The hard-left great and good are set to gather tonight via Zoom to welcome in 2021 with “solidarity”. The Labour Grassroots organisation will welcome luminaries such as Corbyn, McDonnell, Claudia Webbe and Shami Chakrabarti and Skwakbox’s Steve Walker and Unite’s Howard Beckett to their “Review of 2020 party”. Given how this year’s gone for the hard left, the booze will need to be flowing…

Thankfully, Labour Grassroots has thought this through:

Now they’ve lost the red wall there’s little point in hiding their North London bourgeois pretences. As always, Guido will be happy to join Corbyn and toast everything he and his comrades achieved this year…

On the eve of Labour conference John McDonnell has used an interview with La Repubblica to accuse the PM of being a “proto-facist”, disregarding parliament and the courts:

“…someone who has a complete disregard for Parliament and we saw that when he suspended Parliament last year, but then also he is willing to have a complete disregard for the courts as well, and now this complete disregard for international law. I bet there are many of the ingredients, I think, as of Proto-Fascism”

The former Shadow Chancellor also accused Boris of ignoring democratic values. This being the same John McDonnell who spent years trying to reverse the 2016 referendum, months avoiding an election in 2019 and someone without a great relationship with Britain’s Jewish community…

McDonnell also used the interview to deny claims from the book Left Out that he and Corbyn had a massive falling out over Labour’s dealing of antisemitism accusations, to the point McDonnell refused to speak to his boss for weeks. The former Shadow Chancellor ignored interview requests from the authors, saying “why would I cooperate with the Murdoch press”. Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire claim to have four different sources backing up the claims of a massive rift – readers can make up their own minds…

The LibDems aren’t the only ones with an antisemitic headache this morning. Asked on LBC why Pete Willsman is still a member of the Labour Party 16 months after Labour was handed a recording of him saying Israel was behind allegations of antisemitism in the party, Sir Keir dodged the question. So much for zero-tolerance…

Let’s try Sir Keir again with this photo from a Zoom chat last night, in which John McDonnell and Laura Pidcock shared a virtual platform with notorious arch-antisemite Tony Greenstein. This is the second time Guido’s seen Greenstein alongside Labour MPs, after Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy were caught on Zoom.

Tony Greenstein boasted about McDonnell and Pidcock’s appearance alongside him, rejoicing they had defied the Board of Deputies’ pledge not to appear alongside antisemites:

“I have to say that I am extremely pleased that John McDonnell and Laura Pidcock, whose behaviour throughout the witchhunt has not been a model of socialist solidarity have now seen the error of their ways. The repentance of the sinner on the Road to Damascus is to be welcomed.”

Guido doubts Sir Keir will extend his zero-tolerance to taking action against his own antisemitism-appeasing MPs…

In a move that’s bound to confuse raging Corbynites, John McDonnell has poured praise on Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party, saying his response to Coronavirus has been “exactly right”, as well as extolling the new leader’s socialist virtues. Not the endorsement Team Starmer will have been hoping for…

Speaking to Times Radio, the former Shadow Chancellor said:

“Keir’s got this exactly right. He’s approached the government in a constructive way…”

”He’s taking this government on. What’s interesting is the government itself has had to adopt many of the policies – not just the ones we advocated for in the last general election, the investment etc – but also the policies that we put to them in March to cope with this COVID crisis.”

Those stolen policies presumably include this morning’s record-breaking £2 trillion debt figures…

McDonnell also told Times Radio, “Keir has made it clear he’s a socialist. His expressions in the past and throughout – of course he’s a socialist”. A very different attitude to when Guido caught John describing Starmer’s election as “defeatism” by the party membership…

Left-wing author Leo Panitch’s digital launch of his new book “Search for Socialism” at the weekend featured luminaries of the Labour party’s new hard-left faction; John McDonnell, Zarah Sultana, Corbyn’s former adviser Andrew Murray and former head of strategic comms, James Schneider. Guido joined the Zoom…

John McDonnell had a lot to say on the recent leadership election result, describing the election of Sir Keir – whom he identifies as “a lawyer, white, middle–class, in a suit” – as “defeatism” on the part of the membership, and the result of the working classes’ ‘forelock-tugging’ mentality to the middle class, akin to the election of Tony Blair. Labour’s 500,000 overwhemingly middle-class members might feel somewhat insulted…

The group also used the book launch to plot about the tactics they plan on using to regain ‘leadership’ in the party, with Zarah Sultana – a leading proponent of the newly-revitalised Socialist Campaign Group – setting out:

“in the years ahead, the SCG has a huge role to play in terms of defending and advancing our socialist principles to give our class, anti-racist politics a voice in Parliament and nationally”

It is worth repeating that Zarah, along with the majority of the Labour Party’s supporters are now middle-class, that is why they lost so many traditional Labour seats. The weird and woke policies of the modern Labour Party are not too popular with the socially conservative working classes.  “Our class” is not the working class.

Son of a stockbroker and aristocrat Andrew Murray argued that Labour has to urgently “reconstitute working class politics” for Labour to win again, and son of a multi-millionaire property developer James Schneider agreed with the rest, saying the left need to stay within the party to “organise” – “That’s the way that we will, with a pincer movement, get the leadership of the party to back the policies that we want”. Guido imagines Sir Keir will be only too proud to see his party’s hard-left refusing to respect an electorate’s decision…

John McDonnell is clearly struggling without his old team of media advisers, as he told Sky News last night that if the Human Rights Commission find the Labour Party to be institutionally Antisemitic, “so be it”. His attitude to the never-ending Labour Party antisemitism saga came as he argued for the leaked 850-page report into Labour antisemitism to be given to the HRC in full, so they can see “warts and all”. You’d need multiple commissions to deal with this many warts…

The call to burden the HRC comes as Labour Staff in the GMB union passed a no-confidence motion in general secretary and chair of the Labour Party Jennie Formby, who put together the report designed to deflect from the Corbynistas, and who is ultimately responsible for the decision which resulted in the names of dozens of victims of antisemitism being put into the public domain. This is going to be a big obstacle to Sir Keir’s goal of ending party factionalism…