A new biography of a man who was arguably Labour’s most antisemitic leader has provoked something of a discussion about the roots of imperialist ideology in the British Labour movement.

The twice turncoat Lord Adonis, now readmitted to the parliamentary Labour Party after a mid-career defection to the Coalition Liberal Democrats which torpedoed a Labour election bid, is the author of Ernest Bevin, Labour’s Churchill.

Bevin was a key figure in the building of the Transport and General Workers Union and was minister in the wartime Churchill government and in the postwar Labour administration of Clement Attlee.

As leader of one of Labour’s most powerful affiliates Bevin was a power in the land and in Labour’s affairs. His brutal 1935 conference execution of Labour’s left-wing pacifist leader George Lansbury finds an echo in Starmer’s present day assault on Corbyn’s moral standing.

Bevin’s fellow anti-semite Clement Attlee was shoehorned into the Labour leadership, thus ensuring that when Britain’s war finally assumed an anti-fascist character it would be conducted by anti-semites occupying the posts of prime minister and deputy.

Anti-semitism is deeply embedded in British culture and naturally finds a reflection in Labour traditions. In its crudest form it makes Bevin the prototype for those who think comparing present day Israeli crimes to Nazi genocide has any great explanatory power or strengthens solidarity with the Palestinians.

Anti-semitism’s shape-shifting character failed to find any visible purchase in Corbyn’s thinking prior to or since his election as Labour leader, and even the most searching investigation of his actions and utterances prior to this reveal nothing but examples of his solidarity, most particularly with the Jewish communities in his overwhelmingly proletarian part of London.

That his adversaries in Labour found a common language with the bourgeois media (and the most right-wing emanations of zionist ideology) after his election tells us much about the confected character of the allegations as about the scale of any anti-semitism to be found in Labour.

Nevertheless any socialist who thinks anti-semitism in Labour does not exist is as foolish as those who think racism and Islamophobia can be banished by self-righteous resolution alone or that the latter two more obviously visible phenomena do not deserve equally searching investigation.

Understanding the nature of the anti-semitism assault on Labour is the key to seeking a clear-sighted view of how imperialist ideas have found a new purchase in the thinking of the party’s leadership and MPs.

The Bush/Blair war on Iraq was only possible because the bulk of the parliamentary Labour Party, in alliance with most Tories, was able to overcome the popular mass resistance marshalled by the Stop the War Coalition.

It was the mass character of the anti-war movement that created and deepened a powerful strain of anti-imperialist understanding and began to threaten the Atlanticist orthodoxy in Labour.

When this fused with popular indignation at the 2008 financial crisis and the bailout for the rich that followed, anti-capitalist ideas gained a new currency, especially among young people who face unemployment, poverty pay and student debt with no prospect of affordable housing.

The parliamentary expenses scandal, stock-market swindles, the venal manoeuvring of asset-strippers in retail and manufacturing, and the human cost to working people and their families of the long years of austerity contributed to a significant deepening of this sentiment.

The austerity Coalition government of Tories and Lib Dems narrowed the electoral base of the standard ruling-class ideas they represent.

Interwoven into these processes was and is a growing movement of solidarity with Palestinian national rights and an understanding of Israel’s pivotal role in imperialist stratagems for the Middle East.

As Lisa Nandy restores the “liberal interventionist” reference points for Labour’s foreign-policy brief we should recall what Obama’s vice president Joe Biden said: “If there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one to make sure our interests were preserved.”

It was these factors that laid the basis for Corbyn’s election and the enduring popularity of Labour’s manifesto.

These were seen as an outrage by a Parliamentary Labour Party comprised in its majority by people who gained election in the Blair and Brown years of New Labour’s unshakeable solidarity with big business and the banks. By and large, these people came to share the worship of money and privilege which incorporation into the ruling elite entails.

Labour’s new popular-vote mechanism which allowed Corbyn’s election was an innovation introduced by the right wing to weaken trade-union influence which it perceived correctly as a threat. That it produced the perverse result of Corbyn’s election is one of the great delights of the last five years.

This newspaper has throughly investigated the course of events which led to Labour’s 2019 election defeat, and without going over the territory again we can see that a combination of Labour’s retreat on the pledge to respect the referendum result and the failure to deal effectively with the anti-semitism assault both destabilised the Labour left and estranged the party from key sections of its core support.

