Malia and the Media

The election of the left-wing, pro-Palestine and minority rights activist Malia Bouattia as President of the National Union of Students has provoked ardent condemnation by self-declared guardians of liberal tolerance.

 

The NUS itself, which has for some time been dominated by the right, is in a state of collective panic. Elite universities are threatening disaffiliation. Among students themselves Bouattia is popular enough (she won 50% of the votes), but her enemies have been quick to associate her with antisemitism, citing co-authored blogposts, speeches, public statements and her voting history as NUS black students officer as incontrovertible proof of the dark times ahead.

 

Yet it hardly takes the most thoroughgoing journalist to discover how much the panic about Bouattia and the supposed antisemitic bent of young student activists relies on  exaggeration, misreading and vicious personal attack. The fact that Bouattia is a black Muslim woman in a new-found position of leadership can hardly have escaped the attention of her many attackers, though their interventions are peculiarly framed as anti-racist. Bouattia has not claimed to have a perfect record and has embarked on meeting with Jewish groups to repair any damage she might have caused in the past. Yet rather than shouting Bouattia - a very rare female Muslim voice in a position of public leadership - down, her critics would do well to read her past and present statements a little more closely and with less of the distortion that has characterised so much of the debate about antisemitism, Islam and the Left.

 

So what are the allegations made against Bouattia and how do the claims stack up against what she actually said and did?

 

Numerous articles have appeared in the right wing press, some within hours of her election, passing judgement on Bouattia and her allies. It is possible that the Daily Telegraph follows student politics with a keen eye, but rather more likely is that these early pieces were assembled from briefings by the defeated right-wing of the NUS itself. 

 

The first was a straight news story, whose opening paragraph contained the oft-repeated accusation that Bouattia had blocked an NUS statement "condemning ISIS" during her time as black students' officer. In fact Bouattia had requested an amendment and then later voted in favour of it. The Telegraph failed to address this part of the story, or to provide any balance to its negative news coverage of her.

 

According to Bouattia herself in her recent Guardian op-ed, "Two years ago I delayed a National Executive Council motion condemning Isis – but that was because of its wording, not because of its intent. Its language appeared to condemn all Muslims, not just the terror group. Once it was worded correctly I proposed and wholly supported the motion." If Bouattia is lying about her subsequent support for the statement, this would need to be proved. However, no one has even alleged she maintained her opposition, and nobody has bothered to report the fact the statement was eventually passed.

 

Two days after this initial reaction the Telegraph invited Aaron Simons, former head of Oxford University's Jewish Society, to comment. Simons described Bouattia's election as "a dark message to Jews" and compared her "rhetoric" to "Neo-Nazism." Stating that Bouattia's politics was "anything but nuanced", he catalogued the accusations against her:

 

"There are intelligent analyses to be made of the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac, the US pro-Israel lobbying group), or of media bias in international conflict. Then there is the claim that “Zionist lobbies” control the UK government’s counter-terrorism policy and that the “Zionist-led media” orchestrates the misrepresentation of the “global south”. This is dog-whistle anti-Semitism at a deafening volume, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as 21st-century text."

 

Simons is quite right to point to the ideological slippage which sometimes takes place in anti-Zionist politics, from criticising to conspiracy theorising. But the "dog-whistle politics" he cites requires a presumed audience, and suggests Bouattia was deliberately stirring up resentment towards Jews in general. Bouattia is guilty of using a lazy shorthand which could clearly encourage a reductionist, even antisemitic view among her readers. She must be more careful in her criticisms of Israel, as it is her responsibility to inform as well as to criticise. However, it is highly questionable if her remarks amount to antisemitism as such.

 

I have personal reservations about the term anti-Zionism, and have argued its ambiguity can play into all the wrong hands. Yet for the many who identify as anti-Zionist, the point nevertheless needs to be made: Bouattia makes no reference to "Jews" or a "Jewish-controlled media." Her references to the "Zionist-led media" may be reductionist and clumsy, but I can't see how they are principally or even mainly antisemitic in effect. In Bouattia's recent reply to her critics she publicly wrote: “For me to take issue with Zionist politics is not me taking issue with being Jewish … it is a political argument, not one of faith.”

 

To be clear then - these are perhaps the worst statements Bouattia is accused of making. It is grossly mistaken to accuse major media outlets of being "Zionist-led." For this there should be no apologising. Yet do these comments or others warrant the attacks being levelled against her?

