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Jeremy Corbyn
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| Owen Smith |
Is Owen Smith the person to save the Labour Party ? He might be: he could give Labour what it needs above all - time in which to start sorting itself out, to recover.
On 28th June, Labour MPs voted 172-40 that they had no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn as leader: the fact that he remained and remains as leader despite this is unprecedented and morally incomprehensible. I say morally to compare the situation to that of the Brexit vote. Neither the UK Government nor the House of Commons nor Parliament as a whole are bound by the result of the EU referendum legally or technically. The referendum is purely advisory. The House of Commons is sovereign, it can do what it likes. (A curious aspect of the referendum is that the electorate insisted on giving back full power to the House of Commons, power the House didn't want since it has a majority for Remain at the moment.) In fact though the referendum result is absolutely binding in a moral and political sense.
Similarly, a no confidence motion of that size ought to have caused Jeremy Corbyn to resign by all usual expectation in party politics as it has been practiced in the UK hitherto. As an example, consider Mrs Thatcher's resignation in 1990. Mrs Thatcher it need hardly be said was a figure of vastly more political weight and significance than Jeremy Corbyn. When she was challenged for the leadership by Michael Heseltine, she won the first ballot but not by enough to win outright and prevent a second ballot. The voting rules were complicated. There were 372 Tory MPs. She had to secure a 15% lead over her challenger in the first ballot to prevent a second ballot. The results were 204 to her versus 152 for Heseltine with 16 abstentions. In percentages this was 54.8% for her versus 40.9% for Heseltine: thus she was just short of winning outright. Her first response was to fight on. However, senior colleagues persuaded her she couldn't win the next round and so she resigned. She became very bitter about this as time went on: she famously said regarding that advice from her subordinates "It was treachery - with a smile on its face." A more disinterested observer might say that, in the cycle of politics, she was pulled down as she had pulled Ted Heath down in 1975. The point here is that Mrs Thatcher resigned after she had actually won the first vote, but not by enough to win entirely. Her parliamentary colleagues regarded that first round as in effect a vote of confidence. The contrast with Jeremy Corbyn's response to losing the confidence of more than 80% of his MPs is astounding.
The reply of Corbyn and the group around him to the no-confidence vote is that he has an overwhelming mandate from the leadership election in 2015, and this is true. He won among all categories of voters as you can see here in the results on the Labour Party's website: http://www.labour.org.uk/blog/entry/results-of-the-labour-leadership-and-deputy-leadership-election
The night before the no-confidence vote, 27th June, as the Parliamentary Labour Party were meeting to decide whether to have the vote, Momentum held a rally outside the Houses of Parliament. John McDonnell addressed the rally and said the following:
"The protests will be peaceful, but the reason the protests are taking place is because we will not allow the democracy of our movement to be subverted by a handful of MPs who refuse to accept Jeremy's mandate."°
Granted this was said the night before the actual vote, but 80% is hardly a handful, and he must think the principle still applies since he and the Corbyn group continue to fight to retain the leadership.
How does Corbyn manage to continue in the face of such hostility and opprobrium from his colleagues ? Partly, he is used to being beleaguered, his entire experience of politics has been in that position: the more your opponents attack you, the more evidence it is of your own righteousness. Partly, he has achieved almost magically and certainly unexpectedly a position in the Labour Party that his group have been dreaming of since at least when he was involved in Tony Benn's campaign for deputy leader of the Labour Party in 1981. Newsnight unearthed some great footage from that time:
I think the anti-Corbyn Labour MPs are under few illusions as to Owen Smith's wonderfulness. They have to use the means to hand. They face the same set of choices as Julius Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon in January 49 BCE. The context of this decisive move was a crisis in a sustained dispute Caesar was having with his enemies in the Senate. As long as he retained his command in Gaul, he was immune from prosecution: being Consul also had this status. Therefore Caesar wanted to become Consul without any interval from laying down his command: conversely his enemies wanted just such an interval so that they could attack him through the courts: they wanted to prosecute him for what they regarded as illegalities committed while he was Consul ten years earlier. In late 50, Caesar's enemies in the Senate finally got that body to insist that he lay down his command while his great rival and former partner Pompey retained his: Pompey was now allied with the group in the Senate who were determined to preserve the Republic and regarded Caesar and his ambition as fundamentally inimical to it. Caesar now had two choices with three possible outcomes. His first choice was to do nothing, to acquiesce, to obey the Senate: then he would inevitably be destroyed. His second choice was to fight, that is to invade Rome illegally. If he lost the civil war which would definitely follow, again he would be destroyed. But he also might win that war, in which case he won all. From his own point of view, his eventual choice was obvious, and he took it: he invaded. The Rubicon was the border between Caesar's province of Cisalpine Gaul and Italy as the Romans understood it. By crossing it with troops Caesar was committing an irreversible act of insubordination and defiance against the Roman state. Given Caesar's character - which they knew far better than we do - his enemies must have known he would fight, and therefore they must have either wanted a war which presumably they expected to win, led by Pompey, or at least been prepared to accept one.
