Open Letter to Jeremy Corbyn - The Time Has Come to Break With the Labour Party

Labour has Expelled Anti-Racists & Anti-Zionists Whilst Welcoming Islamaphobes, Zionists & Misogynists 

It is time to Create a New Party of the Working Class and Oppressed

Dear Jeremy,

There are very few things in life, apart from our leaving of it, which we can predict with any certainty. But of one thing I am sure. You will not be a Labour Party candidate at the next election.

When you said that the political establishment, from the Sun to the Mirror, the Times to the Guardian, was waging an all-out war against you you were right.  There was nothing that they feared more than an opponent of neo-liberalism, NATO and imperialism. You stood for hope and change which is why, at the 2017 General Election you nearly won despite the wall to wall opposition of the British Establishment.

The tragedy, and it is a tragedy, is that you tried to appease those who are unappeasable. Instead of fighting back you adopted their narrative. You failed to realise that when a wild animal attacks, you need to shoot it not offer it your arm in the hope it spares the rest of you! This was your clear failure.

Almost from the start you sought to placate your opponents. When 97% of the constituencies supported Open Selection of MPs in 2018, it was you who persuaded Len McLuskey to break the mandate of Unite and vote against it. This was the pivotal moment when the Corbyn Project came to an end.

How did Starmer and the Right regain control of the Labour Party? Was it by arguing that we should transfer even more money to the super rich? That we needed to wage a few more wars? Did Wes Streeting argue, as he does now, that we need to privatise the NHS even more when it was privatisation that led to the deaths of thousands of people from COVID when outsourcing of PPE meant that there no stocks available to the NHS when the pandemic broke?

Of course not. Instead they said that you were an ‘existential threat’ to British Jews. Suddenly the Islamaphobic and racist Labour Right donned the clothes of anti-racism. Jews (but not anyone else of course) were the victims of racism.

You above all people should have known that ‘anti-Semitism’ is the only response of apologists for Israel’s Apartheid State. They have nothing else to say when defending the murder of children .

When you were accused of anti-Semitism, instead of realising that this was because of your support for the Palestinians you kept repeating that you weren’t anti-Semitic. The Zionists weren’t concerned about your attitude to Jews. You repeated the nonsense that if you deny you are anti-Semitic then you are part of the problem.

Those who accused you of ‘anti-Semitism’ were the same people who, like Tom Watson, had defended Labour MP Phil Woolas when the High Court threw him out of Parliament after a campaign based on ‘making the White folk angry.’

Tom Watson, who declared that he wouldn’t rest easy until every last anti-Semite was expelled, wrote that ‘I’ve lost sleep thinking about poor old Phil Woolas and his leaflets.’ These were the same people who introduced the Hostile Environment Policy under Alan Johnson.

If anti-Semitism had been a genuine problem in the Labour Party then Watson, Margaret Hodge and co. wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.  When Hodge proposed all-White housing waiting lists in Barking the BNP sent her a bunch of flowers.

Historically anti-Semitism has been the home of the Labour Right not the Left. When Ramsay MacDonald came back from a visit to Palestine, the guest of the Labour Zionists, he wrote:

‘The rich plutocratic Jew (who) is the true economic materialist is the person whose views upon life make one anti-Semitic. He has no country, no kindred. Whether as a sweater or a financier, he is an exploiter of everything he can squeeze. He is behind every evil that Governments do and his political authority, always exercised in the dark, is greater than that of Parliamentary majorities... He detests Zionism because it revives the idealism of his race.’ [1]  

Do you know who printed this garbage? Poalei Zion, which now calls itself the Jewish Labour Movement!

In September 1942 the Coalition Government received pleas to admit Jews from Vichy France which 2 months later was overrun by the Nazis. The Home Secretary was Labour’s Herbert Morrison, the grandfather of Peter Mandelson. What was his reaction?

Lesley Clare Urbach wrote that:

Fearing that Britain would be inundated with appeals to take in refugees if the government allowed humanitarian reasons as a basis of admitting Jews to Britain, Morrison advised the cabinet to reject these requests.

 You might think, given all the nonsense about ‘left’ anti-Semitism by the Labour Right and the ex-left AWL that it was the Left that consigned Jewish refugees to death in Auschwitz.

In October 1942 Eleanor Rathbone MP and Lord Astor asked Morrison to issue 2,000 visas for Jewish children and the elderly in Vichy France. Morrison rejected the request stating that ‘anti-Semitism was under the pavement and that if we let in large numbers of Jews this would cause an anti-Semitic outburst.’

Fear of ‘anti-Semitism’ was apparently the reason for consigning these people to Auschwitz, despite nearly 80% of British people supporting their entry. In other words the anti-Semites had a veto.

But this was not the real reason. When told that they were in danger of being exterminated Morrison responded that ‘of this fact he was not sure.’ In other words Morrison was a holocaust denier.

Morrison feared that after the war these Jews ‘might be an explosive element in the country, especially if the economic situation deteriorated.’[Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, pp. 115-116]. Morrison’s real fear was of Communist Jews .

I was the first Jewish member to be expelled from the Labour Party. I was suspended because I had compared Israel’s refusal to allow Jews and non-Jews to marry to Nazi Germany where, under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews and non-Jews could not marry. I was expelled for calling Louise Ellman MP a supporter of Israeli child abuse for defending the Israeli army’s treatment of children. Apparently I had ‘shamed’ her even though the woman is shameless.

Instead of defending me and all the others who were being targeted you did the opposite. On page 306 Labour’s Leaked Report read that:

Jeremy Corbyn himself and members of his staff team requested to GLU that particular antisemitism cases be dealt with. In 2017 LOTO staff chased for action on high-profile antisemitism cases Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth, stressing that these cases were of great concern to Jewish stakeholders and that resolving them was essential to “rebuilding trust between the Labour Party and the Jewish community”.

