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4903 words
ou make it, then it makes you. The advice comes from the Cuban writer Carlos Franqui,
whose luminous memoir of the early years of the revolution, Family Portrait with Fidel, once
inspired me to seek him out in hope of commissioning a mini-sequel. Franqui, by then well into his
eighties, was living in Puerto Rico and editing Carta de Cuba, the independent cultural magazine
he had founded. The essay I sought never materialised, though contact with one of my heroes was
a reward in itself. And the more I thought about his remark in the years that followed, the more it
claried just about everything.
Franquis words came to mind again as Britains Labour Party went through the early motions of a
post-election inquest following its shattering defeat on 7 May, a day on which so many would-be
masters of history were turned into its puppets. That pencil revolution, after the dullest of
campaigns, might have been a thrilling example of democracy in action, but the aftermath was
disconcerting. Not because Labour had lost to the Conservatives after ve years in opposition; not
because the partys vote share had barely increased; not because it had saved only one of its fortysix seats in Scotland. It was disconcerting because the immediate reactions from inside the tribe
were so desultory in relation to the scale of the catastrophe.
Within days of Ed Milibands instant resignation, the track had been laid for another ride on the
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leadership train. Harriet Harman, deputy leader since her narrow win over Alan Johnson in 2007,
took temporary charge. A timetable and procedure for election were set. Five candidates soon
declared, plus more for the deputy leadership. It was all too quick for columnist Joan Smith, who
wrote that Labour resembles someone whos just emerged from a failed relationship and cant
wait to start dating again.
Former deputy leader Margaret Beckett was charged with overseeing a a forensic, honest inquiry
or, rather, a Learning the Lessons from Defeat taskforce that Harman promised would dare
to look over the edge of the precipice at what happened. But by the time of its launch on 31 May,
many on the left were past that stage, having moved with lightning speed from stages-of-grief to
one-more-heave.
Two months on, Labour is keeping up appearances. Front of stage, the leadership contest is well
into the hustings cycle. Behind the scenes, the election inquest goes on. In parliament, Harman is
valiant against David Cameron. But this post-election period is already resembling the previous
one, as an ambitious Conservative government with a strategic reforming purpose extends its
political hegemony while Labours priority is a new driver and trackside repairs for its exhausted
engine. The Conservative chancellor George Osbornes budget on 8 July, with its condent advance
onto Labours terrain, made the contrast painfully clear.
abours leadership contest gathers most of the limited attention the party is now receiving.
Under a two-stage model approved in 2014, candidates need the support of 15 per cent of Labour
MPs to be nominated. (At present, thats thirty-ve MPs out of Labours total of 232 in a 650-seat
House of Commons.) Those who qualify are then voted on by the partys 190,000 members under a
preferential ballot, with choices distributed until a winner emerges. The process will climax with a
special conference on 12 September. (Timothy Heppells Choosing the Labour Leader: Labour Party
Leadership Elections from Wilson to Brown, published in 2010, gives useful background on eight
earlier tussles across ve decades.)
The short nomination period was eventful, with two gures withdrawing: the highly favoured
shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna (after three days, citing discomfort at heightened media
scrutiny) and the shadow development minister Mary Creagh (after a month, from lack of support).
This left three runners, all in their mid forties. They were Andy Burnham, who came a distant
fourth in the 2010 election before devoting much of the last parliament to preparing a re-run;
Yvette Cooper, who, like Burnham, served in Gordon Browns government (200710) and then
spent ve years in the shadow cabinet; and Liz Kendall, who became an MP only in 2010, thirteen
years after Cooper and nine after Burnham, and thus entered the race as an outsider.