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| Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) |
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| Gnaeus Pompeius (106-48 BCE) |
The anti-Corbyn MPs are in a similar position to Caesar in January 49. They can do nothing, acquiesce, leave Corbyn in place, in which case they will probably go down to a disastrous defeat in the next General Election whenever it is and many of them will lost their seats. There is the possibility also that before or after that General Election many MPs could face deselection by hostile constituency Labour parties (CLPs) dominated by Corbyn supporters. (Some Labour MPs also face reselection when their constituencies merge or disappear when the current boundary review for parliamentary constituencies reports its final proposals in 2018. Fifty seats in the House of Commons are due to be abolished, lowering the total from 650 to 600.) If the anti-Corbyn Labour MPs challenge him and lose, all of these consequences still obtain. But in challenging him, the possibility exists - however remote - of removing him and thus perhaps making the outcome of a General Election less bad, and reducing the threat from Corbyn supporters in their CLPs. The boundary changes will take place regardless. As I said above, I don't think many of the MPs think Owen Smith is the answer to all their problems. But the key point for them about the election of Smith is it would buy time in which who knows what might happen. They are fighting to create the space for the Micawber option, to see what turns up, and in their difficult situation this is an entirely reasonable approach, indeed the only one. It's not capitalism in this case but the Labour Party that really might collapse from its internal contradictions.
I think the memory of sticking with Ed Miliband in spite of their misgivings and then the defeat in 2015 has also hardened many Labour MPs' attitude now. Similarly, the threat as it seemed at the time they made their move of Theresa May calling an early General Election. That threat seems to have receded at the time of writing, but we don't really know when it will take place, it could still be soon. Finally, many of the MPs as committed Remainers were fed up at what they regarded as Corbyn's lacklustre and half-hearted performance during the EU Referendum campaign.
Speaking of Ed Miliband, we can see clearly now how utterly disastrous his leadership was. It culminated as we have already seen in the election defeat of 2015. He also instituted the leadership election system under which Corbyn got elected and is almost impossible to remove. The intent of this system's promoters was that if you widen the franchise, you would inevitably get more centrist victors. You can see this argument in full in this piece from March 2014 by John Rentoul, one of the few people who really is a Blairite: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/ed-miliband-s-labour-party-reforms-are-good-news-for-all-9162681.html *. Reading it now in the light of events is a striking witness of just how wrong someone can be.
To some of Corbyn's supporters - though they wouldn't put it like this - it is as if his very uselessness at modern politics is the clearest guarantee of his authenticity: he is not 'spun'. And isn't Corbyn the most unlikely focus of a personality cult ? Not even his most crazed worshipper could honestly call his colourless and Pooterish personality charismatic. Here he is on 12 July welcoming his automatic inclusion on the ballot paper for the leadership election:
Jeremy Corbyn resembles Tony Blair in this respect: he doesn't care what short or long-term damage he does to the Labour Party as long as he and his faction come out on top.
°From Steve Richards' 'The Corbyn Story' on Radio4, episode 3.
*I picked up this article from Owen Jones on Twitter.