Labour Party members will be voting in the coming weeks on the election of a new leader to replace Jeremy Corbyn. There is only one leadership candidate on the left and that is Rebecca Long-Bailey, and we therefore urge readers and supporters of this website to vote for her. We further urge that Constituency Labour Parties and trade union branches discuss the issue of the leadership and that they also nominate Rebecca Long-Bailey. For the deputy leadership we believe that Party members should support Richard Burgon, as the person with the most consistent record of backing Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and Labour’s radical manifesto.
This campaign is as important as the campaign that won Jeremy Corbyn the leadership in 2015, because if any of the right-wing candidates were to win, they would push as much as they could to undo all the gains of the last four years.
Since Corbyn’s election in 2015, the Labour Party has been transformed, with more than half a million members and with a national conference that genuinely reflects the grass roots of the party, rather than a leader’s jamboree.
It was the surge of new members, radicalised by Corbyn’s agenda, that still frightens Labour’s right-wing today. In 2016, let us recall, 80% of the Parliamentary Labour Party signed a letter of no confidence in Corbyn, despite 60% of Party members having elected him. Three of the candidates for leader today: Keir Starmer, Jess Phillips and Lisa Nandy, signed that disgraceful letter. The party membership replied by re-electing Jeremy with an even bigger mandate.
Labour’s biggest vote increase since 1945
Under his leadership, the Labour Party has twice put forward a radical manifesto, the first time in 2017 winning the biggest increase in Labour votes in a general election since 1945. Many (but by no means all) of those votes were lost two and a half years later and that was due, as we have argued, principally to the Brexit issue and no small thanks to Keir Starmer and Emily Thornberry beating the drums for a second referendum. But Corbyn’s percentage vote in the recent election was still higher than Ed Miliband’s in 2015 and Gordon Brown’s in 2010. The idea that 2019 was the “worst election result since 1935” is a myth created in the editorial offices of the mainstream media.
We have always argue that ‘Corbynism’ was not the product of one man. It was a reflection of a shift in consciousness of millions of working people, crying out for an end to austerity. Daily life in the UK today is characterised by low pay, declining living standards, a dire housing shortage and growing poverty. All the official poverty figures indicate that a big proportion of those in great need are actually in work – because real take-home pay is still below the level of ten years ago. Local government, the NHS and other services on which workers rely, have been cut to the bone. Meantime, the rich and super-rich have increased their wealth and income several times over and for this tiny proportion of the population, payment of taxes is all but optional.
2015 election…the Attack of the Clones
The 2015 general election was fought with three parties leaders who were virtually clones: David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband. Three men in suits, with barely distinguishable policies. Jeremy Corbyn came like a breath of fresh air in 2015, offering the promise of something different; he was not rooted in the ‘old’ politics and that fact excited and energised hundreds of thousands of workers and youth. Here, at last, was hope for a political leadership that would attack the vested interests of the rich and the establishment and end the blight of austerity facing millions of families. Jeremy Corbyn did not create a mass movement against austerity: he merely provided a channel through which it could run and it is in that sense that ‘Corbynism’ is still very much alive today.
A Corbyn Labour government would have presented a genuine threat to the interests of the capitalist class in a manner not seen since 1945 and it was for that reason that Corbyn was subjected to a relentless campaign of abuse, distortions and slander of the sort never before suffered by any Labour leader in history. We are not going to repeat here the arguments we have previously made about the reasons for the general election defeat that were in our last editorial. But the point needs to be made that under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour Party tapped into a deep well of anger, frustration and suffering and at the same time touched a raw nerve with the ruling elite. The condition of working class people in society is the same now as it was in 2019 and as long as it retains a mass membership that will continue to be reflected through the Labour Party.
Three of four candidates showed their disloyalty to Corbyn
In the coming months and years, therefore, we need to defend the gains made in the last four years, both in terms of party democracy and policy. Indeed, we need to extend the gains even further. Because of the big shift in opinion within the party the four right-wing candidates for leadership –Starmer, Philips, Nandy and Thornberry – are all being very circumspect about which policies they will ditch and which ones they will keep. But there should be no mistake: the election of any of these will signal a movement to the right and the abandonment of radical policies. It may also mean an assault on the rights of the mass membership, because it would only be against the party membership that key policies can be ditched and the party shifted to the right.
