Why I’m Supporting Jeremy Corbyn

For the first time in my life recently, I’ve been thinking about politics and in particular the Labour Party on a daily basis. Politics has, to people of my generation who are experiencing the negative side-effects of Thatcherism (I count Blair’s years in power in that) and the cruel recent austerity regime, never felt so important and yet we’ve never felt so far away from politicians, on both a human and a political level.

I was politicised by last year’s General Election result. I grew up in a household where there was an awareness of politics, where Newsnight was on the telly a lot and I won a few approving laughs from teachers at primary school for making jokes about how stupid George Bush was, but where political identities were not particularly strong.

The height of political commentary was my dad, a long retired SWP member who rose far enough in hard left circles to have his parents’ house phone tapped by MI5 at one point, casually saying ‘all politicians are cunts’ a lot. He’d also tell me how, when you go to a polling station, you have three choices on a ballot paper — which are capitalism, capitalism and capitalism.

He didn’t always vote, not caring for the result, seeing Blairite Labour as not worth his time. For the 2010 election, he offered to vote for whichever party I supported. I asked him to vote for the Lib Dems, somewhat enchanted by the prospect of a left of centre party actually achieving some change. He looked at me sadly — our constituency is a Labour/Tory marginal with virtually no Lib Dem representation. He retained that sad look when the Lib Dems got in bed with the Tories and, by proxy, I’d suddenly cast a vote for a Conservative-led government.

The only political activity we ever undertook was participating in the huge Iraq War march through London in 2003. I was ten, my sister eight and as a family we went. I have got many things wrong in my life, but heck, at ten year old I made a better judgement than Tony Blair and over 200 other Labour MPs.

Last year’s election politicised me. Years of witnessing the blatant injustices perpetrated by the coalition government had, for the first time, made me genuinely angry at our political masters. Plus, for the first time in my life up to that point, a left of centre government seemed possible. Ed Miliband made occasional, pleasing left wing utterances. He also seemed like a nice guy and when he told Jeremy Paxman ‘hell yes I’m tough enough’, I tweeted that it was like when Brent finally tells Finchy in The Office to fuck off. Go on Ed! Go on my son!

Him in a coalition with a genuine anti-austerity party in the SNP seemed a bloody good deal to me. I wasn’t bothered that the SNP wanted independence — I’ve listened to enough Proclaimers songs that are essentially Scottish nationalist polemics to be a supporter of their fight for independence. Plus, Nicola Sturgeon seemed great in the debates and people like Mhairi Black had a humanity, a warmth and even a sense of humour lacking in Tories and the Blairite cardboard cut-outs Labour mostly consisted of. Them in government keeping, from a left wing perspective, Labour in check, was actually an exciting prospect.

Then everything started to go wrong.

The Tories won by a majority. I’d booked the day after the election off work so I could stay up all night and watch the election — I was in bed by 2am. When the Nuneaton result came in with a swing to the Tories, I knew enough about the politics of election night to know the game was up. I was distraught, gutted, the worst I’d felt about politics in my life up to that point. In a fit of desolation, on the Friday morning after the election, I joined the Labour Party and decided to do my bit to build a electoral winning social democratic party.

I actually regretted joining at first. The early tone of the Labour leadership election after Miliband resigned was scarily right wing. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall were all making ominous noises about bring brutally tough on welfare and immigration. An ever so slightly more compassionate Tory Party was not the one I wanted to be a part of.

Then Jeremy Corbyn happened.

I knew I’d be voting for Jeremy Corbyn when I was watching the Sunday Politics one morning and saw Harriet Harman say that the Labour Party would be voting in favour of the Tories new proposed benefit cap, cutting the maximum amount you could claim in benefits from £26k to £23k a year. The Labour Party supporting taking money away from the poorest people in society was utterly nauseating.

We had to apparently ‘learn the lessons’ from the last election - stop being Tories was the lesson I wanted them to learn. Actually being Tories just disgusted me. In one stroke, she guaranteed that me and thousands of others would be voting for the one candidate strongly opposing such a barbarian act of parliament.

John McDonnell said he would ‘swim through vomit’ to stop the bill being passed and I had never agreed with a politician more. Harman backtracked so that Labour MPs were told to merely abstain on the vote, not support it. 50 odd Labour MPs ignored her and voted against the whip anyway. Miscalculating the mood of the party so badly makes this, to me, one of the biggest political blunders this century on her part.

There were other, very strong reasons for voting for Corbyn too. Talk of him not being ‘electable’ enough from Burnham and Cooper when they’d just lost two elections was laughable. Kendall? Well what’s the point of a Labour Party if it barely differs from the Tories and doesn’t offer a true alternative.

A genuinely left wing Labour, something I’d never even considered, that had always been a laughable prospect that would never even come close to happening, might actually happen. Being lectured to and patronised by MPs, columnists and commentators too made voting for Corbyn an even more enticing prospect. Fuck the ruling classes, fuck the bourgeoisie. It was the revenge of those, the young and the poor, who’d been forgotten by Labour, lied to by the Lib Dems and were diametrically opposed to the Tories. It was like a dream come true.

It was a dream come true for people like me for many reasons, and the reasons why it felt so momentous and joyful is something current Blairite MPs either don’t understand or don’t want to understand.

