When Jeremy Corbyn first came to my attention in the throes
of the Labour leadership campaign last year, his appearance caught me
off-guard. It wasn’t his intense
socialism or demands for nationalistic responsibility – policies that I had
thought were anathema to the modern Labour Party in the aftermath of Blair,
Brown and Miliband – but rather just his sudden apparition on the stage.
What caught me out with the man was how obscure he was, and
yet how aligned we seemed to be. Not
necessarily on all policy, but certainly in most. For years I had been telling disillusioned
friends seeking revolution in the system that revolutionaries invariably make
terrible political leaders and that change should come from within the
establishment, something that they would dismiss idly as being fanciful
considering how filled with cronies from Oxford, Cambridge and other poncy,
privileged places the government was.
How could change be facilitated when guffawing gits controlled the
system?
Vote for the people that are most inclined toward change, I
would say. And get involved. Political apathy was such an annoyance to me
that I conceived my final year project at university around that very issue,
concerned that my cohorts were not just disillusioned but also blasé about
being disillusioned.
Then Corbyn happened.
All of a sudden, it seemed as if there was a groundswell of support, and
all of those uninterested people became the opposite overnight. Suddenly the Islington MP had an army of
young, loyal, leftist supporters ready to carry his banner. They didn’t do it from the side-lines either,
choosing to be casual observers whilst hoping the establishment Labour Party
would hear them when they cast their ballots… they legitimately joined the
bloody thing and cast their own votes.
For a long time I could not put my finger on what I found
troubling about Jeremy Corbyn, until the media decided to tell me what it was I
should find troubling, which is that he was unelectable. I looked at him on the podium next to an
astute Yvette Cooper and sincere Andy Burnham and in that moment I believed
that this scruff would never be a credible Prime Minister. It went beyond just his appearance. I’ve always had an issue with career
politicians, which is exactly what Corbyn is, regardless of his resistance to
adhere to the sting of party whips.
But therein lay the problem.
It wasn’t his “unelectability” that made me concerned for his presence,
but the fact that he was so often a rebel that I couldn’t work out why such a
supposedly principled man continued to serve with the Labour Party. Why wasn’t he an independent? To be free of the shackles of the established
system and represent his constituency only.
But then again, perhaps he wanted to continue to represent the worker,
and in order to do that it seems you have to possess an in-road with the
unions, which have usually always been tied to Labour. The only problem with this is how he
continued to stick with the party during Blairite rule. The counter to this argument is that plenty
of backbenchers stuck with Labour during Blair, and ultimately it was during
this period that a chasm started to grow between the Parliamentary Labour Party
(filled with Blairites) and the party base (filled with Bennites).
I don’t bemoan Corbyn playing the game, working the system…
rather, I think he must. I have also
discarded my previous concerns that he lacks credibility – quite the reverse, I
now believe he is the most steadfast candidate in the race to 2020. We don’t know who will be on the Conservative
ticket at the next general election, but based on the list of current
contenders I’m not inspired.
Since last year, Jeremy Corbyn has shown himself to be an active
and meaningfully different kind of party leader. At his first PMQs as Leader of the Opposition
he made it a democratic affair, inviting questions from the general public to
be pitched to the Prime Minister. Today,
he has caved to peer pressure and started wearing a tie (though this begs
concern for the future – what would happen if Theresa May displayed disgust at
the lack of cravats in the House of Commons?) and put in several impressive
performances both in and out of the chamber.
During this second leadership contest, I would not have been surprised
if undecided voters went with the Londoner over the Welshman based solely on
their debating styles. Whilst Corbyn
refused consistently to be drawn into personal attacks and kept on message,
Owen Smith couldn’t help but finish every statement with the aside, “I agree
with Jeremy on a lot of things, I just don’t think he is right for the
leadership”, which is a pathetically meekish thing to say. If you agree with most of your opponent’s
policies but don’t think they’re right for the leadership, then you’re
basically saying, “I agree with Jeremy, but I say it better”.
This is an incredibly arrogant position, assuming your level
of charisma is so much higher. As
unfortunate as this may sound, it is true that charisma is so often predicated
on your appearance and tone of voice, and Jeremy Corbyn has a wizened received
pronunciation which will always trump falsetto Welsh in the ears of the
majority of the population. We’re going
into personal attributes here which is wrong, but that is precisely what
Smith’s campaign was essentially about.