A common motif of their declarations was the need for a proper debate, though rival camps were
soon sparring more over phraseology than policy: aspiration, a code word of Labour modernisers,
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for example, or the call to rediscover the beating heart of Labour, part of Burnhams glutinous
repertoire. Liz Kendall was a particular target for barbs (swallowing the Tory manifesto and even
Taliban New Labour). The tiffs seemed as vacuous as the language being fought over. Sharpness
is better than dullness, but they hardly augured any readiness to look over the edge of the
precipice. Perhaps Labour had been, well, precipitate in responding to the election nightmare by
boxing itself into another by-numbers leadership race?
Thats all very well, responded a senior loyalist of my acquaintance when I raised the point, but
what do you expect? Politics goes on, so must process. Labour has rules for every situation, and it is
obliged to follow them. Government needs effective opposition, our people (Labour is very fond
of the possessive) need representation, the party needs leadership. A luta continua and all that.
Then, a step back into the Miliband bunker. We took 9.3 million votes, a rise of 1.5 per cent on
2010. London gave us 44 per cent, a standout success. We fought a strong campaign on themes
poverty, austerity, insecurity, inequality that will dominate the next parliament. The Tories will
become more divided, crises will erupt, opportunities will arise. With more passion, we will thrive.
The case, to my ears, echoed Monty Pythons armless and legless black knight: the result for
Labour, it seemed to say, was a mere esh wound. Passion is one of those argument-losing words
for which there should be an equivalent of Godwins law. The recourse to statistics recalled Tony
Benns infamous boast after Labours wipeout in 1983: For the rst time since 1945 a political
party with an openly socialist policy has received the support of over eight and a half million
people. Reiterating the correctness of the partys message seemed an invitation to shout louder in
peoples faces. And if a rule book is always handy, ruined hopes surely demand the question
famously posed by the trade union boss George Woodcock in 1962: what are we here for?
xistential is a big word. But this was no ordinary loss. Many analysts cite Labours decits on
leadership and economic policy as central factors, but also note a host of subsidiary ones: its fuzzy
prole, reduced support among older voters and neglect of English interests, and the doubts about
its competence. The fragmentary nature of the election reinforced these problems. The
psephologist John Curtice, whose astounding exit poll overturned predictions of a hung parliament
and dened the election-night mood, says that the election result marked the nal death-knell of
the idea that there is such a thing as a single Britain-wide electoral contest. There was, in truth,
one election outcome in England and Wales and another very different one in Scotland. No
wonder, in the aftermath, that demands from north of the border to make the Scottish Labour Party
autonomous are matched by a plan (led inevitably by the Blue Labour seer Jon Cruddas) to set up
an English wing.
To some, then, a thorough overhaul is necessary if the party is ever to come close to regaining
power. In these circles, muted despair over the direction of Milibands leadership has been
succeeded by worry that a cosmetic makeover will leave deeper problems untouched. After all, in
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seven decades only three Labour leaders (out of ten) have delivered a clear majority: Clement
Attlee in 1945, Harold Wilson in 1966, and Tony Blair in his hat trick from 1997 to 2005. How can
the party ever again reach those heights?
Britains electoral map appears to have reduced Labour to islands of red in neighbouring seas of
blue (Conservative) and yellow (Scottish National Party, or SNP). This can mislead, for the effect is
amplied by regional concentration and distorted by the rst-past-the-post model. But both the
constituency boundaries and the electoral system have long served Labours shorter-term electoral
prospects while concealing longer-term weaknesses and creating disincentives to reform. Now, at
last, there can no longer be any reliance on a natural reversal of the pendulum that delivers
power to Labour and thats before even considering the Tories unfolding strategy. This time, a
Labour recovery must mean building beyond its historical areas and bases of support, above all
psychologically. And even some of those bases can no longer be taken for granted.