 

A day later veteran right-winger Simon Heffer made Simons look pretty level headed by accusing Bouattia of "vilifying Jews." A yawning gap between deed and accusation has opened up - without even so much as proper citation. Perhaps Heffer was referring  to Bouattia's comments about Birmingham University Jewish Society being "the largest in the country" and the university being "something of a Zionist outpost." Of course, these comments are problematic because they suggest a possible dislike for Jewish religious self-organisation. Bouattia cannot be excused from these implications and there should be pressure on her to clarify her arguments in future and repair any damage this has caused. 

 

Responding to Bouattia's election Daniel Clemens, the president of Birmingham J-Soc, puts his own views on record: “I think that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are two[sic] and the same thing. Zionism is the belief that Jewish people should have a homeland to live in without threat of annihilation or war. This stems from a Jewish belief. So when someone attacks Zionism they’re indirectly attacking Judaism as a religion, because the two go hand in hand.”

 

So Bouattia, according to Clemens himself, is really only guilty of criticising Zionism, which for him is de facto antisemitism since the link is a theological one. To be clear about the implications of Clemens' argument: imagine a situation where criticism of the British or French state was equal to treason. It is an extremely authoritarian view which would impose the same ban on dissent sought by religious fundamentalists around the world. This is also a thoroughly ahistorical argument: there have been other forms of Jewish nationalism and of Jewish political identity besides Zionism (see: Bundism). Clemens' argument is worryingly reductive. 

 

Simon Heffer went further, calling Bouattia "dangerous" and an "extremist", while her supporters were "odious" and should all be "prosecuted for incitement." Heffer issued these attacks following a single paragraph which restated the aforementioned accusations, shorn of context or any citation or referencing which might make such context available. 

 

By the first of May the posited identity of anti-Zionism and antisemitism had been tacitly confirmed, as the millionaire Tory party treasurer Mick Davis was given space in the Telegraph to condemn the entire left as "antisemitic" and as having "toxic views" - arguing also that anti-Zionist views were "mostly" a facade for antisemitism. 

 

This then became the venue in which to reiterate Israel's "vibrant democracy" - ignoring of course the disenfranchisement of the Occupied Territories or Israel'sown often persecuted Arab citizens (this according to Israeli daily Haaretz). Davis also went so far as to suggest a plot by liberal media outlets and the left to focus exclusively on Israel's "failings" (again ignoring the Left's very loud criticisms of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other authoritarian, Islamic and secular Arab regimes).

 

This process of intensifying caricature of pro-Palestinian arguments, starting with the sometimes problematic language of left-wing activists and proceeding to a demonisation of the left at large and an uncritical celebration of Israel itself, is dangerous for several reasons. First, it enshrines the false assumption that criticism of Israel is somehow identical with antisemitism. Second, it eradicates any trace of nuance from debates about the Middle East, one that is far more damaging than any leftish political correctness it opposes. Thirdly, at its most elaborate and rhetorical it posits a kind of liberal conspiracy against Israel, run by Islamists, their leftie sympathisers, and a politically correct media. In other words, it skirts the obsessions of the far-right.

 

When these arguments are advanced without countervailing views, especially by Tory millionaires or commentators who,in Simon Heffer's case, have a tendency to scapegoat liberalism (he is the author of the Spectator's famous Hillsborough rant, an opponent of gay rights and advocate for the influence of Christian values on education and society), public discourse suffers. Eventually the space for rational argument is gravely reduced.

 

Malia Bouattia has her Jewish defenders. One group of former students and NUS members wrote to the Jewish Chronicle defending her from what they called an "Islamophobic" campaign. The Guardian also printed a letterby Mike Cushman, convenor of Jews for Boycotting Israel, which drew attention again to the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. There are no doubt others, and though it may even be the case that they are in the minority, you would expect the media to show some interest in their views.

 

In its coverage of Bouattia's election the Guardian did at least acknowledge some of the left's defence of the new president, though featured no pro-Palestinian Jewish voices. Not only does this play into the narrative of a strict religious-cum-racial divide, it also excludes dissident Jewish opinion. Though evidence shows the vast majority of British Jews support Israel's right to exist, two thirds are critical of Israeli policy towards the occupied territories. A plurality of opinion is unsurprising - Jews are not a homogeneous group. But you wouldn't know from even the liberal Guardian's coverage that a majority of British Jews agree with some of the views articulated by the pro-Palestinian left. Indeed, public statements defending key figures on the left from accusations of antisemitism, including the Jewish Socialists' Group, have been massively under-reported. The views of Jews are as divided as those of Muslims or indeed any other group - and we must seek to build alliances where we can.