Boris Johnson had one key task — to make Labour unelectable — and his principal tool was the simple demand to Get Brexit Done. As we reach the endgame in this episode it is clear that our hitherto divided ruling class has found a new accommodation in whatever outcome ensues from the trade talks. Whether Johnson survives this is not the most significant issue.

Labour’s right wing is an infallible guide to where the centre point of ruling-class opinion can be found. In New Labour’s time it was a marriage to the City and a love affair with the US, Nato and the EU. Today it is the re-establishment of business-as-usual Labour class-collaboration and a restoration of Cold War verities with China now encircled by military bases.

Starmer is rhetorically constrained to a rapidly eroding extent by the ten pledges that secured enough votes to see him elected. His extraordinarily disruptive actions, which today are co-ordinated with the party general secretary and were choreographed with the publication of the EHRC report, are not the irrational and impulsive acts of men whose judgement is unbalanced.

They breach the prescriptions of the report themselves and have created the conditions for an open civil war in Labour which entails, at his initiative, a police regime which forbids discussion on the very subject which animated every newspaper and news programme.

The only people who cannot discuss these pressing questions are individual members of the Labour Party, although a different temper infuses the discussion in affiliated trade unions, a majority of which, including several who nominated Starmer, have called for the measures taken against Corbyn to be lifted.

Reportedly fifty thousand people have left the Labour Party and the assumption is that these are principally on the left. A substantial number have joined the party since Starmer made his leadership bid, and informed opinion has it that these include a proportion of right wingers who had abandoned hope of a restoration regime in the Corbyn years.

Many people are demoralised by Starmer’s betrayal of his unity schtick. Some will drop out of politics, a few will find solace in the mindless activism and endlessly flexible certainties of marginal groups who yesterday saw factional advantage in entering Labour and now see fresh advantage in fishing among these despairing shoals.

But for the many thousands who have opted to remain in Labour, and the many more affiliated trade unionists and Labour voters the question naturally arises: what on earth is Starmer up to and what does he expect to be the outcome of this grievous orgy of self-mutilation?

The much heralded twenty-point Labour lead remains elusive. The new Labour leadership’s calculation that electoral advantage can be gained by jettisoning overt support for a re-entry to the EU should disabuse the innocent that the Second Referendum campaign resembled in any way what it purported to be: it is revealed as little more than a cynical exercise by political manipulators to close off the best chance in decades for a moderately progressive Labour government.

A rift has opened up between those in the shadow cabinet who think that more advantage is to be gained from opposing or abstaining on any trade deal with the EU.

Among Establishment Labour circles one calculation is that the prime minister’s aim is to carry off a last-minute “no deal” manoeuvre dressed in the language of sovereignty. This remains in the realm of possibility and may yet occur by design, error or maladroit brinkmanship.

But at the heart of ruling-class thinking is a clear understanding that the election of Biden restores the idea of a repositioned Britain as a still-useful conduit for the collective interests of a renewed Atlantic partnership. And this means a new accommodation with the EU.

Two instruments for refashioning Labour foreign policy are the Open Labour faction and the so-called Labour Campaign for International Development. Their prescription is for a renewed imperial alliance.

Arguing for “substantial investment in defence spending” they put it thus: “…the Biden presidency may create an opportunity for a Starmer-led Labour Party to re-envision and reforge the transatlantic partnership around progressive internationalist principles, just as New Labour and the New Democrats congregated around common points of domestic policy in the 1990s.”

That coupling lost any lustre it had with the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis.

Starmer may hold dear to his heart the idea that he can become prime minister. He may calculate that the Tory lead can erode sufficiently and that a purged Labour under his leadership can convince the ruling class that he can be trusted to restore a two-party duopoly of safe hands and sound management for continuity capitalism. But he has built a mountain to climb.

Starmer is the digger driver who fashioned this 80-seat mountain of a Tory majority from a strategy aimed as displacing Corbyn above any desire for a Labour victory.

In doing so he gave the working class and the labour movement a new version of an old problem: how to win office and working-class power when burdened with the class enemy organised as a faction in your party?

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.