Jeremy Corbyn « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Jeremy Corbyn’

Labour can be a movement again under Jeremy Corbyn

18/08/2015, 10:50:40 PM

by Jon Bounds

Despite derision from all corners of the media, and anger from the only corner of the Labour party that the media listens to, Jeremy Corbyn has been attracting crowds most politicians and even most pop stars can only dream about.

We live in a small town in Oxfordshire — Cameron country — where Labour are a distant third in all elections, and the Conservative social club is a signposted landmark and a social hub. My wife Libby is never one to shy away from a political discussion, despite being the daughter of a sometime Liberal Democrat councillor. At least once she has stopped to engage those having a fag outside ‘the Con club’ as it’s known and asked them their opinions on matters of the day.

Most of the time it happens with more respect and decorum than PMQs, even though, leaving aside the Chancellor, participants in these impromptu street exchanges are likely to be more intoxicated.

But do you know what? These proud Tories haven’t got a clue what is going on: they have no inkling that there has even been a Health and Social Care Act, let alone what its impacts are. But these are the people, working class in the true economic sense and ‘aspirational’ — if that means that they are happy to work hard, desire have nice things and want look after their families and friends — and most of all they are the people that we have been told that the Labour party needs to win over in 2020.

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Ignore Twitter. Forget the polls. Corbyn’s not going to win

17/08/2015, 05:18:43 PM

by Atul Hatwal

Jeremy Corbyn will not win the Labour leadership. No matter how real the fevered hallucinations currently seem on this acid trip of a leadership contest, they aren’t real.

Predictions of a Corbyn triumph are based on two assumptions: that the polls are right and Labour’s new recruits have been drawn in because of him and his agenda.

Both are wrong.

The polls and campaign canvass returns overstate his support in the same way that Labour’s support was over-estimated in general election polls and the party’s new mass membership is not a seething hotbed of radical ideologues.

The coda for pollsters from the general election was that simply asking people for their voting preference didn’t give answers which reflected actual voting intention.

Mark Textor, Lynton Crosby’s business partner and the man who conducted the Tories’ internal polling, recently held forth on why his polls were right when so many others were so wrong.

He made two points of note.

First, voters frequently use opinion polls as an outlet for protest.

In an online world of one-click opinion, sticking two fingers up at the Tories by backing Labour in a poll was simple, cost free and gratifying. Less easy to actually vote Labour when most did not trust the party on the economy and it was led by someone who few believed to be prime ministerial.

Second, voters’ make their choice on the basis of the outcome they want to avoid as well as the party they support.

While waverers might have been prepared to consider the idea of a Labour government, even with reservations on leadership and the economy, the prospect of a Labour-SNP coalition, with Ed Miliband run ragged and dragged even further left on spending by Nicola Sturgeon, tipped the balance. So they voted tactically to prevent what they most feared – even if this meant holding their nose and voting Tory.

These insights are directly relevant to Labour’s leadership race.

After a crushing, demoralising general election defeat for the party, what better way for frustrated members and supporters to flick the bird at the leadership than to tell pollsters and canvassers they are backing Corbyn?

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Cooper vs Corbyn is our Healey vs Benn

17/08/2015, 10:24:42 AM

by Jonathan Todd

Yvette Cooper versus Jeremy Corbyn is our generation’s Denis Healey against Tony Benn. In September 1981, it wasn’t just the deputy leadership at stake. The party’s future was too, as it is now.

If Benn had won, more Labour MPs, councillors and activists would have joined the SDP, who’d have usurped Labour as the second largest party. If Corbyn wins, he’ll struggle to find enough MPs to serve as his shadow ministers, which isn’t the position of a party on the verge of government.

MPs only demur from advancement, bringing with it PLP disunity that they invariably seek to avoid, when genuine differences exist.

Corbyn says attacks upon him are unedifying “personal attacks”. But the differences that Labour MPs have are not personal. They are not about his sartorial style. Even if it’s a stretch to see this as screaming “prime minister”. The differences are political.

“He has shown,” Ivan Lewis writes, “very poor judgment in expressing support for and failing to speak out against people who have engaged not in legitimate criticism of Israeli governments but in anti-semitic rhetoric.” “I know,” Liz Kendall notes, “there are many people who have concerns about where Jeremy Corbyn has stood in the past on” Northern Ireland. Not personal, political.

When Anne Applebaum describes Corbyn as “one of many on the European far-left as well as the far-right who appears to have swallowed wholesale Russia’s lie that war in Ukraine has been created by NATO,” and when David Aaronovitch reminds us that for Corbyn, “it is always, always, always the West’s fault,” these are not personal criticisms. They are political concerns shared by many Labour MPs, who see in Corbyn’s foreign policy what Healey once saw in Benn’s: “deserting all of our allies at once and then preaching them a sermon”.

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Jeremy Corbyn is energising politics

16/08/2015, 10:41:24 PM

by Brian Back

After hearing so much about it, I finally witnessed the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon for myself, at a meeting in Cardiff. And, believe me; phenomenon is the right word.

I have previously attended meetings in Cardiff with both Liz Kendall and Andy Burnham, which had audiences of up to around 300 people.