 

In effect, what is being stymied is criticism by the left not only of Israel but also of the implementation of the Prevent Agenda to police extremism (which has proved seriously unpopular among students despite the government spending years trying to implement it). One reason Bouattia won the recent elections was her opposition to Prevent. Following Bouattia's election prominent "anti-extremism" activist and government adviser Maajid Nawaz took to the Jewish Chronicle to deride Bouattia as a symbol of the "poison" of the "regressive left." Indeed Nawaz perversely blames the left for the rise of right-wing populism, failing to mention the left's campaigning against media harassment of migrants and refugees. 

 

Nawaz picks up the IS statement rejection story (again failing to report Bouattia's subsequent support for it) and her comments on the Birmingham University JSoc. But most telling is Nawaz's quotation at length of a Bouattia speech in which she questioned the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel and the dissociation of international campaigners from violent Palestinian resistance, suggesting they were too weak to really secure Palestinian liberation. She said at the time:

 

“To consider that Palestine will be free only by means of fundraising, non-violent protest and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is problematic… My issue is that whilst at time it’s tactically used, or presented as the non-violent option, it can be misunderstood as the alternative to resistance by the Palestinian people…"

 

Bouattia was highly critical of the peace process, which she said was only deepening colonisation and prolonging Palestinian suffering. This "chilling speech", Nawaz suggests, is a sign of the intolerance and bigotry of the student left. It is a mark of how low the standard of debate on Israel-Palestine has fallen that Bouattia's words could be met with such horror. Bouattia's views are far from unconventional - indeed they were voiced by the late Edward Said in very similar language during the Second Palestinian Intifada:

 

"What of this vaunted peace process? What has it achieved and why, if indeed it was a peace process, has the miserable condition of the Palestinians and the loss of life become so much worse than before the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993? And why is it, as the New York Times noted on 5 November, that ‘the Palestinian landscape is now decorated with the ruins of projects that were predicated on peaceful integration’? And what does it mean to speak of peace if Israeli troops and settlements are still present in such large numbers? Again, according to RISOT, 110,000 Jews lived in illegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bank before Oslo; the number has since increased to 195,000, a figure that doesn’t include those Jews – more than 150,000 – who have taken up residence in Arab East Jerusalem. Has the world been deluded or has the rhetoric of ‘peace’ been in essence a gigantic fraud?"

 

Though many disagreed with Said's radical criticisms of the peace process and of the compromises of the Fateh-led Palestinian Authority, there was no concerted effort to silence him or remove him from public life. 

 

How different are things today, when a self-styled anti-extremist - and former adviser to George Bush and David Cameron - can label a Muslim student leader a threat to peaceful dialogue with barely a mutter of dissent. It is precisely the concerted manipulation of misplaced words into elaborate racial crimes that is allowing critics of Israeli and by extension US and British foreign policy to be silenced.  

Anti-Semitism and the Labour Party

A couple of points about anti-semitism

Anti-Semitism and Ken Livingstone

Ken Livingstone, all too fond of his own voice and supremely confident in his own knee jerk opinions, has yet again waded into a public argument and got burned.

Here's what he told the BBC today about Hitler:

"Let’s remember, when Hitler won his election in 1932 his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism. [He then] went mad and ending up killing 6 million Jews. "

All it takes is the toe-curling qualifier "Let's remember.." and you know what's coming: some half-baked, misremembered reduction of the Holocaust to the status of mere accident or act of madness. The Holocaust was deliberate policy and Nazism's hatred of Jews total from the outset. Hitler didn't just "go mad." It was the systematic, rationalised implementation of barbarism at an industrial scale.

I don't think Livingstone intends to be anti-Semitic, but he is. Just like when a perfectly innocent grandparent says something racist. Except you tolerate racist grandparents because they are not usually lifelong leftists with decades-long public careers. This last point is crucial: Livingstone should be well aware of how subtle coding can influence the public reception of certain statements which appear relatively benign but give off a certain malignant message beneath the overt words. The left calls this "dog-whistle" politics - and is rightly angry at the Prime Minister and the Zach Goldsmith campaign for doing it to Sadiq Khan. Livingstone has been a public figure his entire adult life. This seems not to have made him more reflective about his influence on public discourse but less so.

A final note on Livingstone: why on Earth did the Labour leadership allow such a knucklehead to dominate the public debate about this sensitive issue? 

Labour and anti-Semitism

The most controversial episode of the week involves Labour MP Naz Shah, who has been suspended from the party because of anti-Semitic Facebook posts. One reportedly advocated the mass relocation of Israeli Jews to the USA.

There have been odd attempts by left-wingers today to defend Shah from accusations of anti-Semitism. But imagine an analogous situation in which someone on social media proposed relocating the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek with its high Mislim population to, say, Saudi Arabia with the caption "Problem solved." Many on the left would, quite rightly, accuse that person of stupidly endorsing the forced relocation of an entire population. People would call it Islamophobic and they would be right. 

