McCarthyism rises in Labour as it readies for power

Having examined how the North of Tyne mayor was barred from standing again, I see something akin to McCarthyism writes Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian 


I first met the man who has been all over this week’s political headlines four years ago, 300 miles up the A1 from Westminster. It was a bitterly cold Saturday morning in the Northumberland coastal town of Newbiggin and Jamie Driscoll was asking for votes. He’d just caused a minor political earthquake by winning Labour members’ support to run for the new position of mayor of North of Tyne. The cert for that role had been Nick Forbes, Newcastle council leader and longtime big beast – not Driscoll, who had been a local councillor for a few months and who, on winning the selection, had had to rush out to buy his only suit.

I watched this stubbly, scruffy, upbeat outsider doorknock around an estate of small houses and exotic garden statuettes, to a reaction chillier than the wind whipping in from the North Sea. For decades, this had been Labour country, where that political tradition ran through the local economy, its institutions and people’s very identities. But over the past 50 years all that had been destroyed and now it was the land of Vote Leave, desolate and nihilistic. If residents spoke to canvassers at all, it was to spit out statements like “I don’t follow politics”.


After more slammed doors, one activist sighed: “Policy doesn’t matter here. They’ve forgotten what government can do.” For all Driscoll’s ideas and energy, I wrote at the time, his biggest challenge would be closing the vast gulf between the governed and their governors.

That tableau has come to mind many times since the Labour party barred Driscoll from standing for re-election. No more will he trigger democratic earthquakes. Instead, he has become fodder for lobby journalists. When I met him in Newcastle this week, he was slaloming between interviews for Radio 4, ITV, national newspapers, Newsnight and more. The ending of his political career has done more for his national profile than four years in office. I listened as each outlet demanded its shot of Westminster caffeine. Hardly anyone asked what it meant for the north-east, for local democracy, for the people in Newbiggin and anyone else who long ago tuned out all politicians as fraudulent liars only in it for themselves.

And why wouldn’t they? I have chased down and sifted through evidence, much of it never revealed before, and it points to a stitch-up bigger than anything on the Great Sewing Bee. The jumped-up outsider, Driscoll, has been tossed in the bin – but he is merely collateral damage in a one-sided Labour factional fight, whose actors appear not to give a damn for people’s reputations or for the public they’re meant to serve.


Let’s work backwards. Labour officials blocked Driscoll last Friday, soon after he’d been interviewed by a panel drawn largely from the party’s national executive committee. The email he received reads: “[T]he NEC panel has determined that you will not be progressing further as a candidate in this process.” But while the party gave no official reason to the candidate, its enforcers were happy to brief lobby journalists – who in turn quoted anonymous sources that it was because in March he had appeared at a Newcastle theatre with Ken Loach to discuss his films. The renowned director had been expelled as a Labour member in 2021.

Jamie Driscoll addresses the Transport for the North conference in March. Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

On Sunday, Labour frontbencher Jonathan Reynolds told Sky News that Driscoll was excluded for sharing a platform with “someone who themselves has been expelled for their views on antisemitism” – a line swiftly amplified by the media, yet not quite true. I asked Loach’s office to forward his letters of expulsion, which say only that he is “ineligible” due to his support of “a political organisation other than an official Labour group”. That was Labour Against the Witchhunt, which did claim allegations of Labour antisemitism were “politically motivated”. Reynolds was conflating the two. I asked how many other journalists had sought clarification. The answer was one.

A column about Driscoll is not the place to litigate Ken Loach’s views, even if I disagree with much of what he says about Labour’s treatment of antisemitism. It barely needs saying that sitting on stage with a director to discuss their films does not mean you share all their opinions. Far more troubling for British democracy is how anonymous, factional briefings are simply machine-pressed into newspaper “facts” then spewed out on TV.

“They were always looking to get me,” Driscoll claimed this week. I have read emails dating back to 2020 where the new metro mayor asks Labour officials for the party’s local membership lists used by councillors, MPs and mayors as standard. But not here: IT issues meant the lists supposedly weren’t shareable. Until this year that is, when he was told the upcoming mayoral contest meant he could only access lists “if you make a confirmation that you are not seeking the selection”. Another email, sent by Driscoll last month to party officials, notes that a local constituency party has been told by a senior official to disinvite him from speaking.


