Labour have triumphed in the Birmingham Erdington by-election, with former nurse Paulette Hamilton — who was subjected to a series of right-wing attacks on the eve of polling — gaining a 3,266 majority. As the city’s first Black MP, Hamilton has much to be proud of.

For supporters of Keir Starmer, there will be cheer in Labour gaining a higher share of the vote than the nadir of 2019, and unlike two other by-elections in which Labour was defending its seat — the party lost Hartlepool, and nearly lost Batley & Spen — there was a swing away from the Tories.

But while turnout tends to be significantly lower in by-elections than in general elections, the appalling turnout of 27% underlines a massive turnout deficit. You would expect that from Tory voters demoralised by the epic scandals enveloping the government, but Labour threw everything at this seat — including lots of high profile visits from leading figures — and still the overall turnout was lower than the entire vote for the late Jack Dromey, who won this seat in 2019 with just over 50%.

While better than the 2019 low point, Labour won a lower share of the vote — 55.5% — than in 2017, when it chalked up 58%, at the time its highest share since 1997. The Tory vote was also slightly lower than in 2017, but the gap between the two parties in percentage terms is roughly the same. That would suggest a state of the parties akin to 2017, when there was a hung Parliament but the Tories were able to scrape together a minority government with the help of the Democratic Unionist Party.

But what should worry the Labour leadership is: firstly, the Tories are enveloped in one of the greatest political scandals of modern times, with the Prime Minister under police investigation, while there is a cost of living crisis gnawing at the finances of voters who have already suffered the longest squeeze in wages since the early 19th century. There could hardly be more favourable circumstances for a walloping Labour advance — but that has not materialised.

Secondly, opposition parties tend to do significantly better in by-elections than in a general election, because it’s a cost-free opportunity to land a blow on the government. Under Neil Kinnock’s leadership in the early 1990s, for example, you had some absolutely sensational by-election results, not least the Mid-Staffordshire by-election in which Labour’s vote share surged by 24.4%, while the Tories’ vote slumped by 18.3%: it was alas won back by the Tories in 1992 (by Michael Fabricant, no less), with John Major’s party winning the national election.

In that case, precedent generally suggests Labour would do less well here in a general election, which would indicate an overall national result that’s less favourable than 2017. If Labour was to be confident of beating the Tories, it should expect to be securing absolute thumping victories in seats it has won for decades, including at a low-point like 2019. That clearly isn’t happening.

The key problem Labour appears to face — which the testimonies of canvassers points to — is a lack of an enthusiasm for Keir Starmer’s leadership, and for the party as a whole. The question there is: what’s its solution to that, other than aggressively defining itself against its left flank?

Following Ken Loach’s statement that he had been expelled from the Labour party, I sent a tweet declaring that kicking out Britain’s “greatest living film maker while readmitting Trevor Phillips” told you “all you need to know about the state of the current Labour party.” It’s a tweet I stand by: whether you consider him our greatest living film maker is, of course, a matter of taste, and the fact Trevor Phillips was readmitted despite his long history of Islamophobia tells us how morally bankrupt Labour’s disciplinary procedures are.

Following this tweet, several nonzionist and antizionist Jewish socialists corresponded with me and explained why they believed it was problematic. Their reasons centred on a play called Perdition which alleged Zionist collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Directed by Ken Loach and due to be performed in 1987 at the Royal Court, it was cancelled because of its alleged historic inaccuracy, before being significantly rewritten and performed in 1999. Having listened to the objections of the Jewish socialists who corresponded with me, I added a few tweets expanding on them, whilst still opposing Loach’s expulsion.

This led to an online storm on Twitter, in which I was variously accused of giving in to right-wing and Zionist pressure. This culminated in an article written by Asa Winstanley, a blogger who was suspended from the Labour party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership for, among other things, denouncing Momentum — the leftist movement set up to promote socialism in the Labour party — as ‘Momentum Friends of Israel’ because of its educational videos opposing antisemitism. It’s important to emphasise that Winstanley was not suspended by the right: the party’s general secretary at the time was Jennie Formby, a staunch ally of Corbyn who went on to campaign for Howard Beckett to be Unite general secretary. Among other things, Winstanley falsely suggested I had labelled Ken Loach as antisemitic — not something I believe or have claimed — and that I am “no true friend to socialists or Palestinians.” More importantly, he writes a long detailed defence of the historical narrative underpinning Perdition.

Bored as I am with a tedious psychodrama involving myself which seems to consume various political factions on the internet, I don’t want to dwell too much on defending myself: I do so after this brilliant detailed response by a Jewish antizionist explaining in detail why the historical narrative promoted by Winstanley is false and harmful:

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This blog post is a response to Asa Winstanley’s article on Ken Loach’s play Perdition. I get to the bottom of why there are antizionist Jews who are distressed by Loach’s 1987 play and why Winstanley’s account of the Holocaust, which presents a highly unrealistic picture of Jewish power, diverges from a socialist and antiracist understanding of oppression.

In instances of significant oppression there are usually members of the oppressed class who are accused of ‘collaboration’. The term ‘collaborator’ is used to mean a number of things including an oppressed person who is willing to negotiate with their oppressor in an attempt to save their own life or to make their life tolerable under the weight of structural harm. There should be no prohibition on discussing this phenomenon. In fact, in some contexts, discussing so-called ‘collaboration’ can illuminate the horrors of being structurally oppressed. The philosopher, Agnes Callard, argues that one of the great injustices of being oppressed is that it is impossible to make totally pure moral choices, as oppressed classes are often forced to choose between violent resistance where innocent bystanders may suffer or acquiescing to the demands of their oppressor. However, discussed in a different tone, focusing on ‘collaboration’ can easily serve a right wing narrative which victim-blames and where members of the oppressed group are deemed ultimately responsible for their own oppression. In giving ‘collaborators’ a central role in our understanding of oppression we too easily move away from the kind of structural analysis which the left usually champions.

This debate, about when, why and how we should discuss ‘collaborators’ on the left, is central to understanding why some Jews feel uncomfortable with totally positive, hagiographical descriptions of the film-maker Ken Loach. In 1987, Loach attempted to direct a play called Perdition which was about the Holocaust. He encountered obstacles due to the play’s plot attracting significant crticism from many Jews and prominant Holocaust historians. Perdition placed stories of Jewish ‘collaboration’ (some inspired by facts, some totally made up) at the centre of its Holocaust story. The play’s author, Jim Allen, described his intentions behind Perdition as to create ‘the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written, because it [Perdition] touches at the heart of the most abiding myth of modern history, the Holocaust. Because it says quite plainly that privileged Jewish leaders collaborated in the extermination of their own kind in order to help bring about a Zionist state, Israel, a state which is itself racist.’

A number of Jews have been distressed by Allen’s claims and the play which represented them. They are heavily questioning of the use of the word ‘privileged’ to describe members of a racial minority facing death at the hands of a white supremacist state. They are shocked by Allen’s description of the Holocaust as ‘the most abiding myth of modern history’. Allen’s defenders are quick to point out that it does not seem likely, from other things Allen has said, that he was calling the entire Holocaust a myth. However, to suggest that aspects of Holocaust memory and well-researched historiography amount to mythology is to enter the terrain of the far right which many Jews find deeply concerning. For the most part, these Jews are not saying that real instances of so-called ‘collaboration’ are beyond discussion. They are rejecting a framing of these stories which disrupts our ability to understand how structural oppression operates, which victim-blames, and which can be associated with far-right narratives of history. Ken Loach claimed that those objecting to the play were part of a ‘zionist lobby’, in spite of the fact that many Jews who expressed distress about Perdition held antizionist beliefs. These Jews were not offended by what the play concluded about Israel or zionism, they were offended by the play’s implications for understanding the Holocaust.

