Memes and media
If Labour’s manifesto was a turning point in the campaign, the second turning point was Corbyn’s unexpected appearance before a crowd of concert-goers at Tranmere Rovers football stadium on 20 May.
This almost didn’t happen. Many in Corbyn’s team were worried that the response was unpredictable. This was not a political crowd. Those in attendance were eighteen-to thirty-year-olds not expecting a politician to show up. There was the risk that they might boo, throw bottles. The appearance might be relentlessly mocked and trolled on social media. It was judged that Labour’s campaign was going well, so why spoil it with a big risk like this?
However, there was also an argument that Corbyn had already done the mass meetings outside, and while he would continue to do these – he attended over a hundred events, ninety of them rallies, travelling over 7,000 miles – he arguably needed to do something new. The bands appearing that night, from Reverend and the Makers to the Libertines, were keen for Corbyn to attend. And so it was agreed that he would introduce Reverend and the Makers. Corbyn gave a short, characteristic speech addressing education, jobs, health, housing, and decent pay, thanked the crowd, and stood back from the microphone. There was some cheering, and then a low noise started up from the crowd. One of those present recalls,
We heard the ‘Ooooh’ noise, and for a moment we thought they were going to boo. And Jeremy paused for a minute before he clocked it. They were singing ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’. It gave us such a buzz. Then for the rest of that concert, between every single song, twenty thousand people were singing his name. And then it spread. Last week, someone tweeted footage of people chanting it at the Truck Festival, which is between Ed Vaizey and David Cameron’s constituencies, right in the middle of Tory country. I thought it would go well, but no one thought it would go that well.
This meme, the most popular of many among Corbyn supporters, popped up in nightclubs, concerts, and football stadiums all over the country, from Newcastle to Liverpool, Camden, and Birmingham. How did this happen? It wasn’t because of a Labour plan: you can’t script enthusiasm like this. It wasn’t because of Corbyn’s personal magnetism: the man who went on the BBC’s The One Show to discuss his allotment and jam-making predilections doesn’t exude power and dominance. But arguably, unlike many politicians he approaches young people as equals, and takes them seriously as interlocutors. The same qualities enabled him to reach out to celebrity supporters like JME, who interviewed him for i-D. One squirms to imagine, for example, Theresa May or Philip Hammond in a similar setting.
However, none of this would have worked as well or had the reverberations it did, were it not for a profound change taking place. As the Tories discovered to their cost, one reason their strategy wouldn’t work was because the media weren’t working as usual. Patterns of changing media consumption, long under way, had fundamentally changed politics, and Team Corbyn noticed.
The canary in the coalmine here was the 2015 Labour leadership campaign, wherein Corbyn’s social media strategy effectively engaged the broadcasters and press barons in a dispute over the meaning and framing of politics, while also bypassing old media to reach those demographics who had long since stopped paying attention to the print media and television news. By 2017, Labour had improved its game with the traditional media. This involved exploiting May’s increasingly apparent weaknesses, including her bewildering refusal to debate Corbyn directly. Corbyn had handled the obstreperous Jeremy Paxman with stoical good humour, exploiting May’s weakness and the duty of broadcasters to attempt impartiality by offering equal time to the candidates. But Labour had also rolled out a more sophisticated set of digital operations.
