An open letter to Jeremy Corbyn: you have failed as leader, so let’s find a third way
Dear Jeremy
Re: Your Failure
Your election as leader of our party was a bittersweet moment for me. I opposed much of what New Labour did in office. I thought that Ed Miliband should have gone much further in opposition to reject austerity (and that he would have been more successful electorally had he followed this path).
So the platform you stood on ticked a lot of boxes. At last, you gave people who think like me something to believe in. It was good to see so many people enthused, finally, by progressive politics. It was a victory not built solely on new or returning members, or the three-quidders. Many longstanding members rallied to your cause too.
They had been lied to and let down for so long by a succession of Labour leaders. They had been forced to watch as the party was hollowed out. They had had enough, and you gave them a voice.
But I didn’t support you. I campaigned against you, and will continue to do so until you are no longer in a position of influence within our party. Even your resignation would be insufficient now: I want you out of parliament too. While I had once been content to co-exist in the same political party as you, I no longer feel this way.
Let me explain. Your leadership has brought a lot of good things into our party. But you have fallen too far from the person you purport to be. My feelings towards you are much the same as my feelings towards Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
I will compromise, of course, if that’s what it takes to resolve this crisis, because that’s what social democrats do. That’s what social democracy is: a compromise. I wrote to your friend John McDonnell with some suggestions on how the impasse might be overcome, and remain hopeful that a solution can be found. You may yet have a future at Labour’s top table, if you want it.
The first step to a deal, however, is to recognise that your leadership has failed. It does not make me feel good to point out that it has failed for precisely the reasons that I said it would at the time you were elected. But it is the fact that I was right that empowers me to write to you like this now.
The seeds of your failure were sown at the moment of your greatest triumph. I think we need to reflect a little further on why so many people were enthused by your leadership campaign. It was in part because your views were close to their views on many issues. But few people really thought you could actually win a general election.
They voted for you, not in hope, but in resignation. Unusually, I disagree with Zoe Williams on this. The Conservative Party’s 2015 election victory demonstrated, so they thought, that the hegemony of neoliberalism in the UK was stronger than ever. They didn’t vote for you for a better future, but rather to stick two fingers up to the present.
I identified this attitude most strongly among the three-quidders. Most people do not believe they have the power to change the world. Those that realise they in fact do tend to be members of political parties already — they do not need a discount or a gimmick to encourage them to sign up.
Although the hearts of many, if not most, of these three-quidders was in the right place, the painful truth is that most of them do not understand politics well enough to have used their vote responsibly. Neoliberal hegemony was nothing like as strong as it seemed to them at that point — which I, like many others, tried to point out. After the EU referendum, it has never been weaker. But thanks, above all, to you, Labour cannot capitalise.
This isn’t just about the three-quidders though. I know longstanding members from the right and centre of the party that voted for you too. They knew it was irresponsible but, at the same time, they knew that Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper had little chance against David Cameron or whoever his successor might have been. If the Tories are going to keep winning, they thought, let us at least be as virtuous as we can be while we lose.
They saw in you a man of principle, who would never waver from what you believed, who would never knowingly lie, who would always put serving others above your own self-interest.
Jeremy, I do not know if you were ever that man. Either way, you are that man no more.
Let me just say, as an aside, that where I agree with Zoe Williams and your supporters is on the dross served up by Burnham, Cooper and Liz Kendall during the leadership election. None deserved to be leader, and none would have revitalised the Labour Party as you have. Unless you go now, however, the bad is going to outweigh the good by a long, long way.
Irrespective of how we got here, you must know that you now cannot lead. This government and the one that will shortly follow need to be scrutinised and challenged.
You are not going to convince 172 MPs to change their mind — in fact this group is growing in number. These MPs have their own mandates and they are entitled to a say in who leads them in parliament. You are not able to provide an effective opposition, nor an alternative government.
This is our moment. The UK’s political elite is in disarray. Has it occurred to you that you could actually be making a more significant contribution to British political life from outside the formal structures of the party? You are a well-known public figure now, with, to some extent, an authoritative voice. Without the burden of leadership, you would be free to opine without having every utterance dissected into a million pieces. And people would listen.
We can beat them, Jeremy. And I genuinely believe you’d have more success nudging the next Labour government’s agenda leftwards if you were a critical friend, rather than embarking on mutually assured destruction.
Re: Your Character
But maybe that’s the problem. You don’t actually have any original ideas, do you? I’ve been studying British economic policy for a very long time. I cannot think of a single, radical, transformative idea that has emerged from your camp in the last year.
There is, however, a far bigger problem. Jeremy, you are misleading the party’s members.
This is not the kind of leader you were supposed to be.
