I was surprised to see a very short article yesterday, which casually mentioned that the Labour Party officially banned Corbyn from the party.
I would have thought that this would be a huge issue in England. But it seems to be just a minor announcement , and didn’t grab much attention.
So, for those of you who eat fish and chips, will you please explain to a poor guy who prefers to spell Labor without a u----What’s Going On?
Is Corbyn no longer considered a major player, so this announcement isn’t a sign of anything important?
Or is it actually an important issue for Labour, because they are genuinely afraid that Corbyn could once again gain control of the party,?
The official notice did not give any explanation for why they are banning him. But that only makes me even more curious…what’s really going on, and why?
I know that the issue of antisemitism gets mentioned a lot in conjunction with Corbyn’s name. but I find it hard to believe that it’s such a major issue. There are very few Jews in England, and they keep a low profile.* Does the Labour party or the British public really care about antisemitism enough to make it the main reason for expelling a once-powerful leader?
Or are there other reasons for Labour to be afraid of Corbyn?
*(Unlike America, where Jews often hold prominent positions, and there are enough Jews concentrated in New York to have an impact on American politics)
If I am reading the BBC article correctly, Corbyn is still technically a member of the Labour Party, but he had already been banned from being an official “Labour MP” (he is currently an independent). What happened on Wednesday was, the party announced that he would not be allowed to run in the next general election as a Labour candidate. He can still run as an independent, and I am under the impression that he will.
There are other reasons for not being anti-Semitic than fear of retaliation by Jewish people. One such might be fear of retaliation by decent people, who think anti-Semitism is horrible. Most main-stream organizations will soon cut official ties with any public expression of anti-Semitism. So this would not be a surprising reason, to me, for them to rule him out as a Labour MP, assuming he made such public expressions.
What motivates this is primarily the political optics.
For various reasons,Corbyn personally and the brand of politics he represents is considered toxic to the voters Labour needs to win back and win over - as exemplified in the last election result, where the Tories won a swathe of previously (for generations) solid Labour seats in largely post-industrial seats for across the North and the Midlands (so called “red wall” seats).
Basically, he personally and the Momentum movement that surged into and within the party when he first won the leadership were seen as too economically radical, and too often chasing student-union style international issues rather than the bread-and-butter socio-economic problems we all know about.
Anti-semitism comes into it because one of those international issues is Israel/Palestine, where Corbyn has become identified (like it or not) with a strongly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian line. On top of that, there have been many reports of some pro-Palestinian party members hounding and verbally abusing Jewish members in plainly anti-semitic ways (including death threats) and accusations that Corbyn and his leadership team were dragging their heels over dealing with that, and even attempting to interfere in individual disciplinary cases.
Add to that factional in-fighting in the party machinery between Corbynites and the old guard, and the disastrous last election campaign, giving the impression of chaotic disorganisation; plus his own stiff-necked and tin-eared public refusal to toe the party line on a couple of matters to do with the anti-semitism issue (thus keeping it alive and in the headlines rather than helping the leadership move on to more promising ground) - well, you can see why the leadership wants him out.
Patrick has answered the why, but to address this - there are hardline left wingers who still hold a candle for Corbyn but they are a vanishingly small minority. There’s no way he was ever going to make a come back. It isn’t a non issue in the UK - there’s plenty of headlines about this - but the reality is that the majority of the population don’t give a stuff about Corbyn, never really liked his politics (hence the drubbing in general elections), probably don’t know why he’s still being talked about and really won’t notice when he’s gone.
They’re a very very vocal minority which made it look like Corbyn was more popular than he really was. If an election were decided using a clapometer rather than one person, one vote, Corbyn would have romped home.
Not too far from the Bernie Bro phenomenon in the 2016 US election. Lots of very noisy enthusiasm from a very narrow base who listened only to their own echo chamber.
Corbyn just got farther than Bernie did due to the differences in how the two countries pick their party front-runners. Both were / would have been trounced in an election against almost any opponent.