The Tories, reports suggested, were winning the battle in terms of paid-for negative advertising online, targeting marginals with advertising intended to make hate figures out of Corbyn, McDonnell, and – in the ‘dog-whistling’ category – Diane Abbott. The advertising sent out from Labour HQ, meanwhile, largely avoided mentioning the leader, reflecting the assumption that he would be a negative factor.56 But paid-for negative advertising is nowhere near as effective as organic, unpaid reach. A paid attack ad is no match for a dozen friends sharing a clickbait article praising Jeremy Corbyn. When it comes to social media, cash is no match for cachet. And Corbyn’s team began to win the battle through its official social media accounts, through outriders who voluntarily produced acres of publicity material, and through a mass of users who participated in an emerging online Corbynista culture. The Evening Standard reported,
Mr Corbyn’s official Twitter and Facebook pages posted 925 messages over the election campaign, receiving 2.8 million shares. Mrs May’s pages posted 159 times, nearly six times less than the Labour leader, and her messages were shared just 130,000 times.57
Facebook users were overwhelmingly inclined to share pro-Corbyn and anti-Tory stories, including celebrity endorsements from Stormzy and JME, and stories from Corbyn-supporting websites like The Canary and blogs like Another Angry Voice, which accounted for 917,000 shares. Stories about Labour’s rise in the polls accounted for another 557,600 shares. Labour social media campaigning played a significant role in signing up one million people to register to vote, partly accounting for what would be an improved overall turnout. There were also signs of more focus in its online output. Labour’s own pages notably shared fewer stories than in the previous election, but significantly more video content than in 2015. The content it did share was also far more positive than the Tory campaign, focusing on its social promises to build and inspire support.58
Labour also invested in some more gimmicky fare. Corbyn was the first leader of a political party to sign up for a Snapchat account. And on election day, Snapchat released a Labour paid-for ‘Corbyn’ filter for supporters. Supporters also created a 1980s-style arcade game, Corbyn Run, in which the eponymous hero took on Tories, tax dodgers, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher, and Boris Johnson on a zipline. It would be easy to scoff at this kind of thing were it unveiled as a grand leadership initiative, like the ‘Edstone’, but it worked well as a sideline in a campaign fizzing with energy and confidence.
Beyond the distribution of messages, Labour activists used social media as a mobilising tool. Momentum was able to raise £100,000 from supporters through Crowdpac at the start of the campaign, which it then used to build online tools to help activists. For example, the website mynearestmarginal.com, advertised constantly on social media, directed activists to marginal constituencies where their efforts could make the most difference.59 And Momentum activists, deploying the characteristic grass-roots methods of street stalls, door knocking, and evening events, were crucial to winning many of the seats taken by Labour. Battersea, for example, would not have even been the target of a Labour effort were it not for Momentum. Derby North, similarly, was won by Momentum. They also contributed to the online buzz, with their videos, along with those created by the ‘Jeremy Corbyn for PM’ social media account, being shared more than official Labour fare.
By the final week of campaigning, it was clear that Corbyn was far more popular than the coverage had suggested, and that the negative polling didn’t tell the whole story. The polling firms couldn’t agree on what the actual final result would be. Almost all polling, however, gave the Tories a significant lead. YouGov, which had been one of the most favourable to Labour, put the Tory lead at 7 per cent in its final poll; Ipsos Mori put it at 8 per cent, ComRes at 10 per cent, ICM at 12 per cent, and BMG at 13 per cent. Only Survation came close, putting Labour at 40 per cent and the Tories at 41 per cent. But the mere fact of such a diversity of projections and such disputation over them, coupled with the palpable vibrancy of Labour’s campaign on the streets, showed that something unusual was up. Britain was proving to be a more politically turbulent country than it had been for years.
The media and pundits simply refused to believe it. In the Daily Mail, Dan Hodges had written confidently that ‘Corbyn will struggle to significantly exceed the 31 per cent Ed Milib
and achieved in 2015’. In the Observer, Nick Cohen had expected the Tories to ‘tear’ Labour to ‘pieces’, a ‘flaying’ that would leave a handful of Labour MPs: ‘My advice is to think of a number and then halve it.’ The Independent front page asserted that May was ‘on track’ for a ‘sweeping win’. Its Blairite political columnist John Rentoul launched an attack on YouGov’s election model for projecting a hung parliament. ‘Tory lead grows in election’s final poll,’ celebrated The Times on its front page, projecting a majority of up to fifty seats. The Sun was less complacent, warning that a ‘Marxist extremist’ and ‘terrorists’ friend’ could be on the brink of power. It begged readers to ‘keep Corbyn and his sinister Marxist gang away from power’.60
At just after 10 p.m. on 8 June, the exit poll told the tale. Labour had broken through. May had lost her majority. Corbyn might even have to lead a minority government.