As I already mentioned, I disagree with Jeremy on a few
issues but it is not really the end goal upon which we diverge but the means. I too would like to see a nuclear free world (at
least in weaponised form), but he needs to have a viable alternative to
mutually assured destruction to appease party moderates. Is he going to look into more defensive
options to ensure our security? Sure, I
recognise that the idea of launching nuclear missiles is frankly insane, but
fundamentalist terrorist organisations actually are insane, and they're much
harder to target from a submarine in the Indian Ocean.
Following on from the above, our energy
requirement is increasing incrementally year-on-year for obvious reasons and we
need to be able to accommodate the growing demand. Wind, solar and hydrodynamic sources maybe
the preferred option, and are getting cheaper, but still do not beat nuclear on
cost against efficiency. For all those bleating
about safety, remember that this is a technology first harnessed in the 1950s,
at the same time we were first developing the modern computer. If in the latter tech we started with levers
and switches, and sixty years later are communicating instantaneously with
people on the other side of the planet using touch-screen mobile devices, don’t
you think our mastery of nuclear safety methods might have come a long way in
that same period? (Disclaimer: I’m not a
fan of the Anglo-Franco-Sino deal currently being put into place at the
moment).
The rail network needs to be better, but
nationalisation is not the answer to everything – half of the problem is that
the infrastructure itself (the tracks, signals, stations etc.) need to see more
investment and attention. Whilst I am
not arguing that the train companies are to be absolved of blame, one of the
reasons why they can’t add more coaches to over-packed trains is because the
platforms of numerous stations on the network are too small. For the millions of pounds being channelled
into HS2 and Crossrail, relatively little is going to the maintenance and
expansion of the current network.
Yet the policies on which we seem to universally agree are
much more numerous. We share a
displeasure with the anachronistic method of criminalising drugs; I find it
admirable that he has vocally supported the legalisation of prostitution to
ensure the safety of sex workers, so many of whom have few other occupational
choices – like addiction, it is difficult to escape from; whilst I don’t agree
with him about the train companies, I certainly agree with his wish to see
basic national utilities (energy, water etc.) renationalised; and we both
oppose the reimplementation of grammar schools.
Whilst our arguments are different, we both recognise that membership of
the European Union is a much more nuanced issue than the Brexit debacle gives
it credit for.
So where do I stand with Corbyn? Would I vote for him? You might be wondering… did I vote for
him? Fortunately, I didn’t get swept up
in the social justice hype that surrounded last year’s leadership contest and
did not join the Labour Party. I am not
a member of the Labour Party. I’m not a
member of any party. I am a subscriber to both Private Eye and The New Statesman; I get my news either from the BBC (because
despite their biases, they are establishment based, and this in my opinion is
better than being politically biased, which is what all other media
organisations are) or the Associated Press; the only print media affiliation I
felt comfortable with for a time was The
Independent (for which I have felt somewhat vindicated since I started
reading Private Eye); and in the last
two general elections I voted for independent candidates. I am not beholden to any political party,
which gives me a wonderful sense of conscious freedom to vote either for or
against Corbyn.
I still have my gripes, such as the half-hearted way he
campaigned to remain in the EU and his handling of his core supporters. Momentum members may say that this is media
hype, but that group has been a rallying point for Corbynites who also fall
into the social justice warrior category, another facet of modern society that
unsettles me. Corbyn’s unwillingness to
admonish this activist group is concerning.
Activism is something that exists in the party political system,
certainly, but the appearance of Momentum has created a nasty factional
divide. The fact the general public
knows who they are is enough to know their influence, when they would struggle
to name another Labour activist group or one within the Conservative
ranks. These gripes are real, but
perhaps not enough to normally force me to turn on a candidate who I otherwise
feel neither love or hate toward.
The problem still remains.
Whilst his credibility and public image has improved, Corbyn remains
unelectable. I know that people are
going to hate me using that word, and have a perfectly good rebuke to it: he
just got elected for the second time to leader of the Labour Party.
Yes… in the Labour Party. Thousands of people voted for Jeremy Corbyn. 313,209 in fact. But do you want to know what the electorate
population of the United Kingdom is?
In 2015, it stood at 44,722,000.
