The fragile rise of Jeremy Corbyn

 

The striking thing about the Corbyn movement is how quickly it flourished and how quickly it died. The wave of support for a backbench MP to be Labour leader came seemingly from nowhere in the summer of 2015. Fast forward six years; what happened to those thousands of people who supported Corbyn? The Labour Party is firmly in the hands of its right-wing. The candidate most continuous with Corbyn, Rebecca Long-Bailey, was roundly defeated in the 2020 leadership election. Why was the surge of left-wing sentiment, and the turn towards the Labour Party, which led to Corbyn  being elected not sustained? And why was it so utterly crushed?

The question is worth asking, both to make sense of the current routed state of the left in Britain, and to help guide our future direction. Of course there were factors specific to the 2015-20 period at play. The effect of the Brexit debate in demoralising and confusing Corbyn’s support base cannot be doubted. And by the time the Party elected his successor, Covid-19 was with us, perhaps pushing people towards the felt security of the politics of consensus. Nor, I think, can the role of sexism in Long-Bailey’s defeat be entirely neglected. The number of people who, entirely unconscious of this fact, will trumpet their support for the politics of equality, just so long as it is fronted by a man, is not small. Still, when all of those factors have been taken into account, there remains a lot that needs explaining.

I remember being at a meeting of a left-Labour group in 2015, just as the leadership contest was beginning. John McDonnell had been invited, and he told us that the left was unlikely to get a candidate onto the ballot. This would require nomination by 15% of the PLP, that is – at the time – by 35 MPs. With a parliamentary Labour Party unsympathetic to left politics this looked like a tall order. In the light of what happened subsequently, we can expect raising the nomination threshold for leadership contests to be part of what is advocated in future to prevent the left from ever having the leadership again. (The language used, of course, will not be of excluding the left, but of ‘electability’ and ‘moderation’. With respect to the former, it is worth at least noting that the Labour right’s record of winning elections from 2010 to 2015, and from 2020 to the present, is not remarkable, and is compounded by the millions of votes lost to Labour since 1997.)

What happened next was that a selection of MPs who were not Corbyn’s natural supporters, to some extent under pressure from the Party grassroots and others who wanted to see a ‘proper’ debate about Labour’s future, lent Corbyn their nominations. Some would later regret this. He secured 36 nominations and was duly entered into the election. Once in the contest, he captured the imagination of people within, and more importantly outside, the Labour Party. People joined the Party to vote for him. People registered as supporters to vote for him. The category of registered supporter had been introduced by the Collins report in 2014. Inclusion of supporters, lending Labour leadership elections the feel of US-style primaries, had been supported by Labour’s right, the thought being that a moderate wider electorate would check any immoderate tendencies amongst Labour’s membership. As things turned out, the new category had exactly the opposite effect, allowing people a way of expressing support for Corbyn without committing themselves to Labour Party membership. Over 83% of registered supporters voted for Corbyn. Still, the effect of the supporters category can be exaggerated. Corbyn topped the poll of members with over 49% of votes cast. No small number of people joined the Labour Party to vote for Corbyn.

Why were people attracted to Corbyn? His support was grounded in discontent, discontent with New Labour and Tory politics, and wider discomfort with life under neo-liberal capitalism. Nothing expressed the former more than the movement with which Corbyn himself was most associated, the anti-war movement. The nearest thing Britain has had to a mass movement for a good while, this was born out of opposition to the attacks on Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. This latter military adventure had, in particular, felt like betrayal to a significant proportion of Labour supporters and had put a new generation of left-leaning voters off the Labour Party (the surge in the Liberal Democrat vote at the 2010 election was one legacy of this). Now there was an undemanding way to voice opposition to Blair’s legacy of war, by voting for one of its principal opponents to be leader of the Labour Party. Closer to home, a generation whose experience of the world is one of insecure rented accommodation and precarious work wanted an alternative that spoke to these issues, and in Corbyn they had one. Although the expression tended not to be used, and although matters were often framed generationally, there was a genuine class politics at work here. One important element in the vote for Corbyn, then, was desperation, a discontent with economic circumstances which, as with anger over past warmongering, found a way to express itself which didn’t ask a lot in return. Voting for Corbyn was a matter of a small standing order and a couple of mouse clicks.

Contrary to the media’s subsequent spin on events, then, this was not an episode of entryism. It is emphatically not the case that well-organised Marxists flooded the Labour Party to elect Corbyn. Indeed, if Britain had a couple of hundred thousand active Trotskyists, the situation as we find it now would be very different. It doesn’t. Instead the flood of support for Corbyn was both a very welcome, nigh-on spontaneous, expression of deep-rooted dissent, and entirely fragile, coming from people often without formal political experience (and in particular, without experience of the Labour Party) or a settled political worldview. The very features which made the Corbyn surge so refreshing, breaking the mould of British electoral politics and having a genuinely different feel to past movements on the Labour left, made it unequipped to face the attacks which were soon to be directed at Corbyn and at the movement behind his election.

The left cannot rely on the established structures of the state and the Labour Party to play fair with it. These are not neutral apparatuses, amenable to functioning on behalf of whoever happens to be elected leader of the Labour Party. Showing this was a great achievement of Ralph Miliband. Any ascendant left which doesn’t want to be defeated must be prepared to both fight and organise. The Corbyn left didn’t do either to a sufficient extent. I was part of it, and I take my share of responsibility. Far too often the unity of the Labour Party was placed above class politics, or even the politics of keeping Corbyn as leader. Labour became an end in itself, rather than a means to the end of socialism. This is, of course, what left critiques of Labour predicted would happen, and is entirely understandable at a human level: new Party members go along to meetings and want to get on with the people they sit next to, the people they go out leafletting with, the MP who gives a friendly sounding report. Personal cordiality can be difficult to combine with political difference.

What would make a difference at this point would be political organisation and political education. This is what the Labour right possesses in spades through organisations such as Progress. The already existing Labour left failed to make inroads into the new membership. Momentum, meanwhile, did succeed in recruiting from the pool of people who many insisted on terming ‘Corbynistas’. But Momentum proved itself unprepared to do the work of organising and educating.

Its unsurprising that the initial enthusiasm of the Corbyn movement didn’t hold, that the brittle coalition of support for him came apart under the strain of Brexit, the anti-Semitism crisis, and electoral defeat. We have to learn from the experience, and that means recommitment to the patient and generally unexciting work of left-wing organising. What precisely that might look like is a further question, and one I hope to address in a further post. But it needs doing urgently, not least before the last of the Corbyn legacy goes and all of the disillusioned Corbyn voters of 2015 leave political activity altogether.

A final point: one form of organisation that is undoubtedly valuable, which directs peoples’ outlook and provides a firmer basis in the labour movement are trade unions. It would have done immeasurable amounts of good if Momentum had simply asked every one of its members to join a trade union. We ought to be doing what it failed to do, and more generally recruiting people into unions.