Mick Hartley

Nick Cohen, in the Observer today, on the sorry state of the trade unions – Don’t look to Len McCluskey and his sorry ilk to defend workers’ interests:

Who leads Unison? Who leads the GMB? Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t know: they have given you no reason to notice them.

The only leader you will have heard of is Len McCluskey of Unite. He’s not familiar because he has led the way in unionising the marginalised and the exploited but because Unite is playing the vanguard role, to adopt the language of Leninism, in consolidating the far left’s control of the Labour party. McCluskey supported the old Revolutionary Socialist League when it called itself Militant and tried to take over Labour. The Scottish aristocrat Andrew Murray (he’s descended from the earls of Perth and the kings of Navarre on his father’s side and the dukes of Norfolk on his mother’s) not only offers apologies for Lenin but Stalin too. He’s moved from Unite and the Communist Party of Britain to join Seumas Milne, another apologist for Uncle Joe, in Jeremy Corbyn’s office.

Unite is trying to force through the appointment of its official Jennie Formby as Labour’s new general secretary on the grounds that she is the feminist candidate who will challenge the patriarchy. Its egalitarian argument would carry greater force were she not McCluskey’s former mistress. Was it for this that Emily Davison died?  […]

The majority of British unions, with their complicated structures and tiny turnouts in union elections, suit the far left. It would struggle to retain control if union membership reflected the workforce and strategies were built on consensus rather than diktats of whatever Stalinist or Trotskyist faction could stay awake the longest in the interminable meetings.

There are many reasons why workers are enduring the worst wage stagnation in 145 years – anti-union laws, the decline of heavy industry. One deserves more attention than it receives: workers have the most stagnant leaders in 145 years.

More on the nepotism within Labour's leadership, and the return of the Communist Party (!), from Sarah Baxter in the Sunday Times (£):

“Organically”, the communists are already astonishingly well-represented in the top echelons of the Labour Party, which is fast becoming a family-run affair. Michie was famous when I was at university for being a no-holds-barred Soviet sympathiser known as “Stalin’s nanny”. Her brother, the economist Jonathan Michie, was the best friend of Seumas Milne, now Labour’s director of strategy and communications, neither of whom made any secret of their pro-Soviet leanings.

Susan Michie went on to marry (and divorce) Milne’s other great ally, Andrew Murray, the chief of staff of Unite, who only recently quit the Communist Party for Labour. The anti-EU, blue-blooded descendant of an earl was hired last month by Corbyn as a consultant on Brexit, paid for by the union. Labour’s inner sanctum has been well and truly penetrated.

Another Marxist with even more access to power is John McDonnell, Labour’s shadow chancellor, who employs Corbyn’s son Seb as an adviser. (Imagine the fuss about nepotism had George Osborne hired one of David Cameron’s children!) In an interview in 2006, McDonnell named the “most significant” influences on his thought as “Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, basically”….

Look no further for the reason for the fierce infighting under way over the appointment of a new Labour Party general secretary. A post nobody used to give two figs about, yet which could control the party machine, has become the site of bitter warfare between the founder of Momentum and champion of people’s power, Jon Lansman, and trade union muscle, represented by Unite’s candidate Jennie Formby (a former lover of the union’s boss, “Red Len” McCluskey).

Battle commenced only a fortnight ago and will end when Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) anoints the victor in 10 days’ time, yet casualties are already littering the field. Christine Shawcroft, a director of Momentum and NEC member, furiously declared last week: “Nothing would induce me to support a candidate from a major trade union; they stick it to the rank and file members time after time after time.” But in a foretaste of the show trials to come, she was forced to recant and delete her comments on Facebook after a heavy bout of re-education.

Lansman, meanwhile, has gone from hero of the Corbynistas to agent of Zionism for daring to challenge the union-approved candidate. Even Formby felt obliged to come to Lansman’s defence, tweeting that “anti-semitic” attacks on him were “disgraceful and must stop”. But when the Dear Leader himself turns out to have belonged to Palestine Live, a closed group on Facebook with links to Holocaust deniers, conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds and lies about an Israeli involvement in the 9/11 attacks, it is impossible not to see an ugly pattern of anti-semitism on the far left.

Corbyn, conveniently, left the Facebook group around the time he became Labour leader. He claims not to have noticed the vilest posts. “Had I seen it, of course I would have challenged it straight away,” he said last week. His absurd “Monsieur Zen” guise — never seeing what is in front of his nose — is central to his appeal with millennials but has tempted the infighters to treat him as an empty vessel who can be controlled. It may yet be his downfall. The more the “struggle” intensifies between comrades on the left, the less the “masses” are likely to see him as prime ministerial material.

And, on that Palestine Live Facebook group, see Dan Hodges in the Mail on Sunday:

Last week British politics – indeed Britain itself – crossed a line. Amid the drama of the Skripal poisoning, the Trump/North Korea detente and the latest Brexit machinations, it was a transition that passed virtually unnoticed. The moment Labour – and the army of racists that now call Labour their home – successfully achieved the normalisation of anti-Semitism within the UK.