Most of all, you are misleading the party about the possibility that you can win a general election. Although I sometimes get quite angry towards the people that elected you as leader, I know that most of them did so in good faith. Most of them genuinely want to improve the lives of the kind of people that vote for Labour. You are making fools of them.
You know the local elections were a disaster. Your own analysis, now leaked, demonstrates very clearly that the vast majority of gains made were in areas that Labour already holds quite comfortably, and the vast majority of losses were in areas that Labour must win to stand a chance in the general election. It was the worst performance in local elections by an opposition leader in decades. We are talking sub-IDS territory.
You know also that insofar as the recent by-election and mayoral victories mean anything in terms of general election prospects, they had little to do with your leadership
And you know, most heartbreakingly, that the EU referendum result was a disaster for Labour. Persuading only two-thirds of the party’s voters to vote to remain is an appallingly low number, especially when the Labour remain vote was concentrated among the better-off in large cities.
John Curtice is utterly wrong about this, even if a writer with as powerful an intellect as Owen Jones agrees with him. Yes, more Labour voters than Conservative voters supported remain. So what? The numbers say nothing about which of these groups was more likely to have been persuadable. Your attempt, and that by your supporters, to claim vindication via Curtice’s erroneous analysis smacks of the cult-like mentality now fortifying your leadership. You are supposed to disdain ‘the mainstream media’, remember. Curtice is earnest enough, but also a media darling and as mainstream as it gets. His rather mundane analysis was spun into click-bait by a canny editor — no wonder Jones offered his support. The abuse I received from your supporters when trying to point this out on social media was quite vile. Rejecting absolutely everything that emerges from the mainstream media, with the exception of things which appear to support your position, is not honest politics. It is blind faith.
Your line that even Nicola Sturgeon was only able to persuade two-thirds of SNP voters to support remain is also incredibly disingenuous, even though this too was repeated in the mainstream media by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett. You know that the third of SNP voters supporting leave are just as likely to be pro-EU as anti-EU. They voted leave in a misguided attempt to force through Scottish independence, knowing that overall Scotland was likely to vote strongly to remain.
You have absolutely dire personal ratings among the wider electorate, so low that even at this stage it is reasonable to conclude you have little chance of recovering by 2020, let alone an earlier election. That this remains the case even while the Conservative Party is tearing itself apart is really quite remarkable.
The depressing thing is, Jeremy, that I don’t need to tell you any of this, do I? You know it is true.
I should clarify, at this point, that I am very sceptical of the idea of ‘electability’. The invocation of this notion in recent years has always been code for moving Labour back to the right. While I do believe that some leaders are more electable than others, I do not necessarily believe that this is reducible to the left/right ideological spectrum.
Electability is not a set of political or personal characteristics which can be identified definitively in advance of actual elections. But you have had your chance in actual elections, Jeremy, and failed.
Perhaps your ‘remain and reform’ line on EU membership was the right one, the only one that was likely to have persuaded the other third of Labour voters. The experiment could have worked. But in practice, it did not.
One the reasons it didn’t work is that you don’t actually believe it, do you? On the morning of 24th June, you called for Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to be invoked immediately.
Only an idiot could possibly believe this is the best option for our country right now. One can accept the result of the referendum, as I do, without calling for immediate withdrawal. It would have a devastating impact on the people that Labour exists to represent. I do not believe you are an idiot, Jeremy. What you are is a steadfast opponent of the EU.
You are entitled to your view but it is not one that is shared across the labour movement, and never will be. What you did was an unforgiveable abdication of responsibility. In a funny sort of way, maybe your dismal failure in the EU referendum proves you right about honest politics. People do want politicians to be honest; they could tell you were concealing your real views, so they chose to ignore you. Just a thought, Jeremy.
Of course, I see that you have now quietly stopped calling for Article 50 to be immediately invoked. I wish I knew what had changed your mind, but that would require a degree of transparency which I think you simply aren’t comfortable with.
The absurd truth is that you don’t really know what the UK should do now, do you? Once you wade through all the waffle, it is clear that the leader of the Labour Party essentially has no position on how to negotiate withdrawal from the EU. That is a real-word problem with which you refuse to engage.
You have never shown much interest in the business of actually governing. You’re a critic, not a leader. You were once a pretty good critic, actually. But you have assumed a role for which you have no aptitude, and it is destroying who you once were.
I was devastated to see you claim that George Osborne’s admission that his fiscal rule will not be met by 2020 was a result of your opposition. This is absurd. Osborne has abandoned his target because Brexit means it will not be met, not because he has changed his mind on deficit reduction.
Do you really intend people to believe that you have won the argument on austerity, when you know that you have not? Austerity goes on, Jeremy. Brexit reinforces austerity. This issue is far too important for this kind of gamesmanship. I cannot see how it benefits you to give people false hope — although you are of course already preparing your excuses for when your failure becomes apparent.
