The re-suspension of Chris Williamson after the two-day lifting of his suspension in late June is an index of the supine and treacherous nature of the mainstream ‘left’, and the complete lack of backbone of Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott themselves. With the reimposition of his suspension, the likelihood is that Williamson’s case will be forwarded by the NEC to the National Constitutional Committee, a body so corrupt and dominated by witchhunters, both of the overt pro-Zionist right and their Lansmanite agents that Williamson is likely to have the kind of rubber-stamp expulsion previously dealt out to the likes of Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein.

This is an incredible provocation against the left and those who joined the Labour Party to support Corbyn and to reassert working class politics and political representation against the neo-liberalism and neocon war making of the Kinnock/Blair/Brown period. The aims are clear: Williamson is regarded by many of the left as the rightful Deputy Leader to Corbyn, rather than Tom Watson who is just as crooked a liar as Boris Johnson, having gained election in 2015 by promising to loyally serve under the obvious winner, Jeremy Corbyn; he has become Corbyn’s most entrenched enemy and organiser of provocations, smears and hate campaigns against the left.

Momentum’s Jon Lansman revealed himself once again to be an outright enemy of the left and an ally of Tom Watson in seeking to overthrow Corbyn; his denunciation of Williamson’s brief readmission on Twitter illuminated his reactionary nature very clearly. 

Likewise the joining in with this of middle-class fake left celebrities like Owen Jones, Ash Sarkar and Matt Zarb-Cousins; these petty bourgeois poseurs are epitomised by Sarkar who shot her mouth off to Piers Morgan last year: “I’m literally a communist, you idiot!” she postured. Well in backing the racist- Zionist campaign against Chris Williamson, she is now “literally” a scab!

This has finally dug Momentum’s grave, as there has been news of widespread cancellations of membership of this miserable abortion of a left movement since Lansman’s position became known. The bulk of Labour members are opposed to Chris’s purge, as shown embarrassingly when the very Blairite Labour List attempted a survey of membership sentiment around it: 61% voted in favour of Williamson’s reinstatement: only 31% supported his suspension.

If Williamson is expelled we say he should stand in his own seat, Derby North, in the General Election as an Independent Anti-Zionist Labour candidate. No one on the left should oppose him, and anyone who does stand against him for Labour will be marked in advance as a Zionist stooge and should be excoriated by the genuine left. He should force his way back into Labour the way Ken Livingstone did after 2000. This could be an inspirational tactic if such an outrageous expulsion were to go ahead.

However, the purge could be headed off by a determined campaign by a reinvigorated left within the party. Williamson’s decision to go public and fight back is indicated by his speaking at the SWP’s Marxism on 5 July and in Liverpool on 22 July at a public meeting demanding “Defend and Build the Labour Left. For a socialist Labour government”… Reinstate Chris Williamson and all wrongly accused!

A victory by Chris could lay the basis to reverse all the fraudulent expulsions of leftists as the behest of the anti-Arab Zionist racist thugs who are currently gaslighting Labour’s anti-racist, pro-Palestinian membership.

We cautiously welcome the initiative by Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW) and the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) to call for a properly democratic, inclusive organisation of the Labour Left, even though LAW itself does not have clean hands. LAW, like Momentum to a degree, has a record of falsely accusing some of its own supporters of ‘anti-Semitism’ and purging them, including supporters of Socialist Fight and LAZIR (Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism). Likewise we support the call by prominent London Labour left figure Graham Durham for a new, inclusive left-wing organisation. But we are opposed to it being a mere network of local groups.

Any such body has to be democratically organised and have a central, elected body, accountable to conferences etc. to decide policies, otherwise it is danger of being subjected to the tyranny of structurelessness. The whole left must insist on full implementation of working class democracy, which means no ideological bans and proscriptions against left-wing tendencies and full freedom of political debate. Working class democracy should be the principle which organises the left and the Labour Party itself if we are to go forward.

