Jeremy Corbyn « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Jeremy Corbyn’

This polarised leadership contest is ignoring the key lessons from our general election defeat

06/08/2015, 05:52:39 PM

by Daniel Charleston Downes

A common complaint made by public service workers about governments is that the manner in which decisions and policies made are is entirely hegemonic. The secretary of state for health, education or defence rarely has first-hand experience of those sectors they represent and if they do it was often a while ago. Added to which, politics is placed above pragmatism and the experience and knowledge of workers at the coal-face that could give a detailed account of what the problems really are.

In any analysis of the 2015 general election defeat it would follow logically that the best accounts could be given by those that fought and lost marginal seats. Thankfully this is exactly what the Fabians have done in their collected essays Never Again edited by Sally Keeble and Will Straw. This collection gives accounts of seven regions around England where Labour underperformed. It gives insight into what the successes were of CLPs directly involved in their communities and the issues that national policy and leadership were giving candidates on the doorstep.

Whilst the existence of the document itself is cause for much cheer, it appears as if the leadership contenders are coming to the wider debate about the future of the Labour party with their direction already established. Corbyn for example has in his analysis inevitably come to the conclusion that Labour were too right wing and did not provide clear opposition to austerity. This seems counter to all evidence, the near 80% of the electorate that supported a pro-austerity party and the experience of many accounts on the doorsteps. Further it completely ignores the conclusions of the Trades Union Congress survey that showed Labour were generally perceived to have been too soft on both welfare and immigration.

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Corbyn at the Adelphi: Vintage 80s nostalgia that would deliver a vintage 80s Labour result

05/08/2015, 07:25:57 PM

by Richard Scorer

Liverpool, Saturday evening: 1100 people cram into the Adelphi ballroom to hear Jeremy Corbyn. My political identification is old Labour right, and I’m probably voting for Liz Kendall, but my Scouse in-laws are Corbyn supporters and invited me along. It was a good opportunity to see what a Labour party led by Corbyn might look like.

First, the warm up acts, starting with the Liverpool Socialist Singers. The compere jokingly asked if anyone present wanted to sing the national anthem. This having elicited the intended booing, we were all invited to join in singing the Internationale. An interesting choice, I thought. The Internationale, not The Red Flag; at this rally, even traditional English socialism is seen as too tame . Then we moved on to the speakers. The quality of oratory was high, the content unrepentedly hard left. The leader of the Bakers Union called for a general strike: wild applause. Paula from Unison quoted Blair’s “heart transplant” comment. Her answer to Blair: “my arse”. It was amusing, and Paula was a powerful speaker.

Then Jeremy himself. He comes across as palpably decent, but with a touch of naivety, just like Tony Benn (who, you’ll remember, got through an entire interview with Ali G without realising that he was a fictional character). His themes were anti-austerity, anti-welfare bill and anti-war.

Austerity was never quite defined. I think in Corbyn’s mind it means any cut in public expenditure, unless it’s cutting spending on something he sees as bad, like defence. Corbyn sort of implied his economic programme has been costed: subject to bit more work by the guys in his policy team, the abolition of tuition fees would be fully paid for by an 0.2% increase in corporation tax. But really, he doesn’t think that costing a programme is necessary, because you can borrow more: “debt is now only 80% of GDP. Under the Attlee government it was 250% of GDP. And they still increased public spending, and so can we”.

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Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign is an emotional spasm

05/08/2015, 11:05:12 AM

by Rob Marchant

“You call that statesmanship? I call it an emotional spasm.”

Aneurin Bevan, shadow foreign secretary, 1959 Labour party conference

Bevan’s withering lines, warning the party against unilateral disarmament, illustrate the fact that we are not in a new place. In the face of a public, for whom two world wars were still a very recent memory, the party’s left had “gone off on one”, on defence and other matters – to be fair, a move largely nurtured by Bevan himself – with the result that Labour wandered in the wilderness for thirteen long years.

A similar effect took place in the 1980s under Michael Foot: seventeen more years. The party now teeters on the brink of a third, post-war wilderness period of comparable length.

Whoever wins the leadership in September, it seems clear that our current stay in opposition will eventually have lasted at least a full decade. A sudden Tory meltdown in this parliament looks remote and, objectively speaking, Cameron has made a better fist of being party leader than most in Labour give him credit for. He has, after all, increased his vote – no mean feat for a leader previously forced into Britain’s first formal coalition since the time of Churchill and Attlee.

No, it is time to take a step back. It is now more a question of, will it be just ten years in the wilderness, or will it be fifteen, or twenty? That is what the next few short weeks will decide.

But Labour, currently engaged in a frantic bout of navel-gazing, seems oblivious to this fact. While Uncut still believes he will not win, the surprising success of Jeremy Corbyn’s unplanned campaign points to a part of the Labour family pathologically incapable of learning from its past.