So, Naz Shah shared something on social media that was in effect anti-Semitic, even if she didn't intend it to be. But how widespread is Labour anti-Semitism? At Open Democracy today Jamie Stern Weiner counts nine individuals and one Labour organisation accused of anti-Semitism. In each case the accused were suspended or inquiries launched within one or two days. Both Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell have publicly spoken out against anti-Semitism and racism of all kinds throughout their careers and especially as Labour Party leaders. If we lived in a rational world this would be enough. Anti-Semitism is poisonous - and where it occurs it should be stamped out.

So why are so many in the Labour Party desperate to associate the current leadership with anti-Semtism? After all, a Tory councillor was recently expelled from his party for anti-Semitism, with no remonstrations aimed at David Cameron for tolerating such an individual. Are the accusers - mostly from Labour ranks themselves - really saying that something about their party attracts or even creates anti-Semites? Of course, they are not. Their assertion, entirely without evidence, is that Corbyn is the inadvertent cause of all this. Never mind the fact that some of these allegations clearly pre-date Corbyn or involve people within a large organisation he can hardly have had anything to do with.

After all, why would anti-Semites be attracted to a party led by a fiercely left-wing leadership famed for its supposedly wet Islington multiculturalism, positive views about immigration, racial minorities and a multi-faith society. Or for that matter a leader who says things like, “I go to churches, I go to mosques, I go to temples, I go to synagogues. I find religion very interesting. I find the power of faith very interesting.” During the leadership election last summer Corbyn stated that the UK should have “relationships with all sections of society in Israel” and said, “We shouldn’t judge everything to do with Israel through the prism of whatever Benjamin Netanyahu is saying from one day to the next – Israel’s politics is much wider than that."

Indeed, every one of Jeremy Corbyn's enemies in the Labour Party - and many of those beyond it - knows this. The truth is they want to stamp out this left wing upsurge as quickly as they can, at any cost to the long term reputation of the Party.

Anti-Semitism and the Left

Since the anti-Semitism controversies started leftists have been arguing that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are different beasts, and that to criticise Israeli policy is not to be anti-Semitic. Both statements are in a sense true. But they are in fact separate arguments and there is a careful process of elision operating between them. What is missing is a definition of anti-Zionism and whether it is itself identical with criticism of Israeli policy.

To be clear, I do not consider myself an anti-Zionist and I don't think the left more generally should endorse thee term either. This is because anti-Zionism is hard to pin down and this very ambiguity plays into both the hands of the left's enemies and the anti-Semites. After all, what does it mean to be anti-Zionist? It cannot mean simply being against this or that Israeli policy, since that might make Barack Obama an anti-Zionist. Does it mean being against all illegal Israeli settlements? Or all the territories seized by Israel after 1967? Or is it to be against the existence of the Jewish state? And what would that mean in practice? It
is one thing to regard Israel's foundation as unjust (so was that of the USA) and quite another to think it worthwhile to oppose its continued existence.

Anti-Zionism is an increasingly unhelpful designation, which merely throws up barriers between leftist Palestinian solidarity activists and potential allies. Its easy confusion with anti-Semitism does too many favours for all the wrong people.

Now, it is important to remember the cause of all this: Jeremy Corbyn is a long term Palestinian solidarity activist and much of the Atlanticist state, the conservative and imperialist right, the private media and the neoliberal wing of the Labour Party want desperately to destroy him. It is useful for them to associate him with anti-Semitism.

A note on the embattled Labour leadership then: they knew full well this storm was brewing - that anti-Zionism and Palestinian solidarity are a discursively delicate issue; that their weaknesses could be exploited by their enemies; that they would need to carefully construct an unassailable ideological position. They didn't do enough to prepare for this battle. Why didn't Corbyn give a set-piece speech months ago on internationalism and solidarity with the world's marginalised, declaring a Labour foreign policy based on cooperation and an end to imperialist wars, with arms open to all willing to cooperate? Instead we get Livingstone fudging his own bizarre Hitler theories on daytime telly. The Labor leadership needs to get better, fast.

Let Sleeping Tax Dodgers Lie

In normal times, when it hangs around in the periphery of politics, tax can seem a dullish grey thing. Revolts against it tend to come out of that periphery too: sensible people keep their heads down and pay up. Only the agitated right of the white middle class, angry at the poor getting its dough, can summon any passion for it.

