Corbyn

by Richard Seymour

  While the Labour Party machinery experimented with excluding party members and supporters on the basis of near-Jesuitical distinctions, the media dutifully advised the public of the coming danger. The near-unanimity of the media’s offensive, supported by the Conservative Party, a section of the Labour Right and actors within the state, was hard to miss. The Media Reform Coalition, set up in the wake of ‘Hackgate’ – the infamous scandal exposing News of the World phone-hacking and the shady relationship of the Murdoch press to top politicians and police chiefs – studied the press response to Corbyn’s victory and found that the papers ‘systematically undermined’ Corbyn from the first day of his leadership. A survey of 494 articles across the press found that 60 per cent of the coverage was negative, with only 13 per cent positive.34

  The right-wing newspapers predictably augured ‘chaos’. The Telegraph predicted that union leaders would try to use ‘coordinated strikes and demonstrations’ to ‘topple the Government’, while another columnist warned of Corbyn’s supporters ‘seizing the means of production and distribution directly through strikes and organised demands’.35 The Daily Mail published a delirious fantasy about Jeremy Corbyn taking office and the first days of his administration, which began: ‘The night sky over London was thick with choking black smoke…’.36 Invoking an indebted basket-case economy torn apart by rioters, demonstrators and revolutionaries, it was practically salivating over the apocalyptic scenario it conjured up. One can’t help but see in such eristic a degree of projection and nostalgic wish-fulfilment: the right-wing yearning for the old fighting days of the Cold War, when they could crush the Left in the name of the Free World. Even the seemingly sober Financial Times was at it, complaining of an ‘air of menace’ stalking Corbyn’s campaign: ‘National socialism, it was once called. One side waves the flag, the other demands a bigger state. Both rail against outsiders – the right against immigrants, the left against international capitalism.’37 Here, the exuberant followers of a bearded, anti-war socialist were found to be analogous to the Third Reich. The Financial Times not only reached the threshold of Godwin’s Law, in three sentences, it also compared powerful multinational capital to the desperate refugees being left to drown in the Mediterranean and subject to racist persecution across Europe.

  One of the most insidious attacks from the Right was organised by the Jewish Chronicle, edited since 2008 by the Tony Blair–worshipping neoconservative pundit Stephen Pollard. In an article published a month before the outcome, the Chronicle posed a series of ‘key questions Jeremy Corbyn must answer’.38 Most of these were insinuation, guilt-by-association tactics. So, for example, it queried his links to Carlos Latuff, whom it characterised as ‘the notorious anti-Semitic cartoonist’. Latuff is notoriously pro-Palestinian, but support for Palestine is a far cry from anti-Semitism. Even the Jewish daily Forward considers it a ‘stretch’ to call his cartoons ‘antisemitic’.39 Far more insidious was the attack on Corbyn for supporting Raed Salah, whom the Chronicle depicted as ‘a man convicted of the blood libel’. This was particularly obnoxious, because Salah had been the subject of a deportation struggle, in which these claims of anti-Semitism were used by the government to support his expulsion from the UK. What the Chronicle failed to mention was that Salah won that court case precisely because these claims were shown to be false and based on mistranslations.40 The fact that Salah was being slandered by the government is the reason why Corbyn, quite ethically, stood by him. Nonetheless, the Chronicle’s article provided material for reams and reams of similarly insinuating media attacks, such as Dan Hodges’s claim that Corbyn’s victory would be ‘cheered by terrorists and racists’; and it served as ammunition for Labour’s mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan to attack Corbyn in the Daily Mail for ‘encouraging’ terrorism.41