So great a debacle makes a return to ofce in 2020 near impossible, except in the event of some
intervening national upheaval or major constitutional change involving electoral reform and a
repeal of the xed-term parliaments law. And given Labours abyss in Scotland, the latters
independence which will return to the agenda if the SNP wins the 2016 election to the Edinburgh
parliament would barely alter its prospects in England and Wales. The party is thus likely to be in
the wilderness for at least another decade. Whatever way the cake is cut, 7 May 2015 spells a
historic reckoning.
here was little sign in the post-election weeks that Labour was yet ready to look this
predicament in the eye. Politics was always going to trump existentialism. But the rule book itself
had a late and mind-bending trick to play. Just before the close of the nominations period on 15
June two minutes before noon and after tense lending of nominations from the
oversubscribed, Labours parliamentary left secured the entry ticket it always craves for one of its
own: Jeremy Corbyn, a backbench MP since 1983 and two decades older than his rivals. The dial
went haywire and has yet to settle.
Corbyn needed non-allies to help him qualify. Of the thirty-ve nominations propelling him over
the line, sixteen were from fellow London MPs, including rival candidates for the mayoralty in
2016, Sadiq Khan and David Lammy, and the mercurial Jon Cruddas. Having made the cut, Corbyns
presence on the ballot is galvanising the ever-rudderless left, in and beyond the party, and pushing
its priorities (support for welfare, public services, trade union rights; opposition to austerity,
nuclear weapons, Britains wars) up the agenda. Every grain of evidence for his appeal is now being
amplied by keyboard warriors to create an impression of momentum, making the true picture
hard to assess. In this respect, the contest echoes the general election, whose result confounded
the pollsters.
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Again, there is reason to be cautious. In normal times, the morosely genial Corbyn speaks for a
coterie of the like-minded, much reduced since the heady days of the 1980s when Bennism was on
the march and revolution in the air. Now things are more sedate. My entry into all of this, he
says, was because a number of us on the left of the party thought there ought to be a debate about
the economic strategy and how we deal with the issue of austerity. In that debate, Corbyns
positions his ank has positions rather than policies or ideas will be subject to more detailed
scrutiny than is customary. That could prove enlightening for party members who want to see
another Labour government in their lifetime.
Moreover, the recent record of left-wing candidates is poor: two of Corbyns comrades and fellow
London MPs embarked on vain leadership crusades in 2007 and 2010, with John McDonnell twice
withdrawing from lack of support and Diane Abbott coming last. And if many commentators
welcome his entry on pluralist democratic grounds, the Guardians Polly Toynbee (Every Corbyn
vote gives ammunition to Labours enemies) and Martin Kettle (Party of opposition or party of
government? Purity or power?) also voice the weary wisdom of a realist centre-left faced with
another impossibilist spasm.
Many Labour colleagues are equally sceptical. The Independents Andy McSmith, a sympathetic
observer of the partys ups and downs, was told by a left-wing Labour MP that Corbyn as
leadership contender is a hilarious idea: If Jeremy thought there was any chance that he was
going to win, hed be on the rst plane to Caracas. He has spent his life avoiding responsibility. He
reminds us of when we were young.
But within Corbyns camp there is bubbling optimism. A supporter I spoke to mentioned the social
resonance of the wider lefts populist nostrums, as measured by its media personalities teeming
twitter feeds, rapturous applause on the BBCs weekly debate show Question Time, and loud
approval in the cultural sphere. Syrizas referendum victory in Greece conrms that an antiausterity message can carry popular weight. A more solid asset is the lefts proven ability to win
and keep control of many trade unions; Britains biggest, Unite which has 1.4 million members
decided on 5 July to back Corbyn for the party leadership. Several other unions have climbed on the
bandwagon.
These trends are reinforced by reports of audience enthusiasm at the early hustings. This is a
serious campaign that has growing momentum, Corbyn says, a chance to reverse spending cuts
and reductions in living standards and invest our way to growth and fairness. It is
characteristically broad-brush, detail-light stuff. But its working among the faithful.
Moreover, rumours y that Labours low membership barrier three quid by 12 August and few
questions asked, guv will tempt entryists from right and left to tilt the vote in Corbyns favour.