Asked for comment, Labour didn’t reply – but this is petty, attritional stuff, which is what happens when politics is evacuated of ideas and arguments and becomes simply about who is in whose good books. Cliqueishness is hardly exclusive to Keir Starmer’s Labour, but it is starker now because instead of real politics all this lot have is office politics. 

Which brings us back to the much-discussed NEC panel, supposedly to divine his suitability to stand. I have viewed footage of the entire hour on Zoom, which discusses nothing of Driscoll’s beliefs or achievements. Three of the five panel members are from groups on the right of the party, and all anyone wants to know is why he spoke to Loach. They refer to the director’s “controversial views” and quote the Jewish Chronicle’s coverage. How, they ask, might the event be viewed by a “hostile media”?

Driscoll replies that Holocaust denial is “abhorrent” and that he has signed up to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. He recalls how he used to fight fascists in the street. None of it is good enough.

A rather bumptious young man informs the mayor that “you can’t separate someone’s views from their work”. The twentysomething declares that Driscoll shouldn’t have discussed the films but instead attacked Loach’s politics. On that basis, Starmer ought to be disqualified for appearing with Loach on the BBC’s Question Time – and so too should the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, who in 2019 wrote a paean in this paper to Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, praising the way it “brings across how the right to a family life has been eroded in modern Britain”.

We all know that a week is a long time in Starmer’s politics, but he did once proclaim a proud regionalism. Now what’s left?

Attacking McCarthyism, Ed Murrow told his TV audience: “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another.”

By these standards, Driscoll is a victim of McCarthyism. The office he holds is now a mere electoral toy to be enjoyed by a favoured faction. And those people in Newbiggin and Ashington and anyone else who might be looking on with half an eye will see nothing but machine politicians serving themselves. This was the swamp out of which Nigel Farage emerged.

War or peace, truth suffers

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

UKRAINE has published a list of some 620 academics, journalists, military veterans and politicians who it says are Russian propagandists. Three such worthies in the list are Indian, and they seem baffled by the accusation.

As ‘agents’ go, there’s probably nobody to beat Pakistan, followed by India in sheer turnover. Someone praising an Indian batsman in Pakistan could fall into the category of an Indian agent as is known to have happened with cricket enthusiasts in India cheering for a Pakistani bowler. An Indian or Pakistani critical of authoritarian rule in their countries could be portrayed as enemy agents.

Rahul Gandhi has made the grade more frequently than many others. Opponents of nuclear weapons on both sides are easily saddled with the opprobrium of helping the enemy. Occasionally, campaigners for peace between the two become targets of slander. Others run the risk of annoying both sides.

The Pakistani establishment deemed Faiz Ahmed Faiz as too close to India. And now his daughters have run into trouble with the Indian visa regime.

Let’s suppose Russia were to publish a list of Ukrainian ‘agents’ in India. Quite a few, surely, including top-ranking former diplomats, would be running for cover having declared the imminent fall of Vladimir Putin either by assassination or a bloody coup.

The maxim that truth becomes a casualty in war is thus only half true. Peacetime is no longer a safe sanctuary for the ill-fated truth against being exchanged for something more expedient. Countries are creepily spying on their own unlike the old days when foreign agents were planted abroad to pry on each other.

A very determined American lover of democracy exposed the subversion of the constitution in his country whereby ordinary citizens were spied on in a Big Brotherly way. He is now parked in a Moscow hotel, some distance from those seeking to hunt him down as an enemy of the state. Such heroes are not uncommon across the world. Julian Assange and Mordechai Vanunu belong to this club.

Ukraine’s unusual move has an Indian parallel. It reminds one of framed pictures of intellectuals critical of the ultra right-wing government in Uttar Pradesh hung in public squares in Lucknow. The high court ordered the photos removed to protect the life and limb of those framed, as also their privacy.

Ukraine’s countermeasures have a history. During the war with Nazi Germany, Britain, currently advising Kyiv, had a department of propaganda, which was called that. It toggled also as the information department in its other avatars.

The ministries of information in our patch have remained a euphemism for the state’s propaganda overdrive targeting its own people mainly, come peace or war. In Ukraine, the Centre for Countering Disinformation was established in 2021 under Volodymyr Zelensky and headed by former lawyer Polina Lysenko.

According to UnHerd — the journal that carried absorbing responses from some of the alleged Russian propagandists — the disinformation department sits within the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine. Its stated aim is to detect and counter “propaganda” and “destructive disinformation” and to prevent the “manipulation of public opinion”.