And the worst thing is not so much that it is veering close to repeating its mistakes, but that such a mistake could have considerably worse consequences than previous times.

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Labour is being consumed by Corbynista, ultra-left micro-sects

03/08/2015, 08:44:15 PM

by Nick Small

On Saturday I met Green party Leader Natalie Bennett at Liverpool Pride. She was with the party’s parliamentary candidate for Liverpool Riverside. Also with them was one of their local election candidates, who’s recently registered as a Labour Party supporter. I said to her that I’d assumed she’d left the Green party, as I’d seen her name as a registered Labour supporter. She replied, in front of Natalie Bennett, that she was still a Green Party member and supporter but had registered as a Labour supporter just to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.

“I was a Labour voter for 30 years,” she said, “and I support Labour’s values.”

“But what about the bit about not being a supporter of any organisation opposed to the Labour Party?”, I asked.

“Erm…”, was the response.

“Natalie, ” I said, “Is this allowed under Green party rules? Surely if you sign up to this, you’d be ineligible to stay a Green party member?”

Natalie replied in that familiar, refreshing manner I’d got to know so well from the televised debates, “It’s not something we’d recommend, but if someone wants to perjure themselves…”

On Saturday evening Jeremy Corbyn held a rally in Liverpool. It was chaired by a man called Alec McFadden, ex-IMG, ex-Socialist Action, ex-No2EU, who’s stood against many a Labour candidate over the years. McFadden announced to the rally that he’s applied to be a registered supporter. Another prominent speaker at the rally was Tony Mulhearn, one of the 47 surcharged Liverpool councillors, expelled from the party 30 years ago, who’s now a leading light of TUSC. He’s holding off rejoining, until Jeremy wins.

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What the Labour right should do now

03/08/2015, 11:10:18 AM

by Jonathan Todd

“Emotional landscapes. They puzzle me. The riddle gets solved and you push me up to this state of emergency. How beautiful to be!”

As the UK confronted emergency in the Scottish referendum, I played the Bjork song Jóga obsessively. There is something in the urgency of Bjork’s voice and the tune’s texture that felt of last September’s zeitgeist. And it was beautiful to be in Trafalgar Square at the Better Together rally when Bob Geldof reminded us:

“Before there was a United Nations, before there was a United States, before there was a united anything, there was a United Kingdom.”

It spoke of all that we have been, all that we could be, and all that Alex Salmond would disregard. Hope rooted in pride, resisting Salmond’s insistence that there was nothing to be proud of.

Now Jeremy Corbyn has pushed my party – Labour – to its own emergency. His geography teacher style, like Salmond’s cheeky chap routine, has a cut through of authenticity amid our over spun times. They proffer simple solutions to complex problems, swallowed by demoralised peoples – Scotland under Tory government, Labour after defeat.

They – or at least their supporters – tell people like me that Labour is not our party. That we are “red Tories”, unfaithful socialists, and collaborators in the misery that they would resolve.

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We’ve been here before with Bennites like Corbyn. It will end the same way. In blood and vomit

01/08/2015, 01:07:24 PM

by Paul Richards

Labour’s last double-decade in opposition started with a winter of discontent, and this one starts with a summer of seppuku. What could have been the start of a process of healing after a disastrous election result, is instead descending into viciousness not seen since the early 1980s. There will be those old enough to remember what it was like back then. For those who don’t, it was no tea party.

The Bennites’ strategy was simple: to set up a series of positions on everything – Nato, the EEC, Trident, the monarchy, the civil service, the Lords, the banks, the media, and businesses – and then denounce anyone who deviated from this position as ‘a Tory’. This epithet didn’t include the actual Tories, but instead any Labour party member, MP or trade unionist who didn’t agree with state control of Marks & Spencer, kicking out the Americans, and support for Sinn Fein. Denis Healey? Tory. Barbara Castle? Tory. Harold Wilson? Tory.

A booklet was circulated amongst local activists called How to deselect your MP, which explained how to use the new rulebook to get rid of any Labour MP who failed to meet the same ideological tests. It was waved under the nose of any MP who dared to support non-Bennites for the national executive or vote for non-Bennite motions at the GC. These were times of fear and loathing, when Labour Party meetings were unpleasant places to be, characterised as small groups of activists firing resolutions at each other from across the room.

The greatest opprobrium was reserved for anyone who had served in the treacherous Wilson and Callaghan governments. Ministers were traitors, and should be treated with contempt. In his memoir, Denis Healey recalls Jim Callaghan being subject to a “barrage of the most offensive personal abuse both in public speeches, and perhaps even more wounding, in the private meetings of the National Executive Committee.” This was a former Labour home secretary, chancellor of the exchequer, foreign secretary, prime minister and leader of the Labour party: being bawled at by nonentities, paper-sellers and placemen.

