 |
| Jeremy Corbyn speaking at a CWU event at Manchester Cathedral in October 2015. |
On Saturday, Jeremy Corbyn started his second term as leader of the Labour Party. And yet, despite a second large popular vote victory - actually increasing his already considerable mandate - the Labour Right has already marked out their territory.
Even the night before the vote, Labour MPs where making demands. Amongst them, a demand for shadow cabinet roles that have joint policy setting power with the leader (Sparrow, 2016) and for arbitrary deadlines for leadership reviews that will effectively keep Corbyn on permanent probation (Asthana & Mason, 2016).
For Corbyn's part, he accepted his new mandate with a conciliatory speech. He said it was time to wipe the slate clean, to put aside things said in the heat of the contest and strongly denounced hostility and bullying. He called Labour the 'engine of progress' and called for unity around what the party's factions have in common.
Despite paying lip service, the Labour Right has, from the beginning, resisted Corbyn and sought every means of undermining him. And all the while it has demanded that Corbyn must compromise - which, from their attitude, can only be interpreted as saying Corbyn must do things their way.
To be fair, the leadership of Corbyn certainly has plenty of issues - but none of them really offer the Right of the Labour Party any reflected glory.
Corbyn has displayed poor media strategy - which isn't about playing the media's rigged game, but reaching out to the broader public with a coherent message and making a connection (Jones, 2015; Jones, 2016); and, as Billy Bragg expressed concern, there is a worry that he, and the Labour Party as a whole, are offering 20th century solutions to 21st century problems (Bragg, 2016) - expressed not least in Corbyn's embrace of his party's standard issue rejection of pluralism, saying no to the prospect of a broad progressive alliance.
However, while Corbyn may very well not be the party's saviour, Labour without him has nothing constructive to say. All there has been is whinging, that turns quickly into very public tantrums at the slightest provocation - and even without.
There isn't even any particular effort being made to engage with the positives of Corbyn's short tenure. Rallies where tens of thousands turn up to see Corbyn speak and a tremendous increase in membership and engagement - these things are readily dismissed, when they should be engaged with and used as a platform to reach out into communities.
Trying to reduce support for Corbyn to a 'personality cult', even making comparisons to the supporters of Donald Trump (Manson, 2016), is malicious, untrue and counter productive. It blatantly ignores the fact that many of Corbyn's more militant supporters are part of a long ignored faction and are rallying to support and defend their besieged leader, who's public role represents their fragile reemergence.
It is also to act, untruthfully, as if militant ideologists are a thing that has never otherwise existed, is an invention of Corbyn and the Labour Left, and don't form a loud minority of EVERY political movement. The only difference for New Labour or the Conservatives is that their ideologues wear suits and wield greater media savvy - not to mention both connections and influence.
The Labour Right has, from the beginning, fought Corbyn beyond all reason, sense and seemingly self awareness, undermining at every opportunity - crushing their own party's steadily recovering polling just to take a poorly organised shot at toppling him. All the while, they have failed to make any kind of constructive case for how the leadership should be done differently.
As a challenger, Owen Smith offered practically the same policies. He merely stood as not-Corbyn - an embarrassing revelation of the Labour Right's apparent reduction of all the party's problems to be the result of one old democratic socialist and nothing to do with New Labour alienating most of the country.
And now that their latest, large and embarrassing effort to oust him has failed, they're wedged deeply into a corner. How, after such a deep and prolonged an attack on Corbyn's competence, can they proclaim to the public that they stand behind him?
The next move on that front, from a purely practical viewpoint, is an opportunity for Corbyn to take the initiative. To make symbolic gestures of addressing concerns about his poor approach to the media, for example, so that recalcitrant MPs can say their fears have been allayed and so save face - that is, if he really wishes to lead Labour as the broad socialist-moderate alliance it has historically been.