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earth, likable, dry and wry old leftie, utterly sincere. The incentive on both sides to get involved is
clear: right-wingers are as certain hell drag Labour further down as leftists are of the contrary. As
the Commons debated Greece on 6 July, George Osborne teasingly told Corbyn that he would be
an excellent leader of the Labour Party. Jeremy did his best to look displeased.
hus the Corbyn factor has changed the balance of the race. Andy Burnham nds his cloying
northern-lad patter (Im a loyal Labour man, Im true to our roots) more exposed. An incisive
column by New Statesman editor Jason Cowley, noting the contradictions of Burnhams insistent
self-positioning as an authentic, counter-establishment gure, concludes that the danger for him
is that when you peel back the outer layers of clich there doesnt seem much to behold beyond
the sight of a man with a loud voice saying it has to be me.
Liz Kendall had already punctured the balloon in the rst candidates debate on 17 June, when she
trumped Burnhams the party comes rst with an instinctive, low the country comes rst: a
golden moment, with a touch of the ruthless (Burnham was in technical rather than Leninist
mode). She too is already drawing criticism on account of some suspiciously bold priorities for the
party: among them sound public nances, support for business risk-takers, Englands governance,
and engaging in Europe and beyond on Islamist extremism, Russia, climate change and the
global economy. (Childrens early years are a less controversial focus.) Perhaps the most important
sentence of an impressive speech at Reuters on 30 June is this: The Labour Party I lead will
embrace the future not resist it.
Her own danger is to be boxed in as a Blairite. Both as description and insult, the term, always
rather nebulous, is becoming meaningless. She has declined the label. By recuperating it for a
denite purpose, Kendall might subvert the charge, add welcome mischief to the contest, and
perhaps even bring the anti-Blair pathology to a long-overdue catharsis. In the end, however,
Yvette Coopers greater experience and emollience may mean she is judged a safer choice, and she
is also the beneciary of a denite if mainly unspoken feeling that, forty years after the Tories
chose Margaret Thatcher as their leader, its time for Labour to do the honourable thing and elect a
woman.
The schedule is packed: seven broadcast debates and ten party-run regional hustings to come, the
latter chaired by leading journalists. If that grindathon seems conducive to a mix of play-it-safe
and genteel pointscoring, the candidates are by now test-running policy ideas and projecting
themselves in set-piece addresses and interviews. Coopers case for far greater use of digital
technology in delivering public services is an example. Meanwhile, the concurrent tussle for the
deputy leadership pits the backroom xer Tom Watson against the kinetic Stella Creasy, a young
London MP whose campaigns against moneylenders and online misogyny fuel her ambition to
align Labour with the new social activism. Former ministers Caroline Flint, Angela Eagle and Ben
Bradshaw make it a robust eld.
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Its tempting to say that the measure of Labours willingness to renew, as opposed to repackage,
itself will be whether its members choose KendallCreasy over BurnhamWatson. That would be
premature, for neither of the former has yet made a clinching case. But the wager suggests a truth
about current politics in Britain that Ed Milibands disastrous, disdainful reign ignored. Labour
needs to earn the very right to a hearing for whatever it wants to do. That will be won by being
seen to like the country and people it wants to govern, and by becoming trusted to lead them.
f theres a perfect antithesis its name would be Jeremy Corbyn. After the urry of amazement at
his becoming a candidate which is worth recalling, so quickly are such feelings buried as the new
reality is adjusted to disciplines of politeness rightly came into play to give everyone a fair
hearing. In that spirit the many points in Corbyns favour are easy to list: a popular constituency
MP of the rub-along global microcosm that is inner Londons Islington North; champion of the
downtrodden; parliamentary inquisitor; protagonist in redressing cases of injustice; holder of an
allotment; personally decent and incorruptible; tireless promoter of causes. (The principal ones are
helpfully listed in his ofcial prole: People of Islington, Stop the War, Liberation, the welfare
state, the NHS [National Health Service], socialism and human rights including anti racism, anti
imperialism and internationalism, transport safety, the environment.) The checklist or, in his
preferred jargon, platform testies to a full political life.
