by Tom Bower
In the debate, Cameron described Corbyn, Milne and their associates as ‘a bunch of terrorist sympathisers’, but his argument that the bombing would support an army of 70,000 moderate Syrians lacked credibility. Corbyn’s reply was predictable. The unexpected highlight was Benn’s oratory. In an impassioned speech urging that ‘fascists need to be defeated’, he established the moral high ground. The Commons erupted in cheering. Skewered, Corbyn sat stony-faced amid the acclaim for Benn. Then, in a display of petulance, he refused to move so his adversary could sit down. As usual, he could not tolerate a challenge, especially from his mentor’s son. ‘Parliament,’ Corbyn snapped, ‘is supposed to be serious. It’s not a place for jingoistic cheering.’ Despite Momentum’s intimidation, sixty-six Labour MPs voted to bomb ISIS. Although the majority of Labour MPs supported Corbyn, he was bruised by a government majority of 174. Within minutes of the vote, Andrew Murray and Lindsey German encouraged their supporters to trash the disloyal MPs as ‘warmongers’ and (again the overstatement) ‘traitors’ ripe for deselection. Corbyn’s threats, retorted the rebels, had made them ‘a target for home-grown jihadists’. Even ‘Bomber Benn’ was not safe from Corbyn’s militants. Tosh McDonald, president of Aslef, compared him to Hitler. To calm the argument, John McDonnell issued a warning: ‘There is no place in political life for threats or abuse and we will not tolerate them.’ No one took his words seriously; they reeked of hypocrisy.
For a brief moment, Corbyn’s fate again hung in the balance, but days later he was saved. A by-election was held in Oldham, the first of the Parliament, caused by the death of the long-standing Labour left-winger Michael Meacher. Those predicting doom and dismay were trounced by Momentum activists and Corbyn’s Muslim supporters. On a 40.3 per cent turnout, Labour won with a handsome majority of 10,835 votes, with Ukip beating the Tories into second place. Corbyn’s alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood had paid a rich dividend, yet no one mentioned Labour’s tolerance of misogyny during the campaign. At election meetings in Muslim areas men and women had been strictly segregated; Muslim women complained that Labour would not let them stand in council elections; and Corbyn remained silent when his supporters made sexist attacks on female MPs.
Five days later he travelled by Eurostar to Paris, where he had been invited to address four hundred environmentalists and trade unionists about climate change.
‘What’s your big argument?’ he had been asked two weeks previously by his speechwriter Josh Simons. ‘What do you want to say?’
Corbyn looked forlorn. ‘What do you think, Seumas?’ he asked.
‘This is a key moment,’ replied Milne. ‘It involves the big corporations and their influence on the world.’
‘Great,’ replied Corbyn, relieved that something suitable could be prepared. However, as he read the draft of the speech, he became dissatisfied. ‘There’s a lot about markets,’ he said, clearly confused about the political choice between relying on the state to improve the climate and relying on the marketplace. Disgruntled, he looked at Milne. ‘Now’s not the right time to engage in that,’ soothed his adviser, to calm him. ‘We need to be crowd-pleasing.’ He allowed the word ‘market’ to remain in the speech, not anticipating that it would continue to unsettle Corbyn, always resentful of ideas he disliked. While addressing the audience in Paris, he found difficulty in saying ‘market’ out loud. Stumbling over the word, he lost track of his speech, abandoned the script and went off on a ramble about the threat of extinction to certain species of fish at the bottom of the sea. Sensing the audience’s restlessness, he then reverted to slogans about equality, justice and socialism. To his surprise, the crowd cheered. Even better, the celebrated American activist and writer Naomi Klein appeared from the audience and enthusiastically embraced first Milne, then Corbyn. That evening, Klein’s reassurances over dinner in a brasserie gave Corbyn reason to feel that he had escaped without any damage. His safety net was always the company of sympathetic admirers.