Discussions of collaboration have resurfaced again this week with Asa Winstanley’s article defending Perdition. Like Loach, Winstanley reduces objections to Perdition to uncomplicated Zionist motivations. His article presents an opportunity to revisit the real events which Perdition was loosely based upon, to try to separate fact from fiction and to try to understand why some passionately antizionist Jews are shocked by the play.

The real, historical, accusation of collaboration behind Perdition concerned Rudolph Kasztner, a Hungarian Jew who escaped the Holocaust, settled in Israel and became involved in Labor Zionist politics. Kasztner was initially celebrated for being part of a successful mission to save nearly 2,000 Jews from occupied Hungary by bribing senior Nazis to divert a train into neutral Switzerland. Other Hungarian Jews in Israel later accused Kasztner of ‘collaborating’ with Nazis in order to achieve his rescue mission. This accusation became the subject of a famous Israeli defamation trial. It is understandable why Hungarian Jews who’d lost their whole families in the Holocaust, looking for someone to blame, might point the finger at other Jewish survivors and ask ‘why did you save other peoples’ families and not mine?’ or ‘what price did you pay to get out?’. However, that does not answer our question of what the twenty-first-century British left should do with these complex and painful stories.

Winstanley seems to believe we should platform them. However, his telling of Kasztner’s rescue mission is a partial, sometimes unevidenced account which diverges from the kinds of structural analyses of oppression we usually value on the left. It therefore prompts far more questions than it resolves. First and most significantly, Winstanley describes the Jews who Kasztner saved as ‘an elite group’ of ‘mostly fellow Zionists, family and friends’. Winstanley does not provide a citation for this claim and it differs from the accounts found in surviving historical sources. Kasztner was not simply concerned with a small elite but was involved with various rescue efforts which helped thousands upon thousands of Jews. Kasztner’s train to Switzerland, specifically, came to be known as ‘Noah’s Ark’ as it deliberately saved a diverse and fairly representative cross section of the Hungarian Jewish community. According to a Jewish refugee on the train who kept a diary, the transport saved at least 1,670 Jews including 320 children under 14, with the youngest being a newborn baby. Records of the train’s arrival in Switzerland present a similar picture. Mothers reportedly threw children onto the train as it was about to depart, a distressing image which is reminiscent of mothers in Afghanistan right now. An official list of the occupations of the Jews on the train is similarly diverse, recording the presence of many working class Jews. Some sources suggest that Kasztner heavily taxed the wealthiest Jews on the train to ensure there were enough funds for impoverished Jews to also escape.

It is true that many people on the train were affiliated with Zionist beliefs and it seems Zionist Jews may possibly have been prioritised by Kasztner but the mission certainly did not exclusively rescue Zionists. Accounts differ but one passage in the surviving diary suggests that just 25% of passengers were part of the Zionist movement. Another survivor recalls numerous active antizionists being rescued and records fierce debates between the zionist and nonzionist passengers. It is also hard for us to be totally clear about what it meant to call yourself a Zionist Jew in occupied Europe. Zionism was a heavily contested ideology among Jews before the Holocaust and many Jews who transitioned from being antizionists to Zionists during the Holocaust did so only as they watched their friends, family and children die around them, forcing them to reckon with the question of whether a Jewish state could have helped. I believe that the theft of land from Palestinian people was unjustifiable and that no events in Jewish history would or could justify support for colonisation of Palestinian land, but I also understand that Jews who became Zionists during the Holocaust were existing in a very specific context and that the categories ‘antizionist’ and ‘Zionist’ did not necessarily mean exactly the same things to them then as they mean to us now. For example, support for a multicultural and multireligious state in Palestine, often part of the antizionist project now, was historically supported by some political factions who called themselves Zionists but who did not think Jews needed to be a social or political majority to call Palestine their homeland. It is also true that some seats on the rescue train were reserved for Kasztner’s family members but most were not and the passengers were chosen by a panel of four representatives from the Jewish community where Kasztner formed just one voice. Ultimately, therefore, we do not know all the details about the people Kasztner saved, who they were and what they believed. What we do know is that they were a large and diverse group of people fleeing for their lives from a murderous, racist state. Why did Winstanley reduce them to a ‘Zionist’ ‘elite’ without citing any evidence for this characterisation? Were the hundreds of children on board part of this elite? Were the working class Jews part of an elite? Was the newborn baby? Can anyone fleeing from a state which wants to kill them for belonging to a racial minority meaningfully be described as elite within a socialist and antiracist framework?

Kasztner’s detractors have asked what he had to do to persuade Nazis to divert the train. Was he just able to offer a tempting bribe? Did he, as some suggest, agree to try to instil order among the Jews he couldn’t save? Did he actively lie to those Jews? Did he offer Nazis information about other Jews?

Ultimately, the answers to these questions died with Kasztner and I am not saying there should be a moratorium on asking them. They are the questions of introductory ethics: what price would you pay to save the lives of yourself and thousands of others?; Is it right to save some people if you have to leave others behind?; How many adults should you save and how many children? Should you save your family, if you can or should you be self-sacrificing and prioritise the lives of strangers?

As Winstanley notes, the Judge in Kasztner’s defamation trial said Kasztner had ‘sold his soul to the devil’ but, if he did, he did so facing the kinds of moral questions that most of us desperately hope we will never actually have to answer.

I am not trying to write in praise of Kastzner, a man I knew nothing about until I started studying Perdition. I am not claiming that every Holocaust survivor was good or made totally moral choices in the face of their oppression. I certainly condemn Kasztner’s zionist politics because of the inherent implications for Palestinians. However, I am saying it is important we understand there were clear lines between the oppressor and oppressed classes in Nazi Europe. There is no credible evidence that Kasztner had any agency to save any more Jews than he did. He made deals with Nazis in order to save lives and you can argue those deals crossed a moral line but he was not responsible for the deaths of those he could not save. He was largely powerless in the face of a white supremacist machine from which he and his family very narrowly escaped with their own lives.

Winstanley claims otherwise. He claims that the Jews of one specific ghetto in Hungary ‘could have easily overcome’ Nazi guards ‘and escaped to safety across the Romanian border, just three miles away had Kasztner told them what fate he knew really awaited them.’ Here, Winstanley, again, overemphasises Jewish agency during the Holocaust. He cites the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising but he does not note that this uprising was famously and tragically unsuccessful. This was despite the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising being the largest revolt by Jews during the Holocaust and despite the fact that Warsaw Jews managed to arm themselves. In the end, up to thirteen thousand Jews died in the uprising itself, with many burning alive in the Nazi’s merciless retaliation. Almost all of the remaining 50,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were captured and either shot or sent to camps. The German military, by contrast, suffered relatively minimal casualties. Records are inconclusive but likely suggest that, at most, several hundred German soldiers died. Jews did not have ‘easy’ agency to resist the ghettos as Winstanley claims, and he offers only brief supposition to suggest why he thinks an uprising in Hungary might have been drastically different to Warsaw. Given that the Nazis accused Jews of being powerful in order to justify their murder, many Jews find it deeply unsettling to assume that Holocaust victims had significant power to resist Nazis which historical evidence suggests they did not have.