This is also not taking into consideration the fact that
Corbyn has been largely reliant on the youth vote to win his leadership
campaigns, but that same demographic has been notoriously absent from national
votes. His electability is not based on
whether or not he can appear Prime Ministerial, but whether he can realistically
– statistically – win a general election in 2020. By that point, he will be 71 going on
72. He’ll have faced Prime Minister
Theresa May (a seasoned and prickly opponent by all accounts) hundreds of
times, and will have been judged on each of those appearances. He’ll need to quash the dissent in his party,
even if it means kicking out the Blairites.
If he wants to maintain his no-personal-attacks method of campaigning,
he’ll need to learn how to do that effectively.
But more than this, he will need to address one of the
biggest issues that the British public has about him: his stance on
immigration. This is for some people one
of the biggest dilemmas facing Britain in the 21st Century, and
formed the backbone of the Leave campaign during the EU Referendum. Currently Corbyn’s position is frankly
unacceptable to the majority of voters.
Even the Remain campaign during the EU Referendum didn’t
make a pitch on the back of freedom of movement; rather, they couched their
argument in legal immigration, and accepted the need to control the
border. It was only the hard left that
really wanted us to embrace this mantra of the European Union fully, but the
problem with such high-minded rhetoric is it ignores the plain truth that
migration will weigh towards the richer areas, because with economic wealth
comes greater employment. Plus, the UK
has been subject for decades of a narrative that tells the world we are a rich
nation, and barring easy land access to the USA, we should be a final
destination for many migrants seeking success.
We can be proud of that, but not stupid – this country needs billions of
pounds of greater investment in order to accommodate the increase in demand on
our infrastructure, but to do so would plunge us into even greater debt
controlled either by other nations or banks.
This puts me in the firing line for being called “right-wing”,
but this presumes that the majority of the population of Britain are also either
overt or covert right-wingers, in which case, it just further highlights the
low chances Corbyn has of becoming our next Prime Minister. Conservative or UKIP, it doesn’t really
matter, because they only have each other to contend with on the right, whilst
Labour has the cavalcade of Greens, Scot Nationalists, Lib Dems and Plaid Cymru
on the left. The splintering of the
socialist side of the political spectrum is what gave David Cameron absolute
control of Parliament in 2015.
Nevertheless I hope that – barring the appearance of a
centrist liberal in one of the major parties who even greater represents my
views – the Labour Party win in 2020 and Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime
Minister. It will certainly shut up the
moderate Labour members who screamed “unelectable” but held up an odd,
barely-known, un-charming narcissist as an alternative.
But with four years to go, there is still a lot to be done,
not just to serve as a feasible opponent of government, but also to clean up
the Labour house and reconsider the policy.
Out of all things, he must change
his position on immigration, but make sure that it is done in the style of a
long, drawn out thought process in which he is publicly shown to be persuaded
to the idea of either returning to migration rules which existed pre-1973 or
implement new policies about restricting the border. Considering this was a man who voted
forty-three years ago against joining the EEC, I’m sure with a bit of
theatricality this can be achieved.
He also needs to deal with the New Labour members in his
midst, which is an even greater challenge.
Booting them out to form their own party will only hurt Corbyn-Labour’s
share of the vote further, whilst keeping them in will raise questions about
his leadership style. Adding to this,
the existence of Momentum is damaging his reputation both in and out of the
party, so they need to be told to either disband or tone it down.
Yet, the mere fact that I hold conflicting views about
Jeremy Corbyn is telling. With all other
party leaders I have really known in my lifetime, I have so often concluded
that their failings outweigh their potential.
Yet with Jeremy Corbyn, I haven’t reached that same conclusion. On the whole, his values fall fairly in line
with my own with a couple of notable exceptions.
It comes down to what you find amenable about a
candidate. When Labour first ran in
1997, I’m sure numerous liberal economists voiced concern for their support of
PFI schemes, yet 13 million people still voted for them. When David Cameron sought to get the Tories
back into office in 2010, I’m sure plenty of Conservatives were slightly turned
off by his Europhilia, but 10 million of them voted for his party anyway. The question becomes, for his two policy foibles
– immigration and Trident renewal, which are both founded in moral reasoning –
are we willing to ignore him entirely when the alternative may be an
isolationist, privatising, austerity-inducing Conservative candidate?
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