The spectacle of clueless British Labour apparatchiks expelling filmmaker Ken Loach, one of Britain’s cultural treasures, from the party is almost too exasperating for mere words to convey. All religions might as well yank their prophets off their pedestals. The ANC might as well posthumously expel Nelson Mandela. The Rolling Stones, now already bereft of drummer Charlie Watts, might as well exile Mick Jagger beyond Main Street. What’s going on?
Long ago social theorist Robert Michels detected what he called an “iron law of oligarchy” within large organizations, particularly political parties, where tiny administrative elites separate themselves from memberships and seize control, no matter how much at odds their agenda is with the majority’s wishes.
Loach’s ludicrous expulsion is a stellar example. Labour’s Blairite wing, consisting mostly of Oxbridge-educated professionals utterly out of touch with working people, and in it only for the status and publicity, are busy sabotaging their party’s very reason for existence in order to purge dissenting voices.
According to an avalanche of leaked insider emails, the Party elite ~ fresh after ridding themselves of former leader Jeremy Corbyn ~ treat anyone who does not worship the golden calf of the corporate marketplace as a “Trotskyist” whether or not the targets even know what the epithet means. Where does it stop?
These sad antics deservedly conjure classic phrases that echo down the decades: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” Joseph Welch in 1954 asked the commie-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy in televised US Congressional hearings. “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” By this climactic moment McCarthy and his acolytes had extended fabricated accusations of massive commie infiltration even to the US Army, which proved one bullying step too far. Welch was the Army’s Special Counsel in hearings at the apex of the rampaging red scare. Welch’s caustic words signaled the cresting of the witch hunt, though the phenomenon never ebbed entirely away, not even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
No one should misunderstand McCarthyism as the work of one solitary Senator. The red hunt was a wily right-wing means of crippling the real foe: trade unions and all the New Deal forces aiming after World War II to reinvigorate a progressive agenda. The assault was, however, a mixed success.
Many US Democrats who complied with McCarthyism at the time would today doubtless qualify as “Trotskyite” by the exacting criteria of the vigilant crew running the British Labour Party. Indeed, the programme of Clement Attlee’s 1945-51 Labour government, replete with nationalisations and public ownership schemes, sounds way too radical nowadays, and perhaps Attlee too eventually will get the heave-ho from the Party pantheon. Anyone listening to a JFK campaign speech in 1960, or to Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the mid-1960s, would be startled at how far left of current Labour Party pieties they were, which also shows how far to the right mass media has slithered (although “mainstream thinking” in legislatures is well to the right of the US or UK public on almost any issue). Keith Starmer’s Labour party, after the ongoing purges, evidently hopes to reign in tranquility over what’s left of a party that once was dedicated to helping ordinary people.
Ken Loach’s1995 film Land and Freedom, set within the Spanish Civil War, ironically illustrates the betrayal of Spanish revolutionary hopes by rigid Stalinist forces at work within the Republic’s fraying regime. Loach’s own sins are his support for Corbyn’s policies and for questioning overblown accusations of anti-Semitism ~ suddenly synonymous with lack of zealous support for Israel – abounding in the UK political party least afflicted by it. Indeed, in an upbeat Hollywood movie, a leader like the departed Corbyn, who is at first distrusted by established Party figures, would at the point this leader shows they can indeed win elections would accordingly rally around to assure success of the cause. Only on Hollywood screens do such sensible and heartwarming things occur.
In reality, Corbyn, as an internal Party report attests, was abhorred all the more by operatives determined to save the party from its overly enthused membership because, in their centrist creed, the ordinary members were unrealistic. Yet Corbyn realistically could have formed a government in 2017, had it not been for betrayal by the party’s antagonistic administrators.
Labour hypnotically seems to be doing the Tories’ bidding. and have behaved exactly like the Stalinists in the way their fevered centrist imaginations portrayed Corbyn. The mission of such managerially minded creatures is to not dare to disturb the universe, to shore up the status quo humanely, if possible. If not, too bad. The immense anti-Semitic uproar was preposterous, but the hallowed conservative tactic around the planet now is to attack the opponent party’s strongest point with ferocious disinformation assaults. The strategy worked dismayingly well when the Republicans in 2004 “swift boated” Democratic candidate John Kerry by maligning his Vietnam combat record (versus George W. Bush safely nestled in the Air National Guard), and it worked stunningly well again against Corbyn whose anti-racist credentials are impeccable.
The late Studs Terkel pondered those dismal souls who hated the 1960s so much because what they really hated was hope, and wanted it crushed. The people in power clearly only talk to and heed one another, and therefore cannot help but go beyond all reason. Loach’s expulsion may generate a fiercer pushback to the demoralizing idiocy of this wave of expulsions. Have they no sense of decency?