If anyone is any doubt about the pernicious and corrosive effects of Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous reign as Labour leader, you only had to be watching Labour’s conference today. General Secretary David Evans asked the delegates to remember why they joined the Labour Party. One wag (that’s another word for tosser) shouted “Because of Jeremy Corbyn” and, true to form, the comrades started to chant “Oh Jeremy Corbyn”, as if he was some kind of champion darts player. Evans continued. He had joined the Labour Party when his brother, Rob, who has learning difficulties, was being bullied and Evans vowed to join a party that would “fight for everyone”. Conference applauded Evans’ comments, the comrades presumably with great reluctance, but here, writ large, is everything that is wrong with Labour and what it needs to do to make things right.
What is oh so wrong is the ongoing obsession with so many people in Labour at the cult of Corbyn. So let’s be clear about what and who he is. Jeremy Corbyn is a career politician, albeit one with no ambition to climb the greasy pole until he became the token hard left candidate for the Labour leadership vacancy in 2015. He has never had an original idea in his life, he has always been the friend of the terrorist, the man who took money from the islamic fascists of Iran to make TV shows, the man who voted against Labour more often than David Cameron. He was Labour’s accidental leader, elected on a false prospectus of his so-called principles; the Chauncey Gardiner of British politics. But this useless old relic from Labour’s disastrous dalliance with the hard left in the 1980s attracted a huge following on the hard left, but nowhere else. And in 2019, he led Labour to its worst election defeat since 1935.
Labour in opposition achieves nothing. Its affluent members of the chattering classes, who quite fancy a Labour government but don’t really need one, betray those who do. And by campaigning for an unelectable leader the comrades handed Boris Johnson a landslide win. This is the hard left at its most self-indulgent. And here they were again today, singing the name of the biggest Labour loser of modern times. How the hell can that make them happy? Johnson will have been just as happy to hear the sound of Corbyn’s name being sung to the rafters, a reminder to voters why they didn’t vote Labour.
Maybe Evans set a trap for the comrades by starting his speech by asking why people had joined Labour. I doubt it, but if he did, the comrades walked straight into it. Evans immediately reclaimed the moral high ground by illustrating why Labour has to win, to fight for people like his brother. If they love Corbyn more than they want a Labour government to lead this country to a better place, perhaps they shouldn’t be in the Labour Party at all?
I’m sick of the hard left trying to stitch-up deals in smoke-free rooms. They love the rules, the block votes, the conference resolutions; all the things ordinary folk don’t give a toss about. Keir Starmer rightly focuses on a party that has to be electable in order to effect change. And that change must embrace everyone.
To win, Labour must attract voters from the centre ground, the ambitious and aspirational, people who have a social conscience but they also want to get on. Labour under Corbyn had a message: “For the many, not the few” but it should have been “For the many, not JUST the few” (my emphasis) because I felt Corbyn’s message reeked of jealousy. Labour should welcome and encourage people to succeed and, of course, contribute to the needs of others. It’s called fairness and it’s called equality of opportunity. Why should people who work hard be denied good housing, nice holidays and the odd glass of bubbly now and then? At the same time as we make poverty a thing of the past, we also say everyone should have a fair chance in life to fulfil their potential. And the one thing you need to do that is by electing a Labour government.
The Labour government of 1997 did more than any government of my lifetime to improve this country. My one main complaint is that given the size of the majorities they enjoyed, they didn’t go further in consolidating the gains and making them irreversible. Because I have always believed, since I was a teenager in Bristol East, listening to the simplistic sloganising and rhetoric of my MP, Tony Benn, that change must be incremental and not as one big bang. You need to take the public with you. That’s what New Labour did and a new vision of Labour is now what’s needed for the mid 2020s and onwards.
Corbynism was a dreadful experiment that exploded in the faces of the hard left, leaving the fall out to cover the weakest and most vulnerable people in society, people like David Evans’ brother. But for the comrades, it’s just an excuse for another sing song, “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”, indeed.
Labour may not do enough to win the next general election, not least because oppositions rarely win them, but governments lose them. And it may be that Keir Starmer cannot reduce the effects of Long Corbyn on the electorate. But I am sick to the back teeth of the sneering, middle class comrades treating politics as a joke. For people who have learning difficulties, life can be a struggle and to make their lives better it takes good people to do good things. Labour needs a giant coalition of the haves and have nots, and in this case many of those from somewhere in the middle, which is most of us.
The message to the comrades is simple: work hard for a Labour government or leave the party. It’s not about your purity: it’s about winning. And the next time you start singing “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn”, don’t forget what happened in 2019.
