Rob Marchant « Labour Uncut

Posts Tagged ‘Rob Marchant’

Labour, this is what you chose

30/09/2015, 02:22:15 PM

by Rob Marchant

The two important days of conference, the first two, have now passed. We have pinched ourselves. We have pinched ourselves again. But no, that really was John McDonnell outlining a fantasy financial plan on Monday, and Jeremy Corbyn giving the Leader’s Speech on Tuesday.

Let me just say that again. Jeremy Corbyn giving the leader’s Speech. Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour party.

No matter how many times we say those words, it still beggars belief. Only four months ago, it would have been inconceivable.

How long ago that now seems. What happy, carefree days were those.

For those of us who have sat and watched dozens of leader’s speeches, mostly at times when Labour was actually running the country, it seems a strange, parallel universe. You get to know when a party is at a low ebb, just as when William Hague suffered his disastrous four years at the helm of the Tories.

But this is different: Labour’s current convulsions have not resulted in a moderate leader trying to rein in restive backbenchers on the fringes of the party. They have resulted in the election of a leader who is from those fringes. And a kitchen cabinet involving Unite and members of the hard left from outside the Labour party, which is likely to be more extreme – and certainly more brutal – than the man himself.

The Tories managed to pull themselves back, although it took most of a decade. But Labour’s case is that much worse, one wonders if they can pull it off at all.

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Looking-glass Labour: what happens next

16/09/2015, 10:42:43 AM

by Rob Marchant

On Monday, a smiling photo was published of the first Cabinet meeting. A plucky attempt at “business as usual”. But business is now anything but usual, as the disarray at his first parliamentary meeting showed.

As John Slinger wrote at Uncut back in July, we are now in the realm, not of New Labour or Blue Labour, but “looking-glass Labour”. A strange, almost psychedelic parody of what chimes with the public and wins elections for Labour.

Just like with Alice, from the other side of the mirror things look as if the looking-glass side is exactly the same. But it is only when you get through to the other side of the looking-glass, that you see the parts which you could not see so easily before. The bit behind the mantelpiece. The part through the parlour door. They are different.

This is not a prediction. Things will happen at different speeds, and perhaps some will not happen at all. But, according to well-travelled historical precedent, the following is what generally happens in this party, when it develops a critical mass from the far left, as it did in the 1980s; it is essentially the manner of warring factions and coups on which the SWP runs. It is effectively what is happening now within Labour.

One. Corbyn is not a leader. The people around Corbyn now hold the power, he does not. The kitchen cabinet. They are likely to start to agitate early on, in terms of policy and running the party machine. When we talk about the leadership, we therefore mean the leader’s Office, trusted hard-left MPs inside and outside the shadow cabinet, selected members of the NEC and the main trade union leaders, particularly Unite. These people will collectively call the shots, not Corbyn.

Two. There will be an attempt to take over party machinery, as there was a more modest attempt under Miliband: the NEC and the party staff. Many of the party’s longest-serving staff are Blairites and Brownites, and may well be forced out.

Three. Policy will, at the beginning, be a disorganised free-for-all. After the new cabinet have spent some months looking like a rabble, things will settle down, as sensible voices are drowned out, side-lined or reshuffled out, to give way to reliable hard-left thinking. As to the direction of policy, the death of public-sector reform, fairy-tale economics and isolationist foreign policy is probably a good bet.

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Corbyn’s pacifism won’t really affect Britain from opposition, right? Wrong

02/09/2015, 09:50:36 PM

by Rob Marchant

Another week, another revelation about what a Corbyn-led foreign policy would look like. It is enough that Labour would, as it did in the days of George Lansbury, be directed into a position of “peace at any price”, even if that were saving lives from genocide in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, as a previous Labour government did.

This is not an exaggeration: it is hardly a surprise that the chair of Stop the War Coalition, by definition, supports the idea that any military action by the West under any circumstances is a bad thing (although, strangely, that organisation has shown itself not so against war when it is conducted by a non-Western power, such as Russia).

And so we have been treated in recent days to a reminder that Corbyn regards the death of Osama Bin Laden as “a tragedy”. While, in times of peace, it is right to uphold the right of anyone to a fair trial, Bin Laden was killed in war zone. And it is difficult to imagine many British citizens agreeing with that particular stance, let alone those of New York, where he contrived the death of three thousand.

Leaving on one side the fact that this statement was made on PressTV, the propaganda channel of a deeply unpleasant regime, it is extraordinary that we even have to make these arguments.

And then there was the concern articulated by Halya Coynash, one of Ukraine’s most respected human rights activists, that Corbyn had essentially adopted the Russian position on her country:

“His assessment of Russia’s annexation of Crimea coincides nicely with that presented by Russian President Vladimir Putin and on Russian television and he has simply ignored grave human rights concerns under Russian occupation.”

However, for some it is convenient to think that, should Labour elect Jeremy Corbyn as its leader in a few days’ time, his wacky foreign policy ideas would not do Britain any harm. After all, in opposition, what can a party leader do? And in the hearts of many of his most fervent supporters is the realisation that their man can never be Prime Minister.