Accordingly, on 11 December Corbyn went to Stop the War’s Christmas party in a Turkish restaurant in Southwark. He arrived with John Rees, a Trotskyite who had publicly pronounced that the ISIS executioner Mohammed Emwazi had been an ‘extremely kind’ and ‘beautiful young man’ until MI5 turned him into a murderer. Corbyn was welcomed by a standing ovation led by Lindsey German and Andrew Murray. Surrounded by his own kind, he praised Stop the War as ‘a vital force at the heart of our democracy’. To further cheers, he criticised ‘unjust wars’. (He meant Britain taking on ISIS in Raqqa, not Assad bombing his opponents in Aleppo.) Before leaving, he offered his Breton hat to be auctioned – it sold for £270. That party was very different to Labour’s own Christmas celebration a few days later – a sulky standoff between warring factions exchanging bad jokes.
The split over Syria did not damage Labour. Most Britons had decided that the bombing would make their own country less safe. A ComRes poll placed support for the Tories at 37 per cent, down 3 per cent, and Labour up 4 per cent at 33. Corbyn’s problems were that on the economy the Tories were 41 per cent against Labour’s 18, and his personal approval rating was only 29 per cent. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said before flying off for a holiday in Malta with his wife. She insisted he needed a rest, while Corbyn could never resist an opportunity to board a plane to escape office routine and strife.
Two weeks later, a poll showed that while 60 per cent of the electorate as a whole were critical of Corbyn, 60 per cent of Labour voters approved of his performance. The Blairites despaired. Peter Hyman, a speechwriter for the former prime minister, wrote at the end of 2015, ‘This is the biggest existential moment in Labour’s history.’ The party’s existence as an alternative government, he lamented, was in doubt. While Labour was credible as the Ukip of the left, Corbyn would never win more than 28 per cent of the vote in an election, the same as Michael Foot. Not enough electors believed in pacifism, republicanism and anti-capitalism. ‘Millions of Britons have been left stranded without a political home,’ Hyman concluded.
Corbyn saw it differently: Labour’s natural voters had recovered their party from the Blairites. Fired up, he returned from holiday determined to eradicate the last of that breed. Working from ‘Taking Control of the Party’, a document produced by Katy Clark and Jon Lansman, he summoned those he judged guilty of ‘incompetence and disloyalty’ to his office. Top of his list for dismissal were shadow defence minister and supporter of Trident Maria Eagle, chief whip Rosie Winterton, and Hilary Benn. During endless meetings, Milne particularly demanded Benn’s dismissal. ‘He wants revenge,’ observed one member of the inner circle. To reduce the fallout, a newspaper was briefed that Benn was to be fired.
At this point Tom Watson re-entered the battle. In Corbyn’s office, he directed his attack at the leader. To protect Corbyn, Milne interrupted him. ‘Shut up,’ snarled Watson. ‘It’s not up to you. You weren’t elected.’
Eventually, several MPs were fired or resigned, but not Winterton or Benn, the latter agreeing not to oppose Corbyn openly. ‘I haven’t been muzzled,’ he insisted. ‘Sacked by Jeremy Corbyn for too much straight-talking, honest politics,’ tweeted Michael Dugher, the shadow culture minister and a working-class MP. Pat McFadden, the Labour spokesman on Europe, was also fired, the fall guy for Benn. Unusually, McDonnell came clean about the dismissals. They were clearing out ‘a narrow right-wing clique’ that was pursuing a ‘right-wing Conservative agenda’.
‘You’re comparing us to the British National Party,’ John Woodcock told McDonnell in the voting lobby. ‘You’re a disgrace.’ The shadow chancellor refused to apologise. Once again, some MPs discussed a coup against those in the bunker, while others predicted that Labour would be out of office until 2030.
In the fallout, Maria Eagle was replaced by Emily Thornberry. The CND-supporting Thornberry was accused by Labour MPs of knowing nothing about defence. She replied that since her brother-in-law Major General Richard Nugee was a ‘top soldier’, she could master her brief. Next she said that Tr
ident was as outdated as the Spitfire, because drones could spot the submerged submarines. She was wrong, but within Labour that was irrelevant. Ninety per cent of the party’s new members supported Corbyn’s attendance at a CND rally against Trident. Only trade unionists were unimpressed. Paul Kenny, the general secretary of the GMB, reminded Corbyn that unilateralism had divided Labour in the 1950s and had kept the party out of power for thirteen years; 46 per cent of the country was in favour of Trident and only 28 per cent against. The party conference, said Kenny, and not Corbyn, would decide whether to keep the weapon. Even McCluskey told Corbyn to his face that Livingstone should be removed from the defence review and Trident should not be scrapped. Corbyn made an even more arbitrary compromise than usual: the submarines could go out on patrol, but without their nuclear missiles. At the end of the week he blamed the atmosphere of indecision on his ‘great failing in life’ – letting everyone talk. Some thought he could have mentioned other failings, but no one doubted his real ambition – to secure unchallenged power.