Why not just admit that the electoral challenge ahead is an incredibly difficult one? Tell people that things aren’t going well in most respects, but that you see a bigger picture, and believe that your leadership will bear fruit over the very long term. If you like, tell people that that Labour is more likely to be able to implement its programme when it does attain elected office if it works hard to ‘preference-shape’ in advance.
You should tell people this because you believe it to be true (if indeed you do). It is what the Jeremy Corbyn elected by Labour members last summer would do.
Re: Your Ideology
I still think you’re a good guy, deep down. It is absolutely correct that writers such as Nick Cohen continue to highlight your political and financial links to some of the planet’s worst regimes. But let’s not forget that politics is an inherently dirty business, and your conduct is no worse than that of the British establishment which you bitterly oppose, and with which most leading figures within Labour have always been aligned with to some degree.
The real issue here, quite simply, is that you occupy a different ideological tradition to the vast majority of the labour movement — as is your prerogative. Clearly you are not in the elections business. But you are not really even in the preference-shaping business, are you? Quite simply, you do not subscribe to the so-called ‘parliamentary route’ to socialism.
Social democracy exists to negotiate a progressive compromise with capital. Capitalism’s reliance on democracy is an opportunity for socialists to pursue the interests of the worst off. Capitalism’s reliance on the state creates an architecture through which to see those interests realised.
Is the compromise ever a satisfactory one? Of course not. Has Labour ever made a bad deal? More often than not.
But if the thing with which we were seeking a compromise were so amenable to our programme, then why would be seeking to reform it in the first place? It’s not supposed to be easy, Jeremy.
If you will forgive me an indulgent side note, I am not sure that ‘reform’ is the correct word here. Will Hutton implied in a recent column that the job of social democrats is to reform rather than replace capitalism. For me, however, this is a moot point. My kind of social democracy sticks a pin in the question of whether capitalism will survive the longue durée, and just gets on with the job of improving lives pragmatically.
Insofar as capitalism exists, I am an anti-capitalist, and radically so. Unlike most advocates of capitalism, I believe in economic freedom, as well as equality, in its redistributive and predistributive varieties.
But capitalism is a very crude term for a bewilderingly complex set of social, political and economic practices. The idea that overthrowing capitalism is a meaningful endeavour is a fantastical one, and I disagree with Hutton that social democrats need to define themselves against this agenda.
The rub, Jeremy, is this: most of the people sustaining you in power are not your kind of socialist. They are social democrats. Desperate ones. To me, they are comrades who have lost their way. To you, I believe they are merely fodder.
Re: Your Diary
Tom Watson says negotiations are over. To be frank, I couldn’t care less what Tom Watson thinks. There is still a chance to salvage something from this situation. If you lose, you’re finished. If you win, Labour is finished.
Let’s be ironic. Let’s find a third way.
Jeremy, I would like us to meet. I have nothing personally to gain from your resignation — nor from you clinging on as leader. How many other people that you are engaging with at the moment can say that?
I sympathise with the causes you claim devotion to. I don’t like you or respect you, but I hope the fact that I’m prepared to say this only serves to underline my trustworthiness.
I will do my best to persuade you to step down. As I said, I don’t want you in my party anymore. But I will also do my best to devise a way forward that sees your platform survive in some capacity, because it is clear that it must if Labour itself is to survive intact. As I said, I will compromise. I will listen.
One thing I will not be able to countenance is any suggestion that Momentum survives your resignation. I know why I want to banish them from our party, but the rights and wrongs of Momentum’s politics is a discussion for another day.
You should disband them mainly because they do not care about you. They see you as a stooge. I know this because some of the very clever people involved in Momentum have told me so.
Come on, Jeremy. I want you to be the best person you can be. I want you to be you. Come completely clean about the party’s short-term electoral prospects and let people decide for themselves which path they want to follow. It’s the only way you are ultimately going to succeed. The truth is going to come out — so tell people on your terms.
Yours faithfully
Craig
P.S. Thank you for citing my research on infrastructure investment at PMQs last week. As Full Fact has already informed you, the research relates to expenditure data from two years ago, and is therefore out of date. In essence, the government has already started to alleviate the regional inequality in infrastructure investment that I and others have identified. It worries me that you haven’t noticed. Unlike you, however, I would not claim that this change is evidence of my success in pressuring the government to change course. They still need to be challenged, with all our might — I believe they are making the economic circumstances of the North worse, not better, even as they slightly (indeed, inadvertently) rebalance public investment. But our first step must be to deal only in truth, not slogans. That used to be your thing, apparently.
