Thread by @MrBenSellers

🧵 I realise that many people get frustrated talking about past events (‘old history’), especially when we are supposed to be ‘moving on’. The past is the past, right? Why stir things up?

But I’m afraid that isn’t the way it works. 1/

Because sometimes the events that happen and political decisions that are made are important, not just because of the circumstances at the time & the outcome of those events, but because of the lessons we learn from them about the way we do our politics. 2/

If we constantly skip over these lessons, without analysing why mistakes happened, we cannot claim to be intelligent socialists & it’s likely we’ll be stuck in a cycle of defeats. It’s the old mantra, “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." 3/

So, I want to explain why the antisemitism issue needs to be discussed & explored further, not to identify individuals who were uniquely to blame, but to understand what it means about the way to do our politics, and the way not to do it. 4/

While antisemitism does exist, in all parts of our society, and no doubt within our movements, the weaponisation of antisemitism was and is not about that. We can see that clearly illustrated by its deployment against the Palestine movement. 5/

Those who weaponise antisemitism do so precisely because they understand its historical significance & power. In short, they use the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust, and the racism against them & since - as a chess piece in a political game. That in itself is a disgrace. 6/

But it’s important we understand that the target wasn’t just Jeremy Corbyn, but fundamentally & most significantly, the movement that had built up around him. 7/

The aim was to demoralise that movement, to fracture it & to a large extent, it achieved this. It is therefore of historical significance to us as socialists, because we have to understand the ways in which they achieved this and the cultures that contributed to the crisis. 8/

People have said to me that antisemitism wasn’t a significant factor in defeating Corbynism, and less significant than Brexit. I understand what they are getting at, but I disagree. It makes the mistake of thinking in electoralist terms, rather than about movement building. 9/

Antisemitism might not have come up on the ‘doorstep’ or in polling as much, but the weaponisation of it has a much more subtle, corrosive effect. If Brexit did for us at the polls, the antisemitism weaponisation made it almost impossible to recover. 10/

And this is where we need to look below the surface.

Above and beyond what they did to Jeremy (which was vile), what did it mean for thousands of committed activists to be called antisemites, daily, almost casually? 11/

What did it do to people’s mental health, their sense of optimists and hope (the lifeblood of any movement)? What I think happened was a mass demoralisation. 12/

But even that is more complex than that. Because the demoralisation was not inevitable. It could have been fought, if there had been a concerted campaign from the top to the bottom of the labour movement, the left of the party, inside &outside Parliament. That didn’t happen. 13/

So, it wasn’t just the fact that people were under attack by the press or the rightwing of the Labour Party, smeared as racists and defamed as ‘Jew haters’, but the fact that there was little response. 14/

When I say response, I don’t mean a statement or a press release, I mean a united, determined, sustained, collective campaign to defend the grassroots of the movement (just like the antisemitism weaponisation was a campaign). 15/

Because let’s remember who were the targets, the victims of this campaign: it was thousands and thousands of good people. People who had decades of experience, others who became activists because of Corbyn. 16/

People who gave up their weekends and their evenings, who put work, relationships, family bonds in jeopardy because they were now being loudly denounced as racists, tarred as people who hated Jewish people because of a deep down prejudice. 17/

Many of these people had years of anti-racist activity under their belts. Many were, of course, Jewish. 18/

To not have a collective, organised response to that, one which had a defence of those people and that activist community at its heart, is not something that can just be glossed over. I would just reiterate that the responsibility was collective, and part of a culture. 19/

The culture is about political expediency over solidarity, pragmatism over principle. That is a culture not restricted to Westminster, it is something that infects our whole movement. 20/

It is a culture that constantly looks to bury difficult issues and find short-cuts. The truth is, there are rarely genuine short-cuts, because it will always come back to bite you. 21/

Looking forward, it’s very clear to me that we have to discuss these issues, not in a condemnatory way, not to simply individualise them, but to learn the lessons together, and do better in the future. 22/

When the Corbyn project first started to implode, around the 2019 General Election, I and others made the case for a genuine reckoning of the mistakes made and the challenges we failed to overcome. 23/

There was little appetite for that discussion at the time. Instead, we went into defence mode. But a consequence of that was that we never really learned the lessons, questioned the detail of what happened and put plans in place to build a more resilient movement. 24/

That was a mistake. We could have analysed what went wrong in a more sober atmosphere. We could have forged a collective campaign to fight the witch-hunt of members & defend people from slurs, not just in Parliament, but across the country. 25/

Now, standing at the precipice of a new attempt to pull the left together & a new left party, we are playing catch up. In that context, and with that urgency in mind, it can be disconcerting to have these debates, but I don’t think we should be scared of it & bury it (again) 26/

One thing, though. It is tempting to focus these debates & arguments on individuals. I get that. I get that people are angry. But I think we know, as socialists, that the causes are rarely individual - they are systematic & collective, about cultures we hardly acknowledge. 27/

If we are going to go on and build, not just a better party, but a better politics and a better culture in our movements, one which looks after each other in solidarity first of all, then we must keep it political. We’re not tabloid journalists. 28/