The child of middle-class radicals who sent him to a high-ranked school (founded 1656) in a
Shropshire market town, Corbyn found himself in the fervent world of Londons left in the 1970s
80s, where he worked as a trade union ofcial and for a decade as a local councillor before arriving
in parliament in 1983, surviving Labours wreckage elsewhere thanks to a fortuitous three-way
split among his rivals. The close shave was never repeated; Islington North the tiniest and most
densely populated constituency in the United Kingdom became Corbyns efdom. For forty years
he has been a knight templar of solidarity, with many peoples under his belt (among them
Palestinians, Kurds, Irish, South Africans, Cubans, Tamils, Chileans, Nicaraguans and Chagos
Islanders), the combination of neighbourhood champion and global emissary giving him the aura
of a Fidel of Finsbury Park.
Patronising? Very well. But aside from the echo of G.K. Chestertons 1904 novel The Napoleon of
Notting Hill, another dream of revolution in village London, it is also apt. Thats not just because of
Corbyns eternal beard and pet eld cap (black not green), nor the decades of leaden speechifying
without a single new thought, nor even the sense that much about him is rooted in an upbringing
whose orthodoxies he never questioned, far less rebelled against. (What Fidel has done is to
impose on Cuba all the punishments he suffered as a boy at his Jesuit school, writes Carlos
Franqui.) Theres also Castros Cuba itself, reverenced in Corbyns weekly column in the Morning
Star, the paper from the Communist Party of Britains stable that he calls the most precious and
only voice we have in the daily media.
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The quasi-religious cast of mind implied by Franquis remark suggests a further afnity that brings
us closer to Jeremy Corbyns political character. Fidel, a driver in historys drama, and Jeremy, a
bicyclist, are survivors from the tumultuous years of half a century ago, but of a particular subgroup: those who at the time acquired a dogmatic, uniform worldview which froze into
impermeability and thus entrapped them completely.
Harold Wilsons quip about Benn in the 1970s, that he immatures with age, appears in every
edition of Britains political lexicon. No one will ever apply it to Corbyn, whose rst-choice
ideological sanctum has proved ever sufcient. If Benn, the great conjuror, made a fetish of his
midlife conversion to socialism, Corbyns far more modest appeal draws on his unwavering
commitment to a collective society. He even strains to avoid the I word, and in that spirit says
its not important to get credit for being right in advance: The cause is whats important. It is
as if the last forty years had not happened which is exactly as Corbyn, and the autopilot left he
represents, often seem to wish. (Though its fair to say that a congenial and thoughtful interview in
the Christian journal Third Way strikes a welcome counterpoint.)
A droll sidelight is Corbyns remark, made in the context of media uff about a parliamentary
beard of the year award in 2001, that his facial hair was a form of dissent against New Labour
and had to stay on that account. Once more, I was reminded of Carlos Franqui, and a vignette from
the early post-revolution period of an encounter with Fidel in Santiagos national palace.
When he saw me he exploded: How could you cut off your beard?
The barber did it for me.
You cant do it. Its the symbol of the revolution. It doesnt belong to you. It belongs to the
revolution.
It was so hot; besides, my kid didnt recognise me, and I dont like making love with a
beard. Dont forget, Im a civilian, not a military man.
I just dont see how you could cut off your beard. What a mule you are! I just dont get it.
Look, Fidel, the whiskers were mine, werent they?
No. No. Nobodys allowed to shave around here.
Ill tell the future for you: someday there will be only one set of whiskers around here
yours. Like to bet on it?
uba set the template for radical style in the era of national liberation and state socialism, an
era that still grips Jeremy Corbyns political imagination. His own trademarks are both a display of
that delity and a claim on it. Thus the passing of the era, long preceded by the debasement of its
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initial promise in countries from Algeria to Zimbabwe, required no fundamental rethinking, for the
change could not be recognised as such. There may be many newer struggles to ght against the
post-9/11 wars, for Hugo Chvezs Venezuela and Syrizas Greece but these are at heart the same
as the older ones. Equally consistent are the forces responsible for the worlds problems: the West,
principally the United States and its junior partner, Britain.