This is a dangerously fallacious reading of the role of the leader of the opposition.

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Corbyn’s skeletons are already tumbling out of the closet. What would happen if he was leader?

19/08/2015, 05:44:57 PM

by Rob Marchant

If current polls are to be believed, Jeremy Corbyn is about to become Labour leader, not just by a small margin but by a landslide.

That is, as our own Atul Hatwal pointed out on Monday, a pretty significant “if”. For a number of reasons; protest voting in polls but not in elections, “shy” voters, ease of manipulation by flashmobs of more informal polls, difficulty of accuracy polling such a select group, further change in the final few weeks and so on. Given this, it is still perfectly possible that Corbyn will fall at the ballot stage, despite Westminster’s prevailing wisdom.

But let us suppose for a moment that he is genuinely on course to win.

In this case, we are at a genuinely historical turning point – a convulsion – for the party; one of a kind it has not really experienced since Ramsay MacDonald’s “betrayal” in the 1930s.

In short, the wilderness years of the Fifties and Eighties would soon start to look like a tea-party.

In the few short weeks following the election, the psychological state of at least a segment of the party, like any person after a cruel blow, has been evolving rapidly. In this case, from initial denial; through collective tantrum, angry with the world; through to depressive isolationism and potentially actual self-harm.

And the divide over the Corbyn “insurgency” is no longer an issue of right and left. While you might expect to hear noises from the political centre at Uncut, the concern here is not merely from the point of view of his politics, disastrously out of touch with the British electorate though it might be (for the record, Anthony Painter makes an admirable fist of taking these seriously and rebutting them point by point here).

No, for many on the party’s left as well as the right, the reality is that the party is looking to take on a leader with personal credentials considerably less attractive than those of Michael Foot. If you still doubt this, read on.

We have already heard about Corbyn’s disturbing apologism for the IRA in its heyday, his “friends” Hamas and Hezbollah. Phenomena comfortably explained away by his supporters as “engagement” in the cause of peace. But in the space of twenty-four hours, two rather more damning stories have surfaced.

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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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Ten hard truths for Labour

23/07/2015, 05:28:13 PM

Following Tristram Hunt’s call for “a summer of hard truths” Labour Uncut is running a short series laying them out. After that bombshell poll, here are some about the party itself from Rob Marchant.

1. The Labour Party has not merely just lost an election after five years of drift; it has been getting worse since. It has now fallen deep into an existential crisis of purpose, with a large portion of its membership worryingly in denial about what the British public will actually vote for.

2. The current leadership election is symptomatic of that crisis. Like in the early 80s with Healey and Benn, many in the party are no longer expecting to get the best candidate, merely looking to avoid a disastrous one.

3. For those who believe Liz Kendall was over-egging the pudding in saying that Labour has “no God-given right to exist”, and that it has earned a permanent place in the British Top Two of political parties, some reading about the Liberal Party in the 1920s is required.

4. A Corbyn win would immediately present such an existential threat to the party. In short, the situation is far worse than the leftward drift that led to the Foot years, because (a) the country has moved right since then and hence less sympathetic, (b) Foot was a principled man who did not apologise for fanatics and (c) we hadn’t just been wiped out in our Scottish heartlands just before he was elected.

5. Labour needs to wake up and realise that Unite already represents an existential threat to it and does not have the party’s best interests at heart. It will at some point destroy itself through its increasing irrelevance to both Labour and its own members, but it could well take Labour down with it. It must not be allowed to.

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No, no, Yvette

01/07/2015, 06:10:20 PM

by Rob Marchant

Yes, leadership candidates need to appeal to party before they can become leader and do anything at all. But the lengths to which some will go to tickle the tummy of a party, which has just suffered two disastrous election defeats, continues to beggar belief.

Better – for the sake of kindness – to gloss over Andy Burnham’s statement that this was “the best manifesto that I have stood on in four general elections”. I mean, what can have possessed him?

To be fair, it is difficult to see it, as some have, as an attempt to lay the blame for the party’s recent meltdown squarely at the door of Ed Miliband. That would be especially difficult, with Burnham’s area of the NHS front and centre in the campaign; and also given that he followed it immediately with the words “I pay tribute to Ed Miliband”.

Which leaves us with one of two far worse conclusions: either that it was convenient lip-service; or that he simultaneously believed Labour had both the right candidate and the right manifesto, and still lost catastrophically. A level of cognitive dissonance verging on the Orwellian.

But just as we thought there could be no dafter statements from the mainstream candidates (after all, daft statements from Jeremy Corbyn are to be expected), up pops Yvette Cooper, asking for Labour to double the number of ethnic minority (BAME) MPs if the party were to win a majority.

A laudable aim, on the face of it. Except when you stop to think about what it actually means.

First, look at the logic: “More than 15% of Labour voters are from BAME communities but just 10% of Labour MPs.” Note that we do not talk about Britain as a whole, just Labour voters (clearly we do not aspire to encourage people who do not yet vote Labour). According to Wikipedia, only 13% of Britons are from ethnic minorities (11% if you exclude those of mixed race). Do we honestly think that there are folk out there saying, “Cuh! That Labour party. They’ve cheated us out of three per cent! It’s an outrage! We demand the exact same percentage and nothing less!”