But times are not normal and today we are faced with an extremely rare thing: protests in favour of paying tax, a veritable springtime of tax returners. These dutiful citizens packing the squares of Reykjavik and - heaven forbid - London really only want to know one thing: why they have to pay tax but lots of very rich people don't.

The rich, it's fair to say, are probably unaccustomed to and thus unprepared for such polite scrutiny. So they dithered marvellously - our Hamlet-lite PM most of all. To publish or not to publish, that was the question. Only late last week, as the evidence of the Panama Papers and opposition pressure mounted, did the usual defences start to emerge.

Primus inter pares here - the inegalitarian go-to - is the familiar argument from victimhood. Boris Johnson got himself in a bit of bother by saying rich folk are the fiscal equivalent of saints, working miracles on the public purse for a doubting or even prejudiced public. The private accident of wealth should by no means lead to public scorn, he argued. David Cameron, in one of quite a few soliloquies on his family income, declared himself "lucky enough to be wealthy." Be it curse or blessing, wealth is apparently just the luck of the draw. The rich can no more choose their family backgrounds than other "put upon minorities" can. Thus the Tories' defence of inheritance reaches dazzling new heights. No mention though of correcting that lottery.

The same Johnson of City Hall flatly refused to say off shore tax havens were immoral. "It depends what you do with them," he said, which is true of anything in a way. If you use a nuclear missile head as a Christmas tree I suppose you're not doing anything wrong. The question is whether such gargantuan power should ever accrue in the hands of a single family. And one can hardly blame people for asking what the long-term social consequences of this habit of accidental wealth accumulation might be.

The British are fond of claiming they acquire things in a fit of absent-mindedness, like the contents of the British Museum or India for example. It's as if the sum total of our historical mea culpa is a slow "Oops." That barely phatic utterance tends to act as cover against deeper interrogation, specifically the question of what to do now about it all.

But no, that's envy, the second wall of sandbags defending the wealthy from the rising tide of the tax-prone mob. "They hate even a hint of wealth," we were told of tax campaigners yesterday in the commons. I'd say the Panama Papers offer more than a mere hint, but hate doesn't quite capture the response. It's more exasperation at the fact that anyone could fail to see their wealth is not wholly deserved. And if it ends up in your hands by accident - a result of the hard graft of others or a social coup - it should in part be redistributed. This is not after all victimless: the more wealth concentrates at the top the worse things get at the bottom (contra the myth that the more mega-yachts bought by the rich, the more jobs for the poor at the port).

"We've done nothing wrong," goes the last line of defence. After all, the PM just got a few presents from his family. One could, by the time he had to publish some information about his taxes, sense the creaking urge of the media to get back to bashing Europe and foreigners. This was all getting a bit close to the bone. After all, tax planning is as natural as family planning. The question of how laws written by wealthy middle aged white men are used by those same wealthy middle aged white men for their own benefit hardly arises.

There's the rub: we tend to hold the rich to different and much more relaxed standards than we do the poor. By the time the PM released info of his Oedipal endowments to the public, several news outfits were starting to feel decidedly sorry for him. Yes of course, the long-awaited summary was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Still, it was nice he'd made the effort. Best let sleeping tax dodges lie.

Benefit fraud amounts to £1.3 billion a year at the taxpayer's expense (less actually than the £1.6 billion left unclaimed). HMRC estimates that tax avoidance costs it £30 billion a year. Other estimates are far higher. Yet it is the poor - because they are more visible, because the papers exploit them, and because they have fewer defences - who receive all the scorn. When the rich play the system it's a "natural" part of life. If the poor do the same it's the delinquent or degenerate result of "welfare dependency." Tax and spending are, in the final instance, class issues. But they are class issues in which those who command capital too often also hold all the cards. Ultimately it's easier and more gratifying to hate the poor since bullying them is more likely to get results. They have fewer lawyers after all.

It's not that people envy the rich. That accusation is, apart from being insulting, rather wearying. Lefties don't object to all forms of competition either. They just object to one of the competitors being shot in both feet while the other is allowed to jump the gun. People are naturally competitive and collaborative in equal measure. It's the context that's important. And in our case the race is rigged.

The Left's Irrelevance in the EU Referendum

Nobody seems to like David Cameron's proposals for staying in Europe. For once the Tory leadership is getting a bit of a hard time from the press, which is nice. But Cameron's position is, in deed if not in word, clear enough: he wants Britain to remain no matter what.

That is more concise than the Left's position, which is slowly congealing, from centre to radical fringe, around remaining in the EU. The British Left has, in its typically storied way, come to the same conclusions as Cameron, though from very different principles and with the usual array of caveats. 

