Corbynism has become a weird, ugly cult, and the saddest thing is that it's Labour that's losing out

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If Labour is a church, Corbynism looks more and more like a cult. It’s on the hunt for heretics. Pro-Brexit MPs are threatened with deselection. Tom Watson, the deputy leader, got it in the neck for calling for action against anti-Semitism: Twitter lit up with nearly 50,000 demands for him to resign. They call this online movement #WeAreCorbyn, and if Jeremy Corbyn was a Monty Python fan, he’d reply: “#I’mNot.”

How on Earth has Labour, a party with an illustrious history of fighting racism, wound up in a civil war over anti-Semitism? Seeing Corbynism as a cult is one way to look at it.

First, consider the believer’s point of view. Corbyn ran for leader in 2015 after two big election defeats: the party had tried Blairism and the soft-Left mush of Ed Miliband and it had lost horribly. Corbyn won his job title with an agenda that was angry yet hopeful, refreshingly idealistic. Had he been wiped out in the 2017 election – as smart alecs like me predicted – he would’ve been discredited and forced out. Instead, Labour got its biggest percentage vote for twenty years. The hard-Left strategy was vindicated.

And then, suddenly, came the anti-Semitism row. “How convenient,” says #WeAreCorbyn.

Corbynites might have taken it more seriously had the media, in their opinion, not poisoned the well. Remember that Ed Miliband had endured many personal attacks when he was leader, including the suggestion that his father – a Jewish immigrant – didn’t love Britain unconditionally. So, in the minds of many Labour activists, the media had overnight gone from being slyly anti-Semitic to being cynically anti-anti-Semitic, and they weren’t buying it. There’s a parallel with US Republicans who so resented the fake news reported about Mitt Romney in 2012 that when Donald Trump came along, they took his side against the mainstream media.

The thing is, Trump may well be innocent of one or two charges levelled against him, but he’s still guilty of 99 per cent of the rest – and it would also be a feat of fanatical lunacy to deny that Jeremy Corbyn has, among other sins, shared platforms with terrorists. I’m not exaggerating. Actual terrorists. He has, for instance, appeared on a platform with Leila Khaled, a Palestinian radical famous for hijacking planes – hijacking planes – who was so iconically nutty in her day that Doctor Who named a companion after her: Leela, the scantily clad savage.

Corbyn’s association with Ms Khaled points to the central problem with his politics: it’s weird. There’s always been weirdness in Labour – Militant, Ban the Bomb, the Alternative Economic Strategy etc – and Corbyn has ridden the mad bus with most of it, but now the weirdness has captured the collective psyche of the party, almost beyond redemption. Moderate MPs won’t move against Corbyn because they tried that once and lost. The activists still seem to want him.

One psychological explanation lies in that wonderful book When Prophecy Fails, a study of an American UFO cult that predicted the world would end on December 21, 1954. Spoiler alert: it didn’t, and yet the cult didn’t go away. You’d expect that those who had devoted so much time and energy to the coming deluge would have been bitterly disappointed that it never materialised, and felt conned.

On the contrary, the more heavily invested a person was in the cult, the more they needed to believe its leader when she said there’d been a change to the schedule, and the more they were willing to stick with the group. Corbyn and Trump work on a similar level. When you’ve come this far with Corbyn – through the IRA stuff, the Venezuela nonsense, the shameless vegetarianism – the further you’re committed to go.

We now live in a hyper-partisan world that preaches high stakes: if my side loses, your side wins, and it’s curtains for me. Many Labour supporters cannot afford to believe Corbyn is guilty of anything because it means the other side might be right – and the other side might win. The tragedy is that this betrays some of the finer features of British socialism.

One is its libertarian tradition, its freedom to disagree. Having spent years dissenting from the backbenches – rightly so, and often right – the hard-Left now wants to push out Labourites who dissent against them.

The second thing to go is the Labour tradition of common sense. As Aneurin Bevan said: “the language of priorities is the religion of socialism.” That includes the immediate, material needs of poorer voters. Corbyn is right to raise bus services at the despatch box, but the party’s ambiguity over Europe is surreal, while the leadership’s enthusiasm for the Palestinians, whether you think justified or not, has consigned the party to talking about things that many constituents would judge irrelevant. Most Britons probably can’t point to Gaza on a map because, well, it’s got nothing to do with their lives.

And the saddest thing imperilled by the cult is the Jewish socialist tradition, which was once the beating conscience of Labour. Its alienation is a crime. Some days I wish I was still a member of Labour just so I could resign from it again.


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/08/07/corbynism-has-become-cult-saddest-thing-labour-losing/?li_source=LI&li_medium=li-recommendation-widget