The Irrepressibility of Ethnopolitics and the Death of the Labour Party

Newton’s third law of motion is, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Sometimes this applies to politics as well as physics, as we see with the present perilous state of the Labour Party, which has been reacting to its previous co-option by globalists and metropolitan elites, by going in the opposite direction towards a politically naïve grass-roots upsurge, combined with strong hints of counter-Semitic sentiment.

This is the true story behind the surprising rise of Jeremy Corbyn, who has now been re-elected leader with an increased majority over his oily and unlikable challenger Owen Smith. (Yes, the Labour Party seems to have an unfortunate oversupply of charisma-deficient beta types who inevitably end up contesting these make-or-break leadership contests.)

The Labour Party has long faced the same dilemma as America’s Democrat Party, namely an egalitarian ethos that empowers those whose stake in the party is pure enthusiasm over those who have a more substantial and financial stake in the party — the party elites — while also marginalizing the interests and opinions of the voter base.

Because of the threat to electability that this presents, the Democrats came up with their “super delegate” system, a way for the corrupt, pragmatic, and power hungry centrists at the top to retain control, something they pulled off with little difficulty in the case of the Bernie insurgency.

Labour, however, have neglected to do this, with the result that their activist base is ascendant and completely out of step with their elected MPs. This meant that the recent Labour Party election was essentially an election between sleazy electability and idealistic un-electability — with the party electorate, dominated by the idealistic activists, choosing the latter. This has effectively caused a major horizontal schism between the party membership and its MPs, the vast majority of whom are now in the awkward position of having opposed their party’s leader.

The clearness of this choice between electability and un-electability may have been obscured by the fact that the candidate favouring the more electable direction was even more unelectable, in personal terms, than the candidate of the unelectable side, Jeremy Corbyn.

While Corbyn comes across as a slightly eccentric but nevertheless likeable old uncle, he actually represents a kind of economically terrifying, hard left idealism that simply does not play well with enough Brits to ever have any chance of winning. Furthermore, he believes in the kind of open borders attitude to migrants that would even give Angela Merkel nightmares.

Owen Smith, by contrast, represents the sleazy centrism that appeals to elected Labour MPs looking to stay close to the voters and which more skilful politicians in the past, like Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, were able to market successfully to voters fed up with the Conservative version of sleazy centrism.

But, in addition to these outward-facing aspects, what we are seeing in the contemporary Labour Party is a simple grass roots turf war with ethnopolitical dimensions, which has effectively made the party unmanageable for the various political interests and agendas that it has traditionally served.

It is not important that the elements driving this uprising are ideologically extreme left. Because of their unelectable nature, ideology is essentially an irrelevance. Who cares if members of Momentum (slogan: “A New Kind of Politics”) believe in unilateral nuclear disarmament or reparations for slavery. It is not going to happen.

What is important is that this movement is simply grass roots and has little truck with the agenda and schemes of the cosmopolitan elites in the party, whose role has been to triangulate globalist leftism with the interests of globalist capitalism and the confused desires of the electorate.

What is going on therefore is a de facto localist and tribalist rebellion against the “Empire” of the cosmopolitan Labour Party.

One of the most interesting indicators of the state of play in the Labour Party is the ongoing “anti-Semitism” controversy, which flared up in April this year, when Pakistani Labour MP Naz Shah got into trouble over a Facebook post of a map, suggesting that Israeli Jews should be relocated to the United States.

By this stage, anti-Semitism, of course, has nothing to do with actual anti-Semitism (pogroms, getting black-balled from the country club, etc.), but much more to do with laughable micro-aggressions, taking positions on Middle Eastern politics, noticing things, and perceiving Israelis as White colonizers of the Middle East. But even at this level, any manifestation of “anti-“ or “counter-Semitism” is routinely denied, disavowed, or apologized for.

But beneath this official level and despite efforts to “remind” everyone that the Labour Party has always been against anti-Semitism, there seems to be an unspoken strata of consciousness or near consciousness about the way that Jews on the left manipulate politics to serve the ends of their own group and that of the “outsourced” part of their identity (i.e., Israel).

The best way to see Corbynism, therefore, is as the maximum allowable degree of counter-Semitism possible in a Leftist organization with strong generational ties to the Jewish community.

The easiest ways to express this and still remain respectable in Leftist terms is to be anti-war, anti-Blair, and anti-globalist. Those a bit braver might try to be overtly pro-Muslim or even anti-Zionist. Corbynistas show all these characteristics — most notably in their vilification of Tony Blair, the PM who fought the biggest war for Israel. From these positions, some even go further to flirting with various anti-Semitic tropes.

Despite efforts to calm things down and get back to an impossible position of blindness on this issue, the controversy continues to rumble on. It continues to percolate its way through the Labour Party in subtle and insidious ways and flares up over and over again. A good indicator of the state of play is provided by Guido Fawkes’s brief, hyperlinked summary of one day (25th of September) at the Labour Party conference:

TODAY AT LABOUR CONFERENCE

9:46am: Corbyn tells Jewish peer who quit Labour over anti-Semitism to “reflect“.

