Marxist Moments

DEAD CATS AND LIVE ISSUES ((Revised)

          Do you recall the banner across the pro-Brexit bus during the Referendum proclaiming £350 million a week for our NHS if Britain left the European Community? It’s just possible that this came from the fertile brain of arch-conservative political publicist Lynton Crosby, since his has now been revealed as the hand behind the Referendum pro-Brexit campaign, together with untold and not altogether accounted-for millions of pounds making it a campaign with lavish resources. This could be sufficient reason for a Second Referendum: that is, if it had not fallen on fertile ground with regard to all those who voted Leave simply to show dissatisfaction with the current status quo in British politics.

          Lynton Crosby is famous (or infamous) for something else: his dead Cat ploy. According to Crosby, if you are wrongfooted by a lethal question from your political opponent, all you need do is pull a dead cat out of a bag and slam it down on the table. (Rabbit, stoat, marmoset – ‘cat’ is zippier.) Your opposition will be so nonplussed by this bizarre turn of events that they will give you breathing space to come up with an answer, or at least a way of diverting the argument into another channel or changing it to a different topic altogether. A Dead Cat is synonymous with diversion away from the class struggle.

          Hitler’s ‘answers’ to the financial and economic problems facing Germany in the early 1930s were basically twofold: the malign consequences of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 (though Hitler left  out Germany’s culpability in starting a world war to begin with), and the so-called 'Jewish Problem' in Germany, which, apart from being non-existent, was completely irrelevant to the German situation and had nothing to do with it; Jews made up a tiny minority of the German population in any case. Anti-Semitism was Hitler’s Dead Cat. Wholly irrelevant and politically lethal at the same time.

          A propos anti-Semitism, this became the Dead Cat for those on the Labour Right to smear Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Left in an effort to destroy the latters’ grip on the leadership of the Party. Helped along by the mass media, this non-issue succeeded in getting many people actually to believe that Corbyn, McDonnell and the Labour Left were suffused in hatred for Jews. Their protest to the contrary and failing to respond with honest contempt (the party has since learned better) was a mistake because to say you are not against Jews must obviously mean that you are, or you wouldn’t be protesting so much. Just this week the Jewish Labour Movement, which falsely claims to represent the true Jewish interest within the Labour Party, has been at it again, declaring that the anti-Semitic Jeremy Corbyn is ‘not fit to lead the Labour Party’, though the Jewish Socialist Group, the Jewish Voice for Labour and other non-Zionist Jews have vigorously denounced the JLM, which is now likely to have to depart from the party altogether. Is it entirely coincidental that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is fighting a close election just now, and has announced his intention to invade the West Bank? Is the JLM taking its orders from the Israeli ambassador to the UK, which is not implausible since links to the Israeli Embassy in the anti-Corbyn movement have been known to exist. Whatever, it is an entirely irrelevant issue apart from being nonsensical, which is how it gets to become a Dead Cat.

          Prior to all the present Brexit furore, various writers for the Daily  Telegraph were bemoaning the fact that Conservatives were failing to put across in a persuasive way the case for the manifold benefits of capitalism; that is, to promote a positive campaign for Conservatism as a party   with ideas of its own, and not merely basing itself on smearing and slandering Jeremy Corbyn.

          Since there are no such ideas – or at any rate ideas that will seem uplifting and positive to any except hedge funders and CEOs – this initiative didn’t much get off the ground. Instead, a new Dead Cat arrived in the form of Brexit: perhaps Lynton Crosby’s finest achievement even if it politically destroyed David Cameron, the one who unwittingly brought it into being.

          It turns out the Tories don’t need any new ideas: they can simply be more divisive, the hope being that this divisiveness will hurt Labour more than themselves: for even the spectacle of Tories clawing each others’ eyes out acts as a Dead Cat if it diverts the public’s attention from Labour’s election programme, and everything else. Never mind the Health Service, affordable housing, the education system, local councils, the legal system, the prison service, the railways, a privatised water system paying out both huge profits and huge water leakage, the Universal Credit fiasco, the Private Finance Initiative fiasco, the inattention to major upgradings in carbon  emission reduction immediately: the answer to all these is: Brexit! Brexit! Brexit!

          Unfortunately the Stupid Party (JS Mill) has been till now too stupid to see that if anything it is Conservatism that is being shamed and dismembered by all this more than Labour. That is because the Tories run the country as the party of government – ostensibly – while Labour are in opposition and so can’t stymie the works even if they could.

          So Mrs May sought to implicate the Jeremy Corbyn she despises in the outcome to three years of Tory muddle and prevarication by drawing him and Labour into the decisionmaking so that they can be blamed when all goes pear-shaped. In reality, she merely slapped down yet another Dead Cat. Her imminent political demise has been predicted ad infinitum for a long time. If now is that time, we will look to Prime Minister Boris Johnson to bring on his own bevy of Dead Cats in the coming period.

          Otherwise, imagining a snap election: ‘Vote for the Dead Cat Party!’

          The slaughter of felines may well continue and proliferate under Toryism for some time to come. Has anyone brought this to the attention of the RSPCA?