The radical and socialist Left, such as it is, has always disliked the EU. But it has always disliked the Eurosceptic Tory right more. Needless to say, it reserves a special hatred for Ukip. Although the EU is anti-democratic (after all, it's an accumulation of trade deals with an admin structure plonked on top, not a convincing model for a state-like government), it is less onerous in practice than the thuggish Victoriana envisioned by British free marketeers as its substitute. 

The Left's argument on the referendum is complex and full of qualifications. It opts for the better of two terrible options without offering an immediate alternative. I know this very well, because it's a position I share. It takes just a little too long - too long for snappy sound bites - to explain that, while the EU is anti-democratic, its disintegration could summon far darker forces. The only thing worse than financial globalisation is cut-throat global competition. Any old Leninist can tell you how that worked out last time: inter-imperial competition created conditions that led to a cycle of unprecedented violence from the 1910s to the 1940s.

Of course, we want a social Europe. But a government of the Left is at least four years away in Britain (likely far more) and unforeseeable in the likes of Germany. And you can't reform the EU through street demos. Which means we are probably doomed to irrelevance. Liberalism and nationalism will carve up the debate between them.

Labour Strife is Here to Stay

Whatever the hopes to the contrary, strife inside the Labour Party is here to stay, for at least as long as Corbyn remains leader. It took the various factions of the Labour right twenty years, from the mid-70s to the mid-90s, to transform the Party from its postwar, reformist orientation to a much more right wing position. It will clearly take the Left longer than a few months to execute the same move in the opposite direction.

It is not necessarily Corbyn's leftism that deters voters. After all, on concrete positions, there is ample support. Rather it is the tangible air of chaos around him that is offputting. Some of this is no doubt down to Corbyn. No excuses, he and his circle have made shoddy PR moves with too much regularity. They've also struggled to get heard above the noise of constant attacks. They could remedy this with better and more frequent TV appearances, snappier sound bites, and a less conventional, constrained approach to opposition. More importantly, they need to get out of Westminster as much as possible if they're going to challenge the feeling that they are no different to the rest.

Corbyn's enemies within Labour are doing him no favours either. But those enemies are too numerous to placate conventionally and their loathing of him too strong to be bought off. Corbyn cannot win if he gets bound up in the fighting inside the Party structures, tweaking personnel and selection procedures here and there. Rather, Corbyn can win the wider ideological war by going to members, supporters, union affiliates and voters publicly, circumventing the tedium of conventional opposition and the constraints of the party structures. 

The Labour Right should be called out for what it is: a faction hellbent on dragging Labour back to the depressing failures of the Kinnock years and the military disasters of Blairism. The Labour leadership cannot beat them on their own turf. Instead they need to call - explicitly - on the movement that got them elected, the movement beyond parliament. They also need to address themselves directly to the public and not to Labour MPs. Dissent will happen no matter what; at least if Corbyn is engaged in a direct dialogue with the public, the impact can be minimised. 

If Labour is to be rebuilt as something different and more radical, it will take time and perseverance. The alternative - the path of the Labour Right - is the same collapse or decay of social democracy seen in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Germany, much of Scandanavia, and undoubtedly soon France. There is no question: the path of the Right - to the extent they have one - will lead to defeat. 

Building a coalition of working-class and mid-income voters is a tall order. It takes more than a different face at the top. There is widespread scepticism not only of Labour but of politics itself. This is not down to politicians' inherent dishonesty, but the repeated failure of government - indeed capitalist democracy - to meet public expectations for rising incomes, decent jobs, and functioning welfare. Political scepticism is a symptom of the slow erosion of democracy by global capital. Convincing people that there can be an alternative to ever diminishing returns - to an increasingly bleak struggle for scant welfare, shit jobs and overpriced houses - is harder than ever after forty years of neoliberalism. Only a commitment to changing people's experience of politics - as something that is participatory, local, and engaging - will do the job. Wonkish policy announcements from Westminster - or indeed from a shiny factory with a hi-vis jacket and a hard hat - won't make people believe you. As both markets and the state have become more distant and impersonal, there is a serious need for politics to be personal for it to work. 

Corbyn's Red Wedding may have been a bit of a damp squib. But there will be blood - and sweat and tears. Labour may lose in 2020 no matter what. Our job as either Corbynites or Labour supporters is to commit ourselves to a better politics and party that might lie the other side of all this.

Podemos: Party and Movement

The thing about Podemos is whatever they do, they face intractable difficulties. Podemos, whether it likes it or not, now personifies the set of contradictions that haunt the radical left's wavering voice in Europe. That voice is split between party and movement, personality and plurality, elections and protest, 'mediatic' leadership and grassroots activism. In a surprising twist, it has turned out that the bottom layer - the activists - are everywhere far more radical, demanding and expectant than the party leaders. So much for the Leninist avant garde! Iglesias, Podemos' general secretary, has staked everything on winning elections - to promptly, and with Keatonesque pathos, lose them. 