The July 14 list on its website names those “promoting Russian propaganda”. Several high-profile Western intellectuals and politicians were listed. Republican Senator Rand Paul, former Democrat Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, military and geopolitical analyst Edward N. Luttwak, political scientist John Mearsheimer and renowned journalist Glenn Greenwald were named. “The list does not explain what the consequences are for anyone mentioned,” the UnHerd story notes.

Next to each name the report lists the “pro-Russian” opinions the individual promotes. For example, “Luttwak’s breach was to suggest that ‘referendums should be held in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions’”; Mearsheimer’s folly was to say that “Nato has been in Ukraine since 2014” and that “Nato provoked Putin”. UnHerd contacted and published the comments by Luttwak, Mearsheimer and Greenwald.

From Feb 24, the very start of the war, said Luttwak, he had “relentlessly argued that not just the US, UK, Norway and others should send weapons to Ukraine, but also the reluctant trio of France, Germany and Italy”.

“What happened is this. I said that there is a victory party and the victory party is not realistic … Their idea is if Russia can be squarely defeated then Putin will fall. But this is also the moment when nuclear escalation becomes a feasibility. It is a fantasy to believe Russia can be squarely defeated. In Kyiv they have interpreted this stance as meaning I am pro-Russia.”

Mearsheimer was equally annoyed at being labelled a Russian plant. “When I was a young boy, my mother taught me that when others can’t beat your arguments with facts and logic, they smear you. That is what is going on here.

“I argue that it is clear from the available evidence that Russia invaded Ukraine because the United States and its European allies were determined to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border, which Moscow saw as an existential threat. Ukrainians of all persuasions reject my argument and instead blame Vladimir Putin, who is said to have been bent on conquering Ukraine and making it part of a greater Russia,” he told UnHerd.

“But there is no evidence in the public record to support that claim, which creates real problems for both Kyiv and the West. So how do they deal with me? The answer of course is to label me a Russian propagandist, which I am not.”

Greenwald saw a clear glimpse of McCarthyism in the Ukrainian list.

“War proponents in the West and other functionaries of Western security state agencies have used the same tactics for decades to demonise anyone questioning the foreign policy of the US and Nato. Chief among them, going back to the start of the Cold War, is accusing every dissident of spreading ‘Russian propaganda’ or otherwise serving the Kremlin. That’s all this is from the Ukrainians: just standard McCarthyite idiocy.”

Ed Miliband isn’t offering socialism – but the Tories are still terrified

Owen Jones in The Independent

The rule of capital is “unimpaired and virtually unchallenged; no social democratic party is nowadays concerned to mount a serious challenge to that rule.” If he was still with us, the socialist Ralph Miliband would have noted two big changes since he wrote these words not long before his death in 1994. Firstly, he’d observe – with little surprise – that capitalism has plunged itself into yet another almighty mess. Secondly, he would undoubtedly be consumed with pride that his youngest son had assumed the leadership of one of these social democratic parties. Momentous events indeed: but his wistful conclusion would have remained the same.

That in mind, I wonder what Ralph Miliband would have made of his son’s transformation from a “laughable blank sheet of paper” to “frothing-at-the-mouth Communist who is going to nationalise your mother quicker than you can say ‘Friedrich Engels had a cracking beard'”. Ed Miliband’s suggested crackdown on land-banking (once endorsed by Boris “Commie” Johnson) and a temporary freeze on energy prices (backed by arch-Leninist Tom Burke, the former Tory special adviser on energy) have provoked comparisons with undesirable elements ranging from Robert Mugabe to the Bolsheviks. After he stood on a soapbox in Brighton and indulged a bystander asking when he would “bring back socialism”, the British right have behaved as though Labour are planning to finish what Lenin was doing before he was so rudely interrupted.

In part, it is the sinister red-baiting of Ed Miliband through his dead father, culminating with the Daily Mail accusing the Labour leader of planning to drive “a hammer and sickle through the heart of the nation so many of us love”. Pass the spliff, Mr Dacre. “Like a good Marxist,” writes The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore, “he detects the cowardice latent in capitalists,” accusing Miliband of being “part of an ideology” which is “ultimately pauperising and totalitarian.” Jeremy Hunt odiously endorsed the Mail’s lunacy, arguing that “Ralph Miliband was no friend of the free market and I have never heard Ed Miliband say he supports it.” George Osborne, meanwhile, accuses Ed Miliband of making “essentially the same argument Karl Marx made in Das Kapital.”

