LRB, Vol. 42 No. 23 · 3 December 2020
Failed Vocation
by James Butler
Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn
by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire.
Bodley Head, 376 pp., £18.99, September, 978 1 84792 645 6
This Land: The Story of a Movement
by Owen Jones.
Allen Lane, 336 pp., £20, September, 978 0 241 47094 7
Politics, Max Weber wrote, is a ‘slow, strong drilling through hard
boards, with a combination of passion and a sense of judgment’. The
maxim, from his lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’, is now usually
deployed to chide a left impatient for social transformation, but
Weber’s account of political leadership deserves more than this. He has
acute things to say about the tragedy entwined in all political action
and about the ‘diabolical powers’ intrinsic to politics, which may warp
a leader beyond recognition. He is sharp too on the subject of vanity, a
cardinal sin in a politician, and its dependent disorders, lack of
responsibility and lack of objectivity. Weber’s is a prescription for
heroes; I wonder if any politician could meet it.
Weber scorns any politics, and any attempt at political leadership, that
is not grounded in an undimmable passion. Such a passion animated what
supporters of Jeremy Corbyn referred to as ‘the project’. To its
adherents, the project promised the rehabilitation and rejuvenation of
socialism in British politics; reform of the Labour Party’s moribund
internal democracy; the building of a mass social movement to bring the
party out of Westminster and into people’s lives; and the pursuit of a
popular left-wing politics fit for the modern world, as alive to the
threat of climate change as it was intent on reversing socio-economic
precarity and the evaporation of workers’ rights. To its detractors this
was just utopian grandiloquence; to wiser Corbyn-sceptics it was at
least a sign of an emerging political realignment which would weaken the
purchase of both the Blairite Third Way and Cameron’s bloodless Notting
Hill Toryism.
The chief priorities of Corbyn’s Labour Party were neatly captured in
two speeches made by John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor and often the
project’s most eloquent spokesman. In 2016 he declared that Labour
members would ‘no longer have to whisper’ the word ‘socialism’: the
party would no longer be ashamed of its values. And in the dying days of
the 2019 election campaign, he outlined a new social settlement with
‘foundations so deeply rooted that no Tory could ever tear them up’. As
McDonnell delivered that speech he must have known that Labour wasn’t
going to be elected. It was a missive to posterity: the project was
collapsing beneath his feet.
Broad scope and lofty ambitions can conceal ambiguities and faultlines.
Was the goal of the project primarily to wind the clock back, to undo
the changes Kinnock and Blair had wrought within the party, and Thatcher
in the country as a whole, by returning the trade unions to a central
position in Labour and chasing a romanticised version of the postwar
settlement? Or was it to bring the post-2008, post-austerity generation
which had been so enthused by Corbyn into formal, institutional
politics? Could the two ambitions be bridged? Why was it important to
change the party’s structure, and how could it happen? Was it intended
to put decision-making power back into the hands of union leaders or
give it to individual members? How could the middle layers of the party
– permanent staff and MPs – be brought on side? When talking about ‘the
project’, who was included? Corbyn and his staff and advisers in
Westminster, or the wider circle of activists and party members, or
supporters in the country generally? During the last 18 months of his
leadership, Corbyn himself, the one man who had sufficient power to
impose clarity on any of these questions, seemed barely involved.
Left Out and This Land are both written by political journalists, the
former by two well-placed Whitehall reporters and the latter by the most
prominent left-wing commentator in Britain, a Corbyn insider. Gabriel
Pogrund and Patrick Maguire have assembled their book from an impressive
array of interviews with key members of Corbyn’s team, as well as with
others implacably opposed to his leadership. Where they primarily
document the project’s disintegration between the 2017 and 2019
elections, Owen Jones describes the emergence of Corbynism from the
exhausted managerialism of late New Labour, gives a defence of its
politics and examines its weaknesses. Both books will be painful and
often infuriating reading for anyone who was at all sympathetic to these
politics, but Jones has the harder task: to assess the failure of a
project he championed, in which he was a significant player, and which
depended on the work and was damaged by the flaws of people he is close
to. Jones can rarely have felt so personally implicated in a piece of
writing. He doesn’t shy away from self-examination: his relationships
with the key actors are made clear, as are his ethical dilemmas as a
journalist, trying to maintain both political commitment and critical
independence. It is a far more honest account of those difficulties than
is ever given by journalists of the political centre, or the right.
