The attacks on Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party are building to a crescendo. Since the 2017 General Election with its surprise advances that were won by the new style leftwing Labour Party - and the start of the Tory Party government's slow-motion car crash - Corbyn in particular has been systematically denounced by all the the main media in a hundred different ways. For example he has been wrong for following Labour Conference resolutions on Brexit; he was unpatriotic and pro-Russian for failing to denounce Russia before any evidence, in the case of the attempted murder of the ex-spy Sergei Skripal; he was a 'pathetic pacifist' when Britain's Tory government added their own little load of bombs on Syria; he was the cause of an exciting new Blairite party break-away, which fizzled in a month; and on and on.
But the most relentless attacks on Corbyn have been the charges that he is anti-semitic. Some of these are farcical, often down-right pernicious, but ultimately they get nowhere. A recent example was started up by the aptly named Baroness Hayter from the (vast, pendulous and unelected) House of Lords. She wanted to get in with a pile of Lords that had already taken out an advert in the liberal British Guardian newspaper denouncing Corbyn as anti-semitic. She was sacked as the Labour Brexit minister in the HOL when she said about the Labour Party leader,
'Those of you who ... have the seen the film Bunker, about the last days of Hitler, where you stop receiving any information into the inner group which suggests that things are not going the way you want.' She was referring to Corbyn's 'failure' to deal properly with anti-semitism in the Labour Party. She hopes to get Labour Peers in the HOL to line up for a vote of 'no-confidence' against Corbyn in response to her terrible treatment. Why can't she stay a Labour spokesperson and also state to the world that her leader is compatible with Hitler?
It should be noted that virtually the entire anti-semitic tirade against Corbyn comes from parts of the Labour Party. Naturally, all the enemies of change in Britain, from the Tories to Farage, jump, to varying degrees, on the anti-semitic band wagon. Most bizarre currently, is that the Equality and Human Rights Commission are now examining Labour's attitude to anti-semitism! This has happened starting in May 2019 completely ignoring the October 2018 all-party House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, which held an inquiry into antisemitism in the United Kingdom. The committee found 'no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other party.' Nevertheless, the EHRC launched a formal investigation into whether Labour 'unlawfully discriminated against, harassed or victimised people' from the Jewish community, saying it had received a number of complaints about Labour’s handling of allegations - from Labour members and leaders.
The source of the anti-semitism attack on Labour is the spearhead of a class offensive designed by its (Labour) leaders to destroy the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party. And the rising tempo, noise and fury erupting in the name of this cause is almost entirely to prevent the Corbyn leadership going into the Labour Conference as still dominant and able to win a Corbyn led government.
The Labour Party has always held a latent combination of class interests. Its membership and voting base are most likely to defend the cause of those seeking serious social change - as diametrically opposed to MPs, some union chiefs, the party organisation etc. This is a shifting condition in time and in context.
In 2017, a radical Labour leadership proposed significant incursions into the capitalist economy in favour of the working class. Because of its success, up to this moment, still nobody in the Labour Party is able to challenge the 2017 Manifesto. Accordingly new 'sins' and 'heresies' are needed as cover to weaken the foundations of 2017 and its leaders. A scapegoat must be identified and slaughtered. Just like a scapegoat, so the sins of the world, which certainly include anti-semitism, are pinpointed onto an innocent source. A layer of the European Jewish population, rightly frightened by the rise of the nationalist right, can and often does identify support for the Palestinian revolt as a part of that danger. It can provide an initial base for antagonism to Corbyn's history of solidarity for the Palestinians - as well as an increased dependence on and acceptance of, the reactionary Israeli government. It is this worry and fear that becomes an opportunity in other's hands.
While the great corporations were not scared of Labour's program per se, they nevertheless understand that once you open the door to some real change then new forces start to act directly in their own interests, particularly after a decade of austerity. And, as they look at France and the movements on climate change, it is this opening that must be crushed. As a result, getting rid of the Brexit song and dance routine cannot not thereby be allowed to become an opening to new movements that begin to develop their own political and economic directions. That is exactly what the Corbyn leadership risks if in government with its program. That is what has to be removed. Who better to act on this than most of Labour's MPs, the Party organisers and the fellow travellers who are entirely reconciled to the maintenance of the status quo and their own golden future - in the name of the overthrow of anti-semitism - for the moment named Jeremy Corbyn.
On the 27th of June the former leader of Scottish Labour said 'there is a serious prospect' that Jeremy Corbyn would agree to hold a second independence referendum (in Scotland.) Kezia Dugdale said she believes Mr Corbyn would give consent for indyref2 if he needed SNP support to form a government after a general election. Despite the clear call in the Labour Manifesto of 2017 to keep the union and not to hold a new referendum on Scotland, Corbyn has personally stated that he would support a second referendum if 'the Scots' called for one'.
