‘Corbynism failed, but Labour risks failure now too if it forgets why he rose’ – LabourList

Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader on September 12th 2015 was just one of the shocks endured by an economic system and a political consensus imposed by Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, and which once seemed hegemonic.

Less than a decade before, with Corbyn sitting ineffectually on the back benches, leading figures in all three main parties claimed left and right no longer existed, arguing that politics was limited to just reducing the harshest social edges of a British economy in which the market had to be supreme, given the implacable nature of the globalised world order.

2008 a lost opportunity

For some in the Labour Party, like Ed Miliband, the 2008 banking crisis was an opportunity to challenge that regime. Instead, the party lost the 2010 election and the Coalition government’s austerity ruthlessly reinforced the system’s neo-liberal logic at the expense of ordinary Britons. The main electoral beneficiary of this ratcheting was the hard right, specifically UKIP and its campaign to leave the EU. For, as leader, ‘Red Ed’ failed to take advantage, fluffing his attempt to carefully move Labour on from its embrace of the market. This was largely due to opposition from his own MPs who still clung to the consensus, such that when Miliband resigned after losing the 2015 election most of those wishing to replace him claimed it was because he had been ‘anti-business’.

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Corbyn was the one exception. Indeed, he promised members he would embrace a radical anti-austerity platform, and suggested Labour should reinstate its original 1918 Clause Four commitment to nationalisation, which Tony Blair had gutted in 1995.

The paradoxes of Corbynism

Corbyn’s victory was replete with paradoxes, having been nominated by MPs who disagreed with his politics and helped by changes to membership rules welcomed by Blair. He nonetheless represented something real. A majority of Labour members were tired of their leaders’ failure to challenge a system which made Britain significantly more unequal while echoing racist hostility to immigration and slavishly supporting neo-conservative US foreign policy. Many had exited the party, fed up with being ignored. If those that remained had reluctantly accepted this situation as the price worth paying for winning elections, by 2010 it only seemed to end in opposition.

A majority, therefore, believed Corbyn’s claim that a return to Labour’s ‘traditional’ values would bring back millions of voters lost since 1997. He certainly succeeded in attracting thousands who had quit Labour’s ranks since the 1980s and even a few younger members of the anti-austerity movement which operated outside conventional party politics. Influenced by his participation with the latter, Corbyn hoped to turn the party into a social movement that would energise communities and create the foundation for a truly socialist administration, one that would echo the achievements of Clement Attlee’s 1945 government.

Measured by his own promises, Corbyn was an abject failure. It would not be a revived radical left that formed the strongest challenge to Britain’s ‘globalist’ regime but the anti-immigrant, anti-EU hard right. He was also replaced as Labour leader by someone who would come to define himself against almost everything for which Corbyn stood.

How far was Corbyn responsible for this failure? He certainly faced massive opposition within the parliamentary party and his early attempts at rapprochement were mostly rejected, culminating in a leadership challenge following the 2016 Brexit vote which many MPs blamed on Corbyn’s luke-warm support for Remain. Some have even suggested Corbyn was sabotaged by Labour officials many of whom were appointed in the Blair era and without which, they believe he might have won the 2017 election.

Internal opposition

Such internal opposition should have been expected by someone promising to fundamentally transform the nature of the party. Yet, despite his rhetoric, Corbyn had no strategy he was willing to support to overcome it. While increasing membership to nearly a million, Corbyn also exhibited little active interest in turning Labour into a social movement, a huge endeavour in any case. Labour under his leadership remained a parliamentary-focused party – albeit a badly divided one with a leader who dearly wished it was something else.

Beyond the party, Corbyn was confronted by an implacably hostile media which merrily distorted what he stood for and exploited to the full the reality of a party at war with itself. If this was also true of many other Labour leaders, Corbyn certainly suffered more than most.

One of Corbyn’s greatest problems was over antisemitism. Many of his most fervent supporters were avowed anti-Zionists which led some to, knowingly or not, use antisemitic tropes in their criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The Labour leader was initially reluctant to distance himself from those who overstepped the mark, which led some to claim this as evidence of his own antisemitism. Undoubtedly weaponised by enemies in the party and media the problem – which was real – seemed to transfix Corbyn until the issue threatened to define his leadership while doing the party no end of electoral harm. His inertia here as in other matters was striking and damaging.

There were personal as well as structural issues that contributed to Corbyn’s failure. But the most significant was one, that would have done for any Labour leader of whatever ideological stripe, was Brexit. With most members backing Remain and many Labour supporters voting Leave this was a binary issue Corbyn tried to finesse but to nobody’s satisfaction. He thus went into the 2019 election with a policy few voters understood or liked in contrast to Boris Johnson who, backed by an unhinged media, falsely claimed he would end all the wrangling as to what Brexit might mean and ‘get it done’. In contrast Labour threatened weary voters with a new referendum on whatever deal it could negotiate.

Remember 2017

Largely, but not exclusively, thanks to Brexit, Corbyn’s leadership ended with Labour winning fewer Commons seats than in 1935: the party was worse off than before he became leader. But Labour’s performance in 2017 suggests we should take a more nuanced view of his impact. Then, before antisemitism and the Brexit debate took a stranglehold, Corbyn denied Theresa May’s Conservatives a Commons majority.

Labour’s manifesto was, in truth, a souped-up version of the kind of document Miliband might have wanted to present to the country had he been able. Yet Corbyn himself appeared to be the kind of leader uniquely able to break with a consensus only making most Britons’ lives ever poorer. While undoubtedly helped by May’s disastrous campaign Corbyn tapped into hopes for the kind of radical change most of his predecessors had been afraid to exploit for fear of losing votes. Corbyn showed that votes could in fact be won that way.

In 2024, Labour – with Corbyn now an exile – was elected on a widely touted promise of ‘Change’ but one so modestly defined many wondered how different it would be from the outgoing Conservatives. A landslide in terms of seats, the party won fewer votes than in 2019, a bizarre outcome that leaves it in a ridiculously precarious position, one that currently has it looking electoral catastrophe in the face. There are many in the party who ache for a more bold and brave government willing to challenge prevailing orthodoxies.

Corbyn’s radicalism did not ultimately succeed but it seems likely that a Labour Party whose leaders believe they can well do without any of it is also fated to fail.

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