By Colin Fox, SSP National Cospokesperson
A year ago Len McCluskey, Paul Mason, Owen Jones, Richard Leonard, Neil Findlay and others were all telling us Jeremy Corbyn was going to be the next Prime Minister. Today even his membership of the Labour Party has gone.
The humiliation of the Labour Left is now complete.
If ever evidence was required of the abject failure of a political strategy – to attempt a ‘shortcut to socialism’ that did not involve working class struggle – this was it.
Jeremy Corbyn is no antisemite. But, as December 2019 demonstrated, he is no leader either. His former “loyal” shadow minister Sir Keir Starmer is now using the antisemitism report to destroy him.
Those on Labour’s Right who conspired against Jeremy Corbyn have triumphed. And they plan to erase all reference to the Corbyn era from Labour’s history. They blame Corbyn for their worst defeat in a century and deny any responsibility for the debilitating civil war they waged over the past five years.
Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite, and Corbyn’s most important backer, is now pleading with people not to leave the Party but ‘Stay and Fight.’
They will not stay. And nor should they. They now realise Labour is no place for socialists. And it is a party now firmly back in the hands of its Right-wing. ‘Normal service has been resumed’ as Starmer has boasted.
The Scottish Socialist Party, almost alone on the Left in Britain, was not taken in by the ‘Corbynmania’ so many others succumbed to. We warned Corbyn’s chances of being elected Prime Minister were nil. We warned the Right Wing, who never accepted his election as leader, would resume control of the party. Those who believed otherwise should have known better. The Labour Party is no place for those serious about emancipating working people from the yoke of capital, injustice, and oppression.
