WITH just over two weeks to go before the general election, the campaign by the Tories and their right-wing supporters in the Labour Party to dump Jeremy Corbyn has been ratcheted up.
This week has seen the old slander that Corbyn ‘is an anti-Semite’ being dredged up by Ephraim Mirvis, a Chief Rabbi, who wrote in the Times newspaper on Monday that Corbyn had allowed the poison of anti-Semitism ‘sanctioned from the top’ to take root in the Labour Party and that Corbyn is ‘incompatible’ with British values and ‘not fit for high office’.
Mirvis was joined the next day by his close friend, the archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, who rushed onto social media to support this blatant appeal for people not to vote Labour because of Corbyn.
But it is not just these religious leaders who have emerged this week, in what is clearly an orchestrated campaign, to prevent an outright Labour victory in the election and prepare for dumping Corbyn as leader at the earliest opportunity.
This was made clear in an interview given by Lord Kerslake, a former head of the civil service who has been acting as a chief advisor to the Labour Party. Kerslake sits in the Lords as an Independent, not a Labour peer, but this has not prevented him from becoming a figure moving behind the scenes in the party.
In his interview on Sky News, Kerslake made it clear that Corbyn’s position as leader was under ‘discussion’ in negotiations with other parties about the emergence of some form of coalition government out of the election.
Making it clear that his preference was for another hung parliament rather than an outright Labour majority, Kerslake said that Labour will have ‘won’ the election if they deprive the Tories of a majority.
Then, he said, Labour would have to win the support of opposition parties to form a minority government and this could not happen with Corbyn as leader.
Kerslake revealed that behind the scenes, and behind the back of Corbyn, negotiations were already taking place to prepare for a coalition government in all but name.
He said: ‘We don’t yet know in truth how that would play out, although the Liberal Democrats have said they could not support a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour government and the SNP said they would want a second referendum.’ Kerslake speaks with the authority of a prime mover in the right-wing plotting against Corbyn.
Despite Kerslake being an ‘Independent’ peer and not a Labour member, he has been admitted into the highest levels of the party and now appears to be running the party on behalf of his close friend and ally John McDonnell.
Supporters of Corbyn in the leadership are warning that this civil service-trained apparatchik is taking over, fears that emerged when Kerslake effectively sacked Kate Murphy, Corbyn’s chief of staff, via a telephone call and without Corbyn’s knowledge.
What is clear is that the right-wing leadership that has coalesced around McDonnell is working, not for a Labour victory, but for a hung parliament and a pro-EU coalition government of Remainers, and the whole thing is being directed by the capitalist state in the form of the ex-head of the civil service!
They see Corbyn as a danger because they fear that the working class and youth will rally around Corbyn in support of Labour’s manifesto and will turn against an alliance with the LibDems and SNP and demand that the manifesto commitments, to re-nationalisation and an end to austerity, are carried through.
To carry out even these limited socialist demands will bring the working class into head-on conflict with capitalism and pose point blank the issue of the working class seizing power and going forward to a workers government that will expropriate the capitalist class and advance to socialism.
Behind all the plotting to oust Corbyn is the fear of the right-wing reformists, and the ruling class, of the revolutionary movement of workers that will not stop at Corbyn’s reforms but carry them through to the socialist transformation of society.
This fear has united all, from big business to the remnants of Fabianism and to religious would-be miracle workers. They all want an anti-Corbyn coup.
The urgent task today is building the revolutionary leadership of the WRP to lead the developing socialist revolution to its victory!
