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MANY years ago, when asked what she considered her greatest achievement, Margaret Thatcher responded with two words: New Labour. Last Saturday, that achievement suffered a bit of a setback.
Jeremy Corbyn’s anointment as Britain’s new opposition leader has been greeted with both euphoria and prognostications of doom. There are two strands to the latter response. One is grounded in the conviction that under his leadership the Labour Party is unelectable. The other is based on the fear that he may indeed end up in No.10 Downing Street five years hence.
After all, Corbyn was a 100-1 outsider when he managed, at the last minute, to win a slot on the Labour leadership ballot. Quite a few of the MPs who endorsed his candidacy did so on the assumption that it would broaden the debate. No one — least of all Corbyn himself — expected him to win.
But something strange happened once he began articulating his views, and the national media felt obliged to broadcast or print his words even as they ridiculed him in commentaries. Labour voters and supporters suddenly began paying attention, and many of them liked what they heard and read. Unlike his rivals, Corbyn had little trouble making it clear where he stood.
The extent of support for Corbyn shows a desire for an alternative.
What’s more, he stuck with his determination to talk about policies rather than personalities. Once he emerged as the frontrunner, many of the stalwarts of New Labour, from Tony Blair, David Miliband and Peter Mandelson to Gordon Brown and David Blunkett, emerged from the woodwork to slap him down.
Blair first declared that anyone whose heart was with Corbyn deserved a transplant, then derided his vision as Alice in Wonderland stuff. The precise extent to which this mendacious ex-prime minister’s interventions boosted the Corbyn campaign is hard to determine, but the effect wasn’t negligible.
The man whom Thatcher designated her heir led Labour to a famous victory in 1997, but he had wedded the party to a neoliberal agenda that at several levels made it indistinguishable from the Tories. In the recent leadership election, Liz Kendall, the only candidate who carried a candle for Blairite policies, received 4.5pc of the vote compared with nearly 60pc for Corbyn.
On a different level, Tessa Jowell, who had once indicated a willingness to throw herself under a bus for Blair, was convincingly run over last week by Sadiq Khan in the contest for Labour’s mayoral candidate for next May’s London election. Khan, the MP for Tooting who served as Ed Miliband’s campaign manager in the 2010 leadership contest, was among those who nominated Corbyn.
The son of a Pakistani-born bus driver, Khan is expected to face off against Zac Goldsmith, the Eton-educated likely Conservative candidate, who also has a Pakistani connection — to the extent that he happens to be Jemima Khan’s brother. Sadiq Khan may have his task cut out, but it’s not unachievable, and a victory for him could have profound consequences for Corbyn-led Labour.
Those within Labour and pretty much across the media spectrum who are bent upon reciting the thesis that the party cannot conceivably prosper electorally under Corbyn could be proved wrong. They fall into a category of opinion-makers who long ago fell into the trap of assuming that any shift from neoliberal capitalism would prove catastrophic.
The extent of support Corbyn garnered among Labour members and supporters points to a deep-seated desire for an alternative. And whereas the views of the half a million or so Britons who voted in the leadership contest obviously cannot be assumed to reflect the opinions of the wider electorate, at least some of Corbyn’s policies — eg on renationalising the railways and utilities — resonate widely beyond core Labour voters.
What’s more, his candidacy has substantially swelled party ranks and the trend is likely to continue, encompassing those in particular who had drifted away from Labour in the dire Blair-Brown years.
All too many of the arguments against Corbyn have been articulated in the context of the tired old trope that principles shouldn’t be paramount because nothing can be achieved without acquiring power. The obvious riposte is: what is the point in aspiring for power when the policies you offer are effectively indistinguishable from those already in place?
Labour lost this year’s election in considerable part because the electorate was unclear about what it stood for. That, at least, shouldn’t be a problem under Corbyn. His chief concern initially will be the Tory-lite MPs who dominate the parliamentary Labour Party as part of the Blair legacy.
There are, of course, plenty of other formidable hurdles to contend with. But the notion of allowing party members to determine Labour policy is potentially revolutionary in its democratic implications. The establishment and the media will go after Corbyn with a vengeance. If he can survive, Britain’s in for very interesting times.
Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2015
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