There Must Be No Repeat of Labour Under Corbyn 2015-19 The Appeasement of the Zionists & the Influence of Advisors like James Schneider Needs to be Curbed
Why
Labour Lost | Interview With James Schneider
When
Zarah Sultana announced her resignation
from Labour and her joint leadership with Corbyn of a new party, Corbyn was
forced to put an end to months of dithering and delay. However he was reported to be ‘so unhappy’ that ‘he only
responded publicly two days later - his team described the timing of the
announcement as "unfortunate".’
The
Party has no name apart from Your Party. The Left Party, if only
as an interim name is far more suitable! Either way it can't have no name.
Even though Starmer has retracted this rich, racist white 'feminist' has doubled down
The
‘Labour’ Government under Starmer has been worse than was feared. Attacks on
claimants, repressive legislation and a speech by Starmer reminiscent of Enoch
Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech with its
reference to an ‘island of strangers’. Although
Starmer ‘regretted’ it subsequently Yvette
Cooper defended it.
Let us not forget the lies the Zionists and the genocidaires told last time around - they will do the same and more next time
There
is a burning need for a mass party of the left. Having Corbyn and Sultana as
joint leaders is sensible. However there can be no repeat of what happened from
2015-19 when Corbyn appeased and did the bidding of the Jewish Labour Movement
despite the fact that the JLM was refounded with the intention of being
rid of him. Its claim to be concerned with anti-Semitism was a lie and
should have been called out by Corbyn who had much personal experience of being
called anti-Semitic over the years.
Instead
the JLM were allowed to pick their targets for expulsion. As we now know from
their support for the genocide in Gaza, its sole concern is with defending Zionism
and the Israeli State.
This extract from p.306 from the Labour Leaked Report shows how Corbyn and his office (LOTO - Leader Of The Opposition) tried hard to appease the racists and the Zionists who had targeted their enemies carefully
Although
it can be argued that Corbyn was ambushed by the Zionists when he was Labour
leader by the false ‘anti-Semitism’ smears, he handled it appallingly. Corbyn
threw his allies to the wolves in a vain attempt to appease his accusers.
Much of this was due to the advice of his closest advisors such as Seamus Milne and James
Schneider. Their main strategy seemed to be to apologise and move on instead of stand and fight. Milne has disappeared to a well deserved obscurity but
Schneider is very much alive and kicking. He cannot be allowed to wreak havoc a second time. As his interview above with Novara Media showed, six months after Starmer
became leader, on why Labour lost the election he
didn’t have a clue as to the nature of the attack on Corbyn.
Schneider
didn’t once mention the false anti-Semitism smears that dominated Corbyn’s time
in office. The concerted attacks of the Zionist press and the media in general
that led to the EHRC case, which then led to Corbyn losing the Whip, went unmentioned. Nor did
he mention it in July 2025 in an interview for New Left Review.
Indeed the genocide in Gaza was only mentioned in passing. Anti-Zionism is not Schneider's strong point.
Schneider’s advice to Corbyn and the leadership of the new party needs to be treated with a
hefty dose of salt given his record from 2015-2019. He needs to play a minor
role rather than being seen as an oracle of wisdom. He still does not understand
why Zionism is important to Britain’s imperial establishment. Schneider also complained
about Zarah Sultana’s announcement of the new party with her resignation:
Unfortunately, the party has already been
launched even though it does not exist. We have been deprived of a carefully
planned launch, but we can live with that.
Corbyn’s advisers cannot be allowed to dominate the new party because they will repeat their old errors. Nearly a year ago a letter was sent (see below) to Corbyn asking him
to reassess his period as leader in respect of the false anti-Semitism
narrative that had been weaponised by the Labour Right and the
bourgeois press, not least the Guardian.
The letter was signed by Chris Williamson, the MP that Corbyn threw overboard, Jackie Walker, the Black Jewish Vice Chair of Momentum before she was stabbed in the back by Jon Lansman and expelled; Asa Winstanley from Electronic Intifada who was suspended and then forced out of Labour and Anne Mitchell, former Chair of Brighton and Hove PSC, who was also expelled for ‘anti-Semitism’ along with myself as the first Jewish person to be expelled.
We were all anti-Zionists not anti-Semites but Corbyn and his office threw red meat to the Zionists not realising that in the words of Rudyard Kipling, 'if once you have paid him the Dane-geld, You never get rid of the Dane.' Substitute 'Zionist' for 'Dane' and you get the message. When you pay a blackmailer, the demands only increase, as they did from 2015-2019.
Corbyn did not to reply to our letter. There has been no reassessment of what happened either by him or his advisors, Schneider included. The consequence of the failure by Corbyn and his advisors to confront the false anti-Semitism smears was the accession of Starmer to the leadership on a promise of rooting out ‘anti-Semitism’.
Today
you cannot put a piece of paper between Starmer and Badenoch. That is why
voters are turning to Reform. Our task is to take on the racist scapegoating of
the right which Starmer has enabled with his attacks on the working class and
poor and offer an alternative.
James Schneider - Corbyn's closest advisor - but has he learnt anything from last time around?
