Less of The Canary and more Marx: How Labour should deal with the conspiracism in its midst

From miners’ lodge-sponsored libraries, where colliers genned up on Marxian economics, to 1980s Labour Party magazine New Socialist, it’s time to claw back the party’s heritage of big ideas

Long before #MeToo and the current craze for veganism, Hollywood legend Paul Newman compared marital infidelity to greedily wolfing down a takeaway hamburger when you’ve got steak at home. Yet a section of the Corbyn left is guilty of roughly the equivalent political error.

Here we are, legatees of the greatest minds the socialist and social democratic traditions have produced over the last two centuries, from Marx, Luxemburg and Gramsci to Keynes, Crosland and Rawls.

Yet some comrades cannot resist poisonous snackettes cooked up by the likes of an Assad fangirl citizen journalist, a hard bop sax merchant who professes to see the point of torching synagogues, and a deranged former division three goalie trapped in a lizard-populated four-dimensional acid flashback fantasy kingdom.

Once house room is granted to such relentlessly self-preening charlatans as Vanessa Beeley, Gilad Atzmon and David Icke, it’s a perilously short step to political judgments centred on the shoddy output of propaganda-driven state broadcasters, half-arsed alt-left websites and the crankier fringes of the Trot diaspora.

Before you ask, this isn’t a snipe from the right. I’m a long-standing lefty who has proudly donated to Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral efforts and knocked on doors for John McDonnell and Diane Abbott for many years.

Nor do I wish to exaggerate the extent of the problem. Thankfully this nonsense remains predominantly the province of a few hundred headbangers on social media, although even that minimal degree of traction feeds the Daily Mail with “vile Labour Twitter troll” stories as if by conveyor belt.

But branding the White Helmets Israeli stooges, or postulating a Rothschild Zionist grip on global central banking, is just the type of dimwitted aperçu that ensured antisemitism renewed circulation among radical young people during the anti-globalisation and Occupy movements, and sometimes emerge in the real world.

As Trotsky himself used to note, with a scratch comes the danger of gangrene. In a climate where 2.6 million Britons think the Holocaust was a myth, no potential Labour standard-bearer should get away with posting offensively photoshopped pictures of the gates of Auschwitz, on any pretext whatsoever.

Tom Watson is right to brand incidents like that a cause for deep shame. So it’s pleasing that Labour left figures such as Jon Lansman are on the case, as demonstrated by the excellent Rothschild Conspiracy Exposed video released by Momentum last week.

Meanwhile, matters are compounded in some quarters by wilful refusal to engage with current affairs, especially in other countries, which comes as an inevitable corollary of making the very words “mainstream media” a dread insult.

Put simply, the Beeb, The Economist and Financial Times have serious sources in Venezuela and Syria; one-man blogs written from bedrooms reeking of hamster urine do not.

Sure, none of those outlets is ideologically neutral. But past generations of socialists learned how to strip out the bias from the well resourced boss class press and arrive at independent conclusions.

That’s still best practice. Activists who take a shine to RT or seek out Press TV online now it has been banned from the airwaves need to ask why the ruling classes of kleptocratic Russia and theocratic Iran foot the bill for TV stations almost nobody watches.

In the past, when British broadcasters gave socialist politicians or commentators practically zero airtime, it was on balance right to appear on them. However small their audiences were, it was better than nothing.

But in the wake of the Skripal affair, McDonnell’s appeal for Labour MPs to give RT a miss was absolutely on point.

What remains lacking is a positive educational programme for a resurgent left, in both boomer and millennial iterations. Sadly, clarity about ideas has never been the British labour movement’s forte.

The very term “left-wing intellectual” is often tantamount to a cuss, as witnessed by the speech Angela Smith gave on departure for the Independent Group (TIG).

Note how gleefully she contrasted the effete book-readers among us to a working class unsullied by any of those highfalutin fancy-pants belief systems as it readies to rally to TIG in its many-millioned ranks.

Gone are the better traditions of the past, from miners’ lodge-sponsored libraries that enabled colliers to gen up on Marxian economics to 1980s Labour Party magazine New Socialist, a forum for debating big ideas. It’s high time to claw that heritage back.

Don’t forget that the phrase “reality-based community” was coined by the US right, as a derisive reference to the rest of us. If you’re a Corbyn supporter who doesn’t reside there already, move in and help us implement the only ideas capable of transforming Britain.