A regular feature of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign are the rallies that he holds which are attended by his faithful supporters in large numbers.
Photos of the turnout are tweeted as though they were proof that Corbyn reaches the parts other Labour politicians can’t – though one of these many tweets last week was embarrassingly misogynist, showing a supporters poster warning “Lock Up Your Dawtaz” because Jeremy was about.
Needless to say, the offending tweet was hastily deleted.
The main point of these rallies and their accompanying promotion on social media is to imply ‘We are a movement, we are many, nothing can stop us.’
Yesterday in #Ramsgate we announced our plan to invest £30b into coastal towns so that no community is left behind pic.twitter.com/0JjWRoUz5a
— Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) September 4, 2016
Over the weekend one of those rallies was held in Ramsgate in Kent – deep in Tory territory – the implication being that Corbyn and the ‘new politics’ can win even here. Now, as any seasoned observer knows, Ramsgate is in the parliamentary constituency of Thanet South and its recent voting history tells the story of middle Britain and its voters. The coastal town has only rarely elected a Labour MP – just three times in its history, and those were all when Tony Blair was Labour leader.
It was the mark of New Labour and its ‘big tent’ politics that it could win – and keep – the trust and support of middle ground voters. That hard-won trust was thrown away completely by Ed Miliband and in 2015, just five years after last having a Labour MP, the party ended up third in the seat behind the Tories and UKIP.
There could be no starker illustration of the fallacy at the heart of the Corbyn campaign. To his supporters, Tony Blair is a ‘Red Tory’ and, they allege, only won election by adopting ‘Tory’ or ‘Tory-lite’ policies. (Notwithstanding the fact that the Tories vigorously opposed the National Minimum Wage, devolution for Scotland, the abolition of the homophobic Section 28 and the Human Rights Act among other policies.)
For Corbynistas, Gordon Brown was obviously a ‘Red Tory’ too – he was, after all, central to the New Labour project. And even Ed Miliband is regularly denounced by Corbynites on social media. His sin? Not being left wing enough. That, in the end, is their fundamental political analysis – voters gave David Cameron the first Tory majority for a quarter of a century to send Labour the message that they weren’t left wing enough.
Regional Investment Banks will bring pride & prosperity to seaside towns like #Ramsgate → https://t.co/S3SFe9faYw pic.twitter.com/gAiGgpPN1r
— Jeremy Corbyn MP (@jeremycorbyn) September 3, 2016
The way, Corbynistas argue, to win back voters in seats like Thanet South is to become a properly left wing, socialist party. The arithmetic is against them – seven out of ten voters in that seat votes for either UKIP or the Tories, neither of them a left of centre protest vote. And across the country half of the electorate went for UKIP or the Tories. Voters in Kent, and around the country, rejected Ed Miliband’s Labour because they did not trust him to run the economy. So what is the Corbynite policy prescription for winning back Ramsgate? More of the same – except more extreme. The ‘policy’ announcement at the Ramsgate rally was a Regional Investment Bank to invest in economic development.
What is a Regional Investment Bank? In policy terms it is a solution in search of a problem. This is irrelevant for Ramsgate, where new rail services now connect the town rapidly to London. The new Javelin trains which serve the area, incidentally, were delivered under Tony Blair and the privatised rail industry – two of the objects of Corbyn’s greatest loathing. Connections there are fuelling a boom in employment: joblessness has halved in the town since 2010, and is in the hundreds. These connections are also bringing an influx of new residents ranging from hardworking Eastern Europeans to the bohemian middle classes who find Brighton too expensive. A Regional Investment Bank sounds like just what it is – an expensive boondoggle, a surefire way of wasting taxpayers’ money on subsidising vanity projects.
In the 1970s the country learned the hard way that public spending doesn’t create growth. Or to put it another way, governments can’t pick winners but losers sure can pick governments. There is a way back for Labour in Kent – it is by being trusted by voters on immigration, welfare and the economy. To go to Ramsgate, as Jeremy Corbyn did, and promise a return to the tax and spend policies of Old Labour is to guarantee that Labour’s back to the future policies reap back to the future 1980s- style defeats.