One of the strongest criticisms of Perdition is that the idea that some Jews bore ultimate responsibility for the murder of other Jews during the Holocaust originated within far-right conspiracies where Nazis tried to minimise their own guilt. Quite bizarrely, Winstanley quotes extensively from Nazi testimony in Perdition’s defence, with Nazi accounts being one of the main primary sources he uses in his article. Winstanley quotes senior Nazi, Adolph Eichmann, saying ‘I believe that Kasztner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal’. We can basically prove that Eichmann’s accounts of Kasztner contained inaccuracies. As Winstanley quotes, Eichmann claimed that Kastzner was not interested in saving older Jews. Winstanley strangely fails to mention that records suggest that Kasztner’s train, in fact, saved nearly two hundred Jews over 55 including approximately seventy over 65. It is not surprising that Nazi testomany about a Jewish holocaust survivor is inaccurate. As most GCSE History students learn, an account of the Holocaust told through Nazi testemony is likely to be ‘biased’. And yet Winstanley quotes from Eichmann largely uncritically, as if Nazi accounts of the Holocaust are to be trusted. His strange conclusion seems to be that Perdition’s reputation can be saved by pointing out similarities between the story in Perdition and a Nazi’s version of events. However, the instances of overlap between Perdition’s plot and Nazi theories, which Winstanley alludes to, are exactly why many Jews of all political perusasions found the play deeply disturbing.

Why is Winstanley so interested in Eichmann’s testimony? His argument is that resurrecting Eichmann’s words is part of his antizionism because it demonstrates that ‘Zionists and Nazis both agreed on the goal of removing European Jews from Europe.’ This is the same argument at the heart of Perdition and it is the argument Ken Livingstone made when he claimed Hitler ‘was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews’. If we understand the problems with this argument we understand a lot about the antisemitism and the left discourse of the last five years.

It is true that there were Zionists who attempted to make deals with Nazis whereby Jewish men, women and children might be allowed to escape to Palestine instead of being murdered. Before 1939, sixty thousand German Jews were able to flee under this deal. However, there are two problems with Winstanley’s claim that ‘Zionists and Nazis both agreed on the goal of removing European Jews from Europe’. First, as they increased their power, (especially after 1942) the Nazi party decided they were not content with a world where Jews were out of Europe but in Palestine. Most Nazis ‘wanted Jews out of Europe’ only in that they wanted them out of this world, they wanted them dead. Nazis stopped Jews at borders trying to escape. Nazis kept Jews in Europe so they could murder them. This was not just because one man, Hitler, ‘went mad’, as Ken Livingstone put it. This was because of a white supremacist ideology. To imply that Nazis just wanted Jews out of Europe is to minimise the events of the Holocaust.

Second, Zionism was fundamentally a response to the systematic and persistent othering of Jews in Europe for centuries, which included segregation, persecution, expulsions and multiple mass-murders, eventually culminating in the Nazi genocide of the 20th century. In other words, the origin of the idea that Jews do not belong on the continent of Europe ultimately lies with various European nation states, their supporters and the ideology of antisemitism. Increasingly some Jews accepted that they would never be fully tolerated in Europe and over time this morphed into the ideology we call Zionism which only attracted majority Jewish support after the Holocaust. This ideology has always been inherently harmful to Palestinians and that is why we must strongly oppose it. I resist collapsing the distinction between white supremacists who wanted Jews out of Europe and the Jews who were forced to come up with a response but I do so without in any way defending zionism.

This is why Perdition is so upsetting to so many Jews, including antizionist ones. Because we do not need to minimise Nazi intentions, overemphasise Jewish power or spin history to claim that ‘Jewish leaders collaborated in the oppression of their own kind’ to make a case for why Zionism is bad. Zionism is wrong, not because of its possible implications for Jews, but because of what it does to Palestinians. To claim that Zionism needs to have harmed Jews as well to be condemned is to decentre Palestinians in their own story. Palestinian pain is important on its own terms and we do not need to prove that Zionism has hurt non-Palestinians to denounce, discredit and fiercely oppose Zionist ideas. I wish that, instead of Perdition, Ken Loach had staged an antizionist play which actually centred Palestinian people rather than being about the Holocaust. Once again, I am not saying that stories of ‘collaboration’ should be buried, but are they the stories that we on the left really want to be telling? If we call Neville Chamberlain a Nazi collaborator, can we really use the same word to describe Jews trying to do whatever they could to save lives? How does this blurring of lines between the powerful and powerless help us advance a socialist vision?

I do not support Ken Loach’s expulsion from the Labour Party. I am not trying to dampen celebration of Ken Loach’s important films, many of which I have personally cherished. I am not trying to ban the discussion of any history or limit free speech. In fact, I am doing the opposite. I am encouraging the left to put all the facts on the table and have an honest conversation about how we want to narrate the oppression of racialised minorities and whether centring so-called collaborators can ever help us construct a structural analysis.

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Finally, in response to Winstanley’s other claims. My own position on Labour and antisemitism has always been consistent, summed up in the opening paragraph of a Guardian column in 2018:

The poison of antisemitism exists among a minority on the left; there is a wider group of people who deny it exists, or are even oblivious to what antisemitic tropes are, and refuse to educate themselves. There are also non-Jews who regard antisemitism as a useful tool, a convenient political device –and nothing else — to attack, undermine and demonise the Labour leadership and broader left. Both of these statements are inarguable, and both speak to the different political factions undermining the historic struggle to obliterate the disease of antisemitism.

This is a position I’ve always referred to as “walking and chewing gum.” My own deeply held view is that neither Jeremy Corbyn nor the vast majority of the left are antisemitic — a position I’ve defended ad infinitum, from TV to my articles— but that antisemitism amongst a minority on the left is real and often bound up with a conspiratorial type of thinking, and has caused genuine hurt and distress to Jewish people. This led me to, for example, write articles defending Corbyn from such attacks as ‘wreathgate’, and to call for proactive political education to combat genuine left-wing antisemitism.

As a result, there are two different online industries dedicated to both claiming that I am one of the main apologists for Corbynite antisemitism, and that I’m a key player in the antisemitism smear campaign against the left. In a sign of how warped some of the thinking is in this whole saga, the latter often cites as evidence my support for action taken by Corbyn’s own allies against the likes of Winstanley and Chris Williamson. In both cases, the claim is that I’ve tried to ride two horses and have it both ways, rather than express my sincere opinion on an extremely complicated issue that has been harmfully simplified.

What I’ve always done is marry unequivocal support for Palestinian justice — from Question Time to my column — with opposition to antisemitism, on the basis that rather than being in any way contradictory, both spring from the same visceral opposition to injustice and racism. Again, that position has led to being repeatedly vilified in the right-wing media, long before Corbyn became leader.

It’s suggested that I de facto support Loach’s expulsion because I agreed with a tweet by a left-wing member of Labour’s NEC who declared that “members who wish to be involved in the Labour movement” should not be involved in organisations such as Labour Against The Witchhunt, a deeply problematic outfit backed by Loach, and I stand by that. But to clarify: I don’t support proscribing that organisation, not because I have any sympathy for it, but because proscriptions lead to witch hunts, and instead members should have disciplinary measures taken against them based on their own individual behaviour.

Finally, a word on the likes of Winstanley. Although their influence is marginal, such as it exists, it is toxic. They do nothing, literally nothing, to advance the cause of the Palestinian people. They speak to a tiny online faction who they succeed in making very angry, sure, but they don’t convince anyone else of anything: quite the opposite, they repel them. They seek to make the cause of Palestinian emancipation as marginal and fringe as they can by monstering mainstream proponents of Palestine’s freedom from Israel’s monstrous occupation. This is how they sustain their own relevance amongst their faction, sure, by presenting themselves as the only true champions of the Palestinian cause: but that is of no help to Palestinians who desperately need solidarity and mainstream that is as broad as possible.

