CORBYN LANDSLIDE

On Saturday I went to the Jeremy Corbyn rally in Milton Keynes. It was a great day. The sun was shining, people were in good spirits, and the event was ably chaired by Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union. Speakers addressed the crowd from the top of the now iconic fire engine.

First up was Niamh Lavelle, a local first time voter who delivered a powerful speech. She began by describing the development of her political understanding. She explained how Jeremy’s campaign for leader last year struck a chord with her. For the first time she felt there was a politician who could relate to her life and her experiences. She gave a sobering account of her anxieties over an insecure and uncertain future: the fact that she was unlikely ever to own her own home, the result of the EU referendum, and the state of the NHS.

The NHS was a recurring theme of the day and was taken up by Danielle Tiplady, a student nurse who highlighted the consequences of the government’s abolition of the student nurses’ bursary. In future student nurses will have to fund their own training by taking out loans. Danielle also spoke of life on the front line for community nurses who get to see the human cost of the cuts in terms of the effect on patients.

Chris Webb gave a rousing speech which pointed out the historic nature of the campaign. In twenty years, he suggested, children are going to be learning about these events in school. When they ask us about our own personal roles, he asked, what will we tell them? Are we going to have to confess we did nothing, he challenged us, or will we be able to tell them with pride that we fought for a better world?

Diane Abbott was excellent as always. She expressed her pride in serving as Shadow Secretary of State for Health under Jeremy’s leadership and delivered an eloquent rebuttal to the arguments that immigrants are a drain on the NHS and drive down wages. She pointed out that immigrants played an important role in building the health service. Wages are driven down not by immigrants, but by predatory employers, insufficiently strong trade union organization, and globalization. She pledged to stand firm against creeping privatization of the NHS, for a moratorium on PFI, and for a renegotiation of PFI agreements which are a burden on the NHS. She and Jeremy will stand with nurses, doctors, and other staff because the NHS is only as good as the morale of those who work in it. If the Tories manage to break the junior doctors, they will move onto other groups of NHS workers. She also pointed out that mental health care has been neglected too long and committed to making sure it gets the priority and funding it deserves. She finished by describing the power of the forces ranged against us but pointed out we have strength in numbers and we can win.

The final speaker was Jeremy and he was inspirational. He thanked the FBU for providing the fire engine and paid tribute to all the emergency services for the work they do. His speech was a tour de force pointing out not only how far we have come since Labour was abstaining on the Welfare Bill a year ago, but also how much still needs to be done. He touched on many issues from the NHS, mental health, education, tax avoidance and evasion, the EU referendum, economic and industrial strategy, inequality, homelessness, zero-hour contracts and employment, community and solidarity, education, culture, climate change, human rights, racism and xenophobia.

Jeremy made a lot of points but two struck me in particular. Firstly, as is often pointed out, austerity is not an economic necessity but a political choice. However, because it has always been presented as the opposite – a necessity not a choice – the idea is deep-rooted. We have a big job of work to do to change people’s attitudes. Secondly, this campaign is not just about campaigning for the leadership of the Labour Party, but it is also about developing our campaigning ability. Once the leadership election ends with Corbyn landslide number two, we will need to take our ideas out in the country to ensure victory at the general election. The lessons we learn from our experience in this campaign will be invaluable.

It has been suggested that Saturday’s rally was the biggest political meeting Milton Keynes has ever seen. I don’t know if that’s true and I found it difficult to estimate the size from ground level – but it was in the thousands rather than hundreds. This is quite remarkable. Far from being a Labour heartland, Milton Keynes is a small town in the South East which voted Conservative in the last two elections. If people are turning up in such numbers even here, something significant is happening.

Since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in September 2015, certain things things have become very clear.

Firstly, tremendous advances have been made under his leadership. These include:

Membership. There has been a big surge in the size of the Labour Party. Huge numbers of people have been inspired to join and the membership has grown to well over over half a million.

Elections. All four parliamentary by-elections which have taken place during this time have been won. They were Labour seats already but three saw a big increase in the share of the vote. The four mayoral elections have all been won (including in two cities where the sitting mayors were not Labour). There was a good performance in the local elections in May.

Government policy reverses. While Jeremy has led Labour in opposition, there have been a substantial number of policy U-turns by the conservative government. These have been on issues such as forcing all schools to become academies, cutting Personal Independence Payments for disabled people, tax credit cuts, and many others.

Setting the agenda. During Jeremy’s leadership, the whole terms of political debate have shifted. A year ago, his was one of the few parliamentary voices opposing austerity and he was ridiculed for it. Now, just about everybody claims to be against austerity. Even the Conservative government has pulled back from Cameron and Osborne’s rhetoric.