Psychologically, his outlook rests on a permanent dichotomy of solidarity and threat. The objects
of the former are diverse politically, and this exposes Jeremy to such genuine criticism as he
receives. (Of the other kind, fossil and dinosaur are tedious staples of the right-wing press,
though even Andy McSmith calls him the voice of the antique left.) Alan Johnson, the academic
and editor of the journal Fathom, who shares a name with the former Labour cabinet minister and
renowned memoirist, wrote Corbyn an open letter challenging his description of Hamas and
Hizbollah as friends and his association with a viciously anti-Semitic preacher. Similar points
arise regarding his support for the regimes in Cuba and Venezuela, his automatic siding with
Argentina over the Falkland/Malvinas Islands and with Russia in Ukraine, or his sympathy for Sinn
Fin (political wing of the now-disbanded Irish Republican Army) and the former Tamil Tigers in
Sri Lanka.
It appears, however, that the threat is always the shaping force, that its always the same, and
taking as read the Great Satan of Washington and the beast of NATO (the major bulwark of the
cold war, says Corbyn) that its always at home. A hallmark of the approach is to identify a
nefarious British hand in almost any global dispute, while crediting other states (Russia and Iran
over Syria, for example) with sincere intentions. And it rejects British military intervention even
where the immediate purpose is to halt or prevent massacre (as in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Libya and
Mali). That these are not policy judgements but default settings suggests that Corbyn belongs to
that recognisable English type, the internationalist who disfavours his own country.
abours long succession battle should be an opportunity to explore such issues. Their salience
is increased by the massacre on 27 June of thirty-eight tourists on a Tunisian beach (thirty of them
British) by an adherent of Islamic State, and by commemoration of 7/7, the murder of fty-two
people on Londons transport network on 7 July 2005. The Conservative governments soliciting of
support for possible attacks on Islamic State targets in Syria conrms that the debate over
intervention that dominated much of the 2000s is not going away.
This highlights a further damaging legacy of 2010 and after, namely Labours readiness to junk its
recent past without thinking through it. The purpose was to project an image of change and unity
after the travails of the later Tony Blair and Gordon Brown periods. The strategy didnt work even
in its own terms. What followed were ve years of arguments postponed, and seething frustrations
camouaged by a surface harmony. A pact of silence over Iraq and the lessons of New Labour
blocked thinking and skewed feeling. Empty abstraction and useless anger lled the debate
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vacuum. The years were, as it turned out, wasted. Now, to cap it all, Jeremy Corbyn is a leadership
candidate and by all accounts doing well. (This sentence still seems inconceivable.) These are
desperate times.
Labours climb out of the bunker was always going to be tough. Its made even harder by disarray
over what the party should, primarily, be. Government in waiting, vote machine, change agent,
populist voice, socialist heritage club, trade union accessory, social movement, cult? And what
follows from each? As it emerges blinking into the light, Labour would do well to remember that
every big choice has consequence. You make it, then it makes you.
Labours future policy portfolio and message to the voters may now be as uncertain as the identity
of its next leader. But these also ow from an attitude of mind, conveyed above all by the partys
look and feel to millions of voters, many of them too busy with life stuff to have much interest in
formal politics.
In a post-election limbo where intuition arguably matters more than policy signals, the
independent-minded Liz Kendall seems alone in grasping this. You can tell a lot about a person by
their instincts, and the country comes rst did it for me. In the end, many Labour supporters
might make their choice in a similar way: less between candidates as such, but between a leap of
imagination and an act of faith.
DAVID HAYES
David Hayes was Deputy Editor of openDemocracy from 2003 to
2012. He is Inside Storys UK correspondent.
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