Jones is also seeking to salvage something from the collapse of
Corbynism. That is presumably the point of his subtitle – ‘the story of
a movement’ – and of his attempt at the beginning of the book to situate
Corbynism in relation to the enduring crisis of European social
democratic parties and, especially, to the history of UK protest
movements – graduates from which initially gave Corbynism much of its
fresh and irreverent energy. Corbynism’s connection to protest
underlines a perennial problem for the left: extra-parliamentary
movements often hit their limits when they try to bring about systemic
change, but the transition to formal politics brings a different set of
problems. For many younger supporters, Corbyn’s run for the leadership
in 2015 was their first glimpse of the power of political parties to
reach an entire country in ways protest simply cannot match. But the
many thousands who were attracted into the party by Corbyn have always
seemed a lost resource: neither the party nor Momentum, the organisation
set up to mobilise them, ever seemed inclined to explore why they had
joined or what their priorities were. They disappear from these books,
too, as soon as the story at the top of the party starts in earnest. The
circle of ‘the project’ shrinks.
This is not in itself a flaw. Both books are effectively court
histories. Pogrund and Maguire write about Labour in Westminster; Jones
writes about the left wing of the party, and provides a richer account
of its ideological and political quandaries. Court histories are always
useful, not least because they allow foot soldiers to find out how the
generals behaved in private. As the cliché goes, they are history’s
first draft: they determine the way the subject will be written about
until, eventually, a revisionist takes up the task. (The gradual shift
in our understanding of one of Britain’s most politically contentious
decades – the 1970s – is an example of this process.) Jones is obviously
motivated as much by a belief that the left should try to shape the
narrative as that it should try to learn lessons from its period in
power. It is wise to read both books with a sceptical eye: for those
involved, the temptation to regard one’s past self with the wisdom of
hindsight, to burnish one’s choices or disown them, must be
overwhelming. (It is commendable that so many of Corbyn’s senior aides
chose to speak on the record, seemingly with candour.) For court
historians it must be tempting to play Procopius, revealing a secret
history of political vice and personal flaws. Sometimes Left Out
overreaches in this respect – repeated references to Tom Watson’s weight
as an index of his appetite for controversy fail to convince. Jones, in
his chapters on Brexit, and especially on antisemitism, moves in the
other direction: in attempting to do scrupulous justice to his
interviewees, he sometimes leaves us unclear whom to believe – but then
Procopius didn’t have to worry about defamation suits.
Neither book offers an extended reflection on the power of the press.
It’s possible that Jones omitted this because moaning about the
right-wing media is a preoccupation on the left. But there are moments
in Pogrund and Maguire’s book that seem to beg an exploration of press
power: for example, their discussion of the anti-Corbynite journalist
Tom McTague, who in 2017 uncovered evidence that Labour staff were
running their own election operation in defiance of the leadership. They
implored him not to publish and he kept their secret; the story only
recently came to light. All journalists decide what secrets to keep, but
few acknowledge the power they exercise in doing so. Without accounting
for press power, and the active choices made by journalists, the mood of
paranoia and bitterness which came to prevail in Corbyn’s office is
quite difficult to explain.
It is an intellectual vice on the left to think that because the world
is best understood in terms of the operation of broad structural forces,
personal qualities are less important. With regard to political
leadership, the past five years have tested that thesis to destruction.
A leader’s first qualification must be that they should want to lead.
Though Corbyn apparently bridled at McDonnell’s often repeated
suggestion that he stood for the leadership simply because it was ‘his
turn’, his first words to one confidant after squeezing onto the ballot
were: ‘You better make fucking sure I don’t get elected.’ Perhaps the
surprise rush of popular support made him warm to the role. But the
ambivalence never went away, and with it came intransigence, obstinacy
and an aversion to making decisions, especially difficult decisions
involving confrontation – which means nearly all leadership decisions.
In the latter half of both books Corbyn is increasingly absent, and his
decisions, when he does make them, are Delphic. He sometimes seems
irritated by having responsibility for matters that don’t interest him,
even though, as his policy architect Andrew Fisher observes, ‘if you’re
the leader you have to lead on everything, not just the things you care
about.’
