Corbyn

by Richard Seymour

  The campaign’s ability to summon enthusiastic participation was matched by its online reach, and indeed the two aspects of the campaign were mutually supporting. Marsha-Jane Thompson recalls:

  There is a lot of exaggeration about social media, but we went from nothing to reaching 2.5 million people within four weeks of our Facebook page being launched. At the moment, our page reaches 11 million people every day … In Colchester, this meant that when we put the announcement out about our meeting on Facebook, all thousand tickets were gone within forty-five minutes. This was before the polls showed Corbyn leading the other candidates.15

  In addition to organising meetings, the social media campaign was able to play off against negative media coverage, rebutting the scare stories, and also make a virtue of those aspects of Corbyn’s ideology and career that the media would try to vilify. As Sellers explains,

  There were three strands to the social media campaign. There were the official [social media] accounts which consisted mainly of standard fare, official statements and so on. They grew huge, naturally. But there were also a number of semi-official accounts which we ran, where we had contact with press officers and people working on the ground in the offices in London, with whom we could discuss rebuttal strategies informally. We also had a slight distance from them. The campaign office didn’t want to get involved in rebuttals, but we felt there were some things that needed to be taken on. So we began to plug away at what Corbyn stood for, the fact that he had a consistent ideology, had remained principled since the 1980s, and we turned this into a positive. We simplified his messages and put them out in easily digestible formats, memes and stuff. Then there was a huge volume of people doing smaller projects that were nothing to do with us or even necessarily the Labour Party – pages like ‘Kittens 4 Corbyn’, and so on. We had some tangential contact with these pages, and we could discuss things with them now and again, but they actually did a lot of the rebuttal work off their own back.16

  This is not a dynamic that is peculiar to the Left. It is part and parcel of a political scene in which the ideological monopoly of the traditional media is breaking down. With the rise of alternative sources of information – and according to YouGov, some 57 per cent of Corbyn’s supporters received most of their information about the campaign from social media17 – there is far less deference to the dominant television and press outlets than there had been before. Meanwhile, the antagonism of the news media to Corbyn tended to compound a sense among supporters of both the authenticity of the candidate, and the general untrustworthiness of the traditional media.

  One of Corbyn’s most important assets in the campaign was his ability to say exactly what he thought, and to express it in a straightforward idiom that anyone could grasp without insulting anyone’s intelligence. This rapidly distinguished him from his rivals, who waffled and looked unconvincing when not delivering prepared remarks. There was, indeed, something unreal about their detachment, their lack of direction, and their confusion in the face of Corbyn’s rising star. It didn’t help their cause that there were three candidates from the party’s broad right-wing. The Labour Right, and its media supporters, couldn’t agree on which of these to support. The Mirror backed Andy Burnham, The Guardian supported Yvette Cooper and the Tory press tended to favour Liz Kendall. The differences between the three candidates were miniscule, but the fact that they all competed for the same shrinking ideological space meant that there was no cohesive opposition from the Labour Right to Corbyn’s brand of socialism.

  It also didn’t help that the candidates looked and sounded like special advisors rather than political big-hitters. Jeremy Gilbert, an associate at the soft-left group Compass, recounts that at the inception of the New Labour project, there was a clear divide between special advisors and the loyal MPs parachuted in to safe seats,

  and the architects like Mandelson and Gould, who are more robust intellectually. But they could never persuade serious intellectuals or serious composite political organisers of their case, so they had to recruit banal and unthinking figures – and we saw the outcome of this in the leadership election.18

  So, after years in government, ideologically and intellectually exhausted, divided into three candidates, the Right faced Corbyn in a curiously hesitant mood. Sellers recalls that ‘they didn’t talk a lot about policy, and they didn’t challenge the policy stuff that we put out – in a way, we weren’t facing a serious opponent, which was odd. This wasn’t the strong, efficient machine we were familiar with.’19

  In a clip from LBC radio, which rapidly became viral, the four Labour candidates were asked by a member of the public to say whether Ed Miliband would feature in the shadow cabinet if they were elected. Corbyn gave a straight answer, in contrast to the waffling of the other candidates, prompting the host to remark: ‘This is exactly why Jeremy Corbyn is shown in this Times poll this morning as way ahead of the rest of you, because he’s given me a straight answer to a straight question, and the three of you can’t do that.’20 Participants at a typically packed meeting in Plymouth’s Guildhall emphasised precisely that he spoke convincingly as a Labour candidate, in a way that none of his rivals did:

  ‘He’s saying things in a way that people can understand,’ said Jo, a former secondary-school teacher. ‘He says things that aren’t patronising, that are talking to working people, and that feel like what the grassroots of this party is all about,’ she said. ‘Change is the word,’ said Kate Taylor, a feminist and Labour councillor who was elected at age eighteen, three years ago. ‘I’m a bit sick of having to constantly put aside my own opinions and beliefs for the Labour Party. I would like to get the Labour Party back to what it was made to be, for working people,’ she said.21

  So it was that, as branch and union nominations began to come in, Corbyn was far ahead of his leadership rivals. Constituency Labour Parties had not been bulwarks of Leftism for some time, but here they gave Corbyn a clear advantage, with 152 constituency branches backing him. By contrast, 109 voted to support Yvette Cooper, 111 backed Andy Burnham and a humiliating 18 backed Liz Kendall. This should not be exaggerated: less than half of the branch nominations went to Corbyn, and he gained fractionally under half of the votes of full members in the final result. Yet no one expected a Left this vibrant in the Labour Party. The results suggested that a long dormant Left, the survivors of old and almost forgotten battles, had reanimated and fused with a younger generation radicalised through participation in social movements and single-issue campaigns.