Neo-liberalism
has for the past 30 years seen a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
Capital has reigned supreme. It was the poor who paid for the banking crisis of
2008-9. It is not migrants who closed the mines, docks and shipyards but the
free market. This is the message that we have to get across and point to things like Farage's support for an insurance system for the NHS that is modelled on what happens in the US.
Starmer,
who described himself as a ‘Zionist
without qualification’, has lived up to our worst fears. He has openly supported a genocide and the use of food as a weapon of war. Even now, despite his protestations he is arming the killers of children. However none of this should have been a surprise. A little due diligence would have outed this snake. When
I was expelled the first person to welcome that
was Starmer with a one word response 'good'.
In February 2020, two months before the leadership election in April, I wrote, that ‘Keir Starmer is the candidate that the Deep State & the British Establishment want you to vote for’. It was patently obvious that Starmer was not going to stick to his 10 Pledges. I love the 4th Pledge about introducing a Prevention of Military Intervention Act and putting human rights at the centre of Britain's foreign policy! Yet many of Schneider's mates in Momentum actually supported Starmer.
No one lies quite like Starmer but the thing is, he is an unconvincing liar. He comes across as synthetic which is why people, even in his own constituency, have never warmed to him. Yet Corbyn, Schneider and the rest of his advisers tolerated this cuckoo in the nest. Five minutes googling would have turned up his police state record as Director of Public Prosecutions.
Not just over Brexit but in his support of the false
anti-Semitism smears and his vendetta against Julian Assange. Yet he was not
removed and there is no reason to believe that any of Corbyn’s advisers gave
serious thought to it. Schneider in particular has a lot to answer for.
My
purpose in raising these issues is not to pour over the entrails of what went
wrong last time but to learn from our mistakes. Having Karie Murphy and James Schneider
as the key advisors to the leader of the new party is a recipe for disaster.
Neither are anti-Zionists. Corbyn himself shows very few signs of learning
anything from the genocide in Gaza. He is still a two statist whereas it is
obvious that Israel is a genocidal state that has got to go the way of the South African Apartheid state.
The
left in Britain has a history of failure.
We cannot repeat the mistakes of the past. The new party should welcome
debate and different currents and factions. However it cannot have parties like
the SWP operating within it with the sole purpose of recruiting to their own
party. You cannot serve two masters.
The
SWP and similar groups on the far-left have been failed projects. There are
reasons for this, not least their failure to accept that the working class in
Britain, atomised as it is after the Thatcher counter-revolution, is not an
agent for revolution in Britain today. There is no organised proletariat. The
Unions are far weaker today than they ever were.
Likewise
with the Workers’ Party. Their recent showing in the Runcorn by-election
of 0.5%, where they campaigned on ‘Stop the Boats’ and ‘Tough on Immigration’
means that although individual members are welcome in a new party George Galloway
can’t be whilst he continues to think he can present a ‘left’ populist version
of Farage’s Reform Party. George is not
someone to take advice and despite his many talents, not least as an orator, he
is not a strategic thinker. His support for Brexit was another disastrous
mistake.
One
of our key tasks will be to break the trade unions from the Labour Party and Labourism. We
have to convince their members that the link with Labour serves only the
interests of the trade union bureaucracy. It is not in the interests of their
members.
But
we also have to be honest. If it wasn’t possible in the early part of the last
century to form a revolutionary working class party or indeed in the 70s and
80s it’s certainly not possible now. That does not mean that the new party
becomes simply a parliamentary party.
It
has to be a party of the oppressed, the working class and those who are at the
sharp end of capitalism and imperialism. It has to be a party of protest and
direct action as well as operating in parliament. It also has to understand
that the capitalist state is an entrenched and repressive political and social
formation that is inherently undemocratic. But to pose revolutionary slogans
and programs at this stage will simply confine the left to the margins.
The
new party will have to face the issue of the Green Party, which is not a
left-wing, still less a socialist party. The Green Party want to green
capitalism not replace it. It is not a grassroots activist party and its main
strategy is taking over the existing state without any serious plan to change
it. It supports NATO and it supports Zionism whilst decrying what it is doing. It
has adopted the IHRA like the rest of the political parties. In Germany Die Grunen was, along with the neo-Nazi
AfD, the most pro-Zionist of all parties. Its former Foreign Secretary,
Annalena Baerbock is a war criminal.
Yanis Varoufakis: Block Baerbock from the UN General
Assembly
Many
people are under illusions about the Green Party. In Brighton where they
controlled the Council twice they were a disaster and not at all progressive.
They not only gave no support to the Palestinians but they even voted alongside
the Tories and Labour to support the IHRA fake definition of anti-Semitism,
as they do nationally.
Owen
Jones has suggested an electoral pact not to compete against each other.
Tactically this may be worth thinking about with a First Past the Post
electoral system, but it comes with the danger of sowing illusions in the Green
Party. Regardless PR is a priority to prevent a repeat of a situation where
someone like Starmer can obtain 63% of the seats with 34% of the vote. The
lowest ever by a winning party.
