Corbyn’s Leadership Bid
Threatens Cozy New Labour, Thatcherite Consensus
It all
started as a caller’s off-hand suggestion during a London radio phone-in show
and, apparently, as a bit of a joke. Even Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing MP who
has represented the constituency of Islington North in the House of
Commons since 1983, viewed his nomination for the Labour leadership
contest as a bit of a long shot. The Tories initially greeted a likely Corbyn
victory as a gift – but they’re not cheering so loudly now. Corbyn’s campaign
meetings and rallies have drawn thousands of people. Like the Scottish National
Party’s anti-austerity call north of the border during the referendum, the
victory of the Syriza Party in Greece, and the emergence of the self-proclaimed
socialist, Bernie Sanders in the US, Corbyn’s movement-like campaign threatens
to change the game and place dynamite under the bedrock of the neo-liberal
Thatcherite consensus that has prevailed since the 1980s.
The
establishment’s terror of a Corbyn victory may be seen in the hysterical media
blitz against him – negative attempts to smear him by attacking his wife,
digging for dirt on his parliamentary expenses (just £80 last year, as it
turned out), digs about his beard, and about the fact that he eats
cold baked beans straight from the can. More substantially, he is smeared as
‘anti-American’ for wanting to remove US bases from British soil,
‘anti-Semitic’ for criticising Israel’s relentless war on the Palestinians,
‘pro-Putin’ over Ukraine because he dares criticise NATO’s post-Cold War
expansionism, and monstrous for suggesting that Islamic State is the result of
the disastrous and illegal war of aggression against Iraq in 2003—which he
opposed at the time, unlike his principal New Labour leadership challengers and
critics, including the Blairites. Tony Blair should be worried: if elected,
Corbyn is planning to apologise to the Iraqi people and has hinted at a war
crimes trial for the former premier.
George
Orwell would be proud of the double-speak from New Labour’s gurus – Gordon
Brown, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson et al. Their rhetoric is ‘radical’ – the
country needs a radical alternative, that attacks poverty and inequality, and
delivers public service and social justice. But they all support the austerity
policies – i.e., further savage cuts in welfare spending on the most vulnerable
– of the Cameron government. This contradiction is helpfully glossed over by
the mainstream media.
As a
democratic socialist, Corbyn has stood on the left of the Labour party for
decades and has hardly changed despite the takeover of the party by ‘New’
Labour. In reality, the party was transformed into a pale imitation of the
Conservatives after the Thatcher revolution. Now, he stands accused of
encouraging Greens, leftists, and even mischievous Conservatives to join the
Labour Party to get elected. His is the authentic voice of a Labour
constituency that many had pronounced dead – anti-war, anti-imperial,
pro-Palestinian, for nuclear disarmament, and for an end to the
privatisation of major utilities.
Corbyn’s
policies – to extract more taxes from big corporations by closing loopholes, to
reverse Tory spending cuts, to renationalise the railways and energy utilities,
to reinstate Clause 4 of the Party’s constitution (to take into public
ownership the ‘commanding heights of the economy’), to renegotiate the
relationship of the state to the individual, is considered revolutionary within
the Labour party but has massive popular appeal across party divides. Corbyn’s
appeal chimes with the dramatic victory of the SNP at the May 2015 general
election – where Labour lost dozens of seats. He also draws support from
traditional Labour and other supporters of the UK Independence Party, which won
5 million votes in the general election. His campaign is a rebuke to the
long-lived politics of TINA – ‘there is no alternative’, the clarion call of
Margaret Thatcher as she dismantled the welfare state and declared war on the
trade unions and working poor.
Although
ahead in the polls, a Corbyn victory is fraught with problems. Several former
and current Labour grandees are warning of a civil war within the party should
the democratic socialist win on September 12. Holding together the party
will be a major problem for Corbyn’s leadership and could lead to a major
split. The last time Labour adopted a left-wing manifesto, back in the early
1980s, with the late Tony Benn at its head, several leading figures on the
right of the party—such as Roy Jenkins, David Owen and Shirley Williams— formed
the rival Social Democratic Party. And that’s the message the Blairites are
driving home – that there will be a replay of the electoral disaster of 1983.
Opposing
the Conservative government’s austerity policies will also be challenging given
the widespread acceptance of savage public expenditure cuts as an “obvious”
strategy. The prevailing consensus is deeply entrenched despite the
near-collapse of the financial system in 2007-08.
And the
record of Labour in power, even before the Thatcher era, was often seen as
evidence, by the Left, of the impossibility of radical reform and
redistribution of wealth, income and power to the working class within a
capitalist order.
Yet, it
is also clear that there is a yearning for change, an alternative to
untrammelled free market ideology, largely adopted by New Labour since the
1990s, indeed a hallmark of their takeover of the old Labour party of the trade
unions. Corbyn’s apparently unlikely bid for the Labour leadership reflects a
deep desire for an overdue debate about the kind of economy, polity—and
country—Britain needs to be in the twenty-first century.
Whatever
the outcome on 12 September, the Labour Party cannot continue in the old, New
Labour, way—Corbyn has torpedoed that project. And the Cameron government will
face the prospect of a revitalised opposition, with broad public support, and a
party with thousands of new members and supporters who are mobilising for
action.
Inderjeet
Parmar is a professor of political science at City University, London.
