The British government under Theresa May’s leadership is riddled with insecurity. Outside the Conservative party, May faces the wrath of the center and center-left who deplore Brexit and all those who commandeer it. Within her own party, she is scorned by those who despise her for apparently betraying the ‘hard’ Brexit they voted for.
By contrast, the shadow cabinet—the opposition party’s leadership, constructed to mimic the actual executive—is stronger than ever. In a short few years, Jeremy Corbyn has hijacked a previously centrist party, gained a legion of loyal fans, and successfully dictated a large amount of the political conversation across the UK. A man widely believed to be anti-semitic has reached highest levels of influence in British politics. How did he succeed?
Corbyn was the underdog in the Labour party’s 2015 leadership race. He was a long-serving radical backbench MP known for his anti-Western foreign policy stances, competing against multiple well-qualified moderate Labour candidates. He maximized a change to voting rules and signed up thousands of far-left grassroots activists who would turn the formerly centrist Labour party of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown into an effective vehicle for his socialist ideals. He received a landslide of 59.5 percent of first preference votes. Building on his success, he created a far-left political movement named Momentum, which has been described as the ‘party within the party.’ It has few parliamentary supporters, but dominates Labour’s entire activist wing. The purpose of this radical organization goes far beyond its stated political platform of increasing public spending and working toward a society with equality of outcome. It is built entirely around Corbyn’s leadership and exists to prop him up against any and all threats.
Momentum has become notorious within the Labour party for bullying opponents, either into submission or oblivion. Momentum builds support through controversy and ruthless attacks on those who stand against Corbyn. The group has taken over countless local Labour groups by ousting moderate leaders and replacing them with Corbyn supporters. They are now swiftly moving on to deselecting parliamentary Labour politicians.
At the center of Corbyn’s appeal is his outsider status and image as a blue collar politician with a modest lifestyle. No matter how hypocritical that image is, his supporters are entranced by this persona and claim him as their one and only political master, because he is a true ‘man of the people.’
Sound familiar? As a relative stranger to organized politics, Donald Trump came into the 2016 GOP primaries with a fraction of the political baggage of his opponents. And he used the party as a platform to create a new movement centered around his leadership. Both Trump and Corbyn won favor by exploiting outrage. They ruthlessly attacked elites, the media and their own party’s previous political positions and leaders.
This approach to politics may be shock-inducing, aggressive and contemptible. But it works. The more unexpected and adversarial Trump’s actions are, the more people talk about him. A single antagonistic tweet of his can now dictate the news cycle around the globe. Corbyn’s influence isn’t quite yet worldwide, but the unwaveringly controversial political positions he pushes are part of a strategy that clearly borrows from President Trump, and allows him to dominate headlines in the U.K. From scrapping the U.K.’s nuclear arsenal, to introducing a “maximum wage” and nationalizing almost every British industry, Corbyn’s unprecedented proposals are as outlandish as they are never-ending.
Where Corbyn differs from comparable modern populist leaders—and perhaps the real key to his astonishing success—is his combination of foreign policy with an internal enemy for his supporters to rally against. British Jews.
The reality is, Jeremy Corbyn has not just survived the outcry against his anti-Semitism; he has thrived off of it. He recently thwarted the plans of his own national executive committee as they attempted to make peace with the British-Jewish community by adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.
After a long and tumultuous summer of the Labour party dismissing the concerns of the Jewish community, last week they were finally voting to fully adopt the very definition of anti-Semitism they had rejected earlier in the summer.
But Corbyn had other ideas. He submitted an explosive statement as a caveat to the adoption of the definition, one which essentially contradicted the very purpose of it. This statement contended that it cannot be anti-Semitic to “describe Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist, because of their discriminatory impact.” This was a flagrant denunciation of Labour’s promise to make peace with the Jewish community. It was also Corbyn’s first public declaration since becoming leader of the Labour party that in effect, he views the establishment Israel as racist. In doing so, he broke with every British foreign policy precedent toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including those set by his own party.
This wildly reckless approach was nonetheless characteristic of his leadership. Ultimately, Labour’s national executive committee adopted a significant clause from Corbyn’s statement, stating that freedom of speech in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be protected. Corbyn’s devoted allies have since flanked to echo the entirety of the statements he made by unlawfully putting up giant posters at bus shelters across London, reading ‘Israel is a racist endeavor’.
Corbyn’s brand of populism thrives from his open embrace of anti-Semitism and his flirting with far-right figures and tactics. In April, he received stamps of approval from former grand wizard David Duke and former British National Party leader Nick Griffin, a prolific “white rights fighter’’. Griffin proclaimed that thanks to Corbyn’s leadership, he would be voting for Labour in the next general election and Duke praised Corbyn for recognizing “Jewish establishment power” and “Zionist power”. More recently, a speech made by Corbyn in 2013 resurfaced where he made comments about Zionists that former British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described as the “most offensive” since Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. Corbyn said that despite living in the country most of their lives, British Zionists “don’t want to study history” and “don’t understand English irony.”
Forty percent of British Jews are now seriously considering leaving the country if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister. The sad reality is that in Corbyn’s calculating strategy, Britain’s 260,000 Jews are an effective target to propel his hijacking of the Labour party forward. The growing popularity of Momentum and its aggressive tactics, increasingly targeted at Jewish MPs and party members, is just one indication of his overwhelming success. More worrying is the polling which suggests that his deplorable tactics could well end up landing him Britain’s premiership.
