Premium Episode 73: The Smearing of Jeremy Corbyn & the UK Labour Party Conspiracy feat Annie Kelly
There was a leak at UK Labour Party leadership. A massive amount of emails and whatsapp conversations are contained in an 850-page report named "The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014-2019." You're never gonna read it, but our UK correspondent Annie Kelly has. She brings us the thrilling (and infuriating) tale of how Labor party leadership worked with the media to smear party leader Jeremy Corbyn by accusing him of being an anti-semite. All the while, they were busy using software to surveil social media and purge pro-Corbyn voters from their ranks. Consolidation of power through "trot-hunting". A mind melter.
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Music by Giraffi Dog from Boom Chakra Tapes (https://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com/) and Nick Sena (www.nicksenamusic.com)
SOURCES:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/07/jeremy-corbyn-interview-we-are-not-doing-celebrity-personality-or-abusive-politics
https://cryptome.org/2020/04/Labour-Antisemitism-Report.pdf
"Is Labour Anti-Semitic? - BBC Panorama" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7eEQMyzLeo
Welcome, listener, to the 73rd premium chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the smearing of Jeremy Corbyn and the UK Labour Party conspiracy episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Annie Kelly, Jake Brockatansky, and Julian Fields.
Greetings, listeners.
This is your UK correspondent, Annie, the Jewel of England, reporting for duty.
It seems only two short weeks ago I was on this show, talking to you about my countryman's bizarre love for dynamiting 5G towers, it is with a heavy heart that I must affirm that old Celtish folk saying, the Brits are at it again.
Usually when we talk about conspiracy theories on the podcast, they tend to be of the, that fake shit variety.
We've discussed all sorts of mad stuff from the right, which usually read like a bad science fiction script if you just replaced aliens with Jews, that sort of thing.
But today is going to be a little bit different, because I want to talk about an actual real life conspiracy.
Yeah, you know, obviously, as someone living in America, we were very excited by the fact that your centrists have managed to leak their documents showing that they're rigging it against the left-wing candidate.
So couldn't wait to have you on Yeah, it was a real treat, although quite sneaky of them to put it in an 850-page document, meaning that nobody read it.
But I did.
This document, thrillingly named, The Work of the Labour Party's Governance and Legal Unit in Relation to Antisemitism, 2014-2019, was leaked earlier in April, and listeners, like the sad chump that I am, I read the whole thing.
It contains some pretty shocking information and I'd like to share just a little of that with you today.
You know, the sake of neutrality, I think there's one thing I should make clear about myself and where I am in all this.
Which is that I'm a Labour Party member and I have been since I was 16.
Since my dad is a Labour supporter too, some of my earliest memories are actually leafleting for the party before I could even reach the letterbox.
I've canvassed for every Labour leader we've had, even the really shit ones.
You can imagine then how personally I took it to find out that… Many Labour staff, including the governance and legal unit staff and senior staff with responsibility for managing and overseeing GLU, were bitterly opposed to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and seem to have been demotivated or largely interested in work that could advance a factional agenda.
At its extreme, some employees seem to have taken a view that the worse things got for Labour, the happier they would be, since this might expedite Jeremy Corbyn's departure from office.
Now, before we get into that, let's start at the very beginning.
The Labour Party in the UK is the mainstream left-wing political party.
It's a broad tent, meaning it encompasses several liberal-to-left tendencies.
Although, as is to be expected in practical terms, some factions traditionally have held much more power than others.
This was certainly the case with the disciples of the party's last elected Prime Minister, Tony Blair, whose much-touted third-way New Labour ideology attempted to constitute a synthesis of right- and left-wing politics, while dropping Labour's traditional socialist ideals.
New Labour, I should say, achieved significant electoral success from 1997 to 2007.
Mmm, the good years.
They were incredibly good at driving the car, it just turned out they were aiming for the wall.
I'm trying to describe this in the most neutral terms that I possibly can, because there's been such an obvious tension between this section of the Labour Party and its more socialist elements for just as long.
And I'm quite keen for this podcast episode not to kind of get read as the sort of ramblings of a bitter Corbynite.
Although it is and it will.
So, these tensions that I mentioned were brought to the fore when Jeremy Corbyn ran in the Labour leadership election in 2015, following the previous leader Ed Miliband's loss in the general election.
Corbyn was a self-described socialist and said that he ran because he had been disillusioned with the lack of left-wing voices in the mix for the leadership.
As a Guardian article during the leadership election put it, A Corbyn leadership would represent a seismic shift for labor in terms of how the party is led and in terms of policy.
Gone would be the days of policy handed down by the leadership with little consultation.
There has to be an open debate in the party and so I have suggested we do a number of open conventions on the economy, the environment, the constitution, social and foreign policies, he says.
The change in approach is causing heart palpitations among mainstream labor figures, who fear that Corbyn could veer even further to the left than Michael Foot.
Not left foot, Michael left foot foot!
The late labor leader famously took the party to its worst result in 1983, since Universal Franchise on a manifesto that Gerald Kaufman famously described as the quote, longest suicide note in history.
Yeah, and what's funny about that article, we'll drop the link and the sources obviously if you want to read it, but this was before Corbyn had won, and it actually, even though they've got this little dig in here, it's probably one of the fairest Guardian articles I've seen covering him.
You know, they were quite keen on him, he was a bit spicy before he became Labour leader, this all changed much later.
