Socialism Today

In any battle the tactical details and their timing always have an element of the accidental and unexpected in them. Keir Starmer’s suspension of Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party on October 29 and – after the decision by a disciplinary panel of the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) to reinstate Corbyn on November 17 – the withdrawal of the parliamentary whip, may not have followed a prepared script.

It could be, as the former Labour Party chair and Corbyn-supporting MP Ian Lavery said of the October suspension, that there was “a miscalculation” involved, at least initially. Others, like the columnist Owen Jones, have spoken of Starmer’s ‘panicked’ reaction to events.

But a move against Corbyn himself had been an inherent possibility in the single-minded campaign against ‘Corbynism’ that Starmer has conducted since his ascent to the Labour leadership earlier this year.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report, released on October 29 – Investigation into Antisemitism in the Labour Party – is a serious challenge to the rights of the workers’ movement to organise independently of the capitalist class and its agencies.

The report is written in a coy legalese not explicitly attacking Jeremy Corbyn’s four-and-a-half year leadership of the Labour Party, although easily re-messaged by the media to do so with the venal BBC again to the fore.

There is a nod to the right of Labour Party members to “express their opinions on internal party matters, such as the scale of antisemitism within the party” (which Keir Starmer promptly overturned with his suspension of Corbyn).

But the ‘welcome’ given to the report and its recommendations even by those defending Jeremy Corbyn, is mistaken. This is a deeply political document, doing a job for the capitalist establishment.

The end of austerity has been heralded many times by leading Tories over the last few years but never actually arrived. Behind the populist declarations nothing has been done to reverse the deep and damaging cuts of the last decade. Government departments were asked to cut budgets by five per cent at the start of this year. The living standards of the working class remain squeezed.

However, coronavirus has forced Boris Johnson’s government to spend big. As in many other countries, the Tories have turned to state spending to try and limit the catastrophic economic falls triggered by the health crisis – £280 billion of pandemic-related spending has already been made, including £73 billion for job retention measures.

This ‘Covid Keynesianism’ runs contrary to the Tories’ usual neo-liberal instincts. There are ideologues on the right of the party who have swallowed their own lies that austerity was an economic necessity hook, line and sinker. There have been rumblings of discontent from these deficit hawks even as the health crisis rages on. They’re already looking to sharpen the axe for public spending.

In October Nigel Farage, former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), applied to the electoral commission to change the name of his current party from the Brexit Party to ‘Reform’.

He has presented it as the ‘anti-lockdown party’, as well as advocating electoral and constitutional reform. He talks about the economic damage done by lockdown measures and advocates the discredited theory, opposed by most scientists, that isolation of the most vulnerable could go alongside allowing ‘herd immunity’ to develop free of any restrictions for everyone else.

Given his past success with right-wing populism through UKIP, could he be on the way to a comeback? Some liberal commentators have poured cold water over Reform’s prospects, citing a YouGov opinion poll at the beginning of the most recent national lockdown, which said 72% of people supported going into lockdown with only 23% opposed. However, support was lower than at the beginning of the first lockdown measures when it was 93%, and things can change again.

Almost six years after it was set up, the first phase of the Undercover Policing Inquiry – the Mitting Inquiry – finally took place for fourteen days from 2 November 2020. HANNAH SELL looks at the lessons to be learnt, and introduces the opening statement to the Inquiry made by the legal team for three Socialist Party members.

The first tranche of the Inquiry covered the formation of the ‘Special Demonstration Squad’ (SDS) in 1968, then known as the Special Operations Squad, and its activities up until 1972. The next phase, covering from 1973–1982, is due to take place in the spring of next year. The Inquiry as a whole, chaired by the retired judge Sir John Mitting, is expected to finish as late as 2026.

Moving at a snail’s pace the Inquiry is also not very public. Unlike other recent public inquiries the first phase was not livestreamed as demanded by core-participants. It has not released the names of the big majority of the organisations spied on, nor has it given us the real – or even the cover – names of the majority of spies. The ‘non-state core participants’ – those who were spied on – have in almost all cases still received none of the police files relevant to them. The SDS reported to MI5, the domestic secret security service, but the latter’s actions are not part of the Inquiry.