  Far more shockingly to the Labour establishment, Corbyn also gained the support of the largest trade unions, UNISON and Unite, as well as the endorsements of the postal workers union, the CWU, the transport workers’ union, ASLEF, and the other transport workers’ union, TSSA. Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper divvied up the endorsements of the Musicians’ Union, the depleted husk of the miners’ union, the NUM, the builders’ union, UCATT and the shop workers’ union, USDAW. Liz Kendall gained no union endorsements. The advantage of having union support was that it meant there was a well-funded electoral machine working for Corbyn, which there simply hadn’t been for previous left-wing leadership campaigns.

  Why did the leaderships of the larger trade unions, which were not helmed by radical Leftists and had no history of supporting left-wing Labour leadership candidates, back Jeremy Corbyn in this instance? With few exceptions, such as the union backing for Tony Benn’s deputy leadership campaign, the traditional stance of the trade unions in Labour’s internal politics has been to support moderate leadership factions and equally moderate policies. It is true that since the election of a number of left-wing leaders dubbed ‘the awkward squad’, the general trend in trade union support has been to the left, but this has never before led to such a rift with the Labour Party establishment. It is also true that, of the range of alternative leadership candidates available to them, none would fight for union-backed policies in parliament in the way that Corbyn would. But the union leaders are accustomed to bargaining
for minor concessions within the existing framework of the Labour Party, rather than, as they have done by supporting Corbyn, trying to fundamentally alter it.

  In the case of UNISON’s support, one could discern a pragmatic consideration. The threat of a looming election for general secretary Dave Prentis might have inclined him to think carefully about whether he could justify supporting any of the other candidates, none of whom supported union policy in the way that Corbyn did. And while that disciplinary pressure did not apply to any of the other unions, those involved in the Corbyn campaign could see other pressures at work. ‘Union leaders are more connected to the grass roots than we give them credit for sometimes,’ Thompson argues,

  and they could see which way their membership was going. They could see that members in their unions were signing up to support Jeremy. The data on their websites, where people could register to vote and back a candidate, showed that they were overwhelmingly backing Jeremy.22

  Perhaps the most important consideration was hinted at in the CWU’s official rationale for supporting Corbyn. They argued that Corbyn’s victory would help break the ‘grip of the Blairites … once and for all’.23 Throughout the whole period of Blairite dominance, the unions had been slowly sinking into an existential crisis. Their social depth has declined, the legislative climate has remained abysmal, industrial action has sunk to all-time lows, levels of manufacturing have continued to decline and the private sector is overwhelmingly non-unionised. Furthermore, the ability of the unions to do anything to reverse these trends has been seriously undermined by a series of reforms which have hacked away at their political clout within the Labour Party. The most recent of these was a package of measures recommended in the Collins Review, which in one manoeuvre disenfranchised millions of trade unionists. The spark for the reforms had been the Falkirk controversy, in which Unite was baselessly accused of rigging Labour’s selection procedures. That Miliband instrumentalised this fake scandal in order to further weaken the union link ought to have put the unions on their guard. But, not wishing to embarrass Ed Miliband in the year before an election, and having been promised that the process would be continuously reviewed, they backed the reforms. This strategic blunder only compounded their crisis and it is likely that the victory of any other candidate would have led to their further marginalisation.

  Corbyn’s momentum, however much it enlivened the Labour Party, was met with a growing chorus of fury among Labour Rightists. As soon as it became clear that he was the favourite to win, with polls beginning to give him a clear lead as early as mid-July, panicked battle cries began to fly.

  ‘Project Fear’

  During the campaigns for and against Scottish independence, the leadership of the Unionist ‘Better Together’ campaign comprising both Labour and Conservative parties embarked on an offensive privately dubbed ‘Project Fear’ by the organisers.24 The idea was, rather than selling the benefits of the Union, to terrify Scottish voters with visions of political and economic chaos should they vote to leave the UK. At its peak, Project Fear brought together leading figures in the state, business and media operators. The Financial Times reported25 that the government twisted the arms of business leaders – 85 per cent of whom supported the Union – to go public with a series of warnings about economic disaster in the event of independence. Meanwhile, the civil service abandoned its customary pretence of neutrality, as the head of the Treasury Sir Nicholas Macpherson argued that there was no need for neutrality when ‘the very existence of the British state was at stake’. Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, drafted the Queen’s intervention in the debate, while the Treasury published unusually partisan advice. Research showed that the main broadcast media, above all the BBC, were on board with the fear campaign, overwhelmingly publicising negative claims about independence.26

