And now I am really beginning to worry. In the most boring leadership election since, well the last one, it looks like Labour really could commit suicide by electing Jeremy Corbyn as its new leader. “At least he tells things like he sees them” say the dreamers. “He represents what Labour used to be all about.” Like losing elections, for example.
The unilateral nuclear disarmer, the anti-Israeli, pro Hamas, pro IRA supporter is, I would suggest, not exactly the model of loyalty I would want to see as leader. Indeed, who would want to unite around a man who since 2005 has defied the Labour whip on 235 separate occasions. That is to say he has voted against his own party on around 25% of all Commons votes. Well, sorry, but that’s not how politics works in this country. Some might praise Corbyn for being a free spirit, for voting on the basis of his conscience and beliefs, but what if everyone in the Labour Party did that? The Labour government of 1997 – yes, I know it under-achieved, but you can’t tell me things are now better under a hard right ruthlessly tight Tory Party unless you are a ruthlessly right wing Tory, that is – would not have lasted five minutes if it was packed with the like of Corbyn, going off on his own flights of fantasy whilst the Labour Party kept losing votes in parliament.
Corbyn was first elected to parliament in 1983. Older readers may well remember this election as the one where Labour went to the polls with the “longest suicide note in history” as its manifesto. Led by the hapless Michael Foot, on a manifesto prepared with the help of reckless Bennite tomfoolery, Labour gained a mere 27.6% share of the vote and were close to coming third behind the emerging Liberal and Social Democratic Alliance. Margaret Thatcher won a landslide victory and changed the country seemingly forever and changing much for the worse. And the delicious irony was the defeat of Tony Benn himself in Bristol South East, the architect of Labour’s disaster, make no mistake about that. Tony Benn, from the party’s far left “Campaign Group”, the same group to which Corbyn would immediately gravitate watched, like the rest of us, as Thatcher set about destroying the post war consensus once and for all. Were Benn and Corbyn shaken up by the defeat? Why no. Both acted, as did many on the far left, that getting over eight million people to vote for a far left manifesto was a victory, despite the fact that Thatcher’s party gained over thirteen million. Only on the far left of Labour would such a resounding defeat be regarded as victory. And Benn’s conclusion? Labour was not left wing enough.
I had by then become used to Tony Benn and his dream-like existence. The night before the 1983 election, with the opinion polls widely predicting a Tory landslide, I attended a public meeting attended by Benn and the actor Bill Owen, Compo from the BBC’s Last Of The Summer Wine. I felt almost physically sick, in the certain knowledge that the next day the country would go to the polls and return Thatcher with a huge majority, but this was not the rhetoric of Benn and Owen at Wick Road Junior School’s main hall. Egged on by the myriad of “Militant” sellers, the two men gave impassioned speeches, ending with Owen roaring “And tomorrow we are going to win”, a sentiment echoed shortly after by Benn himself. People rose to their feet as one. I looked around the room in disbelief because I appeared to be the only one who thought this triumphalism was hopelessly misplaced. Lots of shaking hands and shouted “Well done Tony!” as he left the building to head for another public meeting up the road. This, I knew instantly, was not the politics of reality: it was the politics of simplistic purity. I already had major doubts about Benn and I now I knew they were real, not imagined. The result of the election was even worse than I might have imagined.
I did not notice Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the safe seat of Islington North. Why should I? We had been condemned to more years under the most tyrannical leader of my lifetime so far. I felt like giving up there and then. Corbyn arrived at a time when Labour was at its lowest point, even lower than it is today, believe it or not, after Miliband’s heavy defeat in May. There was a choice to be made. Lurch even further to the left and near certain obscurity or to begin to fight back. Enter Neil Kinnock, the man who brought Labour back from the brink, ruthlessly culling the dinosaurs of the far left. Although Kinnock did not win a general election, he opened the way for, first, John Smith and later Tony Blair. By tacking back to a more centre left position – and yes I know, Blair moved further right than just to the centre left – Labour was able to bring more voters into the big tent. It involved slaughtering a few sacred cows of the far left, like unilateral nuclear disarmament, the scrapping of Clause Four, part four, of Labour’s constitution, a hugely important symbolic statement and a recognition that there was a price to winning, there was a necessary compromise.
