The Long Coup
Britain, state and media, 2016 — present.
In an LBC debate in June 2019 hosted by broadcaster Iain Dale, just a few months before the general election, author and Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer said this:
‘He wants to open the gates of Auschwitz.’
There’s of course no uncertainty as to who ‘he’ refers to in this sentence: Jeremy Corbyn, then leader of the UK Labour party.
The following is an attempt to understand how we arrived at that point.
Between 2016 and the present, a coup was undertaken by the British state. It was conducted, not with troops or tanks or tear gas, but with words, with accusations, with increasingly hyperbolic statements.
The roots of the coup can be traced back to the very early days of Corbyn’s leadership in 2015. His landslide victory in the first and then the second leadership contests was a visceral shock to many, if not most, in his parliamentary party, who had hitherto regarded him as a kind of odd relic, a harmless crank. For this ignored outsider to suddenly emerge as leader, not just of ‘their’ party, but of a popular movement on a scale not seen in UK politics in living memory, shocked them rigid. For were they not ‘the adults in the room’? Did they not hold up the Banner of St Tony, who won *three general elections* and rescued the Labour party from its near-annihilation in 1979 and 1983?
Something had to be done.
April 2016: Labour MP Naz Shah is suspended from the party for social media posts that are designated as antisemitic.
It is not my intention to argue the merits or otherwise of the case against Ms Shah. Certainly some of the wilder accusations against her — that she had suggested Jews be forcibly removed from Israel to the US, for instance — were obviously false and based on what would appear to be deliberate misinterpretations of a social media post. Much was made of little, which is a pattern that repeats throughout this story.
The Shah episode carries all the hallmarks of the campaign. As we would see in every subsequent case, there is a paucity of evidence, there is reliance on interpretation of what was said or done in the most unfavourable possible light, there is instant and angry denunciation, and there is demand for swift action. (Shah was suspended, apologised, and was reinstated. She remains a Labour MP and Shadow Minister.)
What followed from the Shah case would be the spark to ignite the firestorm. Ken Livingstone, former London Mayor, was interviewed about it and, because of the accusation that Shah had proposed relocating Jews from Israel to USA, made reference to the Haavara Agreement that Hitler had struck with German Zionists in 1933, which allowed some 60,000 German Jews to escape to then-Palestine, though of course in appalling conditions.
‘Hitler’ and ‘Zionists’ in the same sentence, no matter the context, no matter the history, no matter the logic.
Boom.
Livingstone was now the focus of hate, and was filmed being pursued and screamed at by a clearly out-of-control John Mann, MP. (Livingstone was suspended and finally left the party. John Mann is now an independent Peer and advisor to the government on antisemitism — the horrifically mis-named ‘Antisemitism Czar’.)
Here again: the evidence is poor (the argument makes no logical sense), the reaction extreme, and the demand for action immediate. Livingstone was from this point a shorthand for the ‘antisemitism crisis’ that was now being talked about in the Labour party. The facts around the case — what he said, what it means — were drowned out in the cries of anguish and rage from centrist and right-wing Jewish people and organisations.
The story was kept alive through the simple method of repeating the same few accusations, re-stating them in newspaper columns and broadcast segments. The same clip — of John Mann screaming at Ken Livingstone on a staircase as TV cameras followed them — was shown again and again, and instead of the obvious conclusion being drawn — that John Mann was in need of a holiday — it was used as further evidence against Livingstone.
‘Accusation = evidence’ is another key component of the campaign. To be accused is to be guilty, to deny your guilt is to be guilty of denial. It’s a perfect trap. So Mann yelling abusive accusations at Livingstone wasn’t seen as an attack on Livingstone, quite the opposite: it was seen as evidence against him.
These few incoherent scraps were sufficient to allow the ‘antisemitism crisis’ narrative to be born. Through the simple method of repeating a handful of minor and disputable ‘incidents’, a vast synecdoche was arrived at, whereby the entirety of the Corbyn programme and/or all of his supporters and followers and/or anyone who spoke in his favour were, automatically, fair game for accusations. It was now a legitimate subject of debate.