To underline just how toxic Winstanley’s politics are: his response to the leaked report alleging Labour officials hostile to Corbyn undermined efforts to deal with antisemitism was to denounce it as an “absolute litany of lies about ‘Labour antisemitism’… Awful document.” This is because the report took antisemitism seriously, declaring that it “thoroughly disproves any suggestion that antisemitism is not a problem in the Party, or that it is all a ‘smear’ or a ‘witch-hunt’.” This political faction distresses Jews, drives people away from the left and provides endless ammunition to the right — and nothing more.

Politics is, more often than not, about the exercise of power rather than truth. A narrative does not need to be honest to triumph: it simply needs to become the commonsense of the powerful. Opponents of the trans rights’ movement — who have the active support of nearly all major British media outlets — have settled on such a narrative: that support for trans people, one of the country’s most marginalised minorities, is misogyny.

The purpose of this is straightforward: like when, in a US Senate race, Lyndon Johnson ordered his campaign manager to claim his opponent had sex with pigs. “Christ, we can’t get away with calling him a pig-fucker — nobody’s going to believe a thing like that,” responded his aide. “I know,” replied Johnson. “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.” If supporters of trans rights are forced into a defensive position of denying misogyny, the reality of trans people is erased: the fourfold increase in transphobic hate crimes over five years; the 83% of trans young people who’ve experienced verbal abuse, the 60% who’ve suffered threats and intimidation, and the 35% who have faced physical assault; the one in four trans people who have suffered homelessness and the 1 in 8 who have been physically assaulted at work; the crisis in trans healthcare — the list is truly endless. Those who fuel the vilification of this brutally assaulted minority dominate the media sphere, but cast themselves as the real victims; it is trans people and their allies who are the real aggressors.

Now, hard right commentator Douglas Murray has written a piece attacking me which — other than accurately describing me as a YouTuber — is factually wrong from start to finish. The blog can essentially be summed up as “how do you like them apples! boot’s on the other foot now isn’t it!”: that decent right-wingers have long been maligned as hateful bigots and extremists by the left, so now wouldn’t it be fun to throw that argument back in our faces, in this case by calling me a woman-hating misogynist.

Murray suspects “I tried to get him fired” —a truly bizarre claim that can only be treated as plausible if anyone thinks I have any influence at… The Spectator magazine — and specifically accuses me of having “on a number of occasions libelled” him, which is true if you think the definition of libel is “accurately quoting someone’s own words”, such as:

• Murray declaring “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board” and “all immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop”
• that “London has become a foreign country. In 23 of London’s 33 boroughs ‘white Britons’ are now in a minority”, casting non-white Britons as foreigners;
• whose books are celebrated by Hungary’s anti-semitic semi-dictator Viktor Orban, who Murray has enthusiastically spent time with and whose democratic credentials he has defended;
• and whose article about far-right French leader Marine Le Pen — headlined ‘Is Le Pen really ‘far right? — By smearing all opponents as fascists, the left blurs the line between democracy and thuggery’ — speaks for itself.

Murray’s piece asks if I have a “woman problem”: the same Murray who wrote a piece subtitled: “‘Feminism’ isn’t producing guides for helping men. It is producing manifestos for torturing them.”

In a normally functioning media ecosystem, Murray’s own wanton ignorance about trans issues would disqualify him from writing about them. He declares himself “Deeply uncomfortable about the idea of a young effeminate boy being told he is actually a girl or a young tomboyish girl being told that she is a boy” — a ludicrously false claim in a country in which young trans people are instead stuck for years on waiting lists before they can receive gender affirming healthcare.

He accuses me of having “repeatedly tried to destroy JK Rowling’s reputation.” Whatever my views on Rowling, perhaps the most powerful literary figure on earth, I have criticised her a sum total of once over a year ago after she used Twitter to pile on a queer BBC journalist, and repeatedly defended her from a disgusting misogynist attack by The Sun.

He then lists a number of women who are undoubtedly on the other side of the question of trans rights: Kathleen Stock, who I have never even mentioned once; Abigal Shrier, who I have never even mentioned once; Helen Joyce, who, again, I have never even mentioned once. He mentions Selina Todd, whose book on class I wrote a glowing review for in 2014, a quote from which was placed on its front cover (I have since privately asked for that to be removed because of her views on trans rights, but I have never criticised her publicly either).

He mentions Julie Bindel, who has obsessively attacked me for years, but again, despite repeated provocation, I have almost never publicly criticised Bindel, except when she decided to lie about my mother and father less than two months after he died.

He mentions Sarah Ditum, who I have almost only ever interacted with when she has charged into my own Twitter mentions, most infamously when I called on those who could afford cleaners to pay for them to stay home during the pandemic, a saga which became known as ‘cleanergate’. One of the only exceptions to this was to respond, this week, to a column she wrote in The Times newspaper contradicting the testimony of Terry Pratchett’s daughter about her dead father that, were he alive, he would oppose ‘gender critical’ arguments (a term invented to give transphobia a respectable intellectual veneer).

By any objective standard, the vast majority of those I have passionately critiqued are right-wing men, including (on multiple occasions) Andrew Neil, Toby Young, Piers Morgan, and Laurence Fox, as well as male politicians from Boris Johnson to George Galloway to Keir Starmer.

Indeed, on the issue of trans rights, there is nobody I have critiqued more stridently than fallen comedian Graham Linehan — who, last time I checked, is a man — or indeed the journalist James Kirkup.

But the mother of all lies in this dossier of accusations of misogyny pertains to the case of Suzanne Moore, a former Guardian colleague. The entire narrative that has become a media consensus surrounding around her departure from the newspaper is a fiction bearing *absolutely no relationship to reality whatsoever*, which goes like this: Moore was hounded out of The Guardian newspaper by a mob led by yours truly who tried to get her fired because she had the temerity to exercise her freedom of speech regarding issues related to women.

This is what really happened. There is a long running internal dispute over trans rights at The Guardian which — mirroring what’s happened in wider progressive circles in Britain — is largely generational in character. This first bubbled to the surface in late 2018, following a leader piece— which is the “official view of The Guardian” column — on trans rights. This led to staff (not me — I’m not staff, but on a freelance ‘retainer’ contract — more on this shortly) organising an internal, anonymous letter of complaint to management centring on the newspaper’s general coverage of trans issues.

The Guardian US — whose staff have looked on in horror at the mainstreaming of transphobia in UK liberal circles — wrote their own separate private letter. Such was their strength of feeling, they published a public editorial criticising the Guardian’s leader.

Alas, staff felt that satisfactory action had not been taken — leading to a general trans writers’ boycott of the newspaper — and it was decided another letter would be necessary. That came to a head when all ‘out’ trans members of staff quit the newspaper over a period of months. When our final trans colleague left — citing not just trans coverage at the newspaper, but incidents within the workplace — the Pride network (i.e. the LGBTQ group) decided that something had to be done. And frankly, if the LGBTQ group did not decide to do something when all our trans colleagues were leaving, what on earth would be the point in having a LGBTQ group?

At the meeting called by the Guardian Pride group, which I attended, Suzanne’s name was not mentioned once.

Now, the subsequent letter wasn’t written by me, organised by me, or distributed by me. In fact, my name had to be manually added by the organisers because the Google document was only accessible to people with Guardian email addresses, and as a non-staff member, I don’t have one. I don’t say that to wash my hands of it — far from it, I proudly signed it, and from the text, you can see why. 338 staff members signed it.