Let me explain — I am 23 years old, born in 1992 so basically grew up under Labour governments. In that time, tuition fees were introduced and then raised to £3000, we waged a hideous war in Iraq that’s resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq, spawned ISIS and other acts of Islamic fundamentalism and done so much harm all over the globe. Private firms were allowed into the NHS. They made it harder to go on the dole and claim benefits when times were tough.

The rich, especially bankers, were feted, even after the economy collapsed. Unemployment went up in the recession, the value of the degrees we were all told to go to university to get has plummeted. The pension age will be about 85 when we jack it in, once we’ve actually got a job that has nothing to do with our degree after graduating. Coming from London, I’m going to be about 50 till I can afford to buy a house and without getting too personal, I’ve got a pretty good job for someone my age.

We’ve had things worse off than our parents and while some of that is down to the Coalition government who exacerbated the faults of Blair and Brown’s reigns in office, they were hardly offering a radical alternative to the coalition government or even the Tories before Corbyn became leader. It felt like Labour Party policy was what the coalition were offering plus Surestart and a brief freeze on energy bills. No thank you.

I don’t feel as if I benefitted particularly from three successive Labour governments and I’m sure others in my generation feel the same. Plus, while I’ve lived my whole life in multicultural London and love what immigration has brought to our shores, many people around my age believe, under the influence of a rabble rousing press, that mass immigration has taken away their culture and their job opportunities.

(That’s not me defending anti-immigrant views by the way — anti-immigrant sentiment is utterly sickening and while I’m not a violent person, Nigel Farage and the drooling dickheads he’s spawned who tell Pakistani twelve year olds to ‘go home’ well and truly test my patience in that regard.)

From a Corbyn supporters perspective, when Blairite MPs tell us that you have to win power in order to achieve change, those cries ring hollow. Why? Because, as a group, we don’t trust or believe them. They’ll get in power by essentially pretending to be Tories and if they do win power they’ll basically be Tories, just like they were before.

What’s the point in that? If winning comes at such a cost, it’s just not worth it. The primary goal of Labour not being about ‘winning’ is anathema to a certain group of MPs and commentators who for over 20 years have been preaching it’s the be all and end all in politics. I want Labour to win obviously, but there’s only a point in them winning if they’re actually going to help people. Simply not being Tories isn’t good enough.

Plus, they’ve tried to sabotage Corbyn from the start and ruin the one chance in life we may ever have to have a mainstream party on the left. On the day Corbyn won the leadership election, a number of MPs resigned from shadow cabinet posts and said they’d never serve in a Corbyn shadow cabinet.

Since then, MPs have given Corbyn no backing whatsoever. They voted against him on the matter of Syria, they trash him on social media, they leak almost literally everything that happens in party meetings to journalists — they abuse him personally in these meetings and, seemingly with pride, message hacks which particular insult they’ve just delivered to the man’s face.

Talk of disunity and a non-functioning opposition — you’re the people who are not united behind the party leader and are sabotaging the party’s chances of doing anything! The last couple of weeks, they’ve spoken of how any incoming government must respect the nation’s vote to leave the EU, though this principle of respecting votes has suddenly vanished when it comes to the Labour Party.

One last point — Blairite MPs are drastically over-represented amongst party MPs compared to the party membership. Liz Kendall, the openly Blairite candidate in last year’s leadership election, won 4.5% of the vote. 4.5% of Labour’s 232 MPs equates to 10 MPs (rounded down from a figure of 10.44). Well, there are far more than 10 Blairite MPs in parliament currently. Jamie Reed and John Woodcock do enough badmouthing of Corbyn for 100 MPs.

Plus, if Corbyn does somehow get deposed as leader, which Labour MP is going to reveal him or herself to have the hitherto unknown ability to win general elections? Many of the MPs currently portraying Corbyn as the antichrist were members of a party that lost badly in 2010, worse in 2015 and saw their constituencies vote Leave in the referendum. If they have the genie in an election winning bottle they’re hiding it bloody well.

To conclude — I don’t love Jeremy Corbyn and have no interest in joining Momentum or joining a march in his name. He’s pants at PMQs, carries a ton of baggage with some of the causes he’s championed over the years, isn’t very good with the press and bluntly I don’t believe he campaigned for Remain in the referendum with all his might. I don’t count myself as a fan of his. Plus, some of his supporters are too…cultish for me to feel comfortable.

However, he represents the first and possibly only time in my life that a left wing Labour Party may come to power and change things for the better. We need Corbyn to stay as party leader, or we’re left with a Labour Party veering closer and close to the Tories ideologically until British politics has a centre-right or even a right-wing consensus. I have no faith in Labour staying anywhere remotely left if Corbyn goes.

After Brexit, Labour has to stand up for working people and particularly for immigrants currently facing physical and verbal assualts because of the colour of their skin and/or the place their parents and grandparents were born. Positively changing anti-immigrant sentiment is so, so important and we can’t allow right wing Labour MPs to indulge in disgusting xenophobia for the sake of a few votes. “British jobs for British workers” and “Controls on immigration” coming from the mouths of Labour Party leaders can fuck right off. Such sentiment has helped lead to the sickening, hideous recent increase in acts of racism in our society.

A left wing, social democratic Labour Party that fights for multicultalism and a cohesive society is worth fighting for. For that reason, I continue to back Jeremy Corbyn.