Corbyn’s meeting had over a thousand, with all seats taken and almost as many squeezed in, standing at the back, as were sitting down.

The audiences for the other candidates were polite, respectful and interested.

Corbyn’s audience was passionate and enthusiastic, at times bordering on fanatical. When Corbyn walked onto the stage, the whole crowd rose to its feet; whooping, cheering, clapping and shouting- giving him the kind of welcome normally reserved for rock stars. His speech was interrupted after every sentence, by the crowd cheering and applauding his statements, in the same way that they would cheer for their favourite song played by their favourite band at a concert or festival.

It was fascinating and amazing to watch.

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Corbynism has already claimed its first major victim: Andy Burnham

12/08/2015, 11:11:09 AM

by Frazer Loveman

It all looked to be so easy didn’t it? After the non-entry of Dan Jarvis and the non-start of Chuka Umunna’s campaign, only Yvette Cooper seemed to stand between Andy Burnham and the leadership of the Labour party. Burnham was probably the more well-known of the two, a politician who oozed humility and understanding.

People knew him for his admirable opposition to NHS re-structuring under Messers Lansley and Hunt and for his work in the Hillsborough campaign. He was also the best positioned to win. Cooper was likely to lose some support to Liz Kendall on the right of the party whilst Burnham had positioned himself to have clear run at the left of the party, whilst still being able to exist on the soft-left. He may have been something of continuity Miliband, but he was slightly more human than Miliband, and also probably more pragmatic.

The forced entry of Jeremy Corbyn into the race, however, has changed all that. Suddenly the leftist bloc vote that Burnham had been presuming would just fall into his camp had an alternative, but no worry, Burnham would still be in a strong position once he picked up Corbyn’s second preferences. However, Corbyn has turned out to be more than just an ‘alternative’ he’s morphed into a bizzare Marxist messiah. With members pledging themselves to the church of Corbyn to the extent that polling by YouGov now shows him to be the clear favourite in the contest, the other three candidates are now in the last chance saloon in terms of stopping the Corbyn tide.

Kendall has responded to Corbyn by doubling down on her position that Labour needs to be a fiscally responsible party in order to win elections, out of all the candidates she is the one who has done the most to challenge Corbyn head-on, and this has led to her being favourite to finish plum last. Cooper had been far more pragmatic. Though she has said that she wouldn’t serve under Corbyn she has been more civil in dismissing him, partly as her camp believed that she could still beat Corbyn on second preferences. Though in recent days even she has been forced into pointing out the flaws in Corbyn’s campaign; accusing him of trying to drag Labour back to the 1970s.

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Labour cannot return to the days of “no compromise with the electorate”

11/08/2015, 10:04:27 PM

by Tal Michael

A winning slogan? You wouldn’t think so, but it seems many in the Labour party have decided that this is the approach they want to take. Twenty five years ago, in the piece of academic work I took most seriously during my time at Oxford, I wrote an essay on the rise and fall of the Labour left. Conventional wisdom was that “the left” was at an all-time low as Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley crushed a challenge from Tony Benn and Eric Heffer.

My analysis was slightly different. I argued that following defeat in 1987, most of the left had concluded that it is far better to propose a modest programme of reform, and when in government to put it into practice, than to go into an election and either lose, allowing the Tories to make things worse rather than better, or to win power, but discover that the economic situation makes it too difficult to deliver on the promises made.

When Neil Kinnock lost in 1992, most of the Labour party agreed to accept the leadership of John Smith and then Tony Blair not because those of us on the left had redefined our own personal views of utopia, but because we recognised that a moderate platform of reform was more likely to secure electoral success.

Whether the 1997 Labour platform was moderate is a matter of contention. A national minimum wage, devolution, investing in health and education, getting young people into jobs, halving child poverty and tackling poverty in old age were all a radical departure from the previous Tory government. The introduction of a minimum wage was going to bankrupt the country according to the Tories – yet now they are pretending they are going to raise it to a living wage.

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Under Corbyn, Labour faces twenty years in the wilderness

11/08/2015, 06:04:39 PM

by John Braggins

I think it’s time for a confession. Not because it’ll be good for my soul, it’s too late for that, but for because in 1980, when as organiser for the Labour party in Camden I took the lead in persuading one of our members to run for leader of the Labour party. When I say I took the lead I mean I drove over to Hampstead and delivered the resolution passed by the GC that night urging Michael Foot to run for leader. At the time Labour had suffered a general election defeat – Jim Callaghan losing out to Thatcher – and Callaghan had stayed on as leader for a further 18 months.

To say that the party drifted during this time would be an understatement, equally to say that 18 months of Thatcher had not changed the political climate for the worse would be another understatement. Like many people around me at the time we thought that what the Labour party needed was a charismatic leader, an orator of great standing, a man of letters who could stand up at the despatch box and take the Tories on, a man who could lead marches and address great rallies.

History, I’m afraid, proved us wrong. We were led into the worst election defeat since 1918 losing three million votes and only just coming head of the newly formed SDP with a manifesto later described as the longest suicide note in history.