Mid-January 2016 was the moment those around Corbyn decided to ratchet up their takeover plans. Neale Coleman, an efficient organiser as Corbyn’s head of policy, was judged by Milne to be too keen to collaborate with MPs. For his part, Coleman found the infighting and communism within the leader’s circle intolerable. After a series of arguments provoked by Milne, he resigned. Intentionally, Milne also clashed with Simon Fletcher, Corbyn’s chief of staff since the leadership election. Without discussion, Milne had approved a fly-on-the-wall documentary by Vice Films featuring himself and Corbyn. On discovering that the production was under way, Fletcher predicted that the result would be ‘a huge embarrassment’. Milne replied that Corbyn needed to ‘cut through the mainstream media’. The result proved Fletcher right: Corbyn and Milne were exposed as manipulative and impetuous. By then, the factional skirmishes started in 2015 could only be resolved brutally.
McCluskey inserted his live-in partner Karie Murphy into Corbyn’s office. Murphy, a niggling bully but with a flash of humour, had been the gatecrasher in the failed vote-rigging scandal orchestrated by Unite in Falkirk. Unashamed by that debacle, McCluskey offered Corbyn a deal: if Murphy were employed as his office manager, Unite would pay her salary. In obedience to his paymaster, Corbyn acquiesced. Among Murphy’s first victims was Jon Trickett, Labour’s election supremo. Next was Simon Fletcher. To undermine him, Murphy habitually altered the items he had listed on Corbyn’s monthly strategy meetings. In a matter of weeks, to McCluskey’s satisfaction, Fletcher resigned. His replacement, Corbyn announced, would be ‘a fantastic person’, namely the soft-spoken Trotskyist Andrew Fisher.
The continuing campaign to remove enemies was directed from Corbyn’s office. Milne, Karie Murphy and James Schneider – a new assistant co-opted from Momentum and educated, like Milne, at Winchester and Oxford – ‘anonymously’ briefed ‘outriders’ on the internet – social media websites including The Canary, Aaron Bastani, Novari Media and Squawk Box – to disparage those like Emilie Oldknow, who resigned in disgust from Corbyn’s office after arguing with Milne, going on to work for the right-wing trade union Unison. Young Corbynistas, the ‘outriders’ knew, relied entirely on social media for their information, and would approve their mockery of Oldknow with the question ‘When did you ever stand on a picket line?’
The vitriol was energised by Momentum, by then employing permanent staff and, strengthened by McCluskey’s money, lobbying for places on the NEC. Among those selected to influence the new Labour Party was Michael Chessum, an organiser of the 2010 riots at Millbank. Chessum condemned Remembrance Sunday as ‘murderers holding special funerals for their victims’. He demanded the ‘exorcism’ of the Labour Party and the deselection of what he called ‘aristocratic’ MPs. His ally was Cecile Wright, who described the 2011 riots in Nottingham as ‘an uprising targeted at the police’.
Momentum’s steering committee included a group of women suspended from the party, among them Jill Mountford, a member of the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. In 2010 Mountford had stood against Harriet Harman, who she described as a ‘chemically pure Blairite apparatchik personally responsible for many of the government’s attacks on the working class’. Five years on, she urged the expropriation of banks and the abolition of immigration controls, the monarchy and MI5 – very much the Milne list. Another unsmiling leftist was Christine Shawcroft. With Corbyn, she still supported Lutfur Rahman, the mayor of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, even after his conviction for corruption and electoral fraud. Alongside Shawcroft was Marsha-Jane Thompson, convicted for forging electoral forms and sentenced to a hundred hours’ community service; and Jackie Walker, an overt anti-Semite. ‘To protect Jeremy’s leadership’, McDonnell helpfully told these women, Labour’s ‘compliance unit’, which had excluded Trotskyites for ‘spurious reasons’, would be closed down. Endorsed by Corbyn and McDonnell, all three re-entered the Labour Party. Among other returnees were the Trotskyist trade union leader Mark Serwotka and Christine Blower, the general secretary of the National Union of Teachers who had stood as a Trotskyist against Labour in GLC elections.