 One purpose of Williamson’s suspension is a blatant piece of ballot-rigging by Watson and the Blairites/Zionists. By engineering the expulsion of Williamson, his most likely challenger for the Deputy’s job – particularly now that such challenges are now easier to make if not to win! – they secure Watson’s hated tenure in his job even though he has no mandate for his attacks on the left. The other purpose is to demoralise the left and hopefully cause large-scale leakage away of Corbyn-supporting members. Which is why no one on the left should resign from Labour. It is exactly what the reactionaries want.

   Corbyn’s lack of backbone and opportunism over this is characteristic, and behind it is the traditional lack of ideological coherence of the Labour left. Trotsky wrote about this most perceptively in the lead-up to the General Strike of 1926:

“The left muddleheads are incapable of power; but if through the turn of events it fell into their hands they would hasten to pass it over to their elder brothers on the right. They would do the same with the state as they are now doing in the party.” (Leon Trotsky, “Problems of the British Labour Movement” (6 January 1926).

The danger of power being handed over to the right, of a new coup, is palpable today. The Zionists and the right-wing have joined in their attack on Corbyn just as the Tories are in a catastrophic crisis of their own, in the middle of a leadership election that looks certain to put in power the reactionary Trump-like adventurer and fraudster Boris Johnson, whose demands for a hard and likely no-deal Brexit are likely to tear the Tories apart and lead to a General Election sooner rather than later.

It does appear likely that the mechanism for a new coup in the Labour Party could be the ‘investigation’ being conducted by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission into supposed ‘anti-Semitism’, which was the result of complaints from various racist Zionist MP’s and the Zionist fake-charity, the “Campaign Against Anti-Semitism”, which is in fact a particularly virulent arm of the Israel lobby, highly political, and aimed at destroying the democratic rights of critics of Israel’s persecution and slow genocide of the Palestinian people.

There are British precedents; the sequestration of the NUM’s assets during the 1984-5 miners’ strike, when a state lawyer declared before a court: “I am the NUM”. That was under Thatcher. But under the Blair/Brown government, we saw similar phenomena. In the late 2000s after Israeli attacks on the Palestinians in Gaza, George Galloway set up ‘Viva Palestina’, with the aim of delivering aid to Palestinian victims of Israeli terrorism in Gaza.

The corrupt Charity Commission, the same one that allows the so-called “Campaign Against Anti-Semitism” to wage flagrantly political campaigns in support of Israeli crimes under cover of charitable status, imposed its ‘regulation’ on Viva Palestina even though it did not claim or seek charitable status. It was then punished for engaging in political activities, even though it never denied being a political campaign to deliver humanitarian aid to a civilian population that had been made political pariahs.

Something like this is the most likely mechanism of the next coup in Labour. Such quangos can be very useful to the ruling class. The EHRC previously ‘investigated’ the BNP, and no doubt this will be used along with copious amounts of lying amalgam to find a legal means to put the Labour Party into some kind of receivership, or something like that, allowing the pro-Palestinian (‘anti-Semitic’) elements in the leadership to be suspended from office etc, and good pro-Zionist types to replace them in the name of ‘anti-racism’.

 Perhaps Watson, the Deputy leader, could take over from the ‘anti-Semite’ Corbyn and on an ‘emergency’ basis, lead Labour into the General Election, and hope to become Prime Minister as a fait accompli to provide the ruling class with a desperately need alternative to the Tories and in position to lead a wholesale purge of the left once again.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. But then again Donald Trump being president of the United States would have been far-fetched just a few short years ago.

Or Brexit. Or Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. It is clear that this is a huge risk for the Labour Party bureaucracy and the ruling class – it could lead to a split in Labour of the bulk of its working class base that might dwarf 1931 and lead to the formation of a real workers party, as opposed to the bourgeois workers party that Labour is. Nevertheless the ruling class and its lackeys are desperate enough to try this, or something like it.

It is obvious that the sentiment at the base of the Corbynite movement is that Momentum must be replaced by another all-inclusive left-wing movement, this time based solidly on the principles of workers’ democracy, not the corrupt anti-democratism signified by Lansman’s personal ownership of Momentum. ▲