Well we were expelled or forced out of the party. Did you rebuild trust with the ‘Jewish community’, i.e. the Board of Deputies and JLM?  Of course not. They went on to demand more victims like Chris Williamson MP, Pete Willsman etc.

I have fought racism and fascism all my life.  I’ve even written the only book on the fight against fascism in Brighton. Marc Wadsworth introduced Stephen Lawrence’s family to Nelson Mandela, which helped build the campaign that led to the conviction of his murderers.

Jackie Walker, a Black-Jewish anti-racist led the campaign to stop Nigel Farage being elected in Thanet and Ken Livingstone pioneered anti-racism work in local government yet, as Marc said, you threw us under the bus until there was no one left but you.

Of course there were a few anti-Semites in the Labour Party. It would be surprising if there weren’t in a party of 600,000. But there were a hell of a lot more Islamaphobes that no one was concerned about.

No doubt Labour has a few paedophiles in its ranks but does anyone say that Labour has a ‘problem’ with paedophillia? Of course not. If the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign had been in good faith then they would have turned their attention to Boris Johnson, whose novel 72 Virgins spoke of Jewish media moguls with big noses rigging elections.

Did it never occur to you that the demonstration against ‘anti-Semitism’ that the Board of Deputies organised outside Parliament in March 2018 had nothing to do with anti-Semitism? In its 260 year history the Board has never organised an anti-racist demonstration.

In October 1936 when Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists threatened to march through the Jewish East End, over 200,000 Jewish and non-Jewish workers rose up to stop them. In what became known as the Battle of Cable Street the fascists were repulsed. What was the attitude of the BOD? It told Jews to stay at home, keep their heads down and do nothing.

In my book, Zionism During the Holocaust, I describe how, when news of the deportations of Jews, from Slovakia to Auschwitz, broke in the Spring of 1942, the Federation of Czechoslovakian Jews organised a demonstration and asked for the Board’s co-operation.

The Board refused. Their demands ‘went against the grain’ of their passive attitude to anti-Semitism. The Federation held a public demonstration and a rally anyway. The Bishop of London, two Christian MPs and the Czech Interior and Rehabilitation Ministers spoke, but not the Board. Both the Secretary, Abraham Brotman, and the President, Selig Brodetsky, refused to attend.

Corbyn on what he likes in Israel

Yet the Board, which refused to organise demonstrations against the Nazis and which opposed the Boycott of Nazi Germany, was only too happy to organise a demonstration against you. Is it not obvious that the only concern of these Zionists was support for Israel?

Only two days ago Naomi Wimborne-Iddrissi, the Secretary of Jewish Voices for Labour, was expelled from the Labour Party for having committed the crime of getting elected to Labour’s NEC. Today if you are Jewish you are 5-6 times more likely to be expelled from the Labour Party. This is what Starmer’s pledge to ‘tear out the poison of anti-Semitism’ has amounted to.

Not only is Starmer a ‘Zionist without qualification’ i.e. a racist but he is a liar and fraud who said anything to get elected Leader. Like all scoundrels he has wrapped himself in the Butcher’s Apron. No sooner was he elected than he dumped the 10 pledges on which he stood. His treatment of you is a shocking act of duplicity but why the hell did you appoint him in the first place? Were you unaware of his role in the persecution of Julian Assange? His first vote in 2015 was to abstain on the Tory Welfare ‘Reforms’.

The removal of the Whip from you, the blatant gerry mandering and fixing of reselections such as Ian Byrne and Sam Parry, the racist and misogynist hounding of Apsama Begum, whose former husband has been allowed to wage a campaign of harassment against her, to say nothing of his support for Khalid Mahmoud, a front bencher who was found by an Employment Tribunal to have unfairly dismissed Elaina Cohen for whistleblowing about the corruption of her boss tells you everything you need to know about this legal shyster.

I don’t say that you were the main culprit in the defeat of the Corbyn Project. That accolade belongs to Jon Lansman of Momentum and John MacDonnell with a supporting role by Owen Jones.

200,000 people have left the Labour Party. The Left has been defeated and the Right are determined to ensure that never again can a socialist be elected as leader of the Party. Democracy has been abolished, left-wing pressure groups proscribed and anti-Semitism openly used as a factional weapon by the right. At the same time Islamaphobes like Trevor Philips, who believes Muslims are a ‘nation within a nation’ are readmitted to Starmer Labour.

There isn’t a piece of paper that you could put between Starmer and Sunak. Indeed sometimes they are to the right of the Tories as with Yvette Cooper’s demand for more refugees to be deported.

Starmer has failed to give any support to striking workers. Far from criticising the government’s failure to restore the nurses’ pay to what it was in 2017 Starmer has criticised their demand for a 19% increase. Yet there hasn’t been a squeak by Starmer at the 23% average increase in the pay for FTSE 100 Chief Executives.

Labour under Starmer is a neo-liberal party of capitalism. It stands for nothing and promises nothing. It rejects the call for the return to public ownership of rail and the privatised utilities despite two-thirds of the population supporting renationalisation.

The 200,000 who have left the Labour Party have not gone away nor have the nearly 13 million people who voted for Labour’s 2017 Manifesto. Parties exist, not as an end in themselves, but as vehicles for social change. The Labour Party is not that party.

It is time for you to make a clean break with Starmer’s Labour Party and lead the fight for a socialist party that stands for the interests of ordinary working class people. In the process you will encourage some of your colleagues to also make a break. The Labour Party stands for war, poverty and continued privatisation. It is time for you to make amends for the failure to fight the Right when it was possible.

In solidarity,

Tony Greenstein

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[1]        A Socialist in Palestine, p. 6.  Poalei Zion Publication, 1922, London,