Who’s afraid of Jeremy Corbyn? The Labour man causing anarchy in the UK
He was virtually unknown a year ago, but now Corbynmania is sweeping Britain. By Martin Watters
A NEW craze is currently sweeping Britain and it’s causing people to believe in the Labour party again.
One man is behind the swell of optimism (and rancour) and he’s an unassuming, bearded, former backbencher named Jeremy Corbyn.
You may not have heard of him — many in Britain hadn’t either until the 66-year-old veteran socialist MP nominated to become the new Labour leader, after the party’s decimation at the last election.
Now, however, Corbynmania is real.
Polls are predicting a landslide for his anti-austerity platform, building on the former union organiser’s activism for a living wage, nuclear disarmament and higher taxes for the rich.
Since June he’s been packing out venues across the country — on top of fire engines, at community halls and in union meetings. Under the slogan “Jez we can” he’s inspired badges on chests, placards in front windows and a cabbie to pen a campaign song.
On the final day to register to choose its leader, Labour struggled to cope with more than 160,000 people applying, crashing the party’s website.
Almost 400,000 new members and supporters have joined the party during the campaign. Out of the 190,000 affiliated union members able to vote, half of these signed up in just 24 hours last week.
Union votes are particularly important for Corbyn and the two biggest, Unite and Unison, joined the long list of other unions endorsing him, including those for food, transport, postal, corrections, communications and firefighting workers.
Corbyn’s message has resonated with supporters, particularly young ones, because he’s the first in a long time to appear actually genuine, even awkwardly so.
His parents, an engineer and a teacher, met campaigning for peace during the Spanish civil war. He rides his bike to work, rarely wears a tie, and says if the whole leadership thing falls through, he’ll go back to “tending my allotment where I grow my vegetables.”
When his fellow MPs were charging the taxpayer electricity for their horse stables during the 2009 expenses scandal, Corbyn claimed £8.95 for a printer cartridge.
The Islington North stalwart says the main reason he threw his hat in the ring was to promote policy debate. He needed to be persuaded to stand — after two other leftist MP colleagues had already run — making the nominations ballot with just two minutes to spare.
A third of the MPs who nominated Corbyn actually supported other candidates but lent their support just to “broaden the debate” thinking he’d never have a chance.
He’s basically a Ken Loach political biopic come to life, the one which we’d all criticise for being too unrealistic.
“I have never held any appointed office, so in that sense it’s unusual, but if I can promote some causes and debate by doing this, then good. That’s why I’m doing it,” he told the Guardian.
What does he stand for?
Policy debate is what Corbyn does best — media label him “unflappable” in interviews — and he’s been on the right side of history, from apartheid to Northern Ireland and Iraq, LBGT rights, tuition fees and workers’ rights.
Corbyn’s manifesto also includes re-nationalising Britain’s privatised trains and introducing rent controls, a mandatory living wage, free education and nuclear disarmament — all paid for with greater taxes on the rich and closing tax loopholes. All of which have strong public support.
Not all of Corbyn’s ideas are so bright. He has flagged re-opening the country’s coalmines, most of which are flooded since their closure in the eighties, perhaps in a hat-tip to the striking miners he campaigned alongside 30 years ago.
But with Russell Brand and Charlotte Church lending their support, alongside the legion of reinvigorated Labour voters, the only roadblock is convincing the Labour party itself.
Annihilation, cliff-edges and coups
Former PM Tony Blair says a Corbyn-led party would not just face defeat but “annihilation”. Blair’s former press secretary Alastair Campbell says Labour would be “driving itself off a cliff”. Julia Gillard’s former communications adviser John McTernan said the leftist should be deposed “within days” if he wins.
‘Jez’ responded as only he can, saying those resorting to personal abuse were “probably a bit nervous about the power of democracy” before quietly reminding Blair about Iraq and warning the rich and powerful about guarding their tax breaks.
Earlier some MPs were so concerned by left-leaning voters “hijacking” the election race, they launched ‘Operation Ice-pick’ to weed out known activists and members of other political parties who paid the three quid registration scheme.
Just yesterday one of Corbyn’s rivals Yvette Cooper admitted a “secret plot” where all of the other candidates would bow out, forcing the contest to be annulled.
Nine frontbench MPs have promised to quit if Corbyn leads, while the soft left, old right, Brownites and Blairites are poised to form a rival pressure group in anticipation of his victory.
Labour and the hard left: it’s complicated
So why is Labour tearing itself apart over a possible left-wing leader?
Corbyn drawing thousands to his rallies is irrelevant, Blairites say, because his supporters will already vote for him. He might be coaxing thousands back to the Labour party, but millions are needed to swing a general election.
British opinion polls came under fierce attack following the last election for being astoundingly wrong about everything, but they predict Corbyn to be the least likely to return Labour to government in a 2020 election.
Critics say this will give David Cameron and George Osborne carte blanche to continue slashing away merrily, with no fear of an opposition posing a threat.
The last time Labour lurched to the left, under Michael Foot in 1983, the party suffered its biggest electoral defeat with its manifesto dubbed “the longest suicide note in history”.
Before the defeat Labour’s right-wingers split from the party; the division didn’t win many seats but helped Labour lose lots of them. Ever since Blairites have shied from radical agendas for being too “self-indulgent” to win elections.
Blair’s Britpop years to blame
“The trouble is,” says Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London, “after Labour started watering down its commitments to radical socialism… it finally had to become the entirely pro-neoliberal ‘New Labour’ before the Tory press would get behind it.
“After which, it won, and did implement a few positive reforms, but ultimately did nothing to strengthen the collective power of British citizens or the Labour movement.
“Instead what we had was a charismatic leader (Blair) who was effectively elected on a promise to the City of London and Rupert Murdoch that he would never, ever, do anything to upset them.”
During the Blair years of Britpop, Gilbert says, the party’s raison d’être was to stop Tory cuts. The only way to do this was maintain power, so the party’s existence revolved around maintaining power, whatever the policy.
This culminated in the sickening spectacle of Labour MPs, after their crushing electoral defeat this year, voting alongside the Cameron government to make £12 billion in “inhuman” welfare cuts, weakening the safety net that working people had fought so hard to create.
But not Corbyn. He was the only leadership candidate to unreservedly reject the austerity that would allow more people to fall into poverty.
“People say he is an old left-winger or an old Marxist but to my generation his ideas seem quite new,” Heather Shaw, 23, told the Guardian.
“His ideas on renationalisation of the railways and the energy companies. Free university tuition that people of my generation have not had. The idea of spending more money on infrastructure.”
Prof Gilbert says it’s unlikely we’ll see an English progressive movement comparable to Greece’s Syrizia, Spain’s Podemos or Scotland’s SNP, even with Corbyn at the helm.
Corbyn might be successfully tapping into similar disaffection with austerity prevalent across Europe, however those popular movements took years to organise.
Faced with inter-party schism and a hostile press, Prof Gilbert sees a Corbyn leadership actually ending quite horribly for Labour but “in the long term that might be a good thing,” with the party forced to reinvent itself as a progressive grassroots movement.
He sees Corbyn being the only candidate with a real depth of possibility and is therefore “probably at least worth a punt”.
Martin Watters is an Australian journalist based in Europe
Published on 18 August 2015.
