang in charge

Labour’s radicals have been waiting for years for a chance to put dangerous ideas into practice

stupendously good at – they are now faced with the actual business of framing policy and engaging with the reality of national events. Result: total breakdown.

This goes beyond the two immediate topics of heated discussion: the unforgivable anti-Semitism scandal and the crazy attempt to defend Russian interests in the spy poisoning incident. But it is important to see that those two dramas are linked to a larger, consistent theme. They both connect directly to the crucial relationship between this new hard Left incarnation that has replaced Labour as we knew it, and the old Communist party. There is a reason why the Corbybistas’ journal of record is the Morning Star and not, say, Socialist Worker – the newspaper of the most powerful Trotskyist organisation in Britain. Jeremy Corbyn himself, as well as his closest tribunes, give their most privileged personal interviews and statements to the paper that began life as the Soviet-funded Daily Worker – the official organ of the British Communist party – and which, even as the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, proclaimed the glories of the “revolutionary reforms” in East Germany that were sure to revitalise the German Democratic Republic.

It takes true dedication to be so tirelessly out of touch with reality. As recently as 2005, long after the whole Soviet show had crashed, the Morning Star described itself as maintaining its “political relationship” with the Communist Party of Britain. Message to all those gullible youngsters who think they are re-living the idealistic Sixties: those of us who invented the New Left back then were sworn enemies of Soviet communism and of its fellow travellers in the West (who obligingly loathed us in return). There were innumerable species of youthful fissiparous Leftist factions but they were either Trotskyist or Maoist – nobody wanted anything to do with the Stalinist empire of labour camps and the continued vicious suppression of Eastern European dissidents. That was why it was called the New Left: because it repudiated the Old Left of Soviet-sponsored communist groups. So the wide-eyed students who chant Jeremy Corbyn’s name today are embracing something that was regarded as archaic and discredited a generation ago: this is a perverse revival of a position that no one with any knowledge of political history should think worth considering.

There is a connection here to the recurrent anti-Semitic theme with which Corbyn’s Labour seems peculiarly unable to come to grips. This tendency is not – repeat not – simply attributable to hostility to Israel or its government. The roots of anti-Semitism in the communist heritage go back much further. Stalin had described the Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans” before the state of Israel existed. He persecuted Jewish writers within Russia for what he saw as their dangerous individualism, which threatened disloyalty to the coercive Soviet regime. I have more than a theoretical acquaintance with these events because they were what caused my grandmother – who had been a Communist trade unionist in the Jewish rag trade in America – to become disillusioned with the party. My grandparents had arrived in Ellis Island at the beginning of the last century, fleeing from the pogroms. But they maintained ties with their family back in Russia who were convinced that the revolutionary socialist cause,

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion to which so many Jews were committed, would transform the old home country. Stalin put an end to that delusion but most of my parents’ generation of Jewish Americans remained on the liberal Left, associating Republicans with white Anglo-Saxon, antiimmigrant snobbery.

They would not recognise what Corbyn’s Labour is saying and doing now as liberal or tolerant. Jewish liberals in Britain who have traditionally supported Labour must surely have similar doubts. Where is the party that they joined in a spirit of communality and social fairness? Answer: it has become something else. It is now in the process of being hollowed out and taken over by the very force that we all thought had become extinct: the ruthless, oppressive, illiberal menace of revolutionary socialism (otherwise known as communism), which persecutes its critics and threatens those who will not conform.

To those of you in the Labour party who might hope to fight, fight, and fight again – as a previous leader of yours once put it – to save the party you love, please take a word of warning from a person who has some experience of this: you scarcely know what you’re up against. You are well-meaning amateurs fighting relentless, brutal professionals. The gang that succeeded in ousting you (much to their own surprise) may have no idea where this is all going to end or even how to cope with the day-to-day reality of mainstream political life, but they sure as hell aren’t going to let go of the levers while they decide, and they won’t take prisoners. They’ve spent a lifetime waiting for this moment.

‘The wideeyed students who chant Jeremy Corbyn’s name today are embracing something that was regarded as archaic and discredited a generation ago’