It should and must be said…as many times as it needs to BE said…that the main reason Boris is in power, his party holding a parliamentary majority on only 42% of the vote, is that his rival in the last election, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, was the subject of the most relentlessly vicious and slanderous attack campaign ever directed against a major party leader in the UK. Corbyn was falsely accused, with brutal, relentless repitition, of at best ignoring antisemitism in his party at next worst encouraging it and at absolute worst of actually BEING an antisemite-the Labour Leaks prove him innocent on the first two charges, and contrary to the Likudnik lie, neither support of Palestinian self-determination nor criticism of the collective miseries the Israeli government inflicts on all Palestinians under the Occupation have anything in common with anti-Jewish bigotry; In addition to having to contend with falsely being accused of abetting or even taking part in expressions of bigotry-something a lifelong antiracist campaigner isn’t even capable of being guilty of, Corbyn had to face endless false accusations of supporting the Irish Republican Army, something he was never remotely close to doing(he supported the reunification of Ireland, but so do the IRA’s arch-rivals in the pro-Irish community in Northern Ireland, the Social Democratic and Labour Party)and of being an apologist for Hamas simply because he used conciliatory language towards that group to help persuade it to negotiate with the Israeli government, as he had helped persuade the IRA to enter what turned out to be successful negotiations for power-sharing.
And if that weren’t enough, the same reactionary forces in the party who put all those obstacles in Corbyn’s path destroyed any possible chance he still had of leading Labour to victory last year-even though they knew that there was no viable alternative to having Corbyn lead the party through that election and no credible alternative leader would have been available if he had stood down before the election was called-by putting relentless pressure on Corbyn to alienate the overwhelmingly and unchangeably pro-Brexit voters in Wales and the North, Northeast, and Midlands of England, areas normally so safely Labour that they were referred to as the “Red Wall”, by reversing the party’s 2017 “we respect the results of the referendum” position on the EU and, instead, forcing Corbyn to agree to push for a second referendum- and then by not being satisfied with that position but pushing on, all the way to the 2019 Labour conference, to try and force Corbyn to further alienate the Red Wall by pledging the party to go Full Remain-a pledge which would have forced Corbyn, if Labour had somehow managed to win power on an all-out Remain position, to personally campaign for Remain in the referendum.
The hardline Remainers destroyed whatever credibility Corbyn still had as leader by doing that.
In addition to having to contend with those indefensible slanders and impediments, Corbyn-one of the most decent, honest and principled people in UK politics-was subjected to a relentless campaign of sabotage from the majority of his own party’s MPs who refused to accept his overwhelming victories in not one but two party leadership contest and refused to accept that those victories meant that the Labour rank-and-file had voted to make a clear break both with the pro-austerity and antiworker policies Tony Blair forced the party to adopt in the Nineties-policies that Labour never had to adopt, as the Tory government of John Major was already hopelessly discredited in the eyes of the electorate at the time Blair gained the leadership in 1994-AND with the complete abolition of internal party democracy imposed, for no valid reason, by Blair and his predecessor Neil Kinnock.
For most of Corbyn’s tenure, the anti-socialist, pro-austerity, pro- continuing military intervention in the Arab/Muslim world wing of the PLP-along with the right-wing party bureaucracy who, as the Labour Leaks showed were the true culprits in any delays in disciplinary proceedings against the tiny handful of Labour members or supporters who were actually guilty of antisemitism- as well as the allegedly “progressive” Guardian and New Statesman newspapers, devoted their energies, 24/7, NOT to working for the defeat of the Tory government, but to the ouster of the first Labour leader since 1985 who actually proposed policies that represented a significant break with Toryism.
Britain ended up with Boris because the people who were supposed to work all-out for a Labour victory chose instead to work all-out for the political destruction of Jeremy Corbyn. They got their way-the Tories, clearly the true party of choice for the anti-Corbyn wing of the party, won a victory they would never otherwise have come close to winning, due almost entirely to the treachery of an outdated and out of touch collection of right-wing timeservers who only continue to sit as Labour MPs because, under current party rules, a sitting Labour MP is virtually guaranteed automatic re-selection for life, whether the MP’s own constituency party wants the MP re-selected or not, or in some cases whether the constituency party had ever wanted that person selected as a Labour candidate in the first place, since some of the anti-Corbyn MPs were originally imposed as candidates by Kinnock or Blair against the wishes of the constituency party-and they got their way in forcing Corbyn to stand down as leader, after which he was replaced by Keir Starmer, a bland, passionless cypher who has no core values and has thus far taken no strong stands on anything other than making it clear that any paid Labour member or supporter will risk suspension or expulsion for criticizing anything Netanyahu does in the West Bank or to Gaza.
As a result, the UK now has Boris-because the Labour Right cared more about preventing the party from making any significant break with Blairism than it did about getting the most despicable and reactionary government in recent UK history out of power.
