Last summer was Labour’s most difficult one since Jeremy Corbyn got elected leader. Politics had been paralysed by Brexit. That paralysis was a deliberate Tory strategy to diffuse the energy and passion of the insurgency through which Labour won back millions of voters in the 2017 election campaign. The Tories used that Brexit-focused paralysis to stifle debate of any other contentious issues. Corbyn’s “centrist”, ie right wing, opponents within the party played along to weaken Corbyn’s position. In spring 2018, a “crisis” around accusations of historical antisemitism deliberately timed and engineered by a diverse range of pro-Tory and pro-Zionist  forces, drew in various anti-Corbyn elements ,

Defector Berger

(especially Luciana Berger who has since defected, having inflicted maximum damage). This limited the impact Labour could make in the local elections in May 2018. Gains that they made nationally were offset against relatively poor results in a small number of councils and particular wards. These were repeatedly attributed by mainstream media to Labour’s “failure” to stamp out antisemitism.

Once those elections were done, the accusations magically started to fade. Newspapers who apparently had no trouble finding several “antisemitism” stories a week to generate screaming front page headlines in the run up to those elections, were running out of material by June and were just recycling tired, old accusations. Labour were lulled into thinking they were over the worst for the moment.

Far from it. Their opponents used June and July 2018 to store up potential cases, just as they are surely doing right now. When last year’s summer recess came, the Tories breathed a sigh of relief. They were still standing, battered and disunited, but without excessive scrutiny of their lack of progress on key domestic issues as well as Brexit. And whilst the antisemitism allegations were almost entirely focused on social media posts, attributed to Labour or Corbyn fans (often without proof), the Windrush scandal which surfaced in early April, and claimed Amber Rudd’s scalp, was all but drowned out. This scandal was so much bigger than loose or OTT language in a tweet that could be labelled as “antisemitism”. Windrush reflected cruel government policies over several years, the Hostile Environment, centrally implicating Theresa May, which had devastating and dehumanising real life impacts especially on Britain’s longstanding Caribbean community.

No doubt Labour was looking forward to getting out and about during last summer and creating a stir in the marginal seats, exposing the government ‘s failures and putting forward its own clear and costed transformative policies. But it didn’t work out like that.

Tory politicians went off for their holidays but left a key task for the Tory-friendly media: to find and publish as many new smears around Labour and antisemitism as possible. The national newspaper headlines and the BBC radio headlines were dominated almost every day through the summer recess by distorted and invented slurs against the Labour Party viz-a-viz Jews, which in most cases had little substance, but spread the poison.

This summer it is essential that Labour is well prepared for a similar onslaught, has a strategy to manage that inevitable attack, and finds a way to get its own positive agenda and radical policies into the headlines. At the same time it needs to re-invigorate its younger constituency, whose energy and commitment has been sapped by the stifling effect of the stalemate over Brexit and the failure of Labour to articulate its complex but principled policy in relation to Brexit in a convincing and positive way.

Labour needs to be confident about quickly identifying and dealing with real antisemitic incidents (there are some), while also being confident about condemning the cynical way that its opponents are trivialising it by using it as a factional political weapon.

Labour needs to call their bluff.  It needs to show that whilst the Labour Party has been speaking out against racist and fascist tendencies nationally and internationally, antisemitism in society has grown on Theresa May’s watch as have much more frequent instances of racism against Muslim communities and several other minorities. It needs to seize the moral high-ground and say this is hardly surprising given the alliances the Tory Party has with Trump and with very right wing antisemitic and Islamophobic parties in Europe. The Labour Party needs to emphasise that they wish to work with the Jewish community and other minority communities in tackling the threat of the Far Right together. And if the self-proclaimed “leaders” of the Jewish community are so blinkered and prejudiced that they refuse to play ball, then Labour should not plead with them, but go over their heads and build links with grassroots Jewish bodies who will.

Labour has to speak loudly and directly about the problems directly facing young people – knife crime, zero-hours contracts, student fees, housing problems, and tap into the militancy they are showing especially around climate change. Labour’s positive statements towards the school students striking over the climate emergency, and their determination to lead a green industrial revolution have shown the way to go.

Labour has developed a set of great policies in the last three years, but hasn’t always promoted them as sharply as they could. These have to be promoted in ways that play up the fundamental class divides in British society, that illustrate the real fault lines which are much bigger and more significant than Leave/Remain. Labour needs to be controversial. Corbyn got a brilliant response when he talked before the 2017 election about the “rigged system” and how he would refuse to “play by the rules”. He got a similar response when he said more recently that the bankers are right to be scared of him. We need so much more of this, and not from Corbyn alone.

In this respect the likely coronation of a blunder-prone, racist liar, right wing populist and fan of Trump, as leader of the Tory Party, opens new opportunities to challenge forcefully his cutting and privatising agenda around the NHS, education, social care, youth provision, the environment, workers’ rights, council housing, legal aid, public ownership etc as well as challenging his racism head on and promoting a range of serious plans on equalities issues.

But, if Johnson wins, it also creates new dynamics around the Labour strategy re Brexit. We are in the endgame now, faced with an opponent who is actively seeking a “No-Deal Brexit” that will inflict enormous damage on ordinary people’s livelihoods. Labour has to champion those people. Its challenge is to do so in a way that enthuses, energises and draws in enough support across the Remain/Leave divide, while sidelining the purists, the “ultras”, on either side who stereotype their opponents but offer no solutions. And it must fully

Laura Pidcock

utilise the most powerful emerging talents such as Rebecca Long -Bailey, Laura Pidcock, Richard Burgon and Dan Carden, alongside stalwarts such as Dianne Abbott and John McDonnell in doing so.

If Hunt wins the Tory race, and tries to show he is more moderate and less personally obnoxious than Johnson, much of this still stands. Hunt represents class privilege and a privatising agenda too, but the key now, whoever Labour face, is to sharpen up Labour’s messages and take them out to the public, especially in the key Tory/Labour marginals in the Midlands and the North of England. This time, there is a cure at hand for the summertime blues, and the prize will be a government of social justice sooner rather than later.