A New Future
As the election results came in at Labour HQ, the atmosphere was something akin to a wild party, gatecrashed by the living dead. As Corbyn’s supporters roared excitedly at each confirmation that the exit poll was right, some of his opponents wandered around in a blitzed, uncomprehending daze.
Many of Labour’s victories were of a kind that it would only normally get if it was winning the election – the ancient Tory constituencies, the middle-class bellwethers, the shock revolt of working-class voters in the richest borough in London. Unbidden, the ghosts of 1997 resurfaced. For the many, not the few. Things can only get better. Were you up for Portillo? On the Left, abruptly, a sense of pervasive gloom, a foreboding of locust years to be weathered with hard-bitten resilience, gave way to the euphoric realisation that Britain is not just one country, not just the declining, nostalgic, backward-looking cultural sump that incubates racist xenophobia and allows right-wing hatchet men to take out every resentment on the poorest. Another, better country had just announced its existence.
A short video made for the Guardian by John Harris illustrated the change. Having gone out to record the political direction of working-class Britain, and largely found the rightward shift of older, white voters angered over Corbyn’s ‘IRA links’, he suddenly found something different. The young celebrating outside pubs and clubs. The Corbyn chant. Asked why they voted Corbyn, they offered various answers: free school meals, the NHS, the politicians ganging up on Corbyn, the Sun’s bile. Two young women, clearly delighted, gave this answer: ‘We want a new future.’
Beyond the Left, too, the mood changed. While some of the mea culpas from Corbyn’s oblocutors were transparently graceless and begrudging, many people expressed a genuine and even moving change of heart. Even Corbyn’s hardened opponents, such as Peter Mandelson and John McTernan, began to express a measured respect for him. Even Tony Blair eventually popped his head out of the crypt to own up to Corbyn’s success. Those, like Chris Leslie MP, who absurdly tried to claim that the result only showed that Labour could have won with a better leader, were largely laughed at.
It is, in fact, possible that with slightly more time to play, Labour would have won. The momentum clearly favoured Labour, and the Tory strategy had run out steam within the first three weeks. Nothing, not even two high-profile and brutal terrorist attacks in the middle of the campaign, could put the wind back in Theresa May’s sails. Labour sources close to the leadership differ on their take about what could have been, with some arguing that perhaps the limits of radical social democracy were reached at 40 per cent of the vote. But either way, it was thanks to Corbyn’s leadership and the radical programme it made possible that Labour got as far as it did.
Beyond Labour, the campaign’s major achievement was to destroy Theresa May’s authority. The Tories, having grovelled before, were suddenly filled with despair and rage. Conservative MPs lined up to savage May. Nigel Evans scathed that she had shot the party ‘in the head’. George Osborne gleefully called May a ‘dead woman walking’. The Osborne-edited Evening Standard took to lambasting May with front-page relish on an almost daily basis. ITV political editor Robert Peston reported a ‘senior Tory MP’ saying, ‘We all fucking hate her. But there is nothing we can do. She has totally fucked us.’ According to Ian Katz, editor of BBC Newsnight, ‘senior Tories’ feared going ‘to the country any time soon’ since Corbyn would be the ‘likely winner’. Theresa May struggles on as Tory leader; it is only for as long as her backbenchers are terrified of having a leadership contest, since ‘pressure for another election could become irresistible’.61
Beyond that, it became immediately clear that the Tories would be unable to govern on a Conservative agenda. The manifesto, lauded on its release, was now a disaster that could not be implemented. Even having negotiated a lash-up with the Democratic Unionist Party, they had to retreat from some of their policies such as pension cuts, means-testing winter fuel payments, and scrapping free school meals. The party’s research instructs them that they lost because of their support for austerity, and indeed they had been warned about this before the election. Even so, the Tory chancellor Philip Hammond is determined to keep spending as low as possible on the premise that it will give confidence to financial markets jittered by Brexit, and is resisting attempts to raise public sector pay. All signs currently are that a major civil war is coming within the Conservative Party, with Europe, supposedly a settled issue, at the fore.62
‘Make June the end of May,’ a Labour slogan had said. Barring a freak occurrence, that is exactly what they’ve done.