Corbyn’s reluctance to compromise on political matters can be
overstated: political realism led him to jettison his long-held
republicanism, though the tabloids spun a few scandals out of his
residual discomfort. More substantively, he compromised on his
opposition to the renewal of Trident partly out of recognition that the
balance of opinion in the party was against him, but also because of a
desire to waylay damaging national security stories. These outbreaks of
pragmatism were rare, and often accompanied by small reassertions of
autonomy, as when he slipped away from his protection officers, or made
public appearances in a less-than-slick green suit his media handlers
had banned him from wearing. Eventually, his capacity for compromise on
principle – however small – seemed to vanish. The contrast with
McDonnell, made in both books, is instructive: his only question for
potential allies was ‘Will you help us win power?’ This sometimes led
him to form improbable alliances, doubtless in desperation, but the
question doesn’t seem to have occurred to Corbyn at all.
Political leadership magnifies personal faults so remorselessly that it
can be easy to forget the virtues that won Corbyn the role in the first
place. Running against a field of mediocrities fluent in non-committal
soundbites, he showed an impressive ability to speak off the cuff with
piercing clarity on the consequences of austerity. His ease around
ordinary people and his avuncular scruffiness chimed with an
anti-establishment mood. But support for him was never purely or even
largely personal. His success was founded on his willingness to speak
honestly about the problems the country faced, its manifold daily
injustices, its government’s addiction to cruelty and humiliation – and
his promise to change all this. That his rivals for the leadership were
unable or unwilling to do the same was their fault, not his.
Having risen to the top of the Labour Party largely by being himself,
Corbyn perhaps saw little reason to change. Sympathetic commentators in
the early period used to cite a new, more consensual style of
leadership, but what they were describing was a hope rather than a
reality. Even at its most functional, Corbyn’s office was chaotic. Karie
Murphy, to whom Corbyn eventually outsourced much of his
decision-making, is said by one staffer to have declared: ‘This is a
left-wing collective. There’s no one leader.’ Murphy insists that she
never exceeded Corbyn’s intentions – others are less sure – but by
failing to lead, Corbyn allowed the clashes and resentments to be
expected even in the best-run political team to become fatal.
This wasn’t all his fault. If the reader ends up with the impression
that the leader’s office hired on the basis of loyalty rather than
competence, it is hard to imagine how it could have been otherwise. The
description in Left Out of the party’s permanent staff as ‘toxic,
distrustful and openly mutinous’ is if anything an understatement:
effectively a network of Blairite leftovers, they seem to have regarded
the party’s leadership and members, most of its MPs and the concept of
democracy itself as impediments to their rightful rule. They worked
assiduously to undermine the project. Both books are studies in the
titanic vanity of politicians, from the leader’s office’s ill-fated
attempts to engineer a Corbynite Glastonbury, to Gavin Shuker’s tortured
comparison of his decision to leave the Labour Party to the Project
Gemini spaceflight programme, to every appearance by the ‘glutinous’
Chuka Umunna. There is a darker side to this: both books describe the
way the PLP’s regular Monday meetings often descended into screaming
abuse from anti-Corbyn MPs, partly for the benefit of the journalists
crouching at the door; it is hard to disagree with Diane Abbott’s
verdict that the intention was to ‘break [Corbyn] as a man’. The abuse
wasn’t directed only at him: staffers could expect similar treatment in
the corridors, Corbynite MPs from their putative colleagues in the
Commons, often from those fond of preaching about civility in the press.
The most fatuous of the irreconcilables, Bermondsey’s Neil Coyle, took
to bombarding Corbyn’s phone with late-night screeds. Andy McDonald, who
served in the shadow cabinet, observes that such behaviour ‘would not be
tolerated in normal workplaces’, and it was exceptional even in the
fractious world of British politics. The party’s new leader agrees that
this was a low point: shortly after Keir Starmer came to office he
announced a drive to fix Labour’s internal culture, though its misfiring
launch suggests something of the difficulty. Nita Clarke, whom he
appointed to oversee the process, was revealed as an enthusiastic
digital partisan of the party’s right and was gone within 24 hours.
Few of these stories are entirely new or surprising, but gathered in one
place they soon become overwhelming. Anyone should be able to appreciate
Corbyn’s resilience, but even his most admiring comrades will have to
admit that the serious defects of his leadership cannot be explained
away by talk of a hostile press and party. Serious conversations about
strategy were avoided; advisers injected their own political obsessions
into press releases or undermined collective decisions; Corbyn vanished
at key points. Seumas Milne, appointed as a loyal and politically
sympathetic figure to guide the communications strategy, was so
obviously in the wrong job that it is all but impossible to understand
how he remained in place after botching the response to the Skripal
poisoning in 2018. Activists who spent the first half of December last
year trudging from door to door in the cold may find it hard to stomach
Milne’s airy response to a new staff member who asked to see the
election strategy: ‘We don’t write it all down, it’s all too fluid, we
have to deal with politics as it is each day.’ In his rare
interventions, Corbyn was fond of invoking moral responsibility:
‘Members do not sweat night and day’ to see the party damaged by leaks,
he declared in one email. Did they not also deserve competence and
decisiveness at the top?
Objectivity and responsibility – the qualities demanded by Weber – were
rarely on show in Corbyn’s office; he was usually unable to make a
ruthless distinction between what could reasonably be kept and what had
to be given up. Successful politicians have to be opportunists: in
‘Politics as a Vocation’, Weber writes that the political sphere has its
own rules, which cannot be remade by sheer will. All the same, Corbyn’s
popular touch did remake and expand what was understood to be possible
in British politics. During his last party conference, even as his
leadership was crashing, a restaurant in which he was eating had to
close its kitchen because its staff demanded a group picture with him.
Popular affection of this sort cannot be created out of thin air, and
his successor may well miss it.
Milne often exhibited the intellectual’s clumsy grasp of practical
politics, but he could occasionally see things others missed. He
responded to the general election exit poll in 2017 – showing that
Labour had surged, costing Theresa May her majority – not with elation
but with despair: ‘It’s too soon,’ he muttered to himself, head in
hands. Perhaps he only meant that if the campaign had lasted a few more
days, Corbyn might have been walking into Number Ten. What’s more likely
is that he understood this would be the project’s high-water mark. The
2017 election remains an awkward reminder for the right, and a totem for
the left. Of the two elections held during Corbyn’s leadership it is the
more interesting, because it demonstrates that Labour can win a
significant section of the electorate with a manifesto well to the left
of what detractors deemed plausible. May was a weak opponent, but she
was still able to bring the Conservative vote-share to unexpected
heights; the 2017 election is not just a story of Conservative weakness.
Milne’s pessimism wasn’t widely shared. Many in the Corbyn camp took the
election result as a vindication of their political analysis – in which
austerity and its consequences were central – and of their
volunteer-heavy combination of populist messaging and face to face
contact. This led to a subtle shift in the project’s ambitions. When
Corbyn won the leadership, few even in his core team expected him to
lead Labour into the next election, then slated for 2020. When he was
pressed not to vote for Corbyn as leader in 2015, Clive Lewis replied:
‘It’ll be about democratising the party, handing power back to the
membership and opposing austerity: why wouldn’t I back it?’ Once these
goals were achieved, many expected Corbyn would sub in a more
conventional politician, firmly of the left, to lead the reformed party
into power. But with May’s majority shattered and the government
unstable, the project expected opportunity to follow opportunity. The
party, McDonnell announced, would now be on a ‘permanent general
election footing’.
It wasn’t an implausible reading. When the country woke to the horror of
the Grenfell fire a few weeks later, it seemed to encapsulate many of
the issues Labour had campaigned on: the country’s deep inequalities;
its disregard for the lives of its poor or black citizens; the
catastrophic results of the Tory privatisation revolution. May’s inhuman
response only strengthened the sense that things were moving in Corbyn’s
direction. But Grenfell soon disappeared from the headlines, and the
press turned its attention back to the familiar drama of Brexit. Milne
dismissed those concerned with Brexit as engaged in an unserious
‘culture war’. But one does not always get to choose which war to fight.
In the wake of Labour’s defeat a year ago, some fantasised – with the
benefit of hindsight – about what might have been if Corbyn had handed
over the reins after 2017. Yet there were few plausible successors on
the party’s left. An anxiety that surfaces occasionally in This Land
concerns the party’s generational politics: its parliamentary wing is
still dominated by the dregs of New Labour, and the fear must be that
the left will repeat its mistake of the late 1980s and retreat to the
political margins. That the continued dominance of New Labour thinking
both laid the ground for Corbynism and choked off parliamentary support
for it is an irony Jones never quite identifies, but which runs through
his analysis.
Corbyn recognised the problem, as did younger MPs on the left such as
Lewis. The obvious solution was to reform the party machinery to enable
an infusion of new parliamentary candidates. It might seem odd that a
leadership which had just defied all predictions and enjoyed an
electoral surge should devote itself to party reform. For their Blairite
critics, it was proof of the project’s fundamental unseriousness –
though Blair enthusiastically remade the party in his own image prior to
1997, and the ferocity with which staffers at Labour HQ resisted Corbyn
proves that control of the party matters to every faction. To control
the party is to have the power to change the country. But for the
project – showing its Bennite inheritance here – it went beyond that.
Democratising the party and empowering its members would – so the logic
ran – produce inspiring candidates of the left, ending the factional
horse-trading that encourages the selection of mediocre MPs. It would
also bring the membership closer to the communities it nominally
represents. By these means, reform would guarantee the power of the left
in the party even after Corbyn.
This was the thinking that informed the Democracy Review undertaken by
Corbyn’s political secretary, Katy Clark, a former MP; it also inspired
the drive in 2018, heavily promoted by Momentum, to introduce ‘open
selection’ for MPs, making it easier to challenge incumbents. (MPs on
the party’s right were eager to paint this as bullying, but this level
of accountability already applies to Labour councillors, and is
established in the SNP, Liberal Democrats and Greens. Few would claim it
has transformed Labour councils into mini-Soviets.) Neither book remarks
on the centripetal force Westminster exerts on grassroots organisations
in the Labour Party; founded with grand ambitions to build a social
movement, Momentum was often reduced to playing the role of factional
battering ram, mobilising its huge email list to vote for its slate in
internal elections and doing little else. It wasn’t enough: Clark’s
review and the open selection motion were gutted at the 2018 conference.
That defeat isn’t much discussed here: in both books, 2018 is crucial
because it was then that the turn to an anti-Brexit position inside the
shadow cabinet began. (The story of Starmer’s ascent begins in earnest
here too.) But the conference defeat was the more serious turning point:
with conservative reforms to selection processes leaving incumbents with
the advantage, there were not going to be many new Corbynist MPs. No
successful challenge to a sitting MP was mounted ahead of the 2019
election. This was the moment the project started to die.
The role of the membership in a left-wing party is more vexed than is
sometimes admitted. The party’s executive wing has always distrusted the
membership – Sidney Webb referred to ‘groups of nonentities, dominated
by fanatics and cranks and extremists’. Many in the trade unions are
wary of the urban, middle-class skew to the membership, especially the
active membership, and are jealous of their own remaining power. The
historical solution to this difficulty was to give formal sovereignty to
party conference, expressed through a carefully constrained membership
vote, and effective autonomy to the parliamentary party – a mirror image
of the split between the dignified and efficient parts of the British
constitution. Critics of this system argue that it chokes off fresh
talent and new ideas, while failing to provide an effective check on MPs
or the leadership. But those wary of the biases of an empowered
membership can find ample support for their view by considering one of
the political disasters that proved most damaging to Corbyn’s Labour
Party: Brexit.
‘The army is crumbling,’ McDonnell said when the Unite leader, Len
McCluskey, pressed him on his growing receptiveness to a second
referendum on Brexit. McCluskey was sceptical: he’d heard rumbles of
discontent in the party’s northern heartlands. His allies in the
leader’s office believed that McDonnell’s head had been turned by
lobbying from the deeply anti-Corbyn People’s Vote campaign; it is more
likely that he changed his mind in light of polling showing Labour
haemorrhaging votes to Remain parties, and because of widespread
disenchantment among party activists. In his view, no party could win an
election without its foot soldiers; in McCluskey’s, the move would
alienate voters in the Red Wall constituencies which had been slipping
away from the party for decades. Both of them were right. Jones suggests
that Brexit was an unwinnable conundrum for Labour, with every route
leading to catastrophe.
In the aftermath of the 2019 election defeat, Brexit policy became the
object of just-so fantasies and excuses on every wing of the party, from
those who claimed the promise of Lexit autarky would have swept the
country to those who believed the country which elected Boris Johnson
had secretly longed for a champion of faceless technocracy. All this was
as much about self-exculpation as it was a means of striking at familiar
targets – Blairites, Trots, Stalinists. There is no doubt that Corbyn’s
standing was damaged in some quarters by appearing to condone a drive to
overturn a democratic exercise, in others by an apparently puzzling
refusal to push back at the disaster being engineered by the Tories.
Retreating behind an increasingly baroque attempt to defer the question
may have kept an uneasy peace in the party, but it prompted disbelief in
a country rapidly evacuating the centre ground.
Staffers interviewed in both books wonder if a clearer position after
2017 – accepting the referendum result, acknowledging the membership’s
unease, backing a soft Brexit – might have yielded a way forward. Jones
even sketches out what such a position might have looked like. But it’s
easy to forget that the government really did seem to be splitting
apart, and Labour MPs’ truculent consent to the post-2017 Corbyn
hegemony would not have held had he looked like rescuing the Tories from
their own mess. It’s noticeable that the issue missing from Jones’s
sketch of a Labour position on Brexit is the one that was most perilous:
immigration. At one point, a baffled Philip Hammond asked why Labour
expected the government to retain freedom of movement as part of a
Brexit deal. After all, he said, ending free movement is ‘what Brexit
means’.
At least McCluskey and McDonnell were trying to face up to the facts on
the ground. Corbyn, Pogrund and Maguire note, was ‘not a politician
built for the Brexit age’, having far less interest in constitutional
politics than his supposed Bennism would suggest; his boredom with the
detail was obvious. The strategic ambiguity pursued by his team was a
reflection of that boredom, and of a hope that by trying to talk about
what they saw as motivating the Brexit vote – issues that were more
comfortable and familiar for the party – they could move the public
conversation back to austerity and injustice. Instead, the party often
sounded irrelevant.
For many, the most miserable reading in these books, which were
published before the release of the Equalities and Human Rights
Commission’s investigation into the Labour Party in November, will be
the chapters on the antisemitism crisis. Left Out tracks the failure to
deal with successive waves of the crisis in painful detail; This Land
attempts to think through the failure of the leadership and the wider
left to confront the issue, but also underscores the cynical uses to
which it was put by the party’s right. Jones’s account tends to the
schematic, touching briefly on the increasing circulation of antisemitic
ideas in British society, its distinctive historical form on the left as
the ‘socialism of fools’, the political evolution of Israel since 1948
and its varying but near universal significance for British Jews. There
are some gaps: any of the Israeli New Historians, even the most
conservative, would raise an eyebrow at the absence of any account of
pre-1967 violence, and the question of whether ‘settler-colonial’ is a
useful label deserves greater exploration – but Jones has made a serious
attempt to understand the left’s weaknesses as something other than the
fault of the party’s right. His account is an improvement on the
defensive response that the public’s perception of the problem with
antisemitism in Labour was distorted, or that positive changes were made
to disciplinary procedures after they were taken out of the hands of
anti-Corbyn party staff. The antisemitism crisis cannot be explained
away, and the statement by Momentum’s founder, Jon Lansman, that he felt
‘used as a Jew’ to defend the party, but was left without support
afterwards, should be a source of shame.
Pogrund and Maguire chronicle the repeated attempts to head off disaster
in the early phases of the crisis. Not every proposal seems plausible –
it is hard to imagine Corbyn visiting Jerusalem, or risking a visit to a
school full of unpredictable teenagers – but the failure to act on any
of them is inexcusable. Jones narrates the wretched launch of Shami
Chakrabarti’s first inquiry into antisemitism in 2016, when Corbyn
seemed to his critics to equate Israel and Islamic State, thus creating
a row that overshadowed its findings (themselves subsequently
sidelined). A missed opportunity to give a speech at the Jewish Museum
and the failure to pursue offers from pro-Corbyn Jewish intellectuals to
ghostwrite or consult, seem negligent at best. The removal of any
apology from Corbyn’s initial statement seeking to explain his approving
Facebook comment on a mural featuring an antisemitic caricature was, in
the words of Corbyn’s aide Laura Murray, ‘fucking stupid and tone-deaf’.
Part of the problem (again) was Corbyn’s obvious chafing against the
requirements of party leadership, which now included engaging with
strands of Jewish opinion he found uncongenial. Progress on the issue
was continually blocked, not least because some of Corbyn’s
long-standing allies on the anti-Zionist Jewish left – many of them his
constituents – would persuade him that he didn’t really need to change
anything. The issue was personal, too: friends testify that Corbyn –
proud of decades of anti-racist activism inside and beyond the Labour
Party – was deeply hurt by the attacks on him, especially when they came
from newspapers with flagrant histories of racism. This is
understandable, but it shows a degree of vanity a political leader can
ill afford in a crisis.
The EHRC’s statutory inquiry into Labour is a sober, conservative and
often lawyerly examination of the problem. It finds Labour responsible
for three breaches of equality law, including indirect discrimination
against Jews and harassment of Jews by party agents. It draws particular
attention to political interference in the complaints process. Its
recommendations – the central one is the establishment of an independent
complaints process for antisemitism – were universally welcomed across
the party. For a few hours it seemed as if a line had been drawn under
the saga. Then Corbyn released a statement welcoming the
recommendations, but insisting that the scale of antisemitism in the
party had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons’ by the
press and ‘our opponents inside and outside the party’. The party
immediately suspended him. The move seems to have taken even Corbyn’s
enemies by surprise; the left in the party was thrown into disarray. All
sides fear a descent into another protracted civil war.
Perhaps that fear played on the minds of the NEC panel, composed of
members from the party’s left and right, which unanimously reinstated
Corbyn, after he had made a second, more acceptable statement, on 17
November. This episode has pleased precisely nobody: much of the party’s
left adduced it as evidence of the new leadership’s intention to push
them out of the party, while the failure to expel Corbyn has enraged
those on the right who eagerly anticipated his removal. At the time of
writing, though Starmer has readmitted Corbyn to the party, he has not
restored the whip. This represents a truce, but like most truces it is
uneasy, unstable and temporary.
Corbyn was not suspended on the recommendation of the EHRC; it has been
made clear his initial statement on the report was the problem. But it
remains unclear whether the party suspended Corbyn because it believed
his statement to be antisemitic, or on the more general ground that he
had brought the party into disrepute. If the former, then questions
follow about why the party is dealing with the matter through a process
just declared unfit for purpose by the EHRC. Some have suggested that
even to mention media coverage or public perception in this context is
to minimise antisemitism, but the report itself is careful to underline
party members’ rights to freedom of opinion, discussion and dissent when
it comes to considering the scale of antisemitism in the party. Critics
of Corbyn’s position point to the report’s treatment of cases in which
the minimisation of antisemitism is taken to constitute harassment (it
is this aspect of Ken Livingstone’s behaviour, as part of his defence of
remarks made by Naz Shah MP, on which the report dwells, rather than his
more obviously offensive remarks about Hitler). As the socialist lawyer
and writer David Renton points out, the Equalities Act sets a bar here:
judges must consider not only the feeling of offence but whether that
feeling is objectively reasonable.
Corbyn’s comment was not a denial that antisemitism exists within the
party, but a claim that its prevalence has been overstated, and that the
overstatement itself has had harmful effects and was employed for
political ends. That is certainly an arguable claim, but – like the
arguments against it – it is legitimate political speech. One might
think his initial statement tin-eared, or that it wasn’t sufficiently
reflective, or that it repeated his tic of mentioning antisemitism along
with ‘other forms of racism’ as if it weren’t serious enough on its own
terms, or did not take specific forms disanalogous to other racisms. But
none of that can possibly justify Corbyn’s suspension, still less the
suspension of members discussing it in their constituency parties.
If, as looks likely, the EHRC report itself is occluded by the
controversy, it will be another missed opportunity. It offers a chance
to think about the way antisemitism enters politics, and how to prevent
its growth. A functional, trusted and interference-free disciplinary
process is a necessary foundation, but isn’t in itself sufficient. The
origins of antisemitism are not bureaucratic but political. The authors
note the digital and social origin of many of the cases they reviewed:
likes on social media, shared posts, status updates. It is possible to
join the Labour Party – and loudly proclaim your membership – entirely
digitally, without making any direct contact with the rest of the party,
or having any opportunity for political education. Labour has, in any
case, rarely taken the political education of its officials, let alone
its members, as seriously as it should. Ceding the digital space to the
conspiracy theorists populating Facebook groups risks letting a problem
grow unseen. This is a challenge for political culture as a whole,
whatever specific relevance it has for Labour. A perfect disciplinary
process might catch every instance of offensive behaviour: a better
strategy would seek to prevent them occurring in the first place.
