How Britain’s far left ‘sympathises’ with the worst of our prejudices - Guardian

How Britain’s far left ‘sympathises’ with the worst of our prejudices
Nick Cohen
Momentum’s Activist Handbook has little positive to say on the immigration front

Sun 5 Aug 2018 15.00 AEST

 ‘You can just about grasp why his fans believe Corbyn is Britain’s first black leader rather than an elderly white gentleman.’
 ‘You can just about grasp why his fans believe Corbyn is Britain’s first black leader rather than an elderly white gentleman.’ Photograph: Finbarr Webster/REX/Shutterstock
The personality cult the British left genuflects before reached its apogee last week when the anti-racist campaigner Lester Holloway declared that Jeremy Corbyn was, when you got down to it, black. You have that right. “Labour actually have the first black party leader in Corbyn.”

“Black in his politics”, Holloway added, as an avalanche of ridicule headed towards him. But the comparison was made. As if to elaborate the argument, the Guardian columnist Owen Jones said that the centre couldn’t fight the nativist forces Trump and Brexit have unleashed. Only a left that holds “powerful vested interests to account, rather than scapegoating migrants and Muslims, can hope to defeat this political poison”.

Not the poisonous scapegoating of Jews, obviously. When it comes to the target of the Nazi conspiracy theory, Corbyn and his allies are the poison. Abandon the Jews, however, and you can just about grasp why his fans believe that Corbyn is Britain’s first black leader – our very own Mandela – rather than an elderly white gentleman who does not appear to have found the intellectual capacity to change his mind on a single issue since he left Shropshire’s Adams grammar school in 1967 with no academic qualifications worth mentioning.

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Grasp it, that is, until you look closer. Momentum, Corbyn’s party within the Labour party, shows its commitment to fighting far-right ideas in its Activist Handbook. It isn’t an obscure work, but a plan for action that Momentum has used to train thousands of British and US activists. Let no one say that Momentum ducks the hatreds of modern Britain. It prepares its revolutionary vanguard for the moment when voters on the doorstep will confront them with the assertion “I think we should kick all the immigrants out.”

When the right complains about political correctness and the call-out culture, one suspects that the worst conservatives are not objecting to overzealous political correctness but to any challenge to racism. Challenged it must be. A left that says, with justice, that Trump, the Brexiters, Fidesz and Lega “scapegoat” foreigners to divert attention from the disasters the financial system has brought has a duty to expose insidious lies.

Our brave Momentum comrades respond to the challenge by telling Corbyn’s supporters to be obsequious before prejudice. Activists must acknowledge that “all concerns are valid”. When confronted with base bigotry, they are not to argue against the sentiment that we should “kick all the immigrants out”, but accommodate it.

The “key language” to use includes “I see your point”, “I understand” and “I can sympathise with that”. After trudging through pages of instructions that continue in this vacuous vein, radical leftists are finally given counter-arguments to put to voters, should they find the courage to raise their timorous voices. They are either irrelevant to debates about migration and ethnicity – Corbyn would stop Britain “from becoming a tax haven for the rich” – or coyly supportive of nativism – Labour would stop “low-paid migrant workers undercutting existing wages”.

You can make a case for both positions while noticing that the far left isn’t prepared to be positive. It does not tell its supporters to say that Britain needs migrants or that migrants are no better or worse than the rest of us. It is not willing to argue that the notion migrants are a burden is false. The best Momentum can manage is a promise that Labour will guarantee existing rights for EU nationals in the UK.

 Bill Clinton in 1998, ‘when Toni Morrison announced he was America’s “first black president”’.
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 Bill Clinton in 1998, ‘when Toni Morrison announced he was America’s “first black president”’. Photograph: Stewart Kendall/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
You would be right to say that far-leftists are no different from Labour operators of the past. Corbyn wants votes, like all politicians, and is not too choosy about where they come from. The real charge against his acolytes, however, is not only that they do not want to argue against racial prejudice but that they cannot argue against racial prejudice. Like the Farages and Rees-Moggs it affects to oppose, Labour wants an end to freedom of movement.

I still don’t think that Corbyn’s supporters begin to understand what the consequences of their capitulation would be if they were to come to power – and imagine the wolfish smile that would spread over Vladimir Putin’s face should that glorious day ever dawn. As the few thoughtful egalitarians left in Labour try to explain, leaving the single market will leave Britain poorer and more unequal. They might reasonably add that Labour cannot defend immigrants at the same time as making an end to freedom of movement its absolute priority. For the question that would arise on the doorstep would be: “If migrants are so good, why do you want to stop them?”

You do not need to turn to the personality cults of Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro to guess the sequel. The last time a startled public was told that a white politician was black was in 1998 when Toni Morrison announced that Bill Clinton was America’s “first black president”. Clinton revealed his blackness because his “unpoliced sexuality” had led the right to persecute him. Morrison was referring to Clinton’s sex with an intern and allegations that he harassed women and worse, which otherwise liberal American feminists found remarkably easy to dismiss for the greater good of protecting their leader.

Even at the time, the equation of Clinton’s sexual voracity with blackness seemed grotesque – and not only on grounds of racial stereotyping. Morrison and her allies had to forget the hundreds of thousands of black suspects that the Clinton administration forced into prison with its racially loaded laws. In retrospect, we can see the Clinton legacy crippled the Democrats. When tapes emerged of Trump boasting about grabbing women by the pussy in 2016, Republicans could reply: “Yeah, well, you stood by Bill Clinton when he did worse.”

Likewise, the legacy of Corbyn will cripple the British liberal-left. How can it not when, confronted with racism, antisemitism and a disastrous foreign policy blunder, the best it could manage was “I can sympathise with that”?

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist