Reasons to see “Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie”

Film review

Let me declare an interest. I am one of a number of Jews, current or recent Labour Party members, interviewed in the making of this film. I’m not going to deal with the campaign of lies and distortions being deployed to have it banned. We’ve tackled that elsewhere. This review attempts to explain why I’d like people to see it and hear our perspective, alongside that of non-Jewish comrades  grappling with a major political question: how did the movement around Jeremy Corbyn go from the dizzying heights of 2017, pulling off the largest increase in Labour’s share of the national vote since1945 and robbing PM Theresa May of her Parliamentary majority, to being comprehensively crushed just two years later?

The team behind “Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie” make a good fist of setting out how the hopes of millions were destroyed. Director Chris Reeves is an old hand at producing videos and DVDs for trade unions, the public sector and campaigning organisations under the banner of Platform Films. Producer Norman Thomas’s script, engagingly narrated by popular Jewish comedian, writer and broadcaster Alexei Sayle, traces the relentless campaign of the political establishment to destroy the movement around Corbyn, terrified by the huge crowds attracted by his anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti-nuclear stance. As one activist quoted says: “It’s not Jeremy they’re afraid of, it’s us.”

Reeves and Thomas make lively use of visuals throughout the 80-minute documentary, including the dancing Starmer robot in the  image above. A recurring theme is Sir Keir’s pledge “I will bring our party together”. Like so many of his promises, and his profession of admiration and friendship towards Jeremy Corbyn, it is shown to be no more than empty words.

The film sets out a pretty incontrovertible case, marshalling newspaper headlines from 2015 onwards alleging Corbyn in Number 10 would be a security threat; he wouldn’t be prepared to press the nuclear button; “Corbyn the Collaborator” was a Czech spy; he had snubbed the Queen; he didn’t “believe in Britain”. We see archive footage of anti-Corbyn Labour rightwingers reacting in horror to their own party’s electoral success in 2017. Actors tap out on keyboards and phones the treacherous exchanges between senior party staff exposed in the Labour Files, deliberately undermining Corbyn and his LOTO (Leader of the Opposition) team, swapping racially abusive and misogynistic comments about his few parliamentary allies, plotting how to root out party members they called “nut jobs” and “Trots” (followers of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky), planning sabotage of the party’s 2017 election campaign including diverting funds away from constituencies where leftwingers stood a chance of winning seats for Labour, via a secret project based in Ergon House.

The smear that stuck

The film shows how these Herculean efforts failed to stop the Corbyn juggernaut. Such was the popularity of the principles espoused by Corbyn and his team, such was the energy generated among the tens of thousands, young and old, who flocked into the Labour Party under his leadership, some devastating new weapon was needed to derail it. The smear that would stick, as stated in the film by Jewish Israeli academic Moshe Machover, was “one of the Big Lies of our time – the lie of the Labour Party being infested with antisemitism.”

Through interviews with a number of knowledgeable Corbyn supporters, most of them Jewish and most now expelled from the party, The Big Lie explains how antisemitism, properly understood as hostility towards Jews because they are Jews, was re-defined to encompass criticism of the state of Israel. Jeremy Corbyn’s support for Palestine could therefore be attributed to hatred of Jews and his most prominent allies, starting with Ken Livingstone, could be targeted with spurious allegations and hounded out of the party. One of these committed socialists, Graham Bash, provides the most eloquent expression of the film’s thesis – that the Corbyn movement was confronted by “a coincidence of interests between the Zionist forces in the Labour Party and the right wing of the Labour party” and that these were not necessarily the same people. They worked together, supported by mainstream media, setting out to ensure that never again would they have to confront the danger of a potential Prime Minister supportive of Palestine, or a Labour leader who sincerely intended to fight the establishment.

It was, in a phrase coined by Moshe Machover, “a concerted, orchestrated campaign.” The narrator then names some prominent participants in that campaign while relevant logos are displayed. Some are Jewish (Board of Deputies of British Jews, Jewish Labour Movement), some not (Labour and Conservative Friends of Israel, We Believe in Israel).  Critics who’ve attacked the listing of pro-Israel, Zionist groups as evidence that The Big Lie promotes anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are guilty of conflating Jewish people, in all their diversity, with the state of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism. We are not a homogenous block with one, undifferentiated identity, and we regard attempts to treat us as such as frankly antisemitic. It’s also worth noting that lawyers consulted by organisers of the Glastonbury festival found no antisemitic content in the film. Their decision to pull it was, reportedly, the result of bullying and threats to the festival’s funding.

