The champagne corks are popping this afternoon with the news that the latest union to declare in the Labour leadership contest has thrown its weight behind Jeremy Corbyn. UNISON has joined UNITE in urging its members to vote for Jeremy Corbyn! Trebles all round!
David Cameron and his successor George Osborne will certainly be celebrating, as will the Liberal Democrats who are gradually recovering after their near death experience in May. UNISON has done its bit today in helping to ensure Labour will be heading towards its own near death experience, although I suspect the preface of “near” might not be required.
My preferred candidate, Andy Burnham, who has now come out fighting said it is unhelpful to refer to the possibility that a Corbyn victory might spell oblivion for Labour. He has a point, I know, but I can’t help believing that Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party would indeed mean oblivion.
The election of Corbyn would, I believe, take Labour back to the early 1980s. Activists and union leaders alike lumbered the party with 67 year old Michael Foot as leader, along with a manifesto cobbled together by Tony Benn and the far left of the party. Doubtless they were very pleased to see Foot into a position into which he was plainly unsuited right from the start, instead of Denis Healey whom he defeated in the leadership election, taking Labour to the worst defeat in its history. “Oh, it wasn’t really like that. The Labour right splitting from the party at the same time to form the SDP, that was the main reason. And the manifesto wasn’t that left wing,” say some people, but I was there and I can assure you that Tony Benn and the far left of the party, including the Militant tendency, had a grip that was taking Labour to the very fringes of politics. And the party was split down the middle. Benn was a bogey man of the left for a good reason. He died as a “national treasure”, but I never saw him like that. He was never as nice as he appeared on television and tolerated and even encouraged the ultra left, many of whom had a vice-like grip on his own constituency.
One thing I don’t see about Corbyn is that he is somehow “a breath of fresh air”. I see him as a breath of stale air, rather like the air that gets circulated round an aircraft cabin. His politics represents an act of faith, hence his record of rebellion and disloyalty which, if repeated throughout the Labour Party, would never have seen it elected in 1997 or at any time since. His is the politics of uncompromising purity, where there is no room for compromise or negotiation. If elected, you would surely see him in the House of Commons lobbies voting against his own party, voting against the three line whip. It’s a disaster waiting to happen, it really is oblivion.
Quite what the unions are thinking about supporting Corbyn is beyond me. Labour’s route to power is a mountain already and with a him in charge Labour would not even make it into the foothills.
I see UNISON and UNITE acting against the interests of their members too by supporting a no-hoper because opposition achieves nothing for the people for whom the labour movement is supposed to represent.
“Things can only get better,” we sang in 1997. My worry for the Labour Party is that things can only get worse.