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Jeremy Corbyn, George McGovern and winning by default

31/07/2015, 06:37:03 PM

by David Butler

A party is selecting a new leader and is using, for the first time, an open selection process. The early front-runners from the moderate wing of the party, who have dominated the party in the previous decades, have faltered and disappointed. Others, young and dynamic politicians, have refused to run for personal and political reasons. Instead, the insurgent, an outsider candidate from the left of the party is gaining momentum. He is backed by a wave of younger activists who are disappointed by the party’s previous period in government with its compromises and controversial war and are idealistic for a new settlement. As the campaign progressed, the moderates try to rally around a candidate, any candidate, to stop the insurgent left. However, it is too late. The insurgent suddenly finds himself party leader.

The year is 1972 and George McGovern has just become the Democratic nominee for President.

On his way to the nomination, McGovern defeated the combined talents of three leading party moderates, Senator Edmund Muskie, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. George J. Mitchell, a Muskie staffer and later Muskie’s successor as Senator, reflected afterwards that “Muskie’s appeal was to reason, to legislative accomplishment, to sort of general policies in the best interest of the country. The primary electorate was interested in emotion, passion, strong views on every issue, and the general election candidate who tries to navigate a nomination process by not being clear on very hot button issues finds it difficult in the nominating process”.

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Irascible Liz needs to learn from mellow Jez

31/07/2015, 10:54:24 AM

by Kevin Meagher

If I was Liz Kendall, cast as the uber-pragmatist in this Labour leadership contest and with a difficult message of “wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee” to sell to the party’s suspicious grassroots, I would look across the ideological divide at Jeremy Corbyn and emulate how he’s running his campaign.

Not by suddenly adopting a policy on Bolivian miners, but by observing the quiet and courteous manner with which he pitches unfettered socialism to a bruised party that wants to believe, but in its heart of hearts knows that some accommodations with the electorate are inevitable.

That’s the centre of gravity of the Labour membership. This is a party that wants to know its politics still means something and aren’t going to be endlessly triangulate away by, as it sees them, careerist politicians. However, purists aside, the party also knows that politics is the art of the possible. So members are there to be courted. To be convinced. To have their would-be leaders calmly explain how Labour moves forward from the mess it’s in, while remaining true to its heritage and values.

All of which is to observe that Liz Kendall’s campaign is so utterly tin-eared and so wide of the mark, that it seems to be taking place in a parallel universe. Whereas Corbyn is sweet reason, Kendall’s camp seems intent on adopting the traditional tactic of the hard left: simplistic homilising at 100 decibels.

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Should Blairites stay or split if Corbyn wins?

30/07/2015, 10:21:33 AM

by Samuel Dale

Jeremy Corbyn is now the bookies’ favourite to win the Labour leadership contest. A couple of dodgy polls puts him miles clear and Corbyn-mania has gripped the nation.

The media is losing the plot. The Spectator’s Rod Liddle thinks he could become prime minister. The Telegraph’s Mary Riddell says he is the a modern politician not a dinosaur. And the Guardian’s Owen Jones believes he would be just swell.

As Atul Hatwal has written this is the same suspension of reality that gripped the nation prior to Ed Miliband’s defeat in May. It is still highly unlikely Corbyn will win.

But humour me. What if on September 13 we wake up to a party in the hands of a leader as unprepared and unsuited to the job since Michael Foot?

For so-called Blarites – moderates who want to actually win and change Britain – there are only two options. Stand and fight to wrest back control of Labour from the grip of a Marxist cabal heading for electoral oblivion.

Or split and create a new party, perhaps forming an alliance with Tim Farron’s Liberal Democrats.

Let’s take them in turn.

First, let’s stay.

Corbyn has no governing experience, he is easily riled, his policies are mad and he has numerous unsavory foreign connections.

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A win on second preferences is second-rate victory

28/07/2015, 03:22:41 PM

by Kevin Meagher

Why would a Labour leader, elected as the second or third preference of party members, go on to become the first choice of voters?

After all, coming second in the British parliamentary system usually means you’ve lost. Winning the contest by default would surely represent an inauspicious start to the leadership of an organisation that seeks to win the hearts and minds of millions of people.

The question arises for two reasons. First, because of the unpredictability of the Labour leadership contest. The main evidence about who will win (opinion polls and the share of constituency party nominations) offers only a partial guide and shows no candidate commanding a clear majority. As a result, the mechanics of the process – which candidates come third and fourth and thus see their support transfer to the two frontrunners – may become all-important and is the current preoccupation of all camps.

The second reason is that Yvette Cooper’s campaign (third in the number of constituency party nominations) is said to basing her strategy on precisely this scenario, assiduously targeting the second preferences of Labour members in a bid to “come through the middle” as other candidates are winnowed out.

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