Around the time Syriza was failing to deliver any of its non-negotiable election promises, party officials were wont to moan about the absent masses. If only the people were on the streets, they said, we'd be winning. Then, with the referendum, the people overwhelmed the party with the some of the largest street demonstrations in Greek history. Shell-shocked by the show of popular force, Syriza promptly threw in the towel. 

However much Podemos may want to distance themselves from Syriza's initial defiance, these are the hopes they carry. It was not Syriza's failure that started Podemos's slippage in the polls, but their embrace of that failure. Iglesias hastily congratulated Tsipras on his capitulation to Europe. A new willingness followed, on Podemos' part, to publicly embrace army and state officials. Iglesias is convinced that winning an election will, by dispelling the myth of ultra-leftism, also win Podemos a hearing with the masses. But the masses have been listening all along. The failure is not with the people, but with the organised left's inability to properly articulate, in electoral terms, its desires.

This is not entirely the fault of Podemos - after all, theirs is an electoral strategy in a context that systematically denies effective power to elected governments. Syriza was the crest of a new left wave that had oriented itself towards elections at a time when election victories meant very little. People understood how little Syriza's January victory would mean. This much is evident from Paul Mason's documentary #ThisIsACoup. People had few illusions about Syriza's ability to beat the European powers. What was really missing was a dynamic link - a dialectical understanding - between the Party and the People. 

This is where Podemos too is failing. Since the beginning of the year Podemos' grassroots - organised into "circulos" - have attempted to reassert themselves in the power structures of the increasingly conventional Party central organs. Iglesias has resisted. Why? The conventional answer - the signs of an emergent megalomania - is too easy. Iglesias has a strategy based on a clear-sighted analysis of the Spanish state (one that, at least rhetorically, tends to neglect the distinction between state and civil society). The "Podemos hypothesis", as Iglesias called it in the New Left Review, was that a popular intervention in the crooked Spanish political system had been made possible since 2011. 

Iglesias was clear that a "regime crisis", not a conventional, far-teaching Gramscian "organic crisis" was gripping Spain. This separation is more than a syntactical expedient, but rather informs the whole response of Podemos to the crisis. In Iglesias' reading, the regime crisis is purely discursive, ripe for intervention at the level of political symbols rather than raw disruptive power. Podemos speaks of restoration rather than transformation; it stages spectacular media set pieces, with the perhaps unanticipated result of a relative decline in street activism. 

Insofar as the crisis has seen a widespread disgust in conventional politics reach a crescendo, Iglesias is right to emphasise the potential uses of the media. But of course the media - at first curious and baffled by the Podemos representatives who showed up on their talk shows - are channelling an anti-Podemos backlash. Without a deepening of Podemos' relationship to the popular movements it surely faces burnout. 

The easy answer to the question of party or movement - "yes to both" - is running into the tangled web of state, civil society, and media. There is no model answer as to how to manage the balance between the party and the movements. Podemos' and Spain's grappling with this problem is bound to be compelling. Whether it can produce victories is an open question. 

The Radical Right and the Crisis in Europe

Throughout Europe the stakes could not be higher. In every corner of the continent - from its historic core to its long-suffering peripheries - underlying conflicts are resolving themselves into a full-blown political crisis.

What are the roots of this crisis? First, the European social model has withered beneath its leaders' feet. Second, the political consensus around integration has collapsed. To understand why this has happened, readers could do far worse than consult the ongoing debate between Germany's preeminent sociologists, Wolfgang Streeck and Jurgen Habermas. Here we only have space to simplify grossly: a kind of evolutionary institutional change has driven out once and for all the old idea of a social Europe, and its replacement - liberal, transnational, capital-favouring - has failed to produce a satisfactory social consensus which might compensate for the loss of the postwar settlement.

In terms of political forces, conventional wisdom has long held that there were clear winners and losers from this process: the old, nationalist left and right lost; the adaptable social and market liberals won. Yet as the social crisis impinges on high politics, that analysis is looking increasingly shallow.

First, social democracy - both in its traditional and in its Blairite forms - has been utterly eviscerated and defeated. In the early nineties the sociologist Michael Mann warned, "Unless socialists raise their eyes from the nation-state, they will have nothing to offer voters." Yet social democrats embraced a multi-national Europe and a transnational capitalism, and collapsed for precisely that reason. Secondly, the traditional centre-right is sharply divided between free market capitalism and national protectionism. This is true not only in eurosceptic Britain, but also - perhaps especially - in countries like Greece and Spain, which entered the European Monetary Union only to crash and burn after 2010.