In part, this was an item of news buried in the BBC News on the Internet and generally unmentioned in TV news in England. But it was and remains a critical question for the UK's future.
The very ex-Tory leader Teresa May made a speech about the UK's Union (4 July). Most commentators who bothered making any comment about her plan to review Devolution ... and her big new thought about how the THE UNION should work ... cringed at the hypocrisy and emptiness of May's discovery - that there were all these other places, besides England, who, it turns out, were in the same country!
One result was Boris Johnson (Britain's next Prime Minister) spending a whole sentence or two on how he was going to be Prime Minister of 'The whole Union!' Now that North Sea Oil (and its wealth) is out of the way (the strange Norwegians mostly put their oil returns in 'The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund', which reached $2 Trillion this year) the Scots could however at least be sure that they would be as poor as the rest of the overwhelming majority of the UK.
The fight for Scottish independence has a long history. The Scottish Labour Party backed independence in the late teens and early twenties of the 20th century. But it was the emergence of the national movement from the late 1970s and 80's that revealed the main basis of Scotland's right to its own self-determination. Scotland (unlike Northern Ireland, but similar to Wales) have both experienced long periods in their modern history where they have been politically oppressed; by an English government and its state. Northern Ireland, on the other hand, was set up as a ruthless, imperial toehold, built to undermine full Irish independence. The apartheid state, set up by Britain in Northern Ireland, was dominated by a totally second rate existence, socially, religiously, economically, racially, as well as politically, for all republicans. The Northern Irish arrangement was created and dominated by British imperialism.
Both Scotland and Wales were not created by British imperialism. Although there were significant echoes of the Irish national experiences (the organised hostility to waves of immigration of the Irish to the west of Scotland, the second rate treatment of Welsh miners etc.,) these countries were not established as imperialist colonies and, in a general sense, were not ruled as imperial colonies. (For example the first British King was Scottish and the Scottish ruling class, eg in banking and financial services, has always been a significant part of the British ruling class. The industrial revolution, denied in whole or in part to Britain's colonies, was never blocked in Wales or Scotland.)
This distinction, between the Irish question and current national movements in Scotland and Wales, is relevant to what is happening now to the UK. Historically speaking, British imperialism was finally brought down by independence movements across the whole globe, including in Ireland, following the two World Wars. (In Northern Ireland the war of independence has only recently finished.) The process now emerging among the movements organising for the separation of mainland Britain, is instead a decisive political act, within what remains of Britain's imperial heartland. And its fundamental character, in Britain's mainland, is that it is a key step towards overturning the whole of Britain's role in, and its subservience to, the domination of globalisation. The 'break up' of Britain is, in that sense, a thoroughly progressive act; an act that is a key part of the reorganisation of the politics and economics of Britain itself. Scottish (and if called-for, Welsh) independence are necessary acts to reverse Britain's political and economic systems - but they are not sufficient.
Why necessary? Why not sufficient?
It is necessary because the deeply required, indeed essential, disruption and transformation of British politics and economics is currently held up by the siege towers built over centuries, designed to protect Britain's ruling class. And those siege towers; the City of London, the 'First Passed the Post' voting system, the 'Home Counties', the public schools and Oxford and Cambridge universities, the Monarchy, the Lords, the select judiciary and the rigid class structure of the armed forces and on and on, are rooted in southern England. Breaking domination of these institutions in Scotland, in Wales will not be possible unless these parts of Britain become separate, critical nations - for themselves. Breaking away from the UK is a solid platform - for breaking up Britain. If the separation is denied or fails to carry through in the struggle to create a new type of nation, a great, not to say historic advance will be lost not just for the new nations but for all in Britain.
The paradox is that the unification of working class people across Britain (see current divisions over Brexit) can only open out once the core structures of Britain, post imperial Britain and its 'special relationships' are denied and then broken down.
Not sufficient? 'Solving' the national question in Scotland (and Wales) however will not be sufficient. Precisely because these struggles are not a battle to overthrow imperialist domination. They are struggles to identify and then secure the political system which those nations reflect and want - as against their participation in political systems which constantly deny their political choices. But of course the political wishes and requirements of the Scottish and Welsh people (should they demand it) lie on a bedrock of economic foundations that criss-cross the globe. To begin the process of moving the predominant economics in the world, in order to meet the requirements of most of the people in your country, is eminently an international requirement.
Again, the paradox of the new nations of the old Britain, is their requirement to reach to all those who seek the same destination as themselves wherever they can be found - not as a kind act - but as an essential necessity.