The letter had nothing to do with Suzanne Moore, as you can see with your own, honest eyes — and the Guardian’s own management know this. But Moore then helped popularise the entirely bogus claim that this letter was an attempt to have her fired. She subsequently published the names of every single person who signed the letter, many of whom were then subjected to abuse on Twitter by the extremely coordinated — and angry — online anti-trans army. The main targets? Women, who were vilified by online transphobic trolls as ‘handmaidens’, causing huge personal distress. Suzanne then wrote for the hard right magazine The Spectator attacking her colleagues and her newspaper, who all responded with silence. It got worse: when Lib Dem politician Layla Moran came out as pansexual, Suzanne ridiculed her over it.

And yet despite all that, Suzanne’s contract was renewed by The Guardian. Her response to her contract renewal? To quit, get a column at right-wing newspaper The Telegraph, and to take part in the classic ‘I’ve been cancelled media tour’ featuring interviews on BBC Newsnight and multiple outlets. Is this the first example in history of someone quitting in protest at not being silenced?

(It gets worse — several journalists have repeatedly tried to get me in trouble at The Guardian over my support for trans rights — including one who publicly decries left-wing ‘cancel culture’).

And yet Suzanne has obsessively publicly attacked me ever since and I have not once risen to this repeated provocation, including when both Toby Young and Laurence Fox repeatedly help spread this lie that I had driven her from The Guardian — whipping up their followers, some of whom subsequently bombarded me with homophobic abuse and threats of violence.

Finally, Murray’s evidence is that, on a BBC television show, I challenged Nimco Ali, godmother to Boris Johnson’s child, about his use of “bum boy”, which she refused to accept was homophobic. This is so self-evidently ludicrous that we don’t need to dwell on it.

Support for trans rights, of course, has nothing to do with misogyny at all. In my own case, the basis for it is the requirement, as a socialist, to use your platform to support the rights of oppressed minorities, the same principle I apply to Islamophobia; and as a LGBTQ person to stand with trans siblings as they are subjected to the same horrors cis (i.e. not trans) gay people were historically subjected to in a media landscape which is overwhelmingly hostile to them.

As all the polling shows consistently, it is women who are consistently — by a big margin — supportive of trans people; transphobia is disproportionately a male problem. Younger people — and disproportionately younger women — are the most supportive of trans people, a source of much of the anxious fury of anti-trans activists who know that, in the near future, they are destined to lose. Cis women are the loudest voices in public life in support of trans rights — whether it be Labour figures such as Dawn Butler, Angela Rayner and Lisa Nandy, or in the media writers such as Ash Sarkar, Ellie Mae O’Hagan, or both Natasha Devon and the late Dawn Foster, both subjected to rape threats as a result.

In all of this, trans writers are both monstered and sidelined — like Munroe Bergdorf, Paris Lees, Freddy McConnell and Shon Faye, whose upcoming book The Transgender Issue is a must read. It is their voices who should be heard the loudest, a principle that, yes, me, a modest YouTuber, have applied to my own YouTube channel.

Today, several self-described ‘moderates’ and ‘feminists’ are gleefully sharing Douglas Murray’s entirely factually wrong piece, purely because it attacks a socialist with the temerity to support trans rights. This itself is indicative of a much bigger problem of what is happening particularly in English political culture, in which hatred and fear of the left — from self-proclaimed ‘centre’ to right — leads to the mainstreaming of the hard right. This is radicalisation happening in real time; the wall between the self-described ‘centre’ and hard right has been breached. We can see where that leads in Hungary, whose ruling party began as members of the Liberal International, and it is a very ugly place indeed.

A final thing. Unlike almost other newspaper columnists, I’m not just attacked online, I’ve been beaten up for my beliefs. A far right extremist is currently serving a prison sentence for attacking me on my birthday for what the judge described as “[my] LGBT and [my] leftwing beliefs.” If that didn’t silence me in either respect, the obsessive tirades of Britain’s commentariat certainly won’t either.

Trans rights, forever.

Why does anyone want to be a parent, with all the stress, exhaustion, and often thankless turmoil it can entail? A simple answer is a very basic instinctive urge implanted in our genes to ensure we procreate and ensure the survival of our species, codified in very powerful and often problematic cultural and social expectations which normally revolve around the nuclear family. In any case, it isn’t universal, or certainly doesn’t have an equally powerful hold over every human, and many individuals — in relationships or not, and regardless of sexuality — have happy and fulfilling lives whether they have children or not.

In my own case, like most people, I took it as read that one day I’d be a parent. The slow adolescent realisation that I was in fact gay was so full of panic because it seemed as though something most people take for granted as an inevitable fact (rightly or wrongly) was never going to happen. This was the late 1990s, when the British Social Attitudes Survey revealed far more people believed homosexuality to be “always wrong” than “not wrong at all” and when several anti-gay laws remained in place: Section 28 (which meant no education about LGBT issues at school, apart from a sex education teacher who warned of the dangers of anal sex), no equal age of consent, no civil partnerships, to right to adopt, and a lack of protection from discrimination. Cultural representation of LGBTQ people was very limited, often reducing gay men to one dimensional clowns or as tragic figures with doomed lives. The shadow of the recent HIV/AIDS crisis loomed large. The main insult thrown around the playground — on a daily basis — was “gay” or some more pejorative derivative.

To be gay, it seemed to this closeted teenager (and countless others, as well as as to our tormenters), meant a lifetime of rejection, being treated differently, loneliness, tragedy, and ultimately dying alone. Unsurprisingly, this context helps lead to far higher levels of mental distress and, with it, self-medication in the form of abusive relationships with alcohol and drugs amongst LGBTQ+ people. As a teenager myself, I was prescribed anti-depressants at the age of 16. TV and film portrayals of straight couples and their families — or friends casually talking about one day having kids — inadvertently felt like cruel taunts about a future denied. One of the most baffling — and terrifying elements — of being gay was that you had no roadmap of any description at all. It all seemed to vindicate the prophecy of Lord Arran, who co-sponsored the 1967 Act partially decriminalising homosexuality in England and Wales, who reassured disturbed heterosexuals: “Lest the opponents of the Bill think that a new freedom, a new privileged class, has been created, let me remind them that no amount of legislation will prevent homosexuals from being the subject of dislike and derision, or at best of pity.”

It’s important to clarify here — not least for any young LGBTQ readers — that this is a nonsense. The anti-gay laws have gone, social attitudes have changed, and most gay and bisexual people are much happier when they come out. It would be a deceit, however, not to pretend that there is a very long way to go — or that things are not sliding backwards.

One of the traditional central pillars of homophobia centres on the inability of same-sex couples to reproduce: one, because it makes them threats to the traditional family; and two, because it makes dangers to children. “Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, must freshen their ranks,” wrote anti-gay campaigner Anita Bryant, who led a homophobic campaign in the 1970s called ‘Save Our Children’ (safeguarding children from predatory gay people was always used to legitimise public homophobic campaigns).

As it so happens, LGBTQ people have always found ways to have families. One approach is co-parenting, in which a mix of parents who are not themselves all in the same relationship raise a child or children together.

Which brings on to this weekend’s Twitter storm. Last week, a brilliant gay journalist I follow called Caspar posted one of those Facebook notifications which reveals a status you wrote on the same day however many years ago. In this case, it was Caspar in 2014 excitedly celebrating his coming fatherhood. Caspar, you see, is a co-parent: he raises children with a lesbian couple. To everyone who knows him, he is a model loving father. Other couples have looked to his family as inspiration before having their own children.