All understood Corbyn’s priorities. These were, first, to transform Britain into a genuinely multicultural country. ‘I don’t think too many migrants have come to Britain,’ Corbyn said during a visit to ‘the Jungle’, a makeshift camp outside Calais for migrants attempting to enter Britain illegally. Unlimited numbers of migrants, he urged, should be encouraged to cross the Channel. MPs sponsored by Unite echoed his rejection of any restriction until ‘saturation level’ was reached. ‘What does it matter if we have to wait another week for a hospital visit?’ asked Rachael Maskell about admitting unlimited numbers of refugees. ‘Or if our class sizes are slightly bigger? Or if our city is slightly fuller? Surely it is worth it to see those lives being restored again?’
Second, Corbyn found a new voice with which to attack the police. Just thirty-one years after the Broadwater Farm riots, he appointed Kate Osamor as Labour’s new equalities spokeswoman. Osamor, the daughter of Martha Osamor, a close ally of Corbyn’s among Islington’s immigrant community during the 1970s, had asserted that Mark Duggan, a professional criminal linked by the police to ten shootings and two murders, had been ‘targeted [with all Tottenham’s residents] for a concerted attack by the repressive forces of the state’. Duggan had been shot dead by the police in Tottenham in August 2011 while under surveillance for being in possession of a gun. Osamor’s scathing distrust of the police appealed to Corbyn until, two years later, she was accused of nepotism. Without revealing that her son had been convicted of serious drug offences, and subsequently lying about the extent of her knowledge, she sponsored his nomination and election as a Haringey councillor, and also employed him as an assistant at the Commons. Corbyn would initially refuse to take any action, but then accepted her resignation so she could spend more time with her family.
Third, Corbyn supported a political strike by junior doctors despite the possible harm to patients. Ostensibly the dispute was about reforming the NHS model created in 1948. The Tories had pledged to impose a new contract on doctors to provide improved seven-day care. The purpose, said health secretary Jeremy Hunt, was to end the waste of unused equipment over weekends and reduce the risk to emergency patients. Most employment contracts in Britain stipulated that Saturday was a normal working day, so there was no reason for doctors to receive special treatment. In Hunt’s proposed contract, the junior doctors would lose overtime payments on Saturdays, but in compensation their employment would be cut from ninety-one to seventy-two hours a week, and basic pay would increase by 13.5 per cent. The British Medical Association, the doctors’ trade union, opposed all those changes. The government, the BMA protested, was endangering the NHS, would undermine patient safety, increase stress, especially for women doctors if they were pregnant, pave the way for privatisation, and cut doctors’ pay by 30 per cent. Under the control of Momentum, the BMA organised a series of strikes and thr
eatened to withdraw emergency care. In a video for Socialist Appeal, Yannis Gourtsoyannis, a BMA negotiator, said: ‘The Conservative government must fall. Lives depend on it.’ Thereafter, Gourtsoyannis met the union representatives of teachers and rail guards at the National Shop Stewards Network (NSSN) to discuss joint action against the government. Linda Taaffe, NSSN’s secretary, was a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Party and an executive of the National Union of Teachers, which was run by Christine Blower, a Trotskyist agitator. ‘Now is the time to ramp things up,’ said Gourtsoyannis. ‘We need to defend Corbyn and show the government the door.’ At a rally in Brighton, Sean Hoyle, a rail union leader, said that NSSN’s task was to defeat ‘this bloody working-class-hating Tory government’. To weaponise doctors against the government, McDonnell appeared on the picket line at St Thomas’s hospital, the first time Labour had officially supported a strike. Consistent with his support for all strikes, Corbyn also endorsed the doctors’ strike, despite the speciousness of the BMA’s complaints.
