Subsequent Labour leaders, most notably Tony Blair, learned the Wilson lesson: never, ever take on the "defense" establishment. The chief role of the UK is to serve as the US war machine's attack dog. Defying that allotted role would be political suicide.
By contrast to Wilson, who posed a threat to the British establishment only in its overheated imagination, Corbyn was indeed a real danger to the militaristic status quo.
He was one of the founders of the Stop the War coalition that emerged specifically to challenge the premises of the "war on terror." He explicitly demanded an end to Israel's role as a forward base of the imperial war industries. In the face of massive opposition from his own party -- and claims he was undermining "national security" -- Corbyn urged a public debate about the deterrence claimed by the "defense" establishment for the UK's Trident nuclear submarine program, effectively under US control. It was also clear that Corbyn's socialist agenda, were he ever to reach power, would require redirecting the many billions spent in maintaining the UK's 145 military bases around the globe back into domestic social programs.
In an age when the primacy of capitalism goes entirely unquestioned, Corbyn attracted even more immediate hostility from the power establishment than Wilson had. As soon as he was elected Labour leader, Corbyn's own MPs -- still loyal to Blairism -- sought to oust him with a failed leadership challenge. If there was any doubt about how the power elite responded to Corbyn becoming head of the opposition, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times newspaper soon offered a platform to an unnamed army general to make clear its concerns.
Weeks after Corbyn's election as Labour leader, the general warned that the army would take "direct action" using "whatever means possible, fair or foul" to prevent Corbyn exercising power. There would be "mutiny," he said. "The Army just wouldn't stand for it."
Such views about Corbyn were, of course, shared on the other side of the Atlantic. In a leaked recording of a conversation with American-Jewish organizations last year, Mike Pompeo, Trump's secretary of state and a former CIA director, spoke of how Corbyn had been made to "run the gauntlet" as a way to ensure he would not be elected prime minister. The military metaphor was telling.
In relation to the danger of Corbyn winning the 2019 election, Pompeo added: "You should know, we won't wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. It's too risky and too important and too hard once it's already happened."
This was from the man who said of his time heading the CIA: "We lied, we cheated, we stole. It's -- it was like -- we had entire training courses."
Smears and Brexit
After a 2017 election that Labour only narrowly lost, the Corbyn threat was decisively neutralized in the follow-up election two years later, after the Labour leader was floored by a mix of anti-semitism slurs and a largely jingoistic Brexit campaign to leave Europe.
Claims that this prominent anti-racism campaigner had overseen a surge of anti-semetism in Labour were unsupported by evidence, but the smears -- amplified in the media -- quickly gained a life of their own. The allegations often bled into broader -- and more transparently weaponized -- suggestions that Corbyn's socialist platform and criticisms of capitalism were also anti-semetic. (See here, here and here.) But the smears were nevertheless dramatically effective in removing the sheen of idealism that had propelled Corbyn onto the national stage.
By happy coincidence for the power establishment, Brexit also posed a deep political challenge to Corbyn. He was naturally antagonistic to keeping the UK trapped inside a neoliberal European project that, as a semi-detached ally of the US empire, would always eschew socialism. But Corbyn never had control over how the Brexit debate was framed. Helped by the corporate media, Dominic Cummings and Johnson centered that debate on simplistic claims that severing ties with Europe would liberate the UK socially, economically and culturally. But their concealed agenda was very different. An exit from Europe was not intended to liberate Britain but to incorporate it more fully into the US imperial war machine.
Which is one reason that Johnson's cash-strapped Britain is now promising an extra  �16bn on "defense." The Tory government's priorities are to prove both its special usefulness to the imperial project and its ability to continue using war -- as well as the unique circumstances of the pandemic -- to channel billions from public coffers into the pockets of the establishment.
A Biden makeoverAfter four years of Trump, the war machine once again desperately needs a makeover. Wikileaks, its youthful confidence eroded by relentless attacks, is less able to peek behind the curtain and listen in to the power establishment's plans for a new administration under Joe Biden.
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