No matter who is elected, we will see a continued and relentless campaign by the media and TV to rid the party of its radical ideas and to silence or decimate its radical membership. Whereas the Labour Party used to be a ‘safe second eleven’ for capitalism, with a mass membership, groaning under the weight of prolonged austerity, Labour is seen as a liability, as an ongoing danger to the interests of the capitalist class. It has to be tamed or destroyed.
The so-called ‘ten pledges advanced by the Board of Deputy of British Jews is only one instance of the kind of pressure that will be put on whoever is elected leader. As we have argued, it is a myth that the Labour Party has some kind of ‘special problem’ with anti-Semitism. The issue is a fake campaign drummed up by the right wing of the party and the Tory media to undermine Corbyn and to intimidate any party members who might be critical of the Israeli government’s policies in relation to the Palestinians.
The ten pledges demanded by the BoD are a draconian series of measures that effectively outsource the internal disciplinary life of the Labour Party to outside right-wing organisations. As the Jewish blogger, Jewish Dissident, put it, “The BoD’s ten demands represent a wholly unprecedented abrogation of the democratic prerogatives of an independent political party by a lobby group that sees its interests as ineluctably tied to those of a foreign state”.
“Jewish Labour Movement” refused to endorse Labour
The pledges are a charter for mass expulsions – for some individuals permanently – and without due process. It suggests that an ‘independent provider’ process complaints. Bear in mind that many complaints of “anti-Semitism” have been found by Labour’s own investigations to be completely spurious, and at least one right-wing Labour MP has explicitly said that any “anti-capitalist” rhetoric is by definition “anti-Semitic”.
The ten pledges include a call for ‘Jewish representative bodies’ to be given access to Labour’s complaints process, which is most probably in breach of data protection law. It calls for the so-called Jewish Labour Movement, an organisation that refused to endorse a Labour vote in the last election, to be given an official role in the party’s political education.
The pledges call for Labour to engage with the Jewish community “via its main representative groups, and not through fringe organisations and individuals”. That means, of course, organisations approved by the Board of Deputies. So Jewish Voice for Labour, an organisation that is supportive of Corbyn and is made up of Jewish Labour members, would be excluded. As would be the UK Rabbinical Executive Board, which, along with the United European Jews organisation (UEJ), published an open letter last November, exonerating Jeremy Corbyn of the charge of anti-Semitism.
It is a scandal that the candidates for leadership should have agreed to the ten pledges. But it is an even greater pity that Rebecca Long-Bailey seems to be so much afraid of a charge of anti-Semitism that she too has agreed. “I will also enact all of the Board of Deputies’ recommendations”, she has said.
“Labour MPs should challenge Long-Bailey’s authority, if elected”
Despite being the best of the five candidates, it does not bode well for Long-Bailey to cave in to this kind of pressure so early in the campaign. If she is elected, and we still hope she is, she will face pressure from the press and Labour’s right-wing no less than that faced by Corbyn. Former Labour minister Roy Hattersley has already written that if she is elected leader, “Labour MPs should challenge her authority”. That is an invitation to rebel, like the Parliamentary Labour Party did in 2016. We would very much hope that Rebecca Long-Bailey develops more backbone and begins to fight back against these anti-democratic, anti-socialist elements who still infest the Labour Party.
The fight for socialist ideas in the Labour Party is not a quick sprint; nor has it ever been a smooth and easy road. Leadership elections are important, but they are still only milestones on a long road. The idea, much touted in social media, that the Corbyn leadership was a “once in a lifetime opportunity” was never true. We have to be in it for the long haul. All we can do is to fight for socialist policies – the most relevant ideas and solutions to the problems facing the working class – through the Labour party and through the trades unions, and that for the foreseeable future. We will fight for a leadership team of Rebecca Long-Bailey and Richard Burgon, not because they are the perfect, finished article, but because we believe they will be the most responsive to the ideas, needs and aspirations of the working class base of the Labour Party.
January 16, 2020