Having followed Caspar for many years, having seen him tweet lovingly about his family and children, and frankly seeing him as the sort of father I’d personally like to be, a jokey exchange followed in which he recommended the same set-up.

Two days later, what can only be described as the anti-trans cult jumped on the exchange. Both Caspar and I were misogynists who wished to rent or steal the wombs of women. Caspar’s co-parents were “reproductive workers” and his children were “human commodities”. The percentage who were deliberately conflating co-parenting with surrogacy — a topic which deserves its own separate conversation — or simply did not understand the difference was beyond me; whether they similarly didn’t understand that “broody” in the context of human beings means a burning desire to have and raise children also remains a mystery. In any case, it escalated dramatically: thousands of largely anonymous accounts raining down abuse, up to and including why this “faggot” should kill himself. Caspar had simply tweeted fondly recalling the moment he became a father with two lesbian co-parents, and now his timeline was brimming with strangers denouncing him and his family.

For the anti-trans cult, this moment was a “gotcha” for one reason above all else. Like all mainstream LGBTQ activists, I support trans rights. Showing an inclination to follow Caspar’s co-parenting family model was therefore hypocrisy: “So now he knows what a woman is! WHY DOESN’T HE TRY AND INSEMINATE A TRANS WOMAN!!!” All of a sudden, in their world, cisgender women who cannot reproduce are no longer women. In any case, many of the tweets descended into mocking the very idea of gay men being fathers at all, and was piled on by alt-right types who at least have the honesty to not pretend not to be bigots.

My first interaction with the anti-trans cult was back in February 2015, when I wrote my first column about trans rights, specifically in support of Stonewall’s heroic then-CEO Ruth Hunt making the charity trans inclusive for the first time. My Twitter account was dog-piled for weeks and they have never let me go since. As it happens, I’ve written very few columns in support of trans rights — the last was December 2017 — and have never gone on to TV or radio to discuss it, because I’m cisgender and didn’t feel it was my place to do so. I have consistently supported trans rights on social media because as a high profile LGBTQ columnist, I feel an obvious responsibility to support trans siblings who are going through the same experiences gay people have always endured — demonised as sexual predators and brainwashers of children, lambasted for denying biological reality, forcing the majority to redefine themselves for the benefit of a tiny minority, as well as being weird or creepy fetishes or simply defined by mental illness. Because so few media commentators support trans rights in the UK, this cult have decided I’m one of the Big Bad Bosses of the evil trans rights’ movement who needs to be ceaselessly targeted as such, leaving people like Caspar collateral damage.

At this point it’s important to clarify I’m not their victim — trans people are — and this is simply to illustrate what these people are and how they operate. Transphobic hate crimes quadruped in a half decade; a quarter of trans people have experienced homelessness and one in eight trans employees were physically attacked by a colleague or customer in a 12 month period: and then there’s the discrimination at work, the fear of leaving the house in case of abuse on the streets, the fear even of using a public toilet. Throw in a never-ending media campaign against trans people — which is far from confined to the dominant right-wing press; the government’s use of trans people as a culture war prop; the Labour party’s failure to clamp down transphobia; and the relentless targeting and victimising of any trans person in public life (of whom there are very few indeed), and it is more than understandable that most trans people I know tell me they are looking to leave the country. A British trans woman has already been given refuge in New Zealand because of the climate here.

When I say they’re a “cult”, I mean it in every sense. Having been on their receiving end — the non-stop dogpiling on social media, sending emails pretending to be my dead father, spamming anyone who mentions me on Twitter, constantly trying to get me fired — I’m more than aware they’re obsessive. They’re monomaniacal — their twitter feeds are often full of thousands of tweets about trans people and nothing else; profoundly conspiratorial in outlook; convinced that there is a coming Day of Judgement, when everything they obsessively oppose will collapse like a house of cards, and everyone associated with the evil of trans rights will be condemned; and they despise perceived traitors more than almost anyone. Women who support trans rights are labelled as ‘handmaidens’. When The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood started speaking out in support of trans rights, many of them denounced her as a ‘handmaiden’, too. [EDIT: Many of them also post about how their friends and loved ones have turned their backs on them as they radicalise ever further on trans rights, a hallmark of every cult].

What is abundantly clear is that the anti-trans cult is a case study in online radicalisation: it is a story, in large part, of vulnerable people with an internet connection who have fallen down one too many rabbit holes. It is not to excuse the behaviour of fallen comedy writer Graham Linehan — banned from Twitter last year — to point out that a man spending every hour of every day, including 3am in the morning or on Christmas Day tweeting about trans people was having some sort of crisis. Yet even as his life was clearly falling apart, the cult kept cheering him on.

They claim to speak on behalf of women, even though every poll shows that women are far more supportive of trans rights than men. They are keenly aware that progressive younger people see trans rights as an article of faith. What sustains them is that unlike the US — where there is a consensus ranging from “centrists” and liberals to the left in support of trans rights — in Britain transphobia is perfectly respectable and mainstream. Indeed, amongst much of the British commentariat, transphobia has not only become acceptable, it has become an identifying hallmark of respectability and moderation. Whatever their failings, while US President Joe Biden’s administration introduces trans rights legislation (which led, in Britain, to #BidenErasesWomen becoming the top trend, itself revealing of how bad things are here) while Vice-President Kamala Harris puts her pronouns in her bio, in Britain support for trans rights is often portrayed as a sign of radicalism and indeed extremism.

Which leads us to homophobia. Transphobia is an evil in its own right, but where else was it going to end? It was obvious when anti-trans organisations allied with Tory MPs like David Davies, whose voting record is anti-abortion as well as anti-gay. It was obvious when prominent UK “anti-trans feminists” hooked up with the Heritage Foundation with its long history of agitating against LGBTQ rights. It was obvious when gay supporters of trans rights, like myself, were constantly attacked on social media as threats to children. And it’s very obvious when a queer father co-parenting with a lesbian couple and myself are dog-piled by a cult which is obsessive and it is hateful. The gruesome truth is this: in 2021, in the here and now, there are all too many who simply do not think that LGBTQ people should be parents at all.

Len McCluskey is a titan of the labour movement and, to my mind, a trade union leader defined by courage, principle and determination. Vilified by the British corporate media, the Unite union in general, and McCluskey in particular, played a pivotal role in the rise of the British left in the 2010s: from the active support offered to movements fighting injustices ranging from tax avoidance to austerity, to Corbynism itself.

McCluskey has written a review of my new book, This Land, about the rise and fall of Corbynism. Its tone, of paternal disappointment, was one I genuinely appreciated. Above all, it expresses another signature trait of McCluskey: of loyalty, in this case, defending the reputations of leading figures in the besieged Corbyn reputation from my own conclusions.

Again, it’s worth setting out the purpose of my book. Its codename was ‘Operation Salvage’. It was intended as a contribution to an effort to rescue the policies and vision of the left from the rubble of that bleak December. That meant looking at what the Corbyn project was up against — internal sabotage, external onslaught — as well as the mistakes that were made. Without doing the latter, a fatalistic conclusion is arrived at: that all transformative political projects of the left are inherently doomed, because they will always be sunk by opposition from within and without. That logic leads you in two directions — either to give up on politics, or to hurtle off to the right. I reject both directions, which is why I think examining what could have been done differently to avoid electoral obliteration is such an important task.

An easier route to applause would have been to write a book detailing how Corbynism was brought down entirely by its opponents, rather than a book which would upset everyone. But that would have been fundamentally dishonest and promoted fatalism and nothing else.

