Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in the Labour leadership election shows the depth of the crisis that is engulfing the party. The size of his majority may have quelled any immediate attempt by Labour MPs to unseat him, but they are already manoeuvring to challenge him over possible British military intervention in Syria and replacing Trident, using the fact that his support in the parliamentary party is negligible. Given his determination to maintain the unity of the Labour Party, Corbyn has already been forced to make concessions. He faces an insoluble contradiction: on the one hand, large swathes of the working class will no longer vote for a pro-austerity Labour Party, while on the other hand, the ruling class and its Labour MP hirelings will not accept a future Labour government led by Corbyn. Throughout the coming period, therefore, Corbyn will have to decide which is more important: building a movement against austerity or preserving the unity of the Labour Party. The two cannot be reconciled. Robert Clough reports.
By the end of the campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party, it was no surprise, even for his most stubborn and malevolent critics, that Corbyn won. But the scale of his victory, 59.5% in the first round, was a resounding shock. Despite the dire warnings of a string of Labour Party pro-imperialist grandees, 49.6% of party members supported Corbyn, as did 83.8% of registered supporters and 57.6% of affiliated union voters. The Blairite and openly ruling class candidate Liz Kendall was utterly trounced, obtaining a miserable 4.5% of the vote. Together, the other two establishment, pro-austerity candidates, Yvette Cooper and the one-time favourite to win, Andy Burnham, shared 36%.
The reactions were immediate. The ruling class was outraged: a democratic vote had brought the wrong result. Within hours, the Conservative Party was presenting Corbyn’s politics as a threat to national security. Days later, the Sunday Times quoted an unnamed army general hinting at possible mutiny if Corbyn ever became prime minister. Shades of 1974 when there were rumours of military coups against the Wilson government. Eleven shadow front bench members resigned, refusing to work with Corbyn. Their passing will not be mourned: among their number were Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper, the openly reactionary Shadow Works and Pensions Secretary Rachel Reeves, Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt and Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna, who had been a leadership candidate for 24 hours before passing the Blairite baton to Kendall. 80-90% of Labour MPs, an unprincipled bunch of frauds and self-serving careerists intent only on feathering their own nests, were horrified at Corbyn’s success. 178 of them abstained in a parliamentary vote on the vicious benefit cuts announced in the July budget – they have only contempt for the plight of the poorest sections of the working class, despising them as scroungers and shirkers.
Corbyn’s victory is clearly a response to years of austerity. There is still no movement out on the streets directly confronting the government’s onslaught, but there is a growing anti-austerity anger to which Corbyn’s campaign gave expression. Anxious to demonstrate its viability as a ruling class party, Labour abandoned any anti-austerity position before the May general election. But the changing mood should have been clear in September 2014 when the mass of the Scottish working class declared resounding opposition to austerity in the independence referendum, underlining their standpoint by ridding Scotland of all but one of its Labour MPs in the May general election.
In England, no credible electoral force existed to challenge the pro-austerity orthodoxy at the time. In fact, such views would have been excluded from the Labour Party leadership contest if a number of right-wing Labour MPs had not decided to nominate Corbyn as a candidate to serve as a punch-bag for the other candidates to demonstrate their impeccable ruling class credentials. The tactic completely backfired. The youth of Corbyn’s supporters, clear when they attended the public meetings which were part of his campaign, was not surprising. Young people have been hit particularly hard by austerity through the tripling of university fees, the withdrawal of Education Maintenance Allowance and the steady restriction of benefit entitlements. The expectation that a higher education qualification would lead to a well-rewarded career has been exposed as a pipe dream: rising graduate unemployment and under-employment, crippling house prices and, especially in London, soaring rent levels, herald a prospect of proletarianisation rather than financial security. These forces were central to the emergence of anti-austerity movements in Greece and Spain.
The pressures on Corbyn are already immense. While he has given expression to a widespread opposition to austerity and emphasised it by putting crowd-sourced questions to Cameron at his first Prime Minister’s Question Time, the question is whether he and his allies will be part of building a movement to really oppose the government’s barbaric programme. Appeals to maintain Labour unity involve making concessions to reactionary forces – and there are plenty in the new Shadow Cabinet:
- Andy Burnham, who blames Labour’s general election defeat in part on being weak on immigration, has been appointed Shadow Home Secretary.