The media were of course thrilled to be given a scandal on a plate like this, and the feeding frenzy was underway. BBC and The Guardian led the charge, BBC going as far as to commission a Panorama which baldly stated a catalogue of unproven accusations, and which has been the subject of enormous controversy.
BBC News and Current Affairs’ role was and remains key. It has two main functions, to amplify and propagate the right-wing press in its ‘press reviews’, and to frame the news so that viewers get only one side of the story, and that side distorted and twisted into unrecognisable forms. Margaret Hodge’s innumerable BBC appearances, and the complete failure of BBC to challenge her on anything she said, were a major contributor to the atmosphere of crisis and urgency BBC established and sustained. The state was speaking to the nation, and BBC was its mouthpiece. BBC collapsed into a propaganda channel and has lost respect because of it.
The coup was also conducted in the arena of BBC topical comedy, which saw fit to make jokes about concentration camp guards and Holocaust denial. BBC rebadged its state propaganda as ‘comedy’, and thereby reached audiences who might not follow the news. It became ubiquitous and normalised, it propagated itself to Friday night audiences who just wanted a laugh, it seeped into the national consciousness and became a ‘shared understanding’.
A notable factor was the complete absence of any dissenting voices anywhere within the media. The other great political scandal of the day, the outrageous con-trick of Brexit, had media voices on both sides. The debate was fierce, both sides were presented, and it was entirely legitimate to be on one side or the other.
But with the Labour antisemitism narrative, dissent simply didn’t exist. It was never debated, it was just assumed. I can think of only two UK journalists who dared to challenge it — BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire, and journalist and author Peter Oborne. (Derbyshire’s morning TV show was cancelled. Oborne left the Daily Telegraph in 2015 and is an independent journalist.)
The absence of critical debate is crucial here. Had any kind of attempt been made by media to examine the accusations, to test what was being alleged against what was actually said — in short, to do journalism on the story — the narrative could never have gained any traction. Only in a media environment of total compliance could the narrative thrive. And that’s what happened. The narrative was accepted without hesitation, and there was (almost) no dissent. UK media failed, completely, to act as any kind of bulwark against it, and acted instead as an organ of the state.
Labour commissioned an enquiry into the issue by (now) Lady Chakrabarti, which duly reported in April 2016. But the report was instantly upstaged by one of the more remarkable incidents in the story, the Smeeth/Wadsworth episode, in which Ruth Smeeth MP accused anti-racism activist Marc Wadsworth of antisemitic abuse actually during the launch of the Chakrabarti report on antisemitism itself.
Again I don’t intend to go back over it all. Suffice to say that it required the manufacturing of an entirely new antisemitic trope — ‘working hand in hand with the media’. As if Jews do not or should not work for and with the media, as if saying Jews work in and with the media — just like anyone else — is somehow problematic. But reason has never played any part in this any more than evidence has. (Marc Wadsworth remains an anti-racism campaigner, though expelled from the Labour party. He had no idea Smeeth was Jewish. Smeeth lost her seat in 2019 and is now Chief Executive of Freedom from Censorship, a free-speech lobby.)
And then Corbyn took 40% of the vote share in 2017.
The image of MP Stephen Kinnock’s face at the exit poll is iconic: shock, dismay, almost physical distress.
Post 2017, the coup required fresh impetus. The general election result had been too close for comfort, and even with what we now know to be organised sabotage within the party machine, Corbyn had denied Theresa May her majority and scored a higher percentage of the vote than Blair in 2005, Brown in 2010 or Miliband in 2015.
Things were getting serious.
The new front was opened in 2018 by Luciana Berger, then a Labour MP, who resurrected an old grudge about Corbyn going back seven years — that he had made a comment underneath a Facebook post about a mural in London’s Brick Lane which — it was now declared — was antisemitic.
I have no intention of re-litigating this bizarre and inexplicably potent incident. Better minds than mine have patiently dismantled it, thousands of hours have been spent arguing about it on social media, and anyone who’s taken the trouble to investigate it even slightly knows it’s simply nonsense.