The
new party will not be a revolutionary party but a mixture of social democrats,
activists, Marxists and those in between. A left reformist party intent on
rolling back the authoritarian state that Starmer and Yvette Cooper are intent
on bringing about with their proscription of Palestine Action and
their introduction of a new Crime & Policing Bill banning protests outside places of worship.
The
old distinction between revolutionary socialists and reformists is to a large
extent irrelevant in a situation which is not revolutionary and unlikely to be
so. Our task is to reverse the drift to the right not establish the
dictatorship of the proletariat. The pendulum has swung to the right in society
and we have to swing it back again. There are a number of measures that can be
taken.
The
savage attacks on benefit claimants, the disabled in particular coupled with
the massive increase in ‘Defence’ i.e. War expenditure and the continued
privatisation of the NHS marks Starmer Labour as no different from the previous
Tory government.
Reform
is campaigning on putting all the blame on migrants and boat people. It is
essential to point the finger at those responsible. The billionaire class, the
banks and multinationals and a system whereby the rich are made richer, all of which is symbolised by a parasitic Royal Family. Reform are
vulnerable on economic questions and a new party is in an ideal position to challenge
them.
There
must be a program of democratising the state. The Police, with their attacks on
Palestine demonstrations have proved that whatever powers they are given they
will abuse. They are accountable to no one and believe themselves qualified to
decide what is and is not anti-Semitism. Their adoption of the fake IHRA
definition of anti-Semitism demonstrates that they are happy to use British Jews
as a pretext for preventing the right to protest.
The
Police implement certain laws and not others. The International
Criminal Court Act 2001 remains a dead letter. The Fox Hunting Act 2004 has
never been enforced yet an obscure clause, Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000
has seen dozens of activists arrested. Today’s Police are Orwell’s Thought
Police.
The
capitalist state is not neutral and never has been which is why Labour’s love
affair with the Police was so disgusting. Their job should be preventing crime not policing dissent. Rape for example has been all but decriminalised. That
means bringing the police under democratic control whilst resisting funding
their desire for more repressive equipment.
A
new party has to have a minimum programme. Nationalisation with little if any compensation
of rail and the utilities. A state bank. An end to private involvement in the
NHS and public control of the NHS. A massive
cut in so-called defence spending. An end to Trident and the British military
role in foreign wars. A repeal of all the Tory and now Labour anti-protest and
anti-trade union legislation. The BBC should be freed from the Zionist lobby
and the warmongers.
We
should also follow most of Europe and the United States in decriminalising
possession of cannabis and growing for one’s own use. There should be massive
investment in public transport alongside an end to the use of fossil fuels.
Internationally
we should call for the decolonisation and de-Zionisation of Israel. An end to
trade with Apartheid Israel. Two states is a neo-colonial solution whose time
has gone and Corbyn needs to wake up to the fact that a Jewish state is a
racist state which should go the way of South Africa.
This
should be coupled with a withdrawal from NATO which is an alliance of
warmongers. NATO has been responsible for the war in Ukraine. Without NATO
expansion up to Russian borders there would have been no war. Without American
and European funding and involvement in the 2014 coup against a democratically elected
President of Ukraine the war would not have started against the
Russian speaking eastern region of the Donbas led by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov
regiment which in turn led to the Russian invasion.
The
democratisation of the British state needs to be high on the list. The House of
Lords should be abolished with its replacement by a second chamber elected in
the regions by PR. A referendum should be held on getting rid of the monarchy
and Britain becoming a republic and joining modernity. The abolition of the
feudal ‘royal family’ with their absurd honours system, palaces and massive
land holdings is long overdue.
The
new party is polling up to 15%, level with
Starmer Labour. Amongst the young, 18-29 it is 33%, ahead of both Labour and
Reform. This is a brilliant place to start but it will only increase if the
party begins organising as soon as possible from the bottom up. Meetings should
be held in every constituency to form an organisation. The Party should be
rooted in the localities.
There
is a need for transparency which isn’t evident at the moment. I’ve had two
mailings from ‘Your party’ whoever that is.
We need to know who is actually running the show. It is
not good enough to wait until November. Who is calling the shots now. Putting
in place a democratic regional structure should be a priority. Calling a
conference to be called at the end of year which without local participation means it is
likely to be more of a rally.
If
the new Left Party is disciplined and doesn’t fall into the habit of fighting
each other then it could do what the French left under Melechon did in France which was to outpoll and prevent
the fascist Front Nationale winning the parliamentary elections.
But
we must also draw lessons from the French experience where Socialist Party
elected representatives then abandoned ship. Anyone elected or standing for the
Left Party must be held accountable and recallable. We should get away from the
idea of professional politicians who see politics as a career.
But
above all we should be prepared for the counter attack. When the party is
established and seen to be credible that is the time when the BBC, Daily Mail, Express and Guardian will revive the ‘anti-Semitism’
smears, terrorism scares, patriotism and much else. In addition to accusing us
of bankrupting the country by proposing that the billionaires should pay some
tax for a change.
There
must be no repeat of 2015-2019 where Corbyn’s first reaction was to apologise
and then appease his critics. The way to defang our enemies is to go on the
attack not concede to their arguments.
Tony
Greenstein
