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Are you sitting comfortably? Let's open the Momentum Book of History...

A couple of years ago, there was a hullabaloo in the press about Momentum Kids - a club for youngsters of Corbyn's left-wing activists, which was quickly dubbed 'Tiny Trots'.

I don't know if the socialist daycare centre is still up and running, but if it is, let's hope there's no history on the curriculum.

Momentum's founder Jon Lansman - mischievously likened by some to Papa Smurf because of his trademark white beard - produced the most extraordinary breakfast tweet today.

It was the morning after Labour MP Joan Ryan had lost a vote of confidence in her Enfield constituency. People were observing that the only media representatives live-tweeting the meeting had come from Jez's favourite foreign broadcaster - Iran's Press TV.

Lansman needed a distraction and it came in the form of Tony Blair.

The former Prime Minister had publicly expressed doubts that Labour could ever be rescued from the hard left.

This was Lansman's chance and he leapt in.


The arrogance of the tweet is offensive, but nothing that wouldn't surprise us. It's when you digest the true meaning of the 20-word sentence that your jaw hits the floor.

Blair was never in the right party.

The Prime Minister who won three consecutive election victories for Labour is written out of history.

He wasn't Labour.

I'm not even going to begin to list all Blair's accomplishments here, because they're well known and you can read about them in a million places.

What fascinates and horrifies me in equal measure is that we are now turning the pages of the Momentum history book and seeing something very ugly.

If Blair was in the wrong party, who exactly was the last Prime Minister worthy of the title 'Labour'?

Was it Jim Callaghan four decades ago?

I suspect not. The Bennite left hated Jim Callaghan.

So was it Harold Wilson? You rarely hear him mentioned by anyone in Momentum, probably because few of the rank-and-file members know of him. Although the left did support Wilson initially, they soon fell out of love. Corbyn certainly wouldn't have been a fan. Vietnam and all that.

Which takes us back to Attlee.

This is the usual benchmark for most Jezuits, as they like to claim that the transformative government of 1945 is the spiritual antecedent of today's left-wing cabal.

Anyone with a smidgen of history - who knows about the internal battles with the Bevanites - will realise that this is a grotesque parody of Attlee's true politics. But we can probably agree that the post-war Labour government is the one that the Momentum members most admire. And almost certainly the only one that many of them admire.

So, what can we conclude? Many of the people who Lansman has helped attract to Labour - and who claim to have its best interests at heart - have only joined it in the past three years. Others have rejoined after a long period of denouncing the party during the Blair era. And when they're challenged on the achievements of the party they claim to support, they bypass 70 years of history to arrive in an age of ration cards and wage freezes.

Lansman, of course, is a long-time member and was active in the Bennite left in the early 80s, along with eccentric characters such as Pete Willsman (the guy who likes to rant about rabbis). Lansman knows better. But he encourages his supporters to embrace a completely erroneous and distorted view of the past.

Are you sitting comfortably? Let's open The Momentum Kids Storybook of History.

It needs some editing and is perhaps a little bit contradictory in places, so make sure you settle down and pay attention, children.

There are broadly two eras that are taught.

BNL - Before Neo-Liberalism

ANL - After Neo-Liberalism

BNL starts in 1945 and continues for about thirty years, until the capitulation of Wilson and Callaghan to the International Monetary Fund and global capital.

ANL starts in approximately 1976 and supposedly continues to the present day. This encompasses Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron and May. These characters may seem different - Thatcher destroying the miners, for instance, and Blair introducing the minimum wage and Sure Start - but that's just an illusion. They all believe in the same philosophy, which is completely different and alien to anything that was believed BNL.

As neo-liberalism advanced, the people rebelled. They started looking for a radical socialist alternative, that was completely different to the neo-liberal policies advanced by failed social democratic parties across Europe. 

They were championed in their quest by a man of humble prep school origins called JC, who was untainted by any scandal apart from his £20k from Iranian state television and firebrand speeches denouncing Israel. 

JC's policies were very radical, so the rich and powerful quaked in fear. 

They would do ANYTHING to stop him. 

At the same time, the policies were actually not really very radical at all and nothing to be feared. Very similar, in fact, to those reasonable and moderate policies advanced by the failed social democratic parties across Europe. 

Nevertheless, the MSM, the Israeli lobby and the Blairite MPs all relentlessly targeted poor JC with false accusations. How he retained his dignity in the face of the onslaught is something that will no doubt puzzle historians for generations to come.

Jez sent out a prophet to spread the word: CHANGE IS COMING. 

His emissary, Chris Williamson, took the Democracy Roadshow far and wide, gathering together all those who believed in mandatory re-selection of neo-liberals. At the end of each meeting, he would take a show of hands, just to demonstrate that the attendees were still young enough to raise their arms. 

Children, this is a story book that is still being written. There are pages left to be filled. History is still being made. But what kind of history exactly?

The eighteenth century French essayist Bernard le Bovier de Fortenelle observed that the ancient Greeks didn't separate stories from fact. 'Il n'y a point d'autres Histoires anciennes que les Fables,' he wrote. There is no ancient history other than the fables.

Lansman gives us a glimpse of a world in which real history and invented history are once again overlapping - this time in an Orwellian and sinister fashion. It's time for a robust, grown-up response.




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