Why can’t Jeremy Corbyn be a left-wing Farage? Why can’t he threaten Labour as Ukip and its successor parties threatened and continue to threaten the Tories? There is a gap in the market for a party to the left of Labour, and Corbyn seems just the man to fill it.
Those of us who intensely disliked his leadership of the Labour party disliked most of all the gormless personality cult which surrounded him and did so much to destroy the left’s claim to possess a sceptical intelligence. But there is no doubt that, if you want to build a new movement, having tens of thousands, and in all likelihood hundreds of thousands, of devotees is a great place to start.
I live in Islington and the Labour candidate Praful Nargund is not well known.
Nor will many on the British left be over-concerned that Corbyn is out of Labour because he refused to apologise for presiding over one of the worst moments in Labour history. The Equality and Human Rights Commission said Labour was responsible for ‘unlawful’ antisemitic discrimination on Corbyn’s watch. Corbyn ducked responsibility by saying that the racism had been ‘dramatically overstated’ by his opponents.
The Gaza conflict has given many on the left licence to stop caring about anti-Jewish racism, assuming, that is, they cared in the first place. Meanwhile Keir Starmer’s decision to offer a blank cheque to Benjamin Netanyahu, of all people, has infuriated white left-wing and Muslim opinion and brought mass protests and mass resignations from Labour.
The material for a new movement is there. You can see it raging on the streets of London most weekends. Why not unite Corbyn and his supporters, the Green party, George Galloway and his Muslim backers, and the remnants of the various Trotskyist and Stalinist parties in a coherent left-wing movement? It could work just as well as Ukip worked. And yet when Corbyn announced he would stand against Labour in Islington North on Friday, he said he would stand alone as an independent. There was no new movement and no new party.
I live in Islington and the Labour candidate Praful Nargund is not well known. He runs private IVF clinics, and the left will get him for that. But he’s also a brave man. Anyone who stands against Corbyn will face the libels and attacks of his supporters. Like so many saints before him, Corbyn inspires cruelty.
One prominent local Labour figure told me a Corbyn supporter had said: ‘I would deserve everything I got if I ran against Jeremy’. Her partner and children said she should not put them through it. The nastiness would not be over when the election was over: ‘We’d have to live in the constituency afterwards and there would be bitter recriminations.’ It will be a gruesome fight and no one wants to predict the winner. But it will be a fight between Corbyn and Labour. Not between Labour and a movement to its left.
For all the apparent affinity with Corbyn, the Green party is running a candidate against him in Islington North. It won’t campaign hard, I am told, but it won’t stand aside either. A big reason why left-wing unity is impossible is that Greens have little connection to left-wing history. However radical their positions can appear, they are not socialists. Working-class trade unionists will never ally easily with a party that wants to close nuclear and gas power stations and is opposed to economic growth.
Sheridan Kates, the Green candidate fighting Corbyn in Islington North, is explicit about the gulf between the Labour movement that was born to fight for the industrial working class, and a green movement born to fight against the despoliation of the planet. He denounces ‘economic plans coming from the incoming Labour shadow government [that] are based on continued economic growth, which widens inequality and harms our planet’.
Pretty much everyone on the left, from Karl Marx onwards, has believed economic growth opened up the possibility to remove or at least ameliorate inequality. The Greens do not. The tension can be seen in the seats where the Greens are competitive. They do well in the bourgeois left areas of Brighton and Bristol rather than the old industrial regions. Tellingly, they are also putting down roots in rural England. The Greens hope to take north Herefordshire and the new Waveney Valley constituency in East Anglia, which includes Beccles and Diss, towns that are far from working-class Britain.
They reject Labour claims that they do well in the soft south by selling out the young and becoming a nimby party. Maybe they are telling the truth. But I wonder for how long they will have much choice in the matter. Home county politicians do not prosper by building homes, after all.
Meanwhile the white, far left’s alliance with British Islam, and on occasion radical Islam, is as much a curse as a blessing. On the one hand it can bring it votes – George Galloway took Rochdale earlier this year – on the other hand, there are huge dangers. Let me explain them with a question: would it be a good idea for Corbyn to invite Galloway to campaign in Islington on his behalf?
To the anger of many on the left, Galloway has followed through on the logic of appealing to Muslim conservatives by saying he didn’t want children to be taught ‘that gay relationships are exactly the same and as normal as a mum, a dad and kids’. One can mock leftists who were willing to overlook Galloway’s support for dictatorships but that does not mean that their anger is not real, and if Corbyn brings in Galloway he will do his cause no good at all.
The truth is that the far left had its one shot at power when Corbyn won the Labour leadership. Under first past the post, you are far better off trying to take over one of the two main parties than campaigning as outsiders – as the Brexit-backing right found when it took over the Conservatives. My guess is that Corbyn’s supporters who are still in Labour won’t risk expulsion by coming to Islington to fight for their old leader. They will stay and dream of one day capturing Labour as Corbyn did.
Why can’t Jeremy Corbyn lead a new movement? Because the Greens go their own way. Because the tensions in the alliance between white progressives and Muslim conservatives are too great. And because, well, of Jeremy Corbyn’s success in snatching the Labour leadership. Keir Starmer is a truly lucky politician. He’s lucky that the Conservative and Scottish National parties have fallen apart just when he needed them to, and lucky that the far left cannot unite. He’s going to be in power for a long, long time.
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