On Saturday it is expected to be announced that Jeremy Corbyn has been re-elected as the Leader of the Labour Party.
The challenge to Corbyn from within his Party has been mostly about personal attributes. The concern has been with Corbyn’s leadership qualities – of rather the lack of them. The message has been that Corbyn is not up to the job and that his poor opinion poll ratings reflect this. Less complaint has been made about his political stance.
On the contrary the rival candidate Owen Smith has toured hustings around the country with the constant refrain: “I agree with Jeremy.” The strategy from Smith and the Labour “moderates” has been to woo the Corbynistas – rather than persuade them that their policies or political philosophy was wrong. The pitch has been that if they wanted to see Socialism implemented then Owen was a better bet than Jeremy.
Now it is perfectly reasonable for members of a political party to seek to oust a Leader who is considered useless. Corbyn has gone from resembling a geography teacher to a hapless supply teacher. Despite his 33 years in Parliament – as well as addressing agitprop gatherings on an almost daily basis for decades – he has yet to develop as an inspiring orator.
Also it is right and proper for Labour MPs to object to threats or abuse from Momentum supporters – whether online or worse still in the flesh. Labour MPs Mary Creagh and Angela Eagle have had bricks thrown the window of their constituency Labour Party offices – with the suspicion that the culprits will be their opponents within the Labour Party.
Staff distressed to discover brick through office window in Wakefield this morning. No excuse for violence & intimidation in our democracy.
— Mary Creagh (@MaryCreaghMP) September 12, 2016
So Labour is not a Government in waiting. It has grabbed the mantle of the “nasty Party” and has a Leader who is spectacularly unfit to be Prime Minister.
It so happens that the personal attack on Corbyn has not worked. It has only fed a bizarre personality cult.
In any case the personal attack misses the fundamental point. It is irreconcilable for the Labour Party to be both a social democratic party and a Communist one. Those with Communist views – whether they call themselves Trotskyists, Marxists or Stalinists – do not belong in a social democratic party. Labour members can try and fudge it by all calling themselves “socialist” but that doesn’t really work – certainly not if the Communist faction end up running the joint.
It is true that coping with this dynamic is not a new problem for the Labour Party. During the Soviet era the threat of infiltration was rather more powerful. Communists would be active in the trade unions which provided an institutional link to the Labour Party.
However the Party leadership in the past would generally thwart efforts to subvert who the Party stood for. Labour was a patriotic party. It was loyal to the Crown, the armed forces, the rule of law, freedom of speech and publication, Parliamentary democracy.
It wanted to reform capitalism but not to overthrow it. It knew whose “side it was on” in the world. Our side. NATO not the Warsaw Pact. The allegiance of Labour was to the United Kingdom not the Soviet Union.
No doubt attempting to win support from the British electorate with an anti-British prospectus would have been electorally challenging. But there was more to it than that. With Ernest Bevin, Hugh Gaitskell, James Callaghan and their contemporaries opposing Communism wasn’t just about winning votes. It reflected what they believed.
The Labour Party had a “proscribed list” of pro Communist organisations that Labour members were not allowed to join – such as the British Soviet Friendship Society.
Now Labour has transformed from preventing Communists being members to being increasingly under Communist control. When Corbyn is asked if he is a Marxist he dodges the question – although the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has been filming identifying himself with the label.
This is the problem that is being dodged. It would remain even if Corbyn spoke more fluently, dressed more smartly and didn’t sit on the floor when there was a seat available.
The reason is that too many of the non-Communists in the Labour Party have some degree of sympathy for Communism rather than accepting the evil nature of that disastrous totalitarian creed. Corbyn’s predecessor, Ed Miliband, for example, took great exception when the Daily Mail attacked his father Ralph as “the man who hated Britain”.
The historian Eric Hobsbawm said that in the 1930s he would “probably” have still supported Communism even if he had known of the millions killed in the Stalin era. When Hobsbawm died Miliband paid tribute to him as a “lovely man”.
While Corbyn has praised Venezuela has providing a model to follow so have plenty of other Labour MPs – enough for him not to challenged much within the Party on this issue.
Thus the Labour Party’s difficulty is not only a Communist faction in the ascendency. It comes from the rest of the Party appeasing them. Its prospects of being restored to being a patriotic, anti Communist, social democratic party seem to be entirely doomed.