But that critique is something I really do want you to remember because it was a very common theme in critiques of Corbyn early on.
Many commentators and MPs said it wasn't about him himself, but his electability.
Yeah, you're familiar with this.
I would love to hear that beautiful word.
I'm so glad that much like in an alien covenant, America has revisited its creating continent, aka planets, England, and is now going to launch the toxins it created, wiping out the entire civilization at its root.
Yeah, I mean, what kind of seems so crazy about this argument is that, you know, it's always contrasted to Blair.
You know, Blair did so well in elections.
You know, Blair left office in 2007.
Do you really, like, not think the country has changed at all since then?
Yeah.
What about the middle?
Except it's still wars!
So some of the criticisms of Corbyn were that he had been a vocal opposer of Trident, which was the country's nuclear weapons programme, as well as a rebellious force against the party line of acceding to a platform of milder austerity than the Tories' Weiland government.
He had been involved in protests against wrongful convictions and poor treatment of those accused of IRA bombings, as well as attending commemoration ceremonies for actual IRA members who had been shot dead by the British Army.
He was also a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights and had defended the organization Hamas from being labeled a terrorist organization by the British government.
Oh my god, in British English it just sounds like a travel agency.
Hamas.
Hamas!
I probably mispronounced it to be fair.
Yeah, you just enter your toto code and... Yeah, you go to Hamas.
Yeah.
In short, it probably wasn't a totally unfair criticism to say that even if you liked Corbyn and supported him on all of these issues, could you honestly imagine him as a safe electoral bet?
This is where things begin to get nasty though, because Corbyn was, unexpectedly, really popular with the membership.
The Labour membership generally skews more left-wing than the party staff itself, something which I gather might be similar over there in the United States.
Yeah, yeah, we also get nothing for our money or our votes, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, they know they've got you locked in.
This is where the report first gives us an indication that Labour's Governance and Legal Unit, the people in charge of the party's internal affairs, called the GLU for short, might have a tinge of political bias.
You see, the writers of the report had access to not just the emails of staff members involved, but also their staff WhatsApp groups, which were made available to them by one of the group's members.
Early on in the report during the 2015 leadership election, we can see that several senior members of GLU were none too happy about Corbyn's surprise successes, or the fact that new memberships were surging.
In one group chat, a staff member says, We're totally fucked!
The party's about to be taken over by complete nutjobs!
Another responds, Yeah, all the people commenting on Twitter, Facebook and
elsewhere are completely fucking mental!
We're so fucking screwed!
Hillary Clinton staff, Dutley.
In a different chat, another staff member refers to new members joining as,
Mentalists!
Peace out yo!
Okay, but so what, right?
Like I said before, the Labour Party is a broad tent and while it would be nice as a Jews paying member to have the people whose salaries we pay show a bit more respect for the grassroots membership, I'm not going to call their manager if they're a bit rude in a group chat.
The problem is, it didn't stop there.
It's probably time to introduce you to a charming little piece of British slang called trot.
I'd never actually heard this word before the 2015 leadership election because the circles I hang out are too full of cool and attractive people to ever use it.
But apparently it's a derogatory word used by the Labour right to denote a Trotskyite leftist.
Obviously those are relatively thin on the ground these days so it's become a bit of a catch-all term for basically any leftist.
What relation would it have to Tanki, for example?
So it's not even really, it's not as specific as Tanki.
As far as I can tell from this report, they literally just mean anyone to their left.
Oh, cool.
Wow.
It sort of seems to derive from Trotskyite, but it doesn't really seem to have anything to do with whether you actually believe in the works of Lenin Trotsky or, you know, yeah, it's just kind of slang.
Yeah, it's a slur.
It's a slur.
No, it's a slur.
Yeah.
As the report says, After the May 2015 election and continuing into the summer, as the Corbyn leadership campaign got underway, there was a surge of people joining the Labour Party as full members or as, quote, registered supporters who had a vote in the leadership election.
With the help of other staff across the party, including staff such as Dan Hogan, who would later join GLU, in the summer of 2015, GLU launched a process of checking new members and supporters, particularly on social media.
To remove them from the process.
Staff described, quote, stalking people on social media to find people who are, quote, trotty or a, quote, twat.
Despite acknowledging, quote, really makes you think about what you put on social media.
Really, Roy, if I was to be stalked, I would sound like a twat.
So...
So wait, this is the person stalking someone saying, now that I stalk somebody, I realize it would not be good if I were stalked because I would look like a twat.
Yeah.
Fuck.
Yeah.
Fuck, that's so good.
I don't even understand, like I can't laugh, it's too good.
Internet etiquette 101.
Numerous staff were involved in this, both senior and junior.
Staff discussed, quote, hunting out thousands of trots, and described this as, quote, trot busting work, or bashing trots, trot spotting, the trot hunt, and trot hunting.
Simon Jackson, acting director of policy and political research, would repeatedly, quote, go on about trot busting.
Another staff member was, quote, celebrating every time he finds a trot.
And Danny Adlepour, campaign's manager, discussed being, quote, trot smasher in chief.
As Cameron Scott, Eastern Regional Director, said on the 19th of August, 2015, quote, priority right now is trot hunting.
Holy shit!
Are you fucking kidding me?
This is everything we say about them in secret and it's all true!
It's all true!
These fucking libs!
I'm gonna kill you!
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