  A remarkably similar pattern was to emerge in the case of the Left’s capture of the Labour leadership. During the leadership election, three Labour MPs from the party’s right-wing – John Mann, Barry Sheerman and Graham Stringer – called for the process to be halted, claiming to be worried about infiltration by the far Left and Tory trolls.27 They argued that the new rules under which the election was being conducted made it impossible to vet participants. As Stringer put it, with the influx of registered supporters, ‘We do not know and could never know whether these people support other political parties.’ Sheerman likewise contended that among infiltrators, only a few of the ‘usual suspects’ could possibly be detected by vetting measures. Mann suggested that ‘long-standing members’ might be ‘trumped by people who have opposed the Labour Party’, invoking the danger of a return of the old Trotskyist faction, Militant.

  The Sunday Times joined in, leading the charge with a front-page story amplifying calls for Harriet Harman to cancel the leadership vote: ‘Hard left plot to infiltrate Labour race.’28 The only solid evidence of such a plot was a call by a groupuscule called the Communist Party of Great Britain for members to join Labour and support Corbyn. This was a group whose membership didn’t exceed two dozen, and whose major claim to fame was its weekly news-sheet, recognised among the cognoscenti as the Heat magazine of the far Left. Otherwise it rested entirely on over-heated claims by right-wing Labour MPs and anonymous officials. Nonetheless, the piece succeeded in framing Corbyn’s supporters as a deviant demographic, a trope that persists in the punditry of the traditional media. Dan Hodges, a Blairite pundit and former spin doctor who had complained about Corbyn even making it onto the ballot, evoked a distorted image of Labour Party constituency meetings swarming with ‘dozens of proto-Trotskyists … demanding a people’s revolution, and shouting down anyone who disagrees with taunts of “Red Tory”’.29 Andy McSmith, a journalist sympathetic to the Labour Right, was less excited about infiltration plots, yet he too rather sneeringly characterised Labour’s registered supporters as ‘£3 day trippers whose idea of political involvement is to log on, vote Corbyn, and tell your mates via Facebook’.30

  In fact, the rules that these people now complained about were exactly the same rules as had been approved overwhelmingly by conference, with 86 per cent of the vote and with opposition largely coming from the Left, in the year before the leadership election.31 They were part of the wider series of transformations recommended in the Collins Review, which weakened the union link and were welcomed at the time as a radicalisation and deepening of previous Blairite reforms.32 The logic of such reforms was to achieve a transformation that even Blair could not. Labour, at its inception, federated the institutions of the labour movement into a broad political party, with trade unionists making up the organised core. The New Labour project had been, in part, to replace this federal structure with one in which the organised core was the professional strata that ran the party, while the base consisted exclusively of individualised supporters and members. By weakening the union link, and replacing the levy-paying trade unionists with a mass of largely passive supporters paying a small fee, the party would be anchored firmly in the political centre.

  What Labour’s party managers had sought, ironically, was precisely the political day tripper – a cash cow, and voting fodder, but otherwise not likely to make life difficult for the party professionals. If no one at the time worried about the possibility of Trotskyist infiltration, this was because it would make precious little difference to anything even if it did happen. That analysis still holds. Almost 300,000 people signed up as members and registered supporters of the Labour Party during the election campaign. The total weight of the far Left in the UK is, based on the acknowledged (and often exaggerated) memberships of its organisations, less than 5 per cent of that total. What is more, most of its members wouldn’t be seen dead in Labour – indeed, many of them have spent years eagerly working to replace it with a British equivalent of the Continent’s radical Left parties.

  Yet, rather than clearsightedly dismissing most of these largely confected complaints of infiltration, the Labour Party management decided to act on them, and beg
an a process of purges. In doing so, they took a fairly broad interpretation of their remit, purging for example the general secretary of the civil servants’ union, the PCS, Mark Serwotka. It is not clear how many were excluded in total. Some alarmist reports, apparently encouraged by acting leader Harriet Harman, who talked up the number of supposed ‘infiltrators’, gave the impression that up to 100,000 people might be purged. The total number of people expelled by the end of the process was reportedly closer to 3,000. Many of those who were banned were targeted for having previously been members or supporters of other centre-Left parties such as the Greens. The perfect idiocy of this defies measurement. For most young political activists, in an era when party identifications are weaker than they have ever been, and when the electoral system is showing signs of unusual volatility, a degree of political polyamory should be expected. It would be remarkable, and something Labour should regret, if it were unable to win back those who might have dallied in the past with the Liberals, the Greens or the Scottish National Party (SNP) – and odd for a party that used to proudly brag about former Tory MPs it had lured into the Blairite fold. To react to success on this front as evidence of ‘infiltration’, when the party managers know perfectly well that there is no evidence of organised entryism, bespeaks some form of political derangement. Worse, many of those who were expelled were not driven out for anything as substantive as an impure political past. The party simply had ‘reason to believe’ that they did ‘not support the aims and values of the Labour Party’. These and similar expulsions appear to have been based on vexatious complaints emailed from local constituency chairs eager to ward off the Corbynite offensive.33