  The centre-Left press had its own lines of attack. The Guardian, a long-standing ally of the Labour Right, played a particularly shoddy role, both in its journalism and its comment pages. Its comment pages were filled with condescension toward Corbyn and his supporters from comment editor Jonathan Freedland, leader writer Anne Perkins, columnist Suzanne Moore (a former eurocommunist pugilist from the pages of Marxism Today) and veteran columnist Martin Kettle (another former Marxism Today writer) – all essentially repeating the habitual refrain of Corbyn’s Labour critics that he and his supporters were obsessed with their narrow concerns and oblivious to his unelectability.42 Its sister paper, the Observer, was little different, with senior journalist Andrew Rawnsley deriding Corbyn’s ‘promised land’, belittling its ‘fantasy’ politics and invoking Labour’s ‘near-destruction at the hands of the Bennites’.43 The paper’s editorial repudiating Corbyn finally induced an exasperated response from the Observer’s senior journalist Ed Vulliamy, who wondered why the paper had joined in the chorus of attacks, leaving ‘a lot of good, loyal and decent people who read our newspaper feeling betrayed’.44 Symptomatically, the flood of disobliging column inches about Jeremy Corbyn in these newspapers was marked by constant harking back to the 1980s. As if nothing fundamental had changed that might bear thinking about. As if the same battles could be restaged – and indeed, the Guardian gave space to one of Labour’s wealthiest donors to suggest that a Corbyn victory could be met by an SDP-style split.45 As if those rallying to Corbyn might not be responding to the problems of twenty-first-century Britain. As if part of the problem might not be the palpable inadequacy of the candidates whom liberal commentators seemed to think had a right to win, regardless of the paucity of their campaigns. One is entitled to wonder who it is here who was really stuck in the past, and really mired in self-serving fantasy.

  One of the main methods of obloquy from the centre-Left papers – aside from the claim that Corbyn’s supporters were either spaniel-eyed naïfs, gently prancing around in cloud cuckoo land, or dangerous ideological zealots – was to bait Corbyn’s supporters as sexist. The Guardian had backed Yvette Cooper for the leadership, partially on the grounds that she would be the first female leader, bringing ‘down-to-earth feminism’ to the role, and challenging austerity policies that hurt women. Its leading columnist and former Social Democratic Party (SDP) star Polly Toynbee seconded the endorsement, announcing: ‘Labour needs a woman leader.’46 This prompted a reply by the seasoned feminists Selma James and Nina Lopez, who pointed out that Cooper not only supported ‘sexist austerity’ but had also implemented it in government, abolishing income support and extending work-capability assessments for the sick and disabled.47 Nonetheless, having supported Cooper as a ‘feminist’, it didn’t require much imagination to notice that Corbyn was not female and thus to indict his supporters ‘brocialists’. Suzanne Moore complained that as Corbyn was ‘anointed leader’ – that is to say, elected leader – ‘not one female voice was heard’.48 The remarkable thing about this complaint was that Corbyn won among women by a landslide. The polls showed that 61 per cent of women eligible to vote in the election supported Corbyn, while the two female candidates, Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper, gained 4 per cent and 19 per cent respectively. The polling company YouGov pointed out that ‘women who are eligible to vote are dramatically more likely to vote Corbyn than men’.49 What Moore meant was that she hadn’t listened to the women who supported Corbyn, an important distinction.

  This campaign spread to the Independent, which published a surreal piece headlined, ‘If it’s truly progressive, Labour will have voted in a female leader – regardless of her policies’.50 It was also mirrored in the Telegraph, which gleefully wondered if Corbyn had a ‘women problem’.51 Cathy Newman, a Channel 4 News reporter who had recently made headlines by falsely reporting an example of sexist exclusion at a mosque, authored a piece for the Telegraph which sneered: ‘Welcome to Jeremy Corbyn’s blokey Britain – where “brocialism” rules’.52 Newman’s complaint did not concern policy, on which Corbyn was difficult to attack, but representation. She alleged that none of the ‘top jobs’ went to women. Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, it must be said, was notable for being the first to hav
e more than 50 per cent of its posts occupied by women53 – as opposed to the pathetic 22 per cent representation that women have in wider public life. The shadow ministries of Defence, Business, Health, and Education were all run by women. The shadow cabinet was, in other words, more gender-egalitarian on this front than any previous Labour shadow cabinet. It is perfectly fair comment to lament that important posts such as shadow chancellor have never been held by a woman, but the force of the point is blunted if it is simply used in an opportunistic way to belabour Corbyn. Likewise, the New Statesman’s effort to pour cold water on Corbyn’s victory, with the headline ‘Labour chooses white man as leader’, would have been far more convincing if the publication had not generously supported every previous white man elected as Labour leader.54