When I began this project, other than a determination to defend left ideas, I had absolutely no motive or firmly established preconceived conclusions. My position was this: I would interview Jeremy Corbyn’s operation — and indeed I interviewed the vast majority of those who worked there, from the most senior to junior staffers — and I would go where the evidence took me, however politically or personally uncomfortable that might be. That’s exactly what I did, without any personal vendetta against anyone.

Len says:

Owen clearly has a personal problem with Seumas Milne, who we are corralled into believing was responsible for all the woes of the Labour Party.

This is untrue on both counts. I have nothing but respect and admiration for Seumas, who once essentially a mentor, and who has been wrongfully demonised by the media and who has personally paid a huge personal cost, and neither does the book advance the argument he was “responsible for all the woes of the Labour Party.” There is nothing I agonised over more, nothing I was more tortured over, than writing about the role of Seumas in this book. There are four pages dedicated to his strengths: his intelligence, his integrity, his warmth, his loyalty, his hinterland. Everything and anything positive any staffer told me about Seumas went straight in the book. I even sent the pages listing his strengths to one of his closest supporters to ask if I had missed anything out: their response was no, I had not. From coming up with “for the many not the few” as Labour’s dramatically successful slogan in the 2017 election campaign, to his commitment to a Brexit strategy driven by an understanding that leave voters were disproportionately concentrated in marginal seats that Labour needed to retain or win, it was all in the book.

But the very basic problem I had to contend with is that the vast majority of people in Jeremy Corbyn’s operation felt — and very strongly felt — that Seumas was simply ill-suited for the job that he was in. This is just a straightforward and inarguable fact. Now the counter-argument here is, well, the Labour leadership had fractured into warring camps by 2019 — which is absolutely true — and those making this argument had political reasons for believing this. But that just isn’t the case. Staffers who I interviewed who emphasised they had the same politics as Seumas, principally on Brexit and international issues, all had the exact same opinion as almost everyone else. So I had a choice: do I honestly reflect what the vast majority of Seumas’ own colleagues thought, or do I lie? And I chose to do the former, not out of any grudge, but because you can’t write a book about what happened to Corbynism without an honest assessment of the role of the Executive Director of Strategy and Communications, who had the total support and trust of the leader of the Labour party.

On antisemitism, Len says:

On anti-Semitism this failure is displayed once again. Having given a brilliant and detailed polemic of the history of anti-Semitism, he veers away to lay blame at the Milne and Murphy, based on a distorted view of what it was like trying to deal with the constant daily attacks.

This does not accurately reflect what I wrote in my chapter on antisemitism.

As it so happens, Len and I are at one on Labour’s antisemitism crisis. In the immediate aftermath of the 2019 electoral rout, Len listed as the number two mistake during the election campaign:

Secondly, failure to apologise for anti-Semitism in the party when pressed to do so, capping years of mishandling of this question.

Now clearly Len is partly criticising Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous performance in his interview with Andrew Neil, in which he bafflingly failed to apologise for antisemitism in the Labour party, despite having done so on previous occasions. But when Len rightly says this capped “years of mishandling of this question”, we then have to ask: Who is responsible for this mishandling? Was it entirely Corbyn’s fault, or was it wider than that?

What my chapter sought to do is look at a collective failure to deal with antisemitism. That included looking at the role of the party machine when was it was under the control of anti-Corbyn elements, the role of Corbyn, and the role of the broader leadership.

The chapter in fact details positive contributions made by Seumas and Karie Murphy, the former chief of staff, to tackle the antisemitism crisis. Karie’s various frustrated efforts — including repeatedly approaching Lord Michael Levy, whose allies, as the book points out, praised her — are detailed, as are Seumas’: for example, the two of them pushing for Jeremy to do the powerful speech on antisemitism he always failed to do at the Jewish Museum.

But it also details their failings, too, because it is an honest, rounded account. Len was among those voices pushing for Jeremy to adopt all the examples accompany the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition in full from the very start. As the book details, there are indeed problems with two of the examples that should be discussed in a rational and calm way, but Labour did not have the moral or political authority on this question by that point, and it was entirely obvious that it would end up signing up to the examples in full. Instead, the party chose to spend weeks getting hammered over its failure to do so, until it eventually signed up in full — which was completely predictable — but did not gain any political credit for doing so.

But while Len pushed for Labour to sign up to the IHRA examples, and while it was also true that the Labour leader did not wish to do so, it was Seumas who led the determined and doomed push against doing so. By definition, Len must believe that Seumas did the wrong thing here.

Similarly, while I did list Karie’s own positive contributions, I also noted her email slapping down staffers who came up with a proactive plan and strategy for the party to deal with antisemitism. Again, this is a fact. An honest account looks at the successes and failures of each leading figure. That’s what the chapter on antisemitism did.

Len writes:

When you are in a war — and be under no illusion, from day one of his leadership, Corbyn was subjected to an internal and external war — you develop methods of defence and attack that change by necessity almost on a daily, if not hourly basis. Being in your living room, observing with a typewriter, is a damn sight easier than being in the ditches on the front line, trying to dodge bullets flying at you from all angles, especially from your own side.

There are a few things to note here.

Firstly, the book looks at the internal and external war in great detail — from the bullying at the Parliamentary Labour Party, the wrecking behaviour of several Labour MPs, the entrenched hostility of the party machine, the often unhinged media hostility.

Secondly, there are worrying implications in this paragraph. Why should journalists criticise anyone in politics based on this logic? Politicians can simply dismiss anyone scrutinising them as carping from the sidelines from their typewriter or indeed MacBook.

Thirdly, please allow a bit of comradely irritation to creep in here. Although Len does say “Owen should have known this given that he has been subjected to attacks for the stance he has taken on some issues,” the idea that I’m somehow immune from the onslaught against the left in the last few years is a tough one to swallow. Let’s park the relentless political victimisation from within the overwhelmingly hostile media industry in which I work — most of which I’m not even at liberty to publicly discuss. The fact I have used my platform to support left-wing causes and movements — not least Corbyn’s own leadership — has led to a relentless campaign of harassment and worse from the British far right, including weekly threats of violence and death, being repeatedly mobbed by fascists in the streets, and indeed being beaten up by a Nazi and his accomplices. That Nazi is now serving a 2 year 8 month prison service, while just this week another far right extremist was given a suspended prison sentence for another death threat. Every day I have to manage the threat to my own safety and those around me (it should be noted that two members of Corbyn’s own operation were assaulted trying to defend me). All of us on the left have had to suffer and make sacrifices in these last few years.

Len adds:

I would have expected him to try to understand what it must have been like running an operation in such extreme difficulties (Stephen Bush clearly understood in his New Statesman review of Left Out and This Land). Instead, he displays no empathy towards such intense and immense circumstances.

The book does do this. It just also reflects the sincere distress and upset felt by the dedicated socialist staffers — who were also working in an environment defined by “extreme difficulties” — at how the operation was managed. As our greatest living trade union leader, I’d hope Len would understand why I thought it important to take into account the complaints of the unionised workforce in the Labour leadership operation, which led to a near-unanimous motion condemning management passed by their trade union branch.

Len goes on to say:

In one complaint, he says of the broadband policy that it should have been trialled in the previous 18 months, failing to understand the battles taking place that sucked so much energy out of Corbyn’s team.

Here I am somewhat mystified, because Len very passionately denounces the broadband policy in my own book. Indeed he says:

In Len McCluskey’s opinion, far from being embraced in working-class communities, billions for free broad- band was seen as an absurd joke. ‘There spoke the desperation, the hope that if you come up with all kinds of policies and push Brexit aside in people’s minds, they’ll be interested in policies,’ he tells me. ‘It was the exact opposite; people thought it was ridiculous.’

