Corbyn: The battle for Labour is the battle for Britain

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn [Photo/Xinhua]

It was never going to be easy for Jeremy Corbyn and his team of socialists. When he won a landslide victory in 2015 to become Labour's leader, he was hated not only by big business, the mainstream media and the British establishment as a whole, he was also reviled by most of his own MPs.

None of this has changed, as the battle continues for the socialist heart of the Labour Party.

From the mid 1990s to 2015 most activists dedicated to radical change were outside the party. They engaged in grassroots campaigning for a plethora of leftist causes – anti-war movements, international solidarity campaigns and student protests, etc.

Meanwhile the government (including Labour-led administrations] was busy dispatching the British military to join America in what seemed like an unending series of wars. Public housing was being decimated, and students pauperized and weighed down by debt.

Indeed, the concept of worker solidarity had been presented by Tony Blair as a delusion of a bygone era. The days of belching factories, coal mines and strikes were supposed to be over. Now, we would all have the chance to become well off, perhaps as entrepreneurs, or in cool high-tech jobs.

We were said to be at the dawn of a new age. And so, a new Labour Party had to abandon its focus on the public sector as the main instrument of policy-making and redistribution. Instead, the public sector was allotted the role of supporting trailblazing private sector enterprises to generate innovation and creativity.

However, ten years ago this month everything changed. At the cutting edge of this "creativity," our financial wizards had designed "collateralized debt obligations." These "innovations" were products conjured up by combining the mortgages of shantytowns in Brazil with those of multi-million dollar mansions.

It was a kind of egalitarian futures market, where rising tides made all boats float. Then came the deluge.

The world economy faced meltdown as these fictitious assets could not save the banks from collapse. There followed a tsunami of nationalization, as governments around the world, starting with Britain and the USA, took failing private banks into public ownership to save a capitalist financial system that had totally failed.

The scale of such "temporary public custodianship" dwarfed anything that Lenin carried out in 1917 or Mao Zedong in 1949. However, now the purpose was to save capitalism not to bury it. It was socialism for the rich because it meant the socialization of the losses of wealthy speculators. However, the public were forced to pay for this privilege.

Governments around the capitalist world loaded the burden of this crisis onto the shoulders of the workers and the poor. Private enterprises slashed their investments, and anger at inequality and injustice spread.

This is the background to why Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader in Britain, inspiring numerous new and enthusiastic supporters to join in supporting his vision of change.

A left-wing force called Momentum emerged, initially by mobilizing Corbyn's support base through social media campaigns. It revealed its potential strength by seeing off internal opposition from the majority of Labour MPs during a leadership challenge in 2016 that failed dismally.

Further, it thwarted Prime Minister Theresa May when she went to the polls prematurely in June 2017. To the surprise of everyone, Corbyn turned the tide and sharply increased the Labour vote to wipe out the Conservative party's majority in Parliament.

However, this didn't stop so-called "moderate" Labour MPs from plotting his removal by hook or by crook. A central theme has been to harp on endlessly about Corbyn's alleged "anti-Semitism," according to the motto, if you throw enough mud at someone some of it will stick.

Backed by predominantly rightwing pro-Israel lobbies, whose influence in the party is centered on a group known as Labour Friends of Israel. they have run an incessant campaign against Corbyn and his supporters, who are overwhelmingly champions of the Palestinian cause.

Many left-wing Labour Party members, often themselves lifelong anti-racist campaigners or Jewish socialists, were falsely accused of anti-Semitism. This surreal witch hunt continues unabated. Sadly, after almost daily media coverage focused on this "issue," Corbyn's own team capitulated to this pressure [accepting the international definition of anti-Semitism] in the hope the matter would go away.

Now that the right wing in the party have tasted blood; they are almost certain to try to oust Corbyn in the near future, but they will fail, when an election is finally called, Corbyn will almost certainly pull off a stunning victory.

However, the first Corbyn led government is unlikely to last long, as even with a sound majority in parliament, many Labour MPs will sabotage his socialist policies. And, when they don't get their way, they will abandon the Labour Party to form a new party.

Therefore a mass social movement demanding change is essential. In all likelihood, only a purge, or the general re-selection of these treacherous MPs by the grassroots of the Party, can ensure that the socialist measures proposed by the Corbyn led Labour Party can be turned into practice.