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This is a competition between individuals who aspire to govern a country. It is not a charity event

17/06/2015, 10:35:38 AM

by Rob Marchant

We’re like that in the Labour Party, aren’t we? Oh, he’s a nice bloke, he deserves a shot at this. One of us. Can’t we swing it to get him on the list? Or, worse: we’d better put him on the list, or there’ll be hell to pay.

Never mind that the rules of the list are that you need to get 35 MP nominations. Nominations, note, not pity transfers. It is perfectly right that all sections of the party should be represented in this ballot. But those – and only those – which have earned them.

So when a bunch of MPs decide at the eleventh hour to switch nominations specifically to let Jeremy Corbyn MP limp onto the shortlist, it is against the spirit of the rules, even if it is not against the letter, plain common sense and the seriousness of a leadership election.

Then again, as Jonathan Reynolds MP noted on Monday, neither is this anything approaching serious politics. It is not.

In one move, a small section of the PLP has achieved three things. One, it has shown its contempt for its own rule-book, were it not clear enough already. It has reinforced the idea that, if the rules provide a result you do not like, pressure people to bend the rules and they will.

Two: it has strengthened the voice of its most extreme wing far beyond its genuine representation in the Labour Party (if you don’t believe this, wait and see how Corbyn actually polls in September, or recall Diane Abbott’s dismal poll in 2010).

Three: it has played right into the hands of a few hard-left clowns, whose strategy was to mobilise in order to hammer an online poll at LabourList, in the hope that its (at that point clearly meaningless) result would create unstoppable momentum for a Corbyn place on the leadership list.

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In the battle for post-Miliband Labour, Unite’s leadership fights from a position of weakness, not strength

05/06/2015, 10:37:30 AM

by Rob Marchant

When you are on the back foot, play the victim. The underdog. Under attack from the establishment. If they ask awkward questions, do not accept the premise of the question. Thus has the hard left defended itself against any kind of rational criticism based on mere facts, for decades.

In a remarkably disingenuous, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger piece at LabourList entitled “Setting the record straight over Unite’s position in Scotland”, Pat Rafferty, Unite’s Scottish General Secretary, writes how Unite tried to save Scottish Labour…but they wouldn’t listen. If only they’d listened to us. Instead, an unnamed “some in the Labour Party” are trying to “attack” Unite. Poor things.

Honestly, what rubbish. Unite was part of the problem, not the solution. At the root of Labour’s wipeout was the parlous state of Scottish Labour. The end result of decades of hegemonic machine politics, of which Unite was an integral part. An overbearing, one-horse town politics on which the carpet was lifted in the debacle that was the Falkirk selection, where the union was accused of manipulating the vote. A debacle that, let us not forget, led directly to the biggest-ever shakeup in Labour’s relationship with unions.

No, it was that, and the SNP’s gradually building itself as a credible alternative government to that Labour hegemony, which lost Scotland’s Westminster seats. Not a sudden surge of nationalism. Many of the SNP’s voters do not even want independence and, should we still need reminding, No won the referendum, not Yes.

But with so much managed from Holyrood, Westminster is now a throwaway election for many Scots, much as the Euros have come to be for much of the rest of Britain. A place to register protest. And they did.

Scottish voters also saw how Unite’s disastrous bluster came close to destroying thousands of jobs in a dispute at the country’s only oil refinery in 2013, only to end up with a worse deal for their members than that originally on the table. According to YouGov, half of the Scots surveyed thought Unite’s actions at Grangemouth were wrong. The convenor? Step forward Stevie Deans, chair of, er, Falkirk CLP.

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This party has to change

20/05/2015, 02:29:11 PM

by Rob Marchant

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Albert Einstein

The Parliamentary Labour Party’s second-lowest postwar ebb (its 1983-1987 nadir was the only time it has been smaller) is not a time for us to adopt a “steady as she goes” philosophy. We’ve been there, after 2010.

The same economics, literally, because the team behind it was the same. The same poor – or absent – decision-making. The same sense of drift (usually leftwards, because that is the party’s comfort zone).

In many ways, Milibandism was simply Continuity Brownism and we should therefore scarcely be surprised that it achieved a similar result. Worse still, we may not have even reached the bottom yet: the political direction of travel is clearly still downwards and will continue to be, until/unless a big change can be made to happen.

But while we listen to a hundred reasons why Labour lost, most of them perfectly correct, we miss something underlying. Yes, we had the wrong leader. Yes, our scoring on the economy was mostly awful. Yes, our policy offering was a rag-bag of quite-good and not-so-good tactical ideas, which lacked a mission, a coherent and credible overall theme. Yes, Scotland. Yes, UKIP. Yes, yes, yes.

But.

How did we get here? How did we get to doing all those things wrong?

We have to go deeper.

The fundamental building block of parliamentary democracy is the political party. You cannot secure power without one. It is the motor which drives the train. And it is the health of this organic, living, breathing thing which ultimately determines the outcome of the politics.

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