Second coming

Published September 28, 2016
mahir.dawn@gmail.com
mahir.dawn@gmail.com

OVER the decades, the British Labour Party has taken pride in describing itself as “a broad church”, implying the existence of differing shades of opinion within an organisation nonetheless wedded to a common purpose. The characterisation has often masked deep differences, which occasionally descend into open internecine warfare, usually when the party is in opposition.

More than 50 years ago, the singer-songwriter Leon Rosselson satirised the party’s centrist tendencies in verses that seem equally applicable to many of the MPs who revolted some months ago against a leader overwhelmingly elected by Labour’s members and supporters last September — precipitating a fresh leadership election in which their target was returned to his position with an increased mandate.

“Firm principles and policies are open to objections,” Rosselson sang in 1962 in The Battle Hymn of the New Socialist Party, “And a streamlined party image is the way to win elections.” In a particularly stinging stanza he goes on to say: “It’s one step forward, one step back, our dance is devilish daring/ A leftward shuffle, a rightward tack, then pause to take our bearings./ We’ll reform the country bit by bit, so nobody will notice it/ Then ever after, never fear, we’ll sing The Red Flag once a year.”


It was not surprising that Corbyn’s mandate had been renewed.


Back then, the party wasn’t ashamed to call itself socialist, even if that definition was barely applicable to most policies of the Harold Wilson/ Jim Callaghan governments through the 1960s-70s. Until the mid-1970s, though, the wide-ranging socialistic measures instituted by the post-war Labour government of Clement Attlee — a mild and uncharismatic leader derided by Winston Churchill as “a modest man with much to be modest about” and “a sheep in sheep’s clothing” — largely remained intact as part of a tacit all-party consensus.

It was in part Labour’s failures, particularly on the industrial front, that paved the way for the advent of Margaret Thatcher, a game changer for British politics. One of the many deleterious consequences of the neoliberal/monetarist ascendancy was to shift the presumed centre of politics sharply to the right. Thus when the supposedly centrist Tony Blair led Labour back to power in 1997, Thatcher was able to hail him, without a trace of irony, as a worthier ideological heir than her Conservative successor, John Major.

Throughout the Blair years and beyond, Jeremy Corbyn was a principled backbencher on the fringes of the broad church, frequently taking a stand against his party’s policies and occasionally facing expulsion alongside his comrade-in-arms John McDonnell, now the shadow chancellor. No one saw him as a future leader.

He barely made it on to the leadership ballot last year, but the incredible enthusiasm his campaign inspired ought to have served as an eye-opener to his parliamentary colleagues, evocative of a changing popular mood. The mild-mannered Corbyn won almost 60 per cent of the vote.

A plot to destabilise his leadership was launched almost right away, with the media more or less across the political spectrum, from the Murdoch rag The Sun to the supposedly left-wing The Guardian, not to mention the technically ‘neutral’ BBC, singing from a similar hymn sheet. In an onslaught unprecedented in its viciousness — although there are echoes here of the concerted, below-the-belt campaign against Michael Foot in the 1980s — Corbyn was dismissed as a throwback who made the Labour Party unelectable. Charges of anti-Semitism and sexism are regularly flung at his supporters.

The bulk of Labour MPs picked the Brexit referendum as a trigger, directly or implicitly blaming the result on Corbyn’s lack of enthusiasm for the European Union. It emerged more or less immediately that they planned to act even if the popular verdict on membership of the EU had gone the other way. The rebels did not have a plan, though, let alone a figurehead cap­able of mounting a cre­dible leadership challenge.

Last Saturday it eme­rged, to no one’s great surprise, that Corbyn’s mandate had been renewed. Not only that, he mana­ged to secure a bigger vote on a larger turnout than last year, and his margin of victory would probably have been wider had the party apparatchiks not imposed a January 2016 cut-off on members eligible to vote.

It is obviously true that overwhelming backing among party members and supporters does not automatically translate into winning margins among the wider electorate. Labour’s overall polling figures are low, but that’s true of social-democratic parties across Europe, where in some cases they have been losing support to organisations or coalitions further to the left. And the commonest alternative for those disenchanted with the status quo is the far right, a rising threat across Europe.

A deeply divided Labour is obviously unelectable. But compromises are being contemplated at the party conference currently under way in Liverpool. Should most MPs be willing to meet the leadership half way, and the centre shifts back to where it belongs, Labour may well not be a write-off if Theresa May calls an early election.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

Published in Dawn September 28th, 2016

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