This is what is really going on. The right are so drunk on three decades of free-market triumphalism, so used to the left being smashed and battered, that they believe even the mildest deviation from the neo-liberal script is unacceptable. They thought all of these battles had been won, that they were rid of all their turbulent priests, and now they are incandescent at the alleged resurgence of defeated enemies. Don’t you know you’re supposed to be dead? It’s not even the most moderate form of social democracy that the right are trying to drive from political life. Anyone who does not advocate yet more aggressive doses of neo-liberalism – more privatisation, more cuts to the taxes of the wealthy, more attacks on workers’ rights – is liable to come under suspicion, too.

The British right’s strategy is pretty clear. They want to do to “socialist” what the US right have done to “liberal”: turn it into an unequivocally toxic word that no-one in public life would want to associate with, and use it as a means to smear political opponents deemed to deviate from Britain’s suffocating neo-liberal consensus. Bemusing, to say the least, given Labour first officially declared itself a “democratic socialist party” under Tony Blair in 1995 as a sop to the left in the party’s new revised Clause IV. He even wrote a Fabian Society pamphlet entitled Socialism. Yes, granted it meant nothing more to him than motherhood and apple pie, and he had more leeway than Miliband because it was rather more difficult to pin him down as a heartfelt lefty, but the point is even New Labour could happily bandy “socialism” about.

But let’s get a bit of perspective here. Socialism? I don’t think so. Labour have – wrongly – committed themselves to Osborne’s spending plans in the first year of a new government. As Michael Gove gobbles up the comprehensive education system for dinner, Labour’s response has been, to say the least, muted. Medialand may be wailing about 1970s socialism being back with a vengeance, but given polls show 69 per cent want the energy companies nationalised, the Labour leader still found himself to the right of public opinion. No commitment on rail renationalisation, either, which some polls show is even the preferred option of Tory voters. There’s suggestions Labour would hike the top rate of tax up to 50 per cent again, but polls show the public would be happy to take it to 60 per cent. Not exactly the full-scale expropriation of the bourgeoisie, is it?

In truth, Ed Miliband strikes me as an old-style social democrat, perhaps what would have been described as the “Old Labour Right” before Blair’s Year Zero. He generally seems well-intentioned about dragging the political centre of gravity away from the Thatcherite right, but appears to fear a lack of political space to do so. He has made moves towards a mild social democracy in limited areas – but it is just that, mild, although even that is too strong for those now imitating the hysterical rhetoric of Barack Obama’s Tea Party opponents.

It is difficult, sometimes, not to be overwhelmed by the  hypocrisy of the right. They don’t mind a bit of statism, as long as, generally speaking, it’s propping up the wealthy. Banks bailed out by the taxpayer, not free-market dogma; infrastructure, education, and research and development that all businesses depend on, paid for by the state; private contractors who owe their profits solely to state largesse; even mortgages now underwritten by the state. It is only when it is suggested that the state might help those near the bottom of the pile that the right cries foul. In their world, “moderation” means the biggest cuts since the 1920s, the driving of over a million children into poverty, privatising the NHS without public consent and dropping bombs on foreign countries. “Extremism” is curbing energy prices, asking the booming wealthy to pay a bit more tax, and stopping construction firms squatting on land during a housing crisis. So let’s start telling it as it is: they are the extremists, however much they squeal disingenuously about the “centre ground”.

Real democratic socialism would not mean the odd curb on energy prices. It would mean a living wage instead of subsidises for poverty pay, and allowing councils to build housing rather than taxpayers lining the pockets of private landlords. It would mean arguing for social ownership – from banks to the railways – giving real democratic control to workers and consumers.

That is not currently on offer from Labour. But the right fear that, if even mild social-democratic populism proves popular, the door might open to more radical ideas. Their whole Thatcherite consensus could prove imperilled. And that is why the British right are starting to sound like bad-tempered Joseph McCarthy clones who stigmatise even timid social democracy as dangerous extremism to block any further shift away from free market extremism. But a word of warning to the right. Look across the Atlantic. How has the Tea Party-isation of the US right worked out for them? Because that is exactly where you are heading.