Opinion Piece: Al Jazeera: The Labour Files (and why you probably haven’t heard of it).
By Garrett Byrne, Political Columnist.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow very lively debate within that spectrum” – Noam Chomsky.
Last fortnight Qatari network Al Jazeera transmitted an investigative docuseries entitled the “The Labour Files.”
The 4 episodes aired across a two week period constituted the most voluminous leak of documents from a mainstream party in British political history
By any metric its substance should have commanded record viewer ratings and elicited swathes of coverage in the British print and broadcast media.
However, corporate media appears to have consciously supressed the gravity of the programme’s revelations aside from a handful of written features in the Guardian, Independent and surprisingly a fleeting mention in the Corbyn loathing Mail on Sunday.
“The Labour Files” in large measure debunked an all-pervasive media narrative of Corbyn led anti-semitism which persisted for years.
The UK press has been historically averse to re-evaluations of their own failings. One grim albeit pertinent example is the BBC ‘s decades long protection of Jimmy Saille aided and abetted by the British taxpayer (BBC license fee)
“The Labour Files” features vast whistle-blower testimony from erstwhile party bureaucrats and key Labour figures operating at the coalface of the Corbyn movement.
It paints a lurid, yet compelling account of a plot waged by an anti-Corbyn official dom operating at Labour HQ in Victoria, London.
In summary, the anti-Corbyn bureaucracy never accepted Corbyn’s leadership triumph in 2015. Their doctrine of politics has always been rooted in Blairite essentialising which remains sceptical of economic redistribution and multipolar driven foreign policy- Redistribution and multipolarity were key tenets of Corbyn’s manifesto.
Against this backdrop: they abused their positions of trusted authority to smash morale across the party nationally and upend Corbyn’s leadership by leaking spurious (often libellous) information to establishment friendly papers- Times, Telegraph et al.
The distorted stories published in these newspapers would then proceed to dominate segments of radio programmes and flagship news fixtures.
The arc of the Al Jazeera programme follows 3 primary targets of the anti-Corbyn clique.
Regional Party Democracy i.e. infiltration of left-wing membership associations in Liverpool and Brighton.
Corbyn’s elected leadership.
Support for Palestinian self-determination.
Elsewhere, the forensic investigation unveils the party’s co-option of EDL linked figures to intimidate grassroot support for Palestine . Damning aspersions are also cast on a BBC Panorama production aired in July 2019 suggesting an endemic anti-Semitism crisis presided over and fuelled by Corbyn’s team.
Cross-referencing the same emails used in the Panorama Programme which Al Jazeera obtained through their own whistle-blowers, it plausibly demonstrateds that e-mail correspondence was selectively edited by Panorama to convey an impression of top-down indifference to anti-Semitism complaints.
In other words, John Ware’s 2019 Panorama programme amounts to a gross breach of the BBC charter which enshrines fairness, honesty and the use of accurate information.
From the advent of 2018 until his cataclysmic failure at the December 2019 General Election, amorphous accusations were aired ad nauseam claiming the party was inherently anti-Jewish under Corbyn.
Source: Hindustan Times.
Some commentators with hundreds of thousands of online followers even had the audacity to charge Corbyn personally as an anti-Semite notwithstanding his lifelong pro-Jewish advocacy most notably illustrated by his role in spearheading the anti-nazi league in the 1970’s.
Allegations broadcast in mainstream media almost invariably emanated from unverified sources. Al Jazeera’s investigation by stark contrast features interviews with their whistle-blower Halima Khan throughout.
This piece does not seek to reconcile Corbyn’s grave miscalculations, nor dismiss that anti-Semitism did not exist in the Labour Party.
It did.
But it principally existed among fringe elements of the membership who like a minority of their Tory counterparts have promoted age old anti-Semitic conspiracies which espouse a revolting notion of Jewish global governance ran by a transnational financial elite.
https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/conservative-hall-green-resign-jew-12860625
The real reason why Corbyn was depicted as such by powerful establishment organs was his unflagged alignment to Palestinian sovereignty which has cast an abiding shadow on British diplomacy since 1917 https://www.britannica.com/event/Balfour-Declaration.
This is not a novel observation but one justified by historical analysis and supported by Al Jazeera’s journalistic expertise.
The foreign policy establishment in Britain, unflinching in its alignment with American led international hegemony could never abide a capitulation to the Palestinian cause. The attempts by newly anointed Prime Minister Liz Truss to emulate Trump in moving the British embassy to Jerusalem irrespective of ecumenical opposition vindicates this thesis.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-uk-embassy-jerusalem-archbishop-canterbury-justin-welby
Corbyn’s election would have threatened this century-long Anglo-American policy orthodoxy.
The powers at be would facilitate his political demolition at all costs.
Freedom of the Press
British media in its current formation very much embodies Noam Chomsky’s aphorism that the façade of press freedom necessitates the need to “limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”
For instance, charged debates over fiscal niceties, Corbyn’s anti-Semitism and COVID 19 always feature on British television.
But never expect establishment press to run discussion panels on how the Israeli occupation of Palestine in the context of international law differs in legality from Putin’s illegal annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia.
The latter scenario is not considered a legitimate terrain of discussion in view of British foreign policy considerations.
The onset of the 21st century has seen the slow but steady erosion of pluralism in Britain’s broadcast media landscape. The UK has revoked broadcasting licenses for CGTN, Press TV and Russia Today (all foreign satellites) citing their toxic editorial perspectives as propagandistic tools of despotic regimes.
That may be, but the essence of free speech stemming from French enlightenment consists of the following understanding.
“I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’
CGTN, Press Tv and Russia Today were far from bastions of objectivity, but at least they illuminated the murkier aspects of British foreign policy in the global south which was otherwise ghettoized by traditional British outlets.
Al Jazeera however has directly hit a nerve by exposing the rotten body politic of one of Britain’s so called natural parties of Government. Its fate like CGTN, Press Tv and Russia Today possibly hangs in the balance. Keir Starmer’s party polling figures continue to skyrocket making his ascendancy to Downing Street real. Starmer was one of the leading parliamentary voices arguing for the revocation of RT in early 2022……….