He even goes on to say in my book:

Len McCluskey was damning about the campaign: ‘It was a mish mash of policies which, in my opinion, was determined by people who don’t live in the working-class world.’

Len has every right to criticise the leadership team and its failures: but it seems curious to be so critical when I do the same thing.

Len says:

Owen is obviously a fan of John McDonnell, as am I. I agree with his description of John as “Labour’s lost leader”, but it was John who ran the 2019 election campaign strategy, for which he has honourably stated “I take full responsibility”, not Murphy or Milne.

But as Len knows, one of the many problems of Labour’s general election campaign is the operation had fatally fragmented by then, was factionalised and siloed, with the consequence that it wasn’t actually ever clear who was running the general election campaign at all. And boy did it show!

Finally, and critically, on Brexit, Len says:

And on the one issue that brought about the tensions and schisms in the top team, Owen fails to point out (with the benefit of the only exact science — hindsight — something he uses often in the book) that it was Milne and Murphy who were proved right, and McDonnell and Fisher (and Owen, reluctantly) who were proved wrong.

One of the things I’ve found completely baffling about the history of Labour’s evolving Brexit position is how Jeremy Corbyn is frequently erased or at best infantilised, even though he was the actual leader of the Labour party.

Like Len, I accepted the referendum result in June 2016 and opposed any new public vote for the next three years, and wrote article after article after article after article advancing that argument. After the European elections, on 27th May 2019, I threw in the towel in a column headlined ‘A second referendum is a bad option for Labour. But it may be the only one left’.

Four months later, Labour conference near-unanimously passed a motion pledging support for a new referendum with Remain on the ballot paper, which Unite’s delegates all voted for, and which Karie Murphy pushed very hard for — yes, as opposed to a motion committing Labour to back Remain which was correctly defeated. Now there’s an obvious retort here: don’t be ridiculous, Unite and Karie fought a rearguard action against a new referendum, lost the argument and had to make the best of a bad situation they did not want. But how is that meaningfully different from my own position, let alone John McDonnell or Andrew Fisher, none of whom had any passionate affection towards the EU and simply felt the Labour party had run out of options?

The basic truth is this. The founding principle of Corbynism was that the Labour leadership would act as the tribune of the membership; that the party would be democratised. According to YouGov — which has correctly called every Labour leadership contest since 2015 — by July 2019, 79% of Labour members wanted to hold a new Brexit referendum, with 15% opposed. Just 45% of Labour’s membership had voted for their own party in the European elections.

At the same time, Labour’s vote had collapsed, not just at the European elections, when the party won just 13.6%, but in the national polls, when it fell catastrophically below 20%. Some of its support was lost to the Brexit Party, but most of its voters were Remainers, and it had largely lost support to the resurgent Liberal Democrats and Greens: their combined share of the vote was higher than that of the Labour party. What is often unremarked about the 2019 election is that, like 2017, it was almost unique in the opposition significantly increasing its share of the vote during a campaign, albeit from a low level: that’s because many Remainers flocked back, but Leavers did not. The counterfactual relies on the Labour leadership somehow facing down its own membership, Remain voters coming back to the party with no referendum commitment, and Leave voters returning, too. But the polling shows that Leave voters defected long before Labour adopted its second referendum position. There’s another point, too: Labour Leave voters are overwhelmingly not Lexiteers: they did not support Brexit because they believed the EU enshrined neoliberal principles. They tended to be the most socially conservative element of Labour’s electoral coalition — and the most likely to be opposed to Corbynism in general, and Corbyn specifically, not least because Tory attack lines on national security, patriotism and terrorism were most likely to land.

And so we return to the erased agency of Jeremy Corbyn and his key allies from the internal Brexit argument. Again, it is infrequently remarked upon, but the MP Corbyn is personally closest to is Diane Abbott. She believed the Brexit project was inherently racist and anti-migrant — leading to passionate clashes in the Shadow Cabinet and Brexit strategy meetings — and, crucially, appealed to Corbyn on the basis that the membership wanted another referendum, and without the membership, Corbyn and Corbynism were nothing. Was she wrong on this point, and if so, how?

Corbyn himself — again, the leader of the Labour party! — was increasingly concerned about the mass support for a referendum amongst the Labour membership and spooked by Labour voters’ defection to the Lib Dems in particular.

In a meeting with the party Whips and party officials in the final lap of the European elections, he declared: ‘We’ve taken the membership too far. We’re not going to get away with it, we are going to have to support a second referendum.’ That led to Karie Murphy to passionately declare ‘This is a betrayal of the working class!’ In a media interview in that final week, much to the chagrin of Seumas — largely because Seumas believed that such an intervention needed to be done properly and not on an ad hoc basis — Corbyn made clear Labour’s support for a referendum in all circumstances. In the aftermath of the European elections, Corbyn again publicly declared Labour would support a referendum in all circumstances.

In a recent interview with Tribune, Corbyn himself said:

We now have an incompetent, dangerous Tory government in office. They’re going to have to come to some kind of agreement with the EU, but it’s already proving difficult to achieve. We could have done things much better. Was there a better way? Well, obviously the party could have just reiterated the 2017 policy, which was one of respecting the referendum result and working to build a relationship with Europe in the future. But the strength of support within the party for a second referendum was absolutely huge — as was reflected in the pressures of the 2018 conference. The result was the compromise reached in 2019.

Yet the revisionist history of Labour’s Brexit decision — which is a Machiavellian alliance of John McDonnell, Andrew Fisher and indeed people like me through my Guardian columns — disastrously bounced the party into supporting a new referendum. This isn’t something I would accuse Len of, but many of those peddling this fantasy narrative relies on erasing the actual leader of the Labour party from the history of what actually happened. It is reminiscent of pre-revolutionary Russia: the Tsar’s infallibility and purity had to be sustained, and anything that went wrong was blamed on his wicked advisors instead.

So when we say Seumas and Karie — who I have huge respect for, incidentally — were vindicated, what do we mean here? None of us wanted a new referendum. All of us, within months or even weeks of each other, came to the conclusion that Labour had no choice but to back one. Whatever the leadership did, the membership — as Corbyn says, “the strength of support within the party for a second referendum was absolutely huge” — plus unions such as UNISON, GMB and the Corbyn-supporting TSSA were going to impose a new referendum at the 2019 conference.

If Labour wanted to avoid this outcome then we need to go into time machine back to 2017 — and I know this is something Len strongly sympathises with. Using the political capital of the 2017 election, Labour could have clearly defined its Brexit position, campaigned on it, and prevented a vacuum emerging which the well-funded People’s Vote filled with devastating consequences. But there are several problems with this, most notably that it relies on hindsight — would Labour have really picked such a fight when the membership were on cloud 9, the Parliamentary Labour Party suddenly at least posing as supportive, and the Tories apparently in complete meltdown, and was it really in Corbyn’s nature? There’s another obstacle, too: the Lexiteer faction of the Labour leadership were opposed to the party defining its Brexit position and even opposed supporting a customs’ union. The Labour Brexit deal they made an article of faith in 2019 was the one they opposed in 2017. It was their last port in the storm — and it was too late.

I’ll end as Len began: he is a friend and a comrade, and to the bitter end, I’ll defend him. His legacy was his critical role in inspiring a new generation of socialists who, I firmly believe, will one day triumph. Naturally, I am sorry that he is disappointed with my book — but I strongly believe that it is an accurate portrayal of the internal story of Corbyn’s leadership. If we are to salvage the left’s vision from defeat, then we must accept and examine the mistakes that have been made — and that is the purpose of my book.