Meanwhile, the Labour left ploughed its own furrow, constantly rebelling and voting against the party, no one more so than Corbyn. The tactics and strategy of the far left was its usual sorry mess, not least in Arthur Scargill’s catastrophic leadership in the miners’ strike of 1984 which, if handled better, could have seen the miners victorious and not broken and humiliated. Blame Thatcher for declaring war on the working class, but blame the far left for letting her do it.
It really is an argument about pragmatism over purity. I believe strongly that the British electorate will not buy into Corbyn’s hard left ideology and would expect an even worse result at the next election than Michael Foot managed in 1983. I am not even sure a Labour Party led by Corbyn, with the likes of Diane Abbott, for goodness sake, in his shadow cabinet would make it as far as 2020. The Tory Party and the Tory press are desperate for Labour to choose Corbyn, witness the recent Daily Telegraph campaign to woo its readers to register and vote for him as the best man to destroy Labour, which he undoubtedly is. A man whose most meaningful achievement in parliament has been to win the “Beard of the Year” vote might not be the man to take on George Osborne in the race to become Britain’s next prime minister.
I believe in the politics of evolution not revolution. As I have said before, Labour wasted its three election victories in the 1990s to the 2000s by not changing society enough. “New” Labour did not challenge the vested interests, social mobility stood still, privilege remained, we remained as far away from a genuine meritocratic society as when Thatcher was in charge. Their legacy was in the bricks and mortar of a saved and improved NHS and investment in wider public services like schools. All good, but the basic building blocks of an unequal society were never challenged. That, I would argue, is what Labour must seek to do in 2020.
Labour somehow needs to attract the missing millions who have gone to the nationalists of the SNP and Ukip, as well as those who decided to stick with the Tory devil they knew. With the latter, many people knew they were still the nasty party, but thought that at least they were competent. Labour needs a clear vision of what this country will look like if they win in 2020. People want to know how it will affect them and be persuaded that a more equal and fairer society benefits all of us. I am not sure that is the case right now with the Thatcherite “me first” principle still running through our society. Labour has time to do that, but it has neither time or a snowball’s chance in hell of winning with Corbyn as leader of the opposition.
My lifetime experience of the far left, in Labour and trade unions, has not been a happy one. Before I left the civil service last year, I was a member of a trade union, the PCS, which was in the complete control of the far left. In fact, someone like Corbyn would probably be on the right of that union, so far to the extremes had it lurched. The union become, in effect, a far left political party. It has run into catastrophic financial problems, members are leaving in droves, it has run a series of disastrous industrial action policies in recent years, including one which threatened the London Olympics with a dispute which occurred on an 11% member turn out in the strike ballot. A union which, to all intents and purposes, often worked against the interests of its members in pursuing political means and not doing the job unions are supposed to be there for, like representing members. If PCS supported Labour, which it doesn’t because politically it is off the left wing dial, it would undoubtedly still endorse Corbyn. Why? Because he represents their type of political purity.
My lifetime in Labour, ended in 2003 when Tony Blair took us into the misadventure that was Iraq, was first as part of a basket case of a party back in the 1970s, run by the far left in the constituencies, along with the revolutionary entryists of the Militant tendency, committed to little more than slogans and rhetoric, but really the overthrow of capitalism by revolution. Nothing too controversial, then. It was Neil Kinnock who first took on the vested interests of the ultra left and started to rewire Labour as a national electoral force. Among those who fought Kinnock all the way was Corbyn, a reminder of how and why Labour was all but destroyed in the election that brought him into parliament.
Labour gave us the wrong Miliband and could now begin the path to self-destruction by choosing Jeremy Corbyn as its new leader. He may represent political purity for the socialist dreamers for whom it matters not a jot whether Labour wins, but I contend that permanent opposition will do nothing for those who depend on the core beliefs of Labour. Put simply, Labour nor the country can afford to have Jeremy Corbyn as its leader. It would be an act of the utmost folly to vote for him, unless you are a Tory, that is.