Finally, the rise of the new radical right, which began in Europe's core countries of the Netherlands, Austria and France, has spread like wildfire into those peripheral states which staked most on EU accession and have often suffered most because of it. The speed of the radical right's electoral gains are unlike anything seen in Europe since the rise of fascism and the authoritarian right in the 1930s: Hungary is dominated by both a hard right and an extreme right party; Poland has elected a party of pronounced right-wing and authoritarian tendencies; Golden Dawn has consistently increased its vote share in Greece; the Front National is perhaps the second party in France after recent regional elections. The list of European municipalities with far-right, xenophobic governments goes on and on - from Austria to Denmark to Britain. Germany, the beating heart of Europe's bad conscience about fascism, has even seen the rise of a nationalist, anti-Islamic group, Pegida. Their stock in trade is anti-Islamic violence. Little can be said of its causes here, save that its pan-European character must originate in pan-European problems, most likely the demands for an enclosure of national sovereignty in the face of a system that has taken to punishing any display of autonomous decision taking by member states. The mechanisms of integration, the social dispensation, the interaction between national democracy and transnational regulation have all broken down. The breadth of these radical-right victories is unprecedented since the Second World War. The danger is not to be underestimated.

All traditional political forces in Europe have ignored this crisis, preferring to side with the rising right and blame our problems on incoming migrants and refugees. Only the radial left has shown any understanding of this crisis. Yet even on the left the strategy for fighting back has been pathetically weak. Some on what remains of the radical end of social democracy have understood that the crisis is not a result of refugees but of the breakdown of a social and political order that shows little evidence of producing anything new. Yet the response is dismal. "We must learn to speak the language of ordinary people again," we are told. It is not how politicians speak, but rather what they represent that is being rejected: an unresponsive, distant, detached elite. In short, the entire political system. 

Walter Benjamin wrote that behind every fascism is a failed revolution, but this is not quite true. Behind every fascism is a failed politics. The far right is offering Europeans a bleak, but so far the only, solution to the political and social void left by global disorder, economic turbulence, and the end of the postwar era.

In this sense, the collapse of the left and the rise of the right are indeed connected. But we massively underestimate the scale of the problem if we assume a direct cause. This is about more than the left's own, internal failure. The success of the Front National in working class regions in France is proof positive of the end of old school social democracy and the absence of any progressive alternative. Yet defeating the right will involve far more than a change of tone or an appeal to people's better nature made through the old political channels, as it is precisely these old political channels - republicanism, democracy, social welfarism, federal or intergovernmental Europeanism - which have ceased to function.

The best evidence of this can be found in the careers of Europe's recent radical-left parties. Phenomenal success in Southern Europe - in Greece, Spain, and lately Portugal - has been followed by equally impressive retreat. This is because those parties have pursued electoral strategies which demand reforms from political systems incapable of permitting them. Even in Britain the assumption among Corbynistas is that the state will allow them to enact reforms if Labour is elected on a serious but modest platform. It doesn't enter anyone's head that the national state may currently be incapable of implementing their reforms. It is not that the nation state will not enact social democratic reforms, but that in the era of global capitalism it cannot. The various levels of official democracy - from the number of votes cast to the power of government itself - have crumpled in on themselves.

The great challenge will be to root radical movements deep in society, far beyond the state and its dependence on global finance. This could take a generation, certainly far more than an electoral victory alone. An intense degree of social mobilisation will be necessary for even the slightest social reforms to be implemented today. The weakness of Syriza, Podemos and Left Block is their lack of deep roots in organised social movements and their reluctance to call on those movements once in power. They have sought to gain legitimacy in the eyes of political systems which themselves lack any legitimacy in the eyes of voters. 

This may seem unrealistic, but it is a safer bet than the fantasies of so-called moderate social democrats. They now advocate tacking hard to the right, accepting anti-immigrant xenophobia, and proposing only the mildest curbs on the freedom of capital. The results will be the same as they have been across Europe: failure to win an audience on immigration; failure to regulate capital; collapse in the polls. France, the political heart of Europe, provides the best evidence of this doomed-to-fail moderation: Francois Hollande offered to soften austerity, yet under him it has only got worse. After five short years in power, the Socialist Party faces total wipeout. Its support has collapsed as the Front National's has risen. 

These pleas for moderation fail because they ignore the deep crisis of democracy across Europe. So far that crisis has fuelled the rise of the far right. Only the radical left can rebuild democracy from the grassroots up.