But I think it’s interesting that the opening salvo in the post-2017 war should be such a misshapen and seemingly ineffective weapon as what came to be called #muralgate. A Facebook comment about a piece of street art that no longer existed, and about which there was not, and could never be, any agreement about whether it was or was not antisemitic, even amongst Jews? This is your weapon?
The point to make here is that the campaign was essentially unconcerned with evidence. It would operate instead on the level of emotional manipulation, extreme displays of victimhood, and would at no point trouble itself to validate any of its extraordinary claims with anything as concrete as evidence. Evidence could be disputed, but who could dispute a feeling, particularly one about the oppression and suffering of Jews? To dispute it was to be the thing they accused you of being.
The paucity of evidence was not a problem, nor was it accidental: it was essential, it was by design. Only in an environment cleared of any inconvenient disputable facts could the emotional theatre be effective. Only by refusing to engage in any valid way with reality could it present its ‘alternative reality’.
What the British public were being invited to accept was that displays of rage were sufficient argument. To be angry was to be right, and to fail to be angry was to be wrong. I recall seeing Channel 4’s Jon Snow holding up a wholly fraudulent Daily Mail story about Luciana Berger and yelling at Corbyn, ‘Do you apologise for this?’ The coup worked by demanding unquestioning allegiance to this theatre of hate, and it got it. You were either for it or against it, and those against it were, by its own viciously circular reasoning, antisemites.
The other accusations — #ironygate, #wreathgate, #prefacegate, #friendsgate — were similar in structure. Take some scrap of reality — Corbyn did use the word ‘irony’, he did lay a wreath, and so on — and blow it up into a monstrous denunciation. Keep using the words ‘Labour’ and ‘antisemitism’ in the same sentence. Keep up the chorus of fury and outrage. Out of these meagre fragments of nothing very much a great rickety Palace of Smoke and Mirrors was constructed, held together only with indignation and hate.
That otherwise rational and intelligent people should get swept up in this poorly evidenced moral panic is testament to how effective the emotional bludgeoning was. But its own dynamic required ever-greater force, ever-greater brutality, and so it was only a matter of time before ‘the gates of Auschwitz’ would be invoked by someone. Cue Simon Heffer, and then Jeremy Hunt MP, who linked his visit to Auschwitz to Corbyn’s Labour party.
This marked the rhetorical nadir of the coup — there really is nowhere to go from ‘the gates of Auschwitz’. Normal inhibitions are cast aside as the race to the bottom is won. Margaret Hodge’s ‘suitcase in the hall’ speech — in which she compared being investigated for allegedly screaming at Corbyn that he was a ‘f****** racist antisemite’ to the pogroms of Nazi Germany — makes perfect sense in this context: the rhetorical pitch had been raised to such an extent that only the most extreme and emotionally violent statements would be attended to. Rhetorical inflation, and the end point of it all was the invocation of one of history’s most horrific events as if it were just a winning card to be thrown onto the table.
Corbyn’s Labour party suffered a huge defeat in the 2019 general election, though that probably had more to do with Brexit than anything else. But Brexit was a policy decision, Brexit was debated (endlessly, if fruitlessly) and anyone could be on either side of it without being accused of monstrous character flaws.
When Tony Blair lied us into the horror of Iraq, many influential voices were raised against it. Robin Cook resigned and made a speech in the House, Tony Benn spoke memorably and powerfully against it, millions marched against it. The debate was furious and passionate.
But the ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’ coup was different. It was not a policy debate (or not overtly anyway, though of course Israel/Palestine is at the heart of it). There was only one side it was considered legitimate to be on — more, there simply was no ‘other side’.
The UK state — politics, media and culture — rose up as one in a terrifying display of brute power and mounted the most gigantic, most concerted and most unanimous reaction I’ve ever witnessed, like a body mounting an immune response to an invader pathogen. The UK state spoke with one voice, and it spoke loud and long, until Corbyn was deposed and his supporters forever tainted with the suspicion of Jew-hate. It executed a political coup.
That such a weapon existed should surprise no-one, of course. But the UK state revealed itself in this strange and protracted coup as a force that could sweep away a political movement of half a million with astonishing ease, simply by lying.
We will be ready next time.