Victory for the Cult of Corbyn? No, the start of a long and brutal civil war
WITHIN a few hours of Jeremy Corbyn’s astonishing victory, the Parliamentary Labour Party was in open revolt, with multiple resignations from the Shadow Cabinet and speculation among MPs on how or when a putsch could be launched against their new leader.
The mood of foreboding among MPs deepened yesterday with the appointment of a new Labour Shadow Cabinet bereft of most of the party’s best talents, and with the ultraLeft MP John McDonnell, who is 64, as Shadow Chancellor.
A f ormer deputy to Ken Livingstone on the Greater London Council in the Eighties, and the head of Corbyn’s campaign team, McDonnell’s stated mission is not to reform capitalism but ‘to foment revolt against’ it.
He favours ‘people’s quantitative easing’, under which the Government would print money to fund infrastructure projects, large-scale nationalisation, and a 7 per cent rise in National Insurance on earnings above £50,000 to pay for the return of student grants.
Derision
Labour lost the General Election principally because under Ed Miliband i t had l i ttle economic credibility. It has even less now it has empowered McDonnell, hitherto one of the parliamentary party’s most divisive and marginal figures.
This move, together with the sacking of Ivan Lewis, the only Jewish member of the old Shadow Cabinet — controversial because of the taint of anti-Semitism around some of Corbyn’s associates — has enraged MPs.
And of course Corbyn has failed to appoint a woman to any of the most senior shadow portfolios. So here’s what the ‘new politics’ looks like: white middle-aged men grabbing all the top jobs.
Had Corbyn won a narrow victory, he could have been gone by Christmas, so little support does he have among Labour’s 232 MPs (99 fewer than the Tories). But his mandate is resounding.
If he comes under pressure from MPs, he will simply appeal directly to the membership for support. His intention is to c hannel t he e nergy and enthusiasm of the quarter of a million members and activists who swept him to power on a wave of hope and adulation.
When I interviewed Corbyn in July, he told me he wanted to build a movement from the bottom up — a classic Bennite position. His political hero is, indeed, Tony Benn, who did so much to divide and then split the Labour Party in the early Eighties, when Corbyn first entered Parliament.
Like Benn, Corbyn prefers to work through the grassroots of the party rather than the parliamentary party. In this model, disempowered MPs become the mere servants, or puppets, of the wider movement, which dictates policy and the direction of the party.
The revised leadership election rules, under which anyone could pay £3 to register as a ‘ supporter’ and vote, have enabled what Benn never achieved — the capture of the party by the radical Left. All is changed, changed utterly.
This is the terrible beauty of the situation in which Labour finds itself as it attempts to recover from its worst General Election defeat since 1983.
On the day before Corbyn’s declaration as winner, I received a message from a former senior Labour Cabinet minister who knew what was coming. ‘When I look at the party, I feel like I’m watching my best friend marry someone who I know is bad for them. The more you tell them that they’re wrong the less they listen. I am heartbroken.’
The wedding has taken place and been consummated. There is no going back.
The Labour Party must live with the consequences of electing the most Left-wing leader in its long, distinguished history, one even more hardline than George Lansbury, the pacifist and Christian socialist who was forced to resign in the midThirties because of his appeasement of fascism and opposition to re-armament.
In a recent speech, Gordon Brown warned Labour that it was poised to choose a leader who stood outside the mainstream democratic traditions of the party. He was ignored.
Each of Tony Blair’s interventions against Corbyn was received with derision. His every pronouncement merely hardened the determination of the Corbynites.
It was not j ust that they supported the veteran backbencher: they were rejecting everything New Labour represented. This is a party not only at war with itself, but ashamed of its recent electionwinning past.
Liz Kendall, the moderate candidate from the Right, won less than 5 per cent of the vote — a humiliation for her and the Blairites.
As a serial backbench rebel, Corbyn has defied the party whip more than 500 times. At the age of 66, he has never held office and has never r un anything beyond his own Islington North constituency office. Yet he is acclaimed as the new messiah of the Left.
During his victory speech, he repeatedly attacked the malign intent of the media and praised the unions, while restating his credentials as a campaigner against ‘grotesque inequality’.
There was no attempt to reach out to business or wealth creators. That vexed word ‘aspiration’ — abused beyond good sense at the start of the leadership campaign — is now banished from the Labour lexicon.
Corbyn was, as ever, true to what he believed and said what he meant. One can admire his conviction, even if you disagree most profoundly with his politics. He is a mil d - mannered, straight- talking kind of guy with the dishevelled appearance of a late-Seventies redbrick university sociology lecturer.
Treacherous
His strident positions are not expressed stridently. But he has succeeded in unlocking the frustrations endured by so many on the Left during the New Labour years, when machine politicians ruled, Brown and Blair feuded, and arch- manipulators such as Alastair Campbell held sway.
Revenge must taste sweet indeed for the Left.
Yet for all the enthusiasm he has inspired, Corbyn’s victory s peech on Saturday was baffling. At times, it had all the guile and subtlety of an impromptu pub rant. But the activists and union paymasters were cheering. Corbyn is the leader of what amounts to a kind of secular cult.
One of his long- standing complaints was that Labour had treacherously abandoned socialism and become the bad capitalist’s friend. Under Tony Blair, i t offered l i ttle more than as ofter version of Thatcherism, and took Britain into a disastrous and illegal war in Iraq.
Yet, it was always said, if you offered the voters a genuine socialist alternative to the Tories, people would support you in their millions. But will the electorate return to Labour?
Corbyn has galvanised a couple of hundred thousand people who identify themselves as radicals, but what will the non-ideological voters in key Southern marginal seats — who so recently rejected Ed Miliband — make of t his particular brand of hard, isolationist socialism? Not much, I would suggest.
There is no doubt that people are weary of austerity, of the havoc wreaked by the forces of globalisation, and of t he unaccountable power of tax- avoiding multinational corporations. It has to be accepted, too, that the Tories won only a grudging mandate in May, and even some of their MPs, such as David Davis, are unsettled by their more draconian policies.
Throwback
In Scotland, where support for Labour has collapsed, the SNP continues to agitate for a second independence referendum, and the British state remains imperilled — ‘Holding the United Kingdom together is a generational struggle,’ was how George Osborne put it when I spent a day with him recently.
Corbyn’s dramatic victory must be understood against this background, but also in the context of a Europe-wide rise in insurgent parties on both sides of the political spectrum.
It seems to me the Cult of Corbyn is less a throwback to the early Eighties (though his politics were formed in that period) than the manifestation of a peculiarly modern phenomenon — that of the new Left and Right populism, as well as people’s loss of respect for, and confidence in, established ruling elites.
Jeremy Corbyn should enjoy his success while he can — because things from here will become a whole l ot more difficult. A leader who does not have the support of his MPs is vulnerable.
A leader who has spent his whole career single-mindedly rebelling against his own party should not expect any loyalty in return, especially with policies as uncompromising as his.
In the months ahead, Jeremy Corbyn will wear his mandate like protective armour — and he will need it, because the knives are out.
Labour is a party divided, its MPs at odds with its members. We are at the beginning of a long civil war.