Who Am I Going to Vote for in the Labour Leadership Election--Part II

The last time I sat down to write down what I was thinking about the Labour leadership election, although I could already tell I was becoming less sympathetic to Jeremy Corbyn, I couldn’t help but go on and on about the parliamentary Labour rebels.

I wrote about the rebels as an élite political class composed mainly of public relations and media aficionados with little experience of doing anything else, and I called for more teachers, engineers and scientists to be elected as MPs.

I apologise to my friends who work in PR if this sounded like an attack on them or their noble profession. I know and admire several people who work in PR, and consider myself fortunate to count them among my friends.

However, even they will be forced to acknowledge that this happy circumstance came about in part because you cannot spend any length of time engaged in Labour Party activities in southwest London without bumping into several PR types.

To be fair, very few of them are direct descendants of existing or former Labour MPs.

Anyway, I wanted to return to the topic of the leadership in order to focus my attention more squarely on Corbyn himself and his entourage.

Perhaps I feel emboldened to be more openly critical now that the left wing author and Guardian columnist Owen Jones has come out with his robust list of questions for Corbynistas.

However, now that Jones has got his blog post out before mine, I am acutely aware of the need to present an original twist so that I am not accused of plagiarising this prophet, this ubiquitous media representative of the downtrodden, this shining northern beacon of the left.

So I will forgo the run-down of how many social media accounts and Twitter followers I have. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen the sandwich pictures already anyway.

As preparation for this blog, I listened to the three part radio documentary on the rise of Corbyn on BBC Radio 4, and I can strongly recommend it.

All too believable is the scene, described with impish joy by John McDonnell in an interview for the programme, where at the meeting of the Socialist Campaign Group (where left wing members of the parliamentary Labour Party hang out), those present were deciding who should be the inevitably doomed hard left leadership candidate this time.

Since McDonnell and Diane Abbott had already gamely put themselves forward in previous contests and been roundly hammered, it was suggested that it was Corbyn’s turn. “Oh, alright then,” Corbyn is reported to have muttered in response.

Thus the course of history was changed forever.

I voted for Corbyn in that leadership election, partly because, as I wrote two weeks ago, the other candidates and their platforms were so utterly uninspiring. I still believe that if any of them had won and made it through to a general election, they would probably have lost. None of them were far removed or different enough from Blair, Brown and Miliband, and the voters would have considered them identical clones. Theirs was a brilliant plan, in a mad, General Melchett sort of way: “Doing precisely what we've done eighteen times before is exactly the last thing they'll expect us to do this time.” I think Kendall slightly edged it on the madness.

Corbyn was mad in an entirely new direction, which appealed to me. The way he parodied David Miliband’s infamous banana photo (which probably cost him the Labour leadership in 2010) and simultaneously played up his own gnome-like features by posing with a giant marrow was not the work of a typical party leader, but rather a great Surrealist, like Salvador Dalí. Either that or it was completely unintentional.

I don’t quite remember what his specific policy proposals were at the time, but I didn’t really need to. I was sure in any case that they would involve renationalising the railways, untangling the National Health Service from the principle of competition, increasing the minimum wage, making university free again, taxing the rich, maybe even eating the rich, and so on and so forth.

I also assumed there would be some slightly less sensible policies thrown in for fun, like reopening the coal mines, abolishing international trade and leaving NATO, but this was the inevitable price to be paid for finally getting what you wanted.

In the back of my mind, if I’m honest, I think I always knew it couldn’t last. Like some others, I thought there would probably be another leadership election in a couple of years. In the meantime, Corbyn would take the party as far left as he could, and good luck to him.

According to episode three of the Radio 4 programme, that was also more or less the plan of the parliamentary rebels: wait a couple of years and then replace him. But that plan disintegrated in the wake of the United Kingdom’s referendum on membership of the European Union.

Quite why this moment was chosen for the so-called coup, I still can’t fully work out.

There were other issues frothing over among Labour MPs, such as the fact that Corbyn and McDonnell addressed rallies of their supporters around the country. Imagine that! A politician addressing a crowd of supporters! Why don’t they just go on TV and spout platitudes like the rest of us?

But it seems it was the EU referendum that did it. The MPs couldn’t handle the fact that 52% of the electorate disagreed with them, and they blamed Corbyn. Margaret Hodge and Ann Coffey proposed a no confidence vote. Hilary Benn resigned from the shadow cabinet.

They were probably also worried that the resignation of David Cameron and the appointment of a new prime minister, Theresa May, could lead to an early election.

Again, I find myself talking about the rebels instead of Corbyn. But perhaps that’s because it is difficult to say what Corbyn was doing during all this time.

I think what I find most irksome in Corbyn as a leader of the Labour Party now is his individualism.

What do I mean by that? Corbyn has proposed that the aims of the Party as articulated in its constitution’s famous Clause IV need to be restated, and has suggested that one option could be the restoration of the 1917 version, which calls for “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry and service.”  Nothing could be more collectivist than that, surely?

The current Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution, inserted there by He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, states instead that “by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone.”

Corbyn is not alone, and the huge demonstrations in support of him are a manifestation of common endeavour, but he and his supporters don’t seem to understand how to turn that endeavour into the achievement of something concrete.

Much has been made of Corbyn’s rebelliousness as a backbench MP, frequently voting against the agreed upon policies of the parliamentary party. This is the voting record of a man who not only stands by his own personal principles, but sets them above the unity required to bring about change based on collectively shared principles.

In other words, Corbyn’s individual conscience is more important to him than achieving more through common endeavour.

Which is a shame, because other than that I quite like the idea of having as prime minister someone who clearly doesn’t want it to be his turn.