For a couple of years I was the commissar for political education in the local Labour Party. I saw the job as trying to show people that there was more to politics than bus routes (important as they are) and getting excited about tally sheets at election time. To that end I organised outside speakers on economics, ecology, Brexit etc. There was no hint of controversy until I proposed getting in someone who is a well regarded expert on the history and politics of east London to talk about the area’s radical Jewish legacy.

The problem with David Rosenberg was that he is what Jewish anti-Zionist comrades call the “wrong sort of Jew”. In addition to being personally friendly with Jeremy Corbyn, he is pro-Palestinian and strongly anti-Zionist. The meeting didn’t happen and no explicit reason was given. Oddly enough, some of the people who blocked it have gone on to parliament or a couple of notches up the Labour ladder.

An awful lot of malicious things were said about the Corbyn movement.  Jonathan Goldstein’s article in the Sunday Times was typical of innumerable others when he claimed with no evidence whatsoever: “large numbers of the influx of far-left members have been carriers of a particular variant of anti-semitism deep in their ideological and political approach”.  Margaret Hodge, who had known him for forty years, suddenly discovered Corbyn was a “fucking anti-semite and a racist”. Morgan McSweeney, the genius who helped Labour lose three million votes, and is directing the party towards electoral oblivion was up to his neck in the lies and slanders.

There have been a few half-hearted efforts to use the same technique against the Green Party. Social media accounts have been trawled and tame journalists have put their names to the details provided to them. None of it has landed.

Of course, since the summer another anti-Zionist Jew has been the Green leader. This might mean that the influx of far-left members into the Greens who voted for Zack Polanski are playing a really clever game. Or just maybe, 99.99% of the accusations of antisemitism were deliberate lies.

Two other factors strike me as significant. The first is that the ongoing eradication of the Palestinians had radicalised people and made them more willing to call out the nonsense. Hence the decision of the Green Party conference to designate the IDF as a terrorist organisation, something Corbyn could not have done as Labour leader.

The second is that the people on the Labour right who were lying with a straight face were part of the world of the journalists, court scribes and columnists. They had broadly similar upbringings, educations and world views and a common hatred of radical movements.

They don’t have the same personal or political links with the insurgent Green Party. They have not had years to cultivate class traitors at dinner parties, conferences and lobbying events who will feed them stories. No doubt that will change at some point. Every party becomes institutionalised to an extent eventually. For the moment economics is the main point of attack, and that is entirely predictable. The Labour right and their friends in the press have spent careers defending inequality.

It goes without saying that anyone who expresses anti-semitic views has no place in progressive politics. However, we are now seeing the Green Party successfully defend itself against the thing that was, in large measure, the undoing of Corbynism. It did so by having no relationship with Labour’s bureaucracy and its mates in the press.