The only other options appear to be continued destructive civil war, that will simply scorch the earth of the Labour brand completely and render it worthless to anyone, or for one or both factions to leave the party - likely the Right, with the party staying in the hands of the significant emergent Left-wing, socialist and radical democratic, faction of which Corbyn is but the face.
As for Labour's future electoral chances? To say that Corbyn and the Left-wing cannot win is to negate entirely the point of party politics. A party organises around a set of common values and seeks to convince the public of their importance.
The reach elected office, a party must find a way of reaching people who do not know, or currently share share, their values and secure their good will. To suggest it is impossible to convince is to say there is now point to holding a dissenting view, or moving in anyway not driven by the crowd.
If a party isn't to stand with a set of ideals, that inform an attitude to policy-making, then there seems little point to having a party. To say - as Labour MPs have - that the party's duty is just to represent the electorate, is not an argument for how to run a party. It is an argument against party politics.
To run an organised party on the basis of just reflecting your constituency's views, is to run a populist machine designed only for grabbing power - turning constituents into passive actors rather than representing them, and alienating them from power.
For the part of the Labour Right, this is just a deeply-ingrained pragmatic reaction to the iniquities of the present electoral system. At every turn there are conflicts of interest that reduce accountability. An MP cannot be held to their manifesto if they must also represent constituents that didn't vote for them - and if they do, thousands of voices are excluded.
The trouble is that playing the game well, within the iniquitous system, produces power. And that is a seductive lure. However, to express a possibly minority and dissenting view, is not supposed to be about 'winning' power. It is supposed to be about representation.
Politics is supposed to be party candidates, representing the full spectrum of beliefs, being sent by their voting supporters as the people's representatives to an assembly where together they will build a consensus. Where they will build an inclusive compromise that reflects the country as a whole. It is not supposed to be about one party supplanting the system itself, to seize power by convincing enough people it is alive to all of their prejudices.
Adversarial politics offers power at a price. That price is currently tearing the Labour Party in two. One solution is to embrace pluralism, with a number of separate parties with common ideals are willing to cooperate - not least to create a more representative and less alienating system.
However, the most likely (and classic) compromise between the party's factions will be a middle ground between the Left's ideals and the Right's demand for 'electability'. The faction that Corbyn figureheads can achieve that - and success heals rifts faster than anything else in politics.
And yet, this inward-gazing uncooperative party-first attitude, that burns within both Left and Right factions, is unhelpful. While to the two groups squabble over power within and for the party, a plural society goes unrepresented and alienated.
References
Laura Kuenssberg's 'Jeremy Corbyn to overturn political rules again'; on the BBC; 24 September 2016.
Andrew Sparrow's 'Labour leadership election result: Corbyn appeals for unity'; in The Guardian; 24 September 2016.
Anushka Asthana & Rowena Mason's 'Labour faces terminal damage if fighting goes on, warns Andy Burnham: Shadow home secretary says Jeremy Corbyn will have earned right to lead Labour party without interruptions if he renews mandate'; in The Guardian; 23 September 2016.
Owen Jones' 'Jeremy Corbyn faces a viciously hostile press – but shutting out the media won't help: The mainstream press may be nasty, but they still control what the public sees. If Jeremy Corbyn is to stop the media offensive, he needs to engage'; in the New Statesman; 16 September 2015.
Owen Jones' 'Questions all Jeremy Corbyn supporters need to answer'; on Medium; 31 July 2016.
Billy Bragg's 'I didn’t attack Jeremy Corbyn at the weekend. Westminster was my target: Despite what the Times says, I still support Labour’s leader. But I wonder whether he, and other politicians, really grasp the scale of reform the electorate wants'; in The Guardian; 18 August 2016.
Tom Manson's 'I'm an ex-Corbynite, and I feel incredibly stupid about how carried away I was by this incompetent man: Corbyn's leadership has been a train crash on a busy Virgin East Coast line with very few empty seats. Voting for Jeremy was a mistake – but we all make them. His cult of personality has become scary'; in The Independent; 21 September 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment