MPs on Wednesday overwhelmingly backed UK air strikes against the Islamic State in Syria, by 397 votes to 223, with a total of 66 Labour MPs siding with the government, while seven Tories defied their party whip and voted against the military adventure.
The Labour right wing was led by Hilary Benn, who brought some comic opera to the proceedings when he compared the IS to Franco and Hitler, suggesting that the IS, which wants to return the planet to a 10th century Caliphate, was an enemy to be compared to the massive might that German imperialism was able to muster, alongside its Japanese allies, in its attempt to attain world domination.
He knows that this is bunk, but then patriotism has always been ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’. PM Cameron greeted Benn, who rounded off the debate for Labour, like a Horatio returned, and obviously the Labour leader of Cameron’s choice. Benn and Co had handed Cameron a victory, in a situation where the latter had no doubt been rehearsing his resignation speech for the second time in just more than a year.
After Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour Party leadership election with more votes than all the other candidates put together, after hundreds of thousands of new members joined the party, the state itself was in danger. The Labour right wing was obsessed about how to keep this working class mob at bay, so as to be able to carry on cosying up to the bosses and the Tories and their austerity programmes.
The continuing economic and political crisis forced Cameron and Osborne into high stakes gambling mode – and the bombing of Syria was the issue that they chose to fight on, staking all on winning the vote, and reversing the 2013 House of Commons defeat. It was a gamble. A number of Tory MPs were also opposed. Another defeat for Cameron would have been his Waterloo and could have triggered an early election.
Since the Labour Party conference had passed an emergency resolution on Syria opposing any new attempts to bomb it, and a group of Tory MPs was opposed to bombing, the issue came down to whether the Labour Party right wing could organise a coup, where scores of Labour MPs would be able to defy the leader and vote with the Tory government.
Aided by the IS attack on Paris, the right wing stepped up their action. They announced that they would vote for bombing, and that a group in the shadow cabinet would walk out if necessary, in order to vote with the Tories. Corbyn was then put to the test: whether he would whip them into a ‘no’ vote, replace them if they quit the shadow cabinet and deselect them with the aid of the mass membership if they voted with the Tories.
The question was whether Corbyn was up to organising the mass of the membership to further the political revolution by purging the leadership. Corbyn was not up to it and crumbled in front of the right-wing hysteria. He declared there would be no whip, that how to vote was a matter for the individual conscience, that is for bourgeois public opinion, and even declared that voting against war in Syria was not party policy.
Corbyn concluded by allowing Benn to sum up in the debate, as if they were equals, on behalf of the Labour opposition and of course Cameron. Benn then entered the scene of history, by courtesy of Corbyn, to the applause of Cameron and the assembled Tories.
Corbyn thought that he was involved in a debate, while his opponents and their Tory friends saw Corbyn’s mass support that flooded into the Labour Party as a semblance of what Marx called the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
There are two Labour Parties. The right-wing opportunists who can be relied on to keep the Tories in office, and the masses of the new members who have no doubt been disappointed by the amateurishness and lack of ruthlessness of Corbyn.
However, millions of workers will have learnt a more than useful lesson. This is that only Bolshevism has that ruthless approach to the struggle for working class power that guarantees success in a revolutionary situation. What is now required is the rapid building up of the WRP in the period immediately ahead to lead the successful British socialist revolution.