6
Prospects: Can Corbyn Win?
Tell no lies; claim no easy victories.
– Amílcar Cabral
The Uses of Crisis, and the Dialectic of Defeat
Two years of Corbyn’s leadership have shown us that he thrives in the face of crisis. This isn’t just a matter of his unearthly calm and serene good humour when under attack. In another political situation, crisis would mean demise. But in this situation, crises have repeatedly shown themselves to be opportunities.
The chicken coup, which at first appeared to be the beginning of the end, strengthened Corbyn’s base and imposed a rapid political clarification on his supporters. Brexit, which looked so devastating to Labour, is now a poisoned chalice for the Tories. The snap election, announced with regal presumption by Theresa May, was a chance for Corbyn to make a once-in-a-lifetime breakthrough for the radical Left. Some of Corbyn’s allies believe that he thrives in such circumstances because he is no longer boxed in by protocol. The journalist Steve Richards had a point when he claimed that power has often left Corbyn ‘more trapped as a politician than he has ever been’, not simply because of political compromises he has had to make, but rather because of deference to internal procedures and proprieties. Campaigning for political change, rather than smooth continuity, is what he is good at, and it allows him to take risks. Perhaps, though, there is also something else at work. If Corbyn doesn’t seem to be afraid of defeat, it might be in part because even defeats have their uses.
In 1861, as the American Civil War raged, the anti-slavery liberal Charles Eliot Norton wrote in praise of defeat.1 The Union Army had suffered a bitter setback in the first battle of Bull Run, near Washington, DC, its slow and ponderous action allowing an easy victory to the Confederates. The defeat was ‘in no true sense a disaster’, Norton wrote, and was indeed both deserved and a valuable lesson. Indeed, its ‘ultimate consequences’ were ‘better than those of a victory would have been’. The latter would have rewarded and entrenched complacency and bad strategy, whereas defeat allowed for fast rethinking and regroupment.
Defeat is an underrated experience in political life. It is natural that on the political Left, at least, the scarring experiences of defeat in the 1980s – of the miners and the wider trade union movement, of Militant, of the Greater London Council, of the Labour Left – would lead to a weary cynicism about the possibilities for change in such a reactionary country. This deadly onslaught by the Right has been a primary argument for the ascendancy, within the Labour Part
y, of a managerial caste hostile to many of its traditions – not just those associated with the Left, but even the old Right defined by the likes of Wilson, Jenkins, and Callaghan.
Indeed, if principle only leads to defeat, why not turn to electoral professionals, media operators, and brutal party managers with at least the virtue of a killer instinct? If nothing else avails, why not at least get some form of electoral revenge on the authors of said defeat by entrusting everything to those who seem to know how to win? And if the Conservative-aligned media are so grossly powerful, why not hand the reins to those who can play the media’s game? Surely, those who in such circumstances cleave to doctrine at the expense of exercising power, even if only to mildly temper the excesses of capitalism, are at best political Don Quixotes, and at worst fanatical wreckers. Such is essentially the argument of the Blairites, for whom the project is about making Labour an effective ‘party of government’ rather than an effective opposition. Forget the policy wonkery, the ‘blue-sky thinking’, the Geoff Mulgans and Charles Leadbeaters, the Spads and fads, and the passing manias of New Labour triviology. The celebrated cerebral spine of the Blairites was in fact flimsy because it was inessential given the paucity of ambition: it requires little intellectual finesse to leave things more or less as they are. The core of New Labour was its appeal to power. It offered a tempting thrill of success to those who had been so brutally defeated, even if the condition of that success was pre-emptive surrender on all essential questions.
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