Secondly, after his election Jeremy adopted an inclusive ‘broad church’ approach. He appointed a shadow cabinet representative of all strands of opinion within the Parliamentary Labour Party. It was entirely open to the PLP to unite behind the leadership in good faith and for all sections of the party to retain some influence on policy and decision-making. If such an approach had been adopted, Labour would have been on course for an excellent performance at the next general election.

Thirdly, however, it seems many in the PLP could not come to terms with the new direction of the party. They simply could not accept the overwhelming choice of the members. Along with their allies in the party apparatus and many sections of the media, they plotted and schemed to oust Jeremy from the first day. Their tactics initially included negative briefings, manufacturing controversies over trivial non-issues (what he wears, whether or not he sings the national anthem, etc), and trying to create a negative perception of his parliamentary performances (PMQs, Trident, Syria). This campaign has culminated in the failed coup of recent weeks. Enormous efforts were made to remove Jeremy by non-constitutional means. First there was the campaign of orchestrated resignations from the shadow cabinet and the vote of no confidence. When that didn’t work, there was a concerted attempt at psychological harassment, bullying, and intimidation. That didn’t break him so the coup plotters were forced to challenge him in an election. It almost goes without saying that this was alongside a desperate attempt to stop Jeremy having an automatic right to be on the ballot paper. And when that failed there was another attempt to do the same, this time via a court of law.

So now we have a leadership election and the Blairites have put up Owen Smith. Their attempt to minimize the margin of defeat has five main strands:

1. Denial and denigration of the the successes. Growth in membership? That’s just Trotskyite infiltrators (as if there were hundreds of thousands of Trotskyites – more than the combined membership of all other political parties in Britain – wandering around who were just waiting for this so they could all join the Labour Party). Winning parliamentary by-elections? That’s just because of good local candidates, nothing to do with Corbyn, and anyway, they were safe Labour seats. Local elections? The results were terrible, you’re just looking at them wrong! Government U-turns? That’s because of the House of Lords or Tory rebels, nothing to do with Corbyn.

2. A massive operation to disenfranchise potential Corbyn voters on spurious pretexts. Anybody who has joined the party in the last six months has been arbitrarily banned from voting (despite the Labour website telling them before they joined that one of the benefits of joining was the right to vote in leadership elections). This excludes well over 100000 people. They are also trawling people’s social media profiles looking for pretexts to deny people the vote e.g. not being sufficiently respectful. The Labour NEC seems to have given up caring about how this looks. It seems to accept that being seen to be dictatorial is a price worth paying for the sake of excluding Corbyn supporters.

3. A relentless smear campaign. The idea seems to be to throw as much mud as possible – no matter how far-fetched, no matter how tenuous the connection to reality – and hope that some of it sticks. Hence we are told that the Corbyn campaign is misogynistic, that Corbynism is a cult, that Corbyn supporters are homophobic, they are racist, that they are violently thuggish. Corbyn himself, we are told is “not a leader”, he is too weak, he is too ruthless, he is a throwback to the 70s or 80s, etc. So a group of 44 female Labour MPs publishes an open letter calling on Jeremy to do more about escalating abuse and hostility, an MP moans that Jeremy threatened to phone his dad, another MP complains about unauthorized entry into her office, and so on.

4. A draconian ban on local Labour Party meetings (except for very tightly controlled nomination meetings). This makes it difficult for members to criticize or object to any of these procedures or to engage in collective discussion, and ensures that their primary source of news and information remains an anti-Corbyn mainstream media.

5. Owen Smith claiming to be more Corbyn than Corbyn himself. It’s somewhat amusing to watch but he has started telling us he is a socialist, or that he is “massively to the left” of Tony Blair (neither of which Jeremy has ever needed to say about himself). He even suggested that Jeremy was a bit like Blair.

So will these tactics work? It seems unlikely. At the time of writing, 63 CLPs have put in supporting nominations for one or other of the candidates. Of the 38 in this list which either nominated Jeremy or did not nominate anybody in last year’s leadership election, 33 have gone for Corbyn and only 5 for Smith. Interestingly, of the 25 who nominated Burnham, Cooper, or Kendall last time round, this time 18 have nominated Corbyn and only 7 have backed Smith. It’s difficult to be sure but it seems possible that Jeremy would win even if voting was confined only to those who voted for candidates other than him last time.

That is not to say we should be complacent. There is a huge task ahead for those of us who want Labour to win the next general election and Jeremy to be Prime Minister. Once this leadership election is over we’ll need to build the nation-wide campaigning infrastructure to ensure victory in 2020 (or whenever it is). But in the meantime we need to ensure the second Corbyn landslide is as big as possible. The bigger the win, the less scope there will be for the hard-line Blairites to make trouble and the less likely members of the PLP will be to be misled into further destabilization attempts.

This site hopes to make a small contribution to discussing and analysing developments as they happen.