A miserable journey through the history of poetry with Jeremy Corbyn, Europe’s most successful racist politician
Dominic Green
Jeremy Corbyn led Britain’s Labour Party from 2015 to 2019. Len McCluskey was, until 2022, the leader of Unite, Britain’s wealthiest and most influential trade union. Together, they took over the third-way Labour Party of Tony Blair, grew Labour’s membership until it was the largest in Europe, and made Labour the most popular racist party in Europe since 1945.
Corbyn, a lifelong apologist for terrorists, called Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends” and insisted the Islamists were “social justice” movements. Elected Corbynite officials blamed Israel for the Sandy Hook massacre, compared Israel to Nazi Germany, advocated the deportation of Israel’s Jews to the United States, and claimed that the Rothschilds ran Britain. Corbyn refused to mention Israel by name. His slogan was “For the many, not the few.” What it meant was “For the many, against the Jew.”
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It had worked before in Europe. Corbyn’s big mistake was that he promised to tax the middle classes. In the 2019 elections, Labour won its lowest number of seats since 1935. This disaster allowed the Blairites to regain control of the party. In 2020, an inquiry by the United Kingdom’s Equality and Human Rights Commission found Corbyn and his allies guilty of “unlawful” harassment and discrimination against Jews, with 23 instances of “inappropriate” interference by Corbyn’s office to suppress complaints by Jewish party members. The publication of the report, new leader Keir Starmer said, was a “day of shame” for Labour. Corbyn, who has no shame, rejected the report and was temporarily suspended.
Like herpes, Corbyn continues to enjoy episodes of virality. In early November, he led a backbench revolt after Starmer had suggested Israel might defend itself against Hamas. As Labour’s Jewish problem returned to the headlines, Corbyn and McCluskey went on Piers Morgan’s television show. Morgan asked Corbyn 18 times if Hamas is a terrorist group. Corbyn refused to answer and grew angry. Eventually, McCluskey, working his face into a rictus between a grimace and a sly smile, said, “Of course they are.”
Corbyn and McCluskey were on Morgan’s show to promote a little red book. Not Chairman Mao’s bestseller, but Poetry for the Many, a verse compendium with annotations to guide fellow travelers through the dialectics of verse. Len and Jeremy, as they call themselves, because we’re all equal here, have solicited nominations for poems from a select cadre of comrades, because some of us are more equal than others. One is the director Ken Loach, who, when questioned about Holocaust denial at Labour’s 2017 conference, replied that “history is for us all to discuss.” Another is the actress Maxine Peake, who claimed in 2020 that Derek Chauvin, the policeman who killed George Floyd, had been trained “by the Israeli secret services.”
“I grew up in rural Wiltshire,” Jeremy confesses, like the dirty little bourgeois deviationist he is. He starts with William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” We imagine young Jeremy communing with nature, which, he explains, “teaches us about the threats of industrial pollution and the extraction of resources from the Earth.” Len also starts with a struggle session. “I was born in a traditional working-class neighborhood in Liverpool,” he boasts. Len starts with Rudyard Kipling’s “If-“, even though Kipling was “a misogynist and racist” with “outrageous” views on Ireland, because Kipling’s exhortations remind him of “big, strong” shipyard workers like his father.
The difference between these two politicians-cum-poetry compilers is not just that Jeremy is a Maoist and Len a Trotskyite. Len is, or once was, working class. Jeremy is forever middle class, the socialist child of socialist parents whose idea of a family trip was retracing the footsteps of early agrarian socialism and going to Tolpuddle to see where the Tolpuddle Martyrs got martyred. Corbyn is the living incarnation of George Orwell’s famous depiction of the bourgeois socialist as a “fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist.”
A few of Jeremy’s selections reflect his upbringing in this Victorian counterculture. An academic failure, Jeremy picks William Blake’s “The School Boy” and George Meredith’s “The Lark Ascending” (“Poems about the environment can be edgy and poignant”). Mostly, his picks reflect the New Left’s turn in his ’60s youth from class war to Third Worldism and away from class politics and toward lifestyle leftism. A sluggish translation of the 17th-century Mexican proto-feminist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz appeared on Jeremy’s wedding invitation. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes reminds him of an “irreverent” stage production he worked on in 1968. “I Into History, Now” by Panama-born Andrew Salkey reminds Jeremy that Salkey’s Caribbean publishing house and bookshop are “only five minutes’ walk from my office.” It doesn’t rhyme.
“There is a poet in all of us,” Jeremy coos, “and nobody should be afraid of sharing their poetry.” Jeremy is cold and sinister. He cannot conceive of poetry as anything other than a blunt instrument of revolution or a tender probe into his navel. Len is warmer: He wears his heart on his sleeve, under his red armband. Len’s revolution may oblige you to hide a radio set under the stairs, but it will let you keep your copy of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Jeremy claims that poetry brings people together and endows new perspectives. Really, poetry serves to bring the world to him in terms he already understands. Len, rooted in the butch mythology of Liverpool, allows himself to enjoy the solid classics of British poetry — up to a point. He picks Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy,” Blake’s “Jerusalem,” Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” and Oscar Wilde’s “Sonnet to Liberty.” Len is always in opposition.
Neither of them can imagine that poetry might be independent of politics. They are aesthetic vegans on a restricted diet of Puritan morality. Poetry for pleasure’s sake is wrong. Jeremy must deny himself the literary inversions of A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad” or the pagan sensuality of Robert Graves, Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney. No W.H. Auden, either. Auden, like Orwell, realized that not only are people and poems more important than politics and power, but “poetry makes nothing happen,” and the revolutionary left least of all.
Now and then, you feel the chilly blast of the airbrush. Blake, Len tells us, learned Hebrew “in order to read scholars in their own language.” What Len is trying not to say here is that Blake, like John Milton before him, learned Hebrew to read the Hebrew Bible. This remains the Zionist entity’s favorite book, so obviously it’s out. The same goes for anything that might suggest that Christianity and what Victorians called the social gospel did far more to shape British socialism than people like Len and Jeremy have ever done. The Bible, despite the influence of the Song of Songs and the Psalms, is sent to literary Siberia along with Dante and Milton, though Milton was a republican and the author of Areopagitica, a pioneering defender of the rights of free speech that Jeremy and Len have abused so freely.
The love poets are corralled into their own section, like a museum display of pre-industrial looms. The Stratford bourgeois Shakespeare is begrudgingly admitted to this section. “I am deeply drawn to love poetry and songs,” Len confides. “Perhaps it’s the romantic in me.” Perhaps it was the romantic in Len that led him to use Unite’s funds to pay the libel lawyers who secured injunctions preventing the public from knowing that he was dating Karie Murphy, one of Corbyn’s party managers. Sentiment is rationed under socialism, like bread and facts.
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Dominic Green is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Follow him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.