Starmer the spook...
and how the Blob ate Boris
Sayleing away
“That fucking idiot Paul Mason, one of the things that he said in his article in LabourList is that he was worried about young people because they're too stupid to make up their own minds because of the contention that Keir Starmer is some kind of State actor - that Keir Starmer is you know part of the security services - either security services adjacent or actually you know an MI5 operative. But I think that that's probably true, that he has been certainly extremely close to both - he has been a state actor, he’s been a state agent as the director of public prosecutions, he's been an agent of state repression for many years. And now he’s fucking leader of the Labour Party. I mean it's breath-taking that you've got Rishi Sunak is in league with the you know the bankers, the JP Morgan's and so on and then you've got Starmer who would appear to be in league with the Security State and you know the arms industry and its various extensions. I mean that's pretty ******* 1984-ish really.”
Alexei Sayle, not being funny or even coherent on the Not the Andrew Marr Show, Youtube.
The well-known comedian was not happy with a film that he had narrated being pulled from the cinema tent at Glastonbury the other week. One of the people who had argued against Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie being given the official blessing of the festival organisers was the activist and writer Paul Mason. We’ll come on to why Mason argued this in a moment.
But my interest was piqued by the “Starmer is MI5” accusation and its similarity to a developing credo within the Conservative party and the political right. Summarised this belief amounts to “we have failed politically because of the nefarious machinations of largely unseen people and organisations”. As Norman Thomas, the head of Platform Films (the company which made The Big Lie) has it, Sir Keir Starmer is not to be regarded as someone Thomas disagrees with, but instead all the time as a devious manipulator who “played a deceptive ‘spy-cop’ role in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet”. There was an infernal plan, you see, and the spooks were in on it. Though mostly it was the Israelis. It usually is. There is, of course, no evidence that Starmer has anything covert to do with MI5.
The Great Yawn
Anyone who titles a film Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, when it is supposedly about how the former Labour leader was falsely accused, is not going to win awards for effective communication. And nor will the film. I made myself watch a shortened version of it for this post and at 55 minutes it was a dire piece of badly-thrown together agitprop – a series of talking heads giving their identical opinions plus archive of St Jeremy being saintly. The central claim made for the film by its supporters: that it establishes that the accusations of antisemitism in the Labour party were deliberately confected - is not remotely borne out by the content of the abbreviated movie. In fact it didn’t even really try to provide evidence for its contention and I don’t imagine that the longer version is anything other than a painful extrusion of the truncated one. What you get instead of revelation is the views of former Corbyn advisor Andrew Murray (now once again happily returned to the bosom of the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain) and a cohort of Labour expellees from Ken Loach to Iranian state TV host Chris Williamson via members of the pro-Corbyn mini-group, Jewish Voice for Labour.
The Huge Evasion
I’ll quickly illustrate the intellectual integrity of the movie by referencing the film’s own captioning of two of its participants, one of whom I had heard of and the other of whom I hadn’t. The first, Professor David Miller is captioned as “Sacked by Bristol University after criticising Israel”. The second, a Rebecca Massey is simply described as “Expelled Labour Party member”, the implication in context being that she was the victim of a witch-hunt.
In fact Miller was fired by his university for accusing Jewish students of being tools of the Israeli government, prompting a statement from the university that:
We have a duty of care to all students and the wider University community, in addition to a need to apply our own codes of conduct consistently and with integrity. Balancing those important considerations, and after careful deliberation, a disciplinary hearing found Professor Miller did not meet the standards of behaviour we expect from our staff and the University has concluded that Professor Miller’s employment should be terminated with immediate effect.
Miller had already been suspended from the Labour Party after accusing Keir Starmer of taking "Zionist money". As to Ms Massey, her expulsion followed her tweeting sentiments such as “Interesting insight into how Israel has Tory and Labour parties under control” and “How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour’s Anti-Semitism crisis”.
With regard to Loach, I wrote this in the Jewish Chronicle this week:
Mason rightly castigated The Big Lie for its contention that there was a devilish Zionist plot to ditch Corbyn. But to the people who made it and appeared in it, it is inconceivable that their defeat and expulsion was not organised by some great malign force. Lacking any apparent capacity for reflection or self-criticism, what else could they believe? To one interviewee, Graham Bash (ex of London Labour Briefing) it all happened “to ensure there never was a prime minister in Britain who defended Palestinian interests”. To another, genuinely horrible man called Tony Greenstein writing on his blog, “Starmer is the candidate of MI5 and the Political Police – he is Establishment down to his manicured fingers.” Those who have known Greenstein as long as I have will understand just what a terrible indulgence he regards concern for one’s appearance to be.
Towards a taxonomy of head-banging
It would be unfair to lump all Starmer critics in with the Big Lie crowd. There are essentially three groups on the Labour and beyond Labour far left. There are the ageing headbangers who - because no one else is listening - spend their time banging their own heads. These are the people in this film, most of them expelled since 2016 (including when Corbyn was leader). These are folk who, despite the ever-present threat from Islamist, “dissident” Republican and far-right terrorist sources, think that MI5 is, per se, a bad organisation. And that – rapists, domestic abusers, paedophiles and murderers notwithstanding – to be the Director of Public Prosecutions is somehow automatically to be on the wrong side from “the people”.
Then there are the younger headbangers like the Guardian’s kibitzer Owen Jones who mostly bang other people’s heads (this week he was tweeting that gay people should barrack the “liar” Keir Starmer should he appear at a Pride event). Jones – a McDonnellite - long ago broke (if far more gently) with the Bash’s and the Williamsons.
And then there those like Paul Mason who temper their radicalism with practicality and their partisanship with principle. And get their heads banged for it. Mason of course, according to Greenstein and others is “an intelligence asset”. More temperately he has recently been accused by Jones of “selling out everything you believe in, blindly cheerleading for a leadership which holds you in contempt, all in search of a parliamentary seat you are never, ever going to get.” To which you can only respond, “why don’t you go for it, O?”
Big Lie, little tent
In the end the Big Lie was shown at Glastonbury in a little tent to what looked like a very senior audience even by the standards of that increasingly senescent festival. I’m not sure it was worth banning.
Banish Peto, Banish Bardolph, banish Poins, but for boring Neal Lawson…
A footnote here. It is hard to regret the expulsion of those appearing in Dreck: The Movie. I even think it’s time Jones made an honest revolutionary of himself and quit Labour before he drives himself quite round the bend. But I don’t feel the same way about the possible expulsion by Labour of the campaigner Neal Lawson, which caused a furore last week. I’ve never liked the rule that you cannot under any circumstances support the candidate of another party while remaining a member of the Labour (or any other) party. I see why Labour candidates may find it irritating to find party members backing rivals, but in circumstances where our voting system will often require people in good conscience to cast and to advocate tactical votes. it is both unrealistic and draconian. I’m not a great fan of Lawson’s (nor he of me, I imagine) but I hope he is allowed to stay in the party.