Oh Jeremy Corbyn: Glasto myth and a poisonous conspiracy theory

Glastonbury, which opens on Wednesday, will air Oh Jeremy Corbyn: the Big Lie, a documentary — a conspiracy theory — that puts the failure of Corbynism at the door of knaves. (Corbyn was a surprise hit at Glastonbury in 2017, and no one was more surprised than he). That voters didn’t like him is too simplistic for his acolytes, who do not understand why so many working-class voters were repelled by him. Rather than search for the cause, they plead conspiracy.

After the Great War, Germany invented a Stab in the Back myth to explain its failure to itself. The Corbynites have one too: this is the Big Lie.

The lie is: Corbyn was robbed of the socialist utopia by a cabal of Right-wing Labour staffers (but not that Right-wing, being in Labour) and MPs in league with Israel, who despised Corbyn because he is pro-Palestinian and anti-capitalist. I don’t doubt that elements of the media and the political class tried to destroy Corbyn for his anti-capitalism; nor do I doubt that Corbyn had many enemies within Labour because they thought he would lead them to oblivion, and he did. But British Jews did not fear Corbyn because of socialism, and even less so due to Palestine: we are British Jews.

You can’t spin an honest man. The vast majority of British Jews feared Corbyn because a rump of his followers believe, and circulate, the conspiracy theory that Jews (I remind you that Israel is the Jewish state) have the power to subvert democracies in other countries, and wish to do so, and this conspiracy was the foundation of the Holocaust itself: the demonic Jew and its insatiable taste to subvert everything holy. And, like a faulty clock, antisemitic attacks in Britain have risen, for which Corbynites will not take responsibility. I cannot forgive them for that. They blame us.

Some of the interviewees are Jewish, or of Jewish descent: Jackie Walker, for instance, who is devoted to the idea of a hierarchy of race (that is, Jews have taken all the space for anti-racist activism). “Some groups are seen as more important than others,” she says. The insinuation is that Jews complaining about antisemitism betray their fellow minorities by taking their space; requesting justice is, in itself, unjust. She was expelled from Labour, protesting that all she wanted was “equal treatment”.

The Big Lie also includes testimony from Ken Loach, who makes feature films on social justice but also directed Perdition in 1987, a play by Jim Allen, that, some critics aruged, turns a factual “collaboration” between a Hungarian Jew and the Nazis during the war into a polemic that insinuates that Zionists collaborated with Nazism: that the Holocaust, for Zionists (that is, Jews) was an opportunity to increase their power. (Loach himself disputes this interpretation.)

This is what they lay before the young people at Glastonbury: conspiracy and betrayal. Young people mistrust Jews, and democratic systems, more than any cohort in Britain. These suspicions co-exist happily. If this what is served them, who is surprised?

When we moved to west Cornwall, we became the owners of a derelict walled garden, filled with ash trees, monbretia and brambles. We tore it out — I found the root of the bramble by the back wall, thicker than a man’s thumb. We could have tarmacked it and made space for four cars; or we could have laid astroturf. Instead we planted like Monty Don.

It’s by a river on the sea: the soil is black gold. The lawn took six days to sprout up. It grew to meadow height. We planted pink roses and peonies and sweetpeas and echiums; pear trees and plum trees and cherries apples; white roses.

Three years later and the garden is alive. The birds come. The insects come. I found two slowworms and a toad. It exudes damp, even on hot days, and a wild joy, and I am happier in it than I’ve ever been.