- Tom Watson, who won the deputy leadership election, has said he will fight against any attempt to oppose a replacement for Trident or leave NATO – key elements of Corbyn’s platform.
- Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn says he may support military action against IS in Syria and along with Shadow Justice Secretary Lord Falconer is determined to ensure Britain remains in the EU. Lord Falconer is also opposed to ending the independence of the Bank of England.
- Shadow Women’s Secretary Kate Green went on record to defend the overall benefit cap after Corbyn denounced it at the TUC conference; Shadow Secretary for Work and Pensions Owen Smith agreed and added ‘We are in favour of an overall reduction in the amount of money we spend on benefits in this country… Because I don’t think the country would support us saying we were in favour of unfettered spending.’
- Shadow Defence Minister Kevan Jones has said that a poem by Heathcote Williams describing the ‘criminal record of Britain’s longest-serving monarch’ published on the Stop the War website on 20 September was ‘a slur on the Queen and will be highly offensive to members of our Armed Forces.’ Corbyn had just stepped down as chair of the Stop the War coalition.
Corbyn has already started to back- pedal on some issues: on continued membership of both NATO and the EU – he has now said that he is in favour of remaining inside to influence its political direction – and railway nationalisation – he is now proposing the half-way house of taking back individual railway franchises into public ownership as they expire. This would mean that two-thirds of the railway system will still be in private hands by the end of the next parliament if Labour wins the 2020 election.
In the absence of any working class movement, concession will lead to capitulation. In Greece, Syriza’s election in January heralded a collision course with German-led European imperialism. Its leader, Alexis Tsipras, made all sorts of radical promises – to oppose cuts in pensions, restore public sector jobs and stop the privatisation programme. Yet the following months saw concession after concession to the debt repayment demands of imperialism, and a refusal to mobilise working class opposition. Final capitulation came a mere week after the Greek people voted overwhelmingly in a referendum on 5 July to reject the terms of the bailout proposed by the Troika of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF. The terms Tsipras accepted were worse than those on the table in January: Syriza had conceded everything. Re-elected on 20 September, Syriza will now supervise an extension and deepening of the savage austerity programme that the Greek people have suffered for more than five years. Reaction follows hard on capitulation.
The crisis of British imperialism is now so deep, that it cannot sustain the material privileges of the upper layers of the working class or widening sections of the middle class let alone those of the mass of the working class. This economic reality does not impinge on the thinking of Corbyn’s admirers such as Guardian columnist Owen Jones when he says:
‘What drives Corbyn, like anybody on the left, more than anything else is the plight of the poorest in society, low-paid workers, those with no affordable housing, and so on. But a political coalition cannot be built purely out of the poorest and the sympathy of others. Now his leadership must also reach out to middle-income and middle-class people.’
It is a pale echo of Neil Kinnock’s argument as a new Labour leader in 1983 when he said:
‘We can only protect the disadvantaged in our society if we appeal to those who are relatively advantaged. The apparent over-concentration of our energies and resources on these groups like the poor, the unemployed and the minorities – does a disservice both to them and ourselves.’
This is the trickle-down theory that has proved completely false and, what is more, has left the working class with no movement to defend its interests. It is reactionary nonsense.
Corbyn has said that he wants to see a massive campaign against austerity. We agree. However, to win, its purpose must be to defend the working class and defeat the ruling class, not to serve as a vehicle for the electoral ambitions of the Labour Party. The coming months will be the test of whether Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist ambitions are real: his policy concessions, however, show him bending under the pressure. Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! stands alongside anyone determined to build a mass movement against austerity. But we will fight any attempt to harness such a movement to the electoral requirements of the Labour Party. We will fight Labour councils implementing cuts and we reject the argument that they have no choice. We will fight all bans or proscriptions designed to narrow the movement to Labour supporters who will not fight imperialism. We fight for a democracy which allows working class people to lead their own struggles rather than a self-appointed minority. Above all we argue that an anti-austerity movement must fight against imperialism and for socialism.
FRFI 247 October/November 2015
