If nothing else, and there really is nothing else, you can say there’s been one positive aspect to Jeremy Corbyn’s miserable failure as leader of the Labour Party. Certainly not his hopeless inability to hold the Tories to account, or to attack them when they were in trouble, as they have been for many months now. Over the EU, the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith and the past voting record of Theresa May, which contradicts all her warm words about what she stands for, Corbyn has been completely silent. There was, as Andrew Rawnsley rightly pointed out in the Observer last Sunday, no coup, just a group of MPs desperate for the Labour Party to have a leader who had the first idea to lead. This was not, nor was it ever going to be, Jeremy Corbyn.
I do not know a great deal about his opponent Owen Smith, but I like what he says and I will certainly be going to vote for him in the forthcoming leadership election. Today, he unveiled a series of policies which represent much of the manifesto on which he will run whereas Corbyn, for all his words, has not in nine months announced one. What we know about Corbyn is what he is against but not what he is for. Where other politicians have policies, he holds positions.
But what was striking about Smith’s policy announcements today was that they were very much of the left. He advocated the introduction of a wealth tax on the richest 1% in society to fund the NHS and to tackle inequality in Britain. And how about this:
Reintroducing Wages Councils to boost pay above the minimum wage in sectors such as retail and care
Minimum guaranteed working hours and the abolition of zero hours contracts
Scrapping trade union reforms that curb the ability of unions to call strikes
To abolish the Department for Work and Pensions, replacing it with a Ministry of Labour and a Department for Social Security
Build 1.5 million homes over five years
Reverse cuts to capital gains tax and inheritance tax
No more cuts to corporation tax
Same rights for agency workers as full time workers
Workers to be placed on company remuneration committees
To me, this is precisely what Labour should be arguing for. It is socialism for the 21st century, it is very different to anything we saw in the twilight of the Labour years and it is crystal clear in its aims. It is the opposite of Ed Miliband’s years where even Labour members struggled to understand what the party was for. And this is where Corbyn comes in.
Corbyn’s election caught the mood, at least within some of the young and disillusioned older left wingers who may have drifted from politics. The illusion was that here was something different, dressed up by his spinners as “new politics” when it was really a return to the politics of the 1980s which Corbyn has never left behind. But to many people it did sound different, maybe even better. Except that Corbyn himself has proved he cannot lead. It really is as simple as that. Put to one side for a moment his Commons voting record because many good Labour men and woman have voted against their party when it went too far. Put to another side his friends in the murderous IRA, Hamas and Hezbollah. These things are important in terms of character but there is a reason why Corbyn was a backbencher for so long: he’s not up to anything better, the same as Diane Abbott and the foul-mouthed John McDonnell.
The cult of Corbyn is based upon his so called incorruptible purity. Even his best friends acknowledge he is a terrible public speaker but, in his own way, he has woken up the Labour Party, even if he has, at the same time, brought about existential issues. And now it’s time for him to step aside.
The polling figures that show the Tories in double digit leads are not all wrong this time. Ask anyone who campaigned on the doorstep for Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees. Corbyn was a liability but the brilliant campaign concentrated on Rees as the local man. The reason Rees won was because of Rees and, in part, dislike of the outgoing mayor George Ferguson. But it had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the great leadership of Corbyn.
In fact, all the so called victories achieved under Corbyn had little or nothing to do with him. He is not an artist, he is a hod carrier. He is popular among the affluent university educated middle classes in London and some parts of the south, but this is not where Labour needs to pile up votes. Ordinary working people do not see him as a leader, never mind a future prime minister, and when the shit hits the fan if Corbyn leads Labour to defeat, as he surely would, it would not be the majority of his well-heeled supporters who would suffer.
No, Corbyn’s achievement, his only achievement, has been to reopen the debate about what Labour is for and what Labour is for is to provide parliamentary representation for ordinary working people and to improve their lives. And without Corbyn, I wonder if Owen Smith would have been so bold today.
If Corbyn really cares about the Labour Party and the working people he purports to defend and support, he should abandon his own personal ambitions and return to the back benches. In other words, do the decent thing and put ordinary people first.
Because this for Corbyn is as good as it gets. Labour has at last changed tack and has a chance to take the party forward in a modern, progressive and realistic way. A victory for Owen Smith would be, at least in part, his victory too because he, perhaps accidentally, moved the goalposts of debate.
Owen Smith would still have a mountain to climb in order to make Labour fit for government whereas Corbyn is not even capable of taking the party to even the foothills of that mountain. Even Corbyn’s best friends say that his election was “not supposed to happen” and that he became Labour’s “accidental leader”.
The experiment is over now and it’s time to really take the fight to the Tories. Corbyn has proved he can’t do that but Smith just might.
The party’s over, Jeremy. It’s time to call it a day.
