Writing in the Spectator, Nick Cohen, a man of the (center) left has a very smart take on the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the sinister Chavez wannabe who now looks likely to head Britain’s opposition Labour Party.
He notes that those voting for Corbyn (an electorate that includes Labour Party members, reasonably enough, but “supporters”, less so) seem unconcerned by the fact that they are picking a leader who very few in the parliamentary Labour party were willing to endorse:
I have not heard one Labour voter say that they are not voting for Corbyn because only two dozen members of the Parliamentary Labour Party wants him as leader. Labour voters are bringing a presidential mentality to a parliamentary system, and a thoroughly modern form of consumerism as well. They want their identities validated, their preferences registered without compromise or caveat.
If Corbyn wins, Cohen argues that either Corbyn or the parliamentary Labour Party will have to be purged, and he is “not at all sure it will be Corbyn”. I’d agree, mainly for the reasons that Cohen gives:
Westminster correspondents are talking of counter revolutions and coups; of Labour MPs going underground and fighting like the French Resistance. Maybe. But you cannot just throw out a leader who has been democratically elected. Beyond that constitutional nicety there are more substantial reasons to wonder whether Labour MPs will be heroes of the resistance or victims of the new regime.
Indeed there is, not least because the Labour party has been transformed both by this election (“Labour now has 610,753 members, supporters and affiliates. Full membership of the Labour Party has gone from 176,891 members in 2007, to 299,755”) and, I would argue, by broad shifts in a country that, regardless of the recent Tory election victory, has been drifting further to the left for a long time now.
And time has buried an understanding of the ruin that Corbyn, a man of the worst of old Labour, could do.
Writing in Little Atoms, Mike Harris:
The average Briton is 40 years old, with 1997 the first general election in which they voted. They simply do not remember or care about the Militant Tendency or the Bennites. They do remember Iraq and the MPs expenses scandal, the shadows of which loom large over the parliamentary Labour party.
And, as for the claim that the parliamentary Labour party will push back against Corbyn, Cohen says that it:
[I]gnores the fact that many will be terrified of losing their jobs. Even under existing Labour rules it is not too hard to deselect a sitting MP. The assumption is that he or she will stay in post, but the local party can organise a ‘trigger ballot’ on whether to begin the process of selecting a new candidate. Any MP who can be accused of being a ‘Blairite’, ‘Tory’, ‘tool of the corporate media’ etc will be open to attack. I am sure Unite or Ken Livingstone’s Trotskyist camp followers will provide the organisational skills required to kick them out.
Cohen concludes:
For years people like me have been arguing that the worst people on the left have been going along with movements and regimes, which are reactionary and in some instances fascistic – radical Islam and Putin’s Kremlin to take the most obvious examples from Corbyn’s CV. We have been trying to provide a left-wing case against the appeasement of imperialist aggressors, in the case of Russia, or of sexist, racist and homophobic religion in the case of radical Islam.
I am putting it as politely as I can when I say we had limited support from mainstream commentators and politicians of the centre left. They didn’t want to criticise ‘our side’. They didn’t want to admit that racism (in its anti-Semitic form) was as much a problem for the left as the right. They didn’t want to puncture the phoney air of righteousness which surrounds left-wing politics like a cloying perfume, or ‘distract’ themselves from the fight against the Tories.
They didn’t want to know. Well they know now.
And Conservatives have no reason to be smug. As things stand, a Corbyn-led Labour party is highly unlikely to win the next (2020) election, but ‘highly unlikely’ is not the same as impossible…