  Another major theme of the ongoing campaign was Corbyn’s supposed unelectability. A typical example of this was the Independent’s misleading story, originally accompanied by a false headline that read: ‘Jeremy Corbyn “loses a fifth of Labour voters”’.55 The substance of the story, carefully obscured within prevaricating formulations, showed something completely different. Sixty-three per cent of Labour voters said they were more likely to vote Labour in the next election with Corbyn as leader, as opposed to 20 per cent who said they were more likely to vote Conservative. Over a third of SNP voters, approximately a third of Liberal Democrats, about one-fifth of UKIP voters and 8 per cent of Tories were more likely to vote Labour with Corbyn as Labour leader. And four-fifths of Tory voters were more determined to vote for their own party, just under a fifth of SNP voters would be more likely to vote Tory, while a third of Liberals and 40 per cent of UKIPers would be more likely to vote Conservative. Corbyn had not lost voters: he had polarised them in a new way.

  The class valence of Corbyn’s supposed unelectability varied, depending on whom one was listening to. According to an opinion piece in the Telegraph, Corbyn’s ‘sub-Marxist drivel’ showed that he had ‘no understanding of the British people’,56 whose great middle class had no need of the types of Leftist reforms he proposed. A similarly splenetic piece in the Guardian held that Corbyn’s Labour was so ‘poncified’ that working-class voters had turned off in droves.57 These claims reached a comical zenith during an otherwise unremarkable by-election. The Times had insisted that Labour was ‘counting the cost’ of Corbyn’s peacenik antics in Oldham, where a UKIP challenge was ready to reduce Labour’s majority to a margin of error.58 John Harris, in a video report from Oldham for the Guardian, held that ‘Corbynmania’ was about to collide with ‘reality’.59 Corbyn’s leadership was ‘looking increasingly fragile’, Harris averred, and cited an encounter with an anti-Corbyn Labour voter to suggest that perhaps the only remaining Labour voters would be the hardened tribalists who put the party first. There being no polling in this by-election, journalists relied on a combination of anecdotes, vox pops and their own prejudices. In the end, Labour held the seat not only with a sizeable majority of over ten thousand, but increased its share of the vote with a 7.5 per cent swing in its favour. The anticlimax was palpable, and the Telegraph wondered whether ‘Muslims worried about war’ might not be to blame for the victory.60

  Other hit pieces strained for effect. For example, a story in the Telegraph – a paper that, more than any other, has been out for Corbyn’s blood – referred to claims that Corbyn had a consensual relationship with Diane Abbot in the late 1970s as ‘damaging’.61 Janet Daley of the Telegraph recounted a horror story from Haringey in the seventies in which Jeremy Corbyn, as a local councillor, may or may not have been indifferent to the squatters residing in a house next to hers.62 Anne Perkins of the Guardian, with a tone so stiff as to be almost beyond satire, complained that Corbyn had not sang the national anthem at a commemoration service: ‘it is his job to sing it’.63 The Sun published a false story alleging that Jeremy Corbyn was a ‘hypocrite’ since, as a republican, he was willing to bend his knee and kiss the Queen’s hand in order to secure state funds for Labour.64 This was complemented by another Sun ‘scoop’, claiming, again falsely, that Corbyn ‘refused to bow’ to the Queen, in an apparently trivial defiance of protocol.65 Such contradictory characterisations suggested something of an internal conflict in the smear department: was Corbyn an inflexibly, excessively principled left-winger, or a conniving opportunist? This dreary sequence of contrived stories reached peak absurdity with the media’s extraordinary attention to Corbyn’s precise comportment in the laying of a wreath at the Cenotaph, with piece after piece suggesting that his solemn nod of the head was not quite solemn enough.66