9:56am: Corbyn says he backs war crimes investigations into British troops.

10:00am: Corbyn says he opposes giving more resources to MI6.

10:22am: McDonnell defends calling Esther McVey “a stain on humanity”.

10:40am: Yvette Cooper tells McDonnell to apologise.

11:06am: McDonnell doubles down, says “yes I do” think they were the right words.

11:15pm: Derek Hatton spotted in the conference hall.

11:52am: Ken Livingstone talks about Hitler on the BBC.

1:42am: Delegate rants about “Jewish MPs” and “Jewish plot to oust Corbyn”.

1:50pm: Fringe speaker compares Tory welfare policy to Nazis’ Arbeit Macht Frei.

5:00pm: Momentum host speaker who called for a Jewish man’s throat to be cut.

5:25pm: Anti-war merchandise mocking injured British soldiers on sale.

6:00pm: Jackie Walker says anti-Semitism in Labour is “exaggerated“.

6:30pm: Leaflets circulated: “Jewish Labour Movement does not belong in Labour”.

As you can see, many of the stories that Fawkes highlights are connected either to the continuing fall-out of the “anti-Semitism” controversy or else bear some relation to anti-war and anti-interventionist sentiment — a strong, implicit rejection of Blairism and its Israel-friendly policies.

What is noticeable is the vitality and longevity of this clash in the Labour Party, despite the best efforts of most of the leadership to “step over it” and get on with the supposed main issue of “stopping the Tories.”

This clearly suggests that the divisions in the Labour Party are powered by stronger factors than mere disagreements about politics and past and future foreign policy. In its essence, it boils down to a conflict between Jews (and other aligned interests) and other ethnic groups that, for their own reasons, take an opposed view.

Of course, it is no secret that in the Labour Party, Jews have traditionally had a more Blairite outlook — political centrism, developing links with big business, favouring global interventionism, etc. In contrast to this, other Labour demographics have tended to be more firmly Leftist. There are two groups of note to mention here.

First, and more obviously, there is Labour’s growing Muslim vote — growing simply because the number of Muslims is growing and voting Labour is their best way to gain control of parts of the political spoils system. This demographic naturally also oppose the neoconservative aspect of Blairism — and attempts to revive it, and also reject elements of centrism that might curtail their welfare entitlements, limit immigration, or interfere with their freedom to live as Muslims.

Secondly, there is the working-class Catholic Irish demographic. Despite being heavily assimilated and bred-in to a considerable degree with the rest of the working class population, it still retains enough of an identity to strongly influence its political behaviour. This is the largest element of the Labour movement to have a distinct ethnic identity, and as such it tends to line up against Blairite tendencies, which are viewed as suspiciously post-imperial.

This brings these two groups together in odd ways. Leftist politicians closest to Muslim positions tend to be of Catholic Irish origin — the best example being George Galloway — or have close ties with the Catholic Irish community, such as Ken Livingstone, a long-term supporter of the IRA.

Not only does Catholicism have its own anti- or counter-Semitic tradition, deeply enmeshed in working class Catholic culture, but the working class Catholics in the UK often see parallels between their own experience of “muh oppression” and that of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. This is made manifest at football matches featuring the fans of the “Scottish” club Glasgow Celtic, a club that was founded by Catholic friars in 1888. While their rivals, the Protestant fans of Glasgow Rangers, wave Israeli flags — highlighting the often observed affinity between Calvinism and Judaism — the Celtic fans wave Palestinian flags and idolize the heroes of the Palestinian struggle alongside the heroes of the IRA.

So, what does this all mean for Labour and its future prospects? The fact is that once ethnopolitics starts to happen, it becomes increasingly difficult to stop and get back to how things used to be. As Milo Yiannoopoulos observed in his recent presentation, “How to Destroy the Alt-Right,” the only way to stop ethnopolitics is to stop everyone having them. “Decide whether we want identity politics for everyone or for no-one,” was how he phrased it. The only thing is you don’t get to decide.

Disguising ethno-politics as something else — Blairism, for example — works for a while, but once the cat gets out of the bag and the toothpaste gets out of the tube, there is no going back. The only theoretical way is by a form of unilateral disarmament, getting one side to stand down first, which is more or less what Whites have unsuccessfully been trying for decades.

The best indication of the power and resilience of ethnopolitics is provided by the present state of the Labour Party. Remember, this is a political grouping founded on the belief that race is nothing and class is everything, a party staffed by people who have schooled themselves in doublethink and denial for decades. But despite this, they are powerless to prevent the machinations of ethno-politic pushing them down the road to unelectability and political irrelevance.

No doubt, many of them may be thinking that the only way to get back to where they once were is to burn down the party and start again. But even that will be no defence in a country waking up to the ethnocentric nature of politics in a multicultural society.