Too much apologising

Graham Bash is one of a number of those in the film who point to the inadequacies in the Corbyn camp’s attempts to stand up to the network of forces determined to crush the left. A feature of the film surprising to some of us who lived through the purge from its inception in 2016, is hearing Andrew Murray bemoaning the failure of the leadership to confront the antisemitism smears effectively. As chief of staff to then Unite the Union general secretary Len McCluskey, Murray was a key adviser to the Corbyn team and showed every sign at the time of favouring a doomed strategy of apologising to the attackers and failing to stand up for allies being attacked. Prominent casualties, starting with Livingstone, included Jackie Walker, Chris Williamson (both of whom appear in the film) and Marc Wadsworth. The film devotes little time to examining the origins of the allegations that were made. It would benefit from drawing a clear distinction between the kind of antisemitism which is prevalent in society and therefore present to some degree in the Labour Party, and the often distorted and exaggerated accusations levelled at Corbyn and his supporters.

Corbyn’s nemesis

A substantial section of The Big Lie is taken up with speculation about Keir Starmer’s role, initially as Shadow Brexit Minister ostensibly working alongside Corbyn for a Labour victory, and then – following the 2019 general election debacle – as his nemesis, replacing him as leader and hounding him out of the Parliamentary Labour Party. For an authoritative study of Starmer’s career, from young leftie lawyer to pro-NATO, pro-business, pro-Zionist scourge of Labour’s socialist wing, I recommend Oliver Eagleton’s The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right. The film makers would have been well advised to stick to citing Eagleton’s book (described in the Economist as “an enjoyably hostile new biography”), rather than stretching credulity with the suggestion that Sir Keir might have been an undercover saboteur, “a spy-cop who infiltrated the Corbyn project just to bring it down”.

Nonetheless the evidence of Starmer’s duplicity and his determination to wipe every trace of Corbynism from the party is convincingly set out in the film: suspending his predecessor for saying what we know to be true about the factional exaggeration of antisemitism in the Labour Party; proclaiming that Corbyn will not be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate for the Islington North constituency he has served for 40 years; eviscerating the party’s leftwing activist base with a campaign of blatantly unjust disciplinary cases; imposing compliant candidates at municipal and parliamentary level against the wishes of local parties. It deals with how Martin Forde KC, commissioned by Starmer himself to investigate the party’s internal culture, came out with conclusions the leadership did not want to hear and was comprehensively blanked by the NEC, the parliamentary party and the media. Forde was particularly damning about the cavalier treatment of Black party members, in contrast to the party’s insistence that everything must be done to avoid offending Jews (though this concern applied only to Jews with an approved, pro-Israel identity).

Members fight back

The Big Lie loses its way, in my view, in a lengthy section platforming a succession of understandably disgruntled activists, expressing their anger and frustration, often intemperately, waving “Starmer out, Socialism In” banners and – in a number of self-indulgent sequences – acting out a spoof version of the Forde inquiry. When it was performed live on stage at the Rialto Theatre on the fringe of Labour Party conference in 2021, it had immediacy and relevance. It does not make good film footage. The Big Lie could be a tighter, more persuasive documentary if much of that material were to be edited out.

Although the film contains few revelations for those well acquainted with the Labour Party’s tyrannical internal regime, it is a useful source of information for the many who are aware of some skulduggery at work without knowing about its full extent.

There is also great value in giving a voice to Labour Party members who have suffered real harm and distress over the last 6-7 years and yet continue to stick by their principles. Some have extraordinary stories to tell, like Rebecca Massey who made a Subject Access Request (SAR) and unexpectedly discovered that her name was on a list of 11 members whose expulsion had been demanded by the Board of Deputies. The SAR revealed exchanges of memos between members of Starmer’s LOTO team and party staffers as they scoured Rebecca’s social media for a transgression they could use against her. She was expelled in May 2020 for posting a Tweet friendly towards former MP Chris Williamson.

The Big Lie celebrates the spirit of huge numbers of people who were motivated by the Corbyn project and the tens of thousands who are now defending their rights as workers, trade unionists, environmental and anti-discrimination campaigners, housing, health and food rights activists, advocates for refugees and asylum seekers and innumerable other causes.

It demonstrates the disastrous nature of Starmer’s increasingly authoritarian, intolerant Labour Party, and the importance of keeping the spirit of defiance alive. As film maker Ken Loach – perhaps the most illustrious victim of the purge – says towards the end of the film, even after the demise of the Corbyn project, “we are hugely strong, if we can get our movement together, now. But it’s urgent.” This is why the message of the film is important and why it deserves to be seen and its implications debated.