  As the government prepared for war in Syria, and Corbyn tried to rally his MPs to oppose it, pro-war Labour MPs continued to generate tittle-tattle for the press. For example, as the parliamentary vote neared, these seasoned warriors – closets groaning with skeletons, minds keenly attuned to the location of buried bodies – suddenly discovered an extraordinarily delicate temper when faced with criticism, online or offline. News reports listed examples of ‘bullying’ and ‘intimidation’ of pro-war MPs, such as protesters gathering outside the constituency office of Peter Kyle MP; an email sent to Labour MPs by someone claiming to be a Labour Party member to the effect that, if they voted for war, they would face votes of no confidence in their constituencies; a Labour councillor suggesting that MPs who voted for war should face re-selection ballots; a tweet sent to Stella Creasy pointing out that ‘in the digital age there is a lot more accountability to voters’; Labour MPs being called mean things such as ‘warmonger’, and ‘red Tory’; and finally, in December 2015, a news story emerged, based on social media rumours, that anti-war protesters had marched past Stella Creasy MP’s home. As it transpired, the story was wholly untrue, but it provoked a series of denunciations of ‘bullying’, and calls from Deputy Leader Tom Watson to expel any Labour members who were found to have participated.67 A perverse logic thus unfolded, in which Labour MPs, claiming to be victimised, bullied and threatened with excommunication, demanded that activists with whose politics they disagreed be victimised, bullied and purged. Without evidence to support their case, MPs launched a campaign to force Corbyn to disband the nascent Labour left group Momentum. They were not able to inculpate the group in any bullying, but feebly suggested that some of its members probably were involved – and thus the leader of the Labour Party should act with monarchical haste to crush the insurgents.68

  These frivolities were interwoven with another, ongoing line of attack. The Tories had responded to Corbyn’s victory with a series of messages and social media memes designed to identify Corbyn as a threat to ‘national security’ – or, less euphemistically, as an anti-British weirdo who doesn’t know how to bow properly at the Cenotaph, won’t sing the national anthem, will not (or, nefariously, will) kiss the Queen’s hand, and has a romantic affiliation to the nation’s enemies. Characteristic of this obnoxious campaign was a Telegraph piece by Tory MP and former soldier Tom Tugenhat, who expostulated that Corbyn was a terrorist ally who ‘wants to see Britain defeated’.69 But far more alarming were the interventions by the military leadership in this debate. The first came via the Sunday Times, which published without comment or criticism the statements of an unnamed senior army general who claimed that a Corbyn government, if it abandoned Trident and cut military spending, could be subject to an armed forces mutiny.70 The fact that this was not widely regarded in media or Westminster circles as an outrageous attack on democracy, suggested that at least some of the British media was prepared to take a positively Venezuelan turn, allowing itself to become a mouthpiece for the most belligerent elements of the anti-Corbyn chorus. Later, as the campaign over Trident heated up, the chief of staff of the British armed forces used an appearance on the BBC to state that he would be worried if Corbyn’s views were ‘translated into power’. This was an explicit and probably planned breach of neutrality, but more notably it was then defended by Corbyn’s own shadow defence secretary, whose differences with Corbyn on Trident had been made clear. No discipline was appl
ied to the chief of staff.71

  Here, then, were all the classic ingredients of a ‘Project Fear’ campaign: a toxic combination of falsehoods, insinuation, trivialisation, scaremongering, and pointed political interventions by the supposedly neutral apparatuses of the state. By and large, it did not work. This is not to say that it went without benefit for those undertaking it. Corbyn would have to struggle under any circumstances to define a radical agenda that would work in modern Britain, win the media battles to gain a voice for his objectives and assemble a viable electoral coalition behind it. In the context of ‘Project Fear’, he and his allies have had to navigate an almost daily sequence of contrived outrages, neutralise hundreds of petty but toxic talking points, and continually negotiate a truce with his own back benchers. Yet Corbyn won by a mile and remains in the leadership with the overwhelming support of the party membership. Despite dire predictions, there has not been a crash in the Labour vote, although it has not markedly improved either. The fact that Corbyn’s opponents have been unsuccessful thus far suggests that there’s something they’re missing.