Today Jeremy Corbyn stands where Michael Foot stood 35 years ago. If history repeats itself Labour will next win a general election in 2033, or more precisely 2035 given the new five year parliaments. I will be 90 years old (hopefully) my children at retirement age and my grandchildren bringing up their families in a world that has had to accept Tory policies as the norm throughout their life.

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Labour is not a museum. It should be a movement for the future

10/08/2015, 07:00:07 AM

by Pat McFadden

It was back in 1959 that some in Labour first though the old Clause IV was out of date. 1959, before the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the same year the German SPD renounced its Marxist heritage with the adoption of the Bad Godesberg programme. Gaitskill’s attempt to change Clause IV was a response to Labour’s third defeat on the trot. He failed. The party would not give up its statement of aims and values dating from 1918 and the original Clause IV survived until the 1990s.

For some the commitment to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” was a serious statement of intent, a yardstick by which to judge Labour Governments who would inevitably be found wanting when it came to implementation. That’s the thing about leaders, they will always sell you out goes the argument. For others its value was more as heritage, not a statement they expected to be implemented but of value as a kind of holy text.

Before Tony Blair attempted to change Clause IV Jack Straw had raised the issue. If memory serves me right he quoted his constituency chairman citing Yeats’s plea to “tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.” For Clause IV was not only about content. It was part of Labour’s religion. It had a poetic appeal and its very longevity lent it symbolic weight. So when Tony Blair set about changing it both he and the opponents of change understood the importance of the change.

Blair wanted a statement of Labour’s aims that a Labour government could seriously attempt to abide by. No Labour Government was going to nationalise the means of production, distribution and exchange. Secondly, he wanted to communicate to the public, most of whom of course hadn’t read Clause IV, that Labour had changed and was modernising to meet new times. He knew Labour had a problem appealing to voters who believed Labour was wedded to high taxes, dominated by the unions and weak on defence. Many of these voters had parents or grandparents who were Labour but they felt they had moved on from a Labour party that seemed locked in the past.

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If Jeremy Corbyn wins, we need to make it work

07/08/2015, 09:43:54 PM

by Brian Back

Let’s face it: with so little time left before members vote for a new leader, it is time that we stopped the shouting, insults and dire forecasts for the future.

It is time to face the facts.

It is time that we took a calm, pragmatic view of the possibility of a Corbyn win. Whilst we should not stop campaigning for the other candidates, we have to face the fact that a Corbyn win is a real possibility. That being the case, how should we deal with this prospect?

So far, everyone seems to be asking the wrong questions regarding the possibility of Corbyn becoming the new Labour leader.

Some have asked whether those in the centre-ground of the Labour party should split, and start a new party, if Corbyn wins. That is not a sensible question, because forming a new party would just split the left-wing vote, thereby guaranteeing a Tory win at the next election. Also, most members would stay with the Corbyn-led Labour party, as would the unions, so the new party would have few members or activists, and very little funding, as well as a very short life-span.

Others have asked whether the centre-ground MPs should stage a coup and force another election contest. This is not sensible either, as disunity and conflict are the biggest problems we face; problems which, if not dealt with, always spell electoral disaster, and a coup would only make things much worse. Furthermore, the next contest would probably be won by Corbyn again, but with a bigger majority, as Labour members react with fury against MPs who are seen to ignore members’ wishes.

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The idea that Jeremy Corbyn laid the foundations for peace in Northern Ireland is total fantasy

07/08/2015, 05:32:36 PM

by Anthony Breach

The other day I was informed that, along with every other person from Northern Ireland, I was wrong about the Good Friday Agreement and the Northern Irish peace process. Rather than being the product of improbable, bewildering, and exhausting negotiations between at least five different parties, it was actually Jeremy Corbyn who “set up peace in Northern Ireland”. This was though I’d never heard any other Northern Irish person before last month utter Corbyn’s name in gratitude, anger, or even at all.

I was directed to an interview with Corbyn (relevant clip) where, along with mentioning his commendable work on the Birmingham Six and some dubious comments on Irish history generally, Corbyn says:

“During the 1980s… we built up regular contacts with Sinn Fein, we were condemned by our own Party Leadership for so doing… and we were proven to be right. In the end, even Margaret Thatcher recognised that there had to be some kind of political settlement in Ireland, that militarily it wasn’t going to be possible, and eventually this became the Good Friday Agreement after the 1997 election.”

How this became “Corbyn set up peace in Northern Ireland” in his supporter’s understanding remains unclear. He is however not the only one to believe this – surprisingly many people are under the impression that Corbyn’s involvement in Northern Irish politics has been not only significant but beneficial.

Corbyn himself makes a politically magical leap from Thatcher’s change in policy and the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, but he does at least avoid claiming outright that his talks were the basis for the Agreement, unlike Owen Jones and other Corbyn supporters.

This was however all before a frankly bizarre interview Corbyn conducted with BBC Radio Ulster where, as the leading candidate for the Labour leadership and our potential offer of Prime Minister to the British people, Corbyn five times refused to explicitly condemn the IRA and equated the British army with a non-state terrorist organisation that murdered British civilians as a matter of policy.

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