The 2019 election occupies only a small portion of these books:
although rumours occasionally escaped the office, few of those going
door to door realised that Corbyn’s team had broken down, riven by
Brexit, antisemitism and questions of basic strategy. In time, perhaps
some of the details will come to seem bleakly comic: the treatment of
the party’s communications ‘grid’ as a secret equivalent to the nuclear
codes, kept even from high-ranking staff, is particularly farcical. In
retrospect, the internal collapse of the project was nowhere more
obvious than in the party’s policy conveyor belt: increasingly aware, in
the words of the polling consultant Marcus Roberts, that ‘the soufflé
wouldn’t rise twice,’ they attempted to replace organic enthusiasm with
a blitzkrieg of pledges. It is a lesson that political tides cannot be
generated – they can only be ridden.
The left’s control over the party and membership ebbed rapidly after the
election; it was always more fragile than political commentators made
out. Now the generational problem that worries Jones became plain:
potential successors were too new to Parliament or too old, and the
project was too divided to give Rebecca Long-Bailey, its eventual
candidate, much of a push. It goes politely unremarked in both these
books, but the lack of succession planning – either for a
standard-bearer in Parliament, or for the left within the party – is
puzzling.
Anyone looking for insight into Starmer, whose victory in the succession
race was obvious months before it concluded, will come away with very
little. Though he was once billed as an arch-Remainer, his affection for
the EU seems to have been largely strategic; it has disappeared in
office. His ten pledges – promises to maintain the core of Corbynite
economic and social policy – have fared better so far, though there is
reason to be sceptical of their durability. Until Corbyn’s suspension,
the Thermidor many on the party’s left feared had not transpired: even
now, the leader’s office would prefer to avoid factional conflict (which
may account for the panicked reaction to its resurgence). The left
remains in disarray: some have taken to mimicking the Blairite
irreconcilables of Corbyn’s tenure, sniping from the sidelines in what
is sometimes obvious bad faith; others have been reborn as unconvincing
Starmerites, or taken vows of silence; others still have abandoned the
party for the political margins – or simply to get some peace.
Of the goals envisioned by Clive Lewis – democratisation, empowerment of
the membership, anti-austerity politics – only the last seems to have
been accomplished. The centre of gravity in British politics and in the
Labour Party has shifted to the left: how long this will last in the
post-Covid economic turbulence is difficult to assess. McDonnell, who
emerges in both books as the most serious and determined politician in
the Corbyn circle, is largely responsible for that shift. He was willing
to make the necessary compromises, the cold assessments of what should
be kept and what sacrificed: it is hard not to wonder, along with Jones,
whether he isn’t the Labour left’s ‘lost leader’. At times in both books
he seems to be holding the project together with his bare hands. It is a
reminder that the alchemy of high office is unpredictable: one Labour
grandee, backstage at party conference a few years ago, remarked on the
astonishing transformation of ‘the world’s most sectarian man’,
exhorting the rest of the left to follow McDonnell’s example.
Left Out ends with the Corbynites out in the cold. Jones, by contrast,
concludes with a defence of the project’s politics. Peter Mandelson, a
sepulchral voice of Blairism, reads him the chargesheet: Corbynism
failed, and its failures were congenital, not contingent; the damage
done to the party was immense. A more self-aware critic might have
admitted his own part in creating these problems, some of which preceded
Corbyn and have outlasted him. But Jones’s defence is more interesting,
as he attempts to rescue Corbynism’s domestic programme, shorn of its
international commitments, as a new common sense on the left, and the
only possible response to this century’s political and ecological crises.
Corbyn would no doubt argue that his domestic and international
commitments are of a piece, but Jones is making a brutal assessment, of
the sort too often lacking in the past few years, of what is possible.
This Land and Left Out are accounts of failure in political leadership,
a failure compounded by the left’s uncertainty about what constitutes
good leadership. We might be sceptical of Weber’s fascination with the
heroism of individual leaders, but his real scorn was reserved for those
who believe in nothing, or treat compromise as an end in itself. ‘What
is possible,’ he wrote, ‘would never have been achieved if, in this
world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.’ None of
the problems to which Corbynism was a response has disappeared. ‘Only
someone who is certain that he will not be broken when the world, seen
from his point of view, is too stupid or too base for what he wants to
offer it, and who is certain that he will be able to say “Nevertheless”
in spite of everything – only someone like this has a “vocation” for
politics.’ Yes, still: nevertheless.
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