Corbyn will surprise everyone
including the media and Cameron – he’s not going to be a pushover
What a 12 months it has been. The Westminster establishment and the
political parties have been shaken to the core, business as usual and normality
will never return. First came the result of the Scottish Independence
referendum and the strength of the ‘Yes’ vote. Fearing a possible victory for
the ‘yes’ campaign panic descended upon the Westminster party establishment.
Hence in the last few days of the campaign the three party leaders – Cameron,
Miliband and Clegg promised what was more or less ‘home rule’ to Scotland. By
today only Cameron of the three leaders remains in office and he is currently wriggling
for all he’s worth on the commitment that was made back then. Therein lies the
seeds of a continuing threat to the survival of the Union and in addition the
proposals for English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) only add to this bubbling
cauldron.
This was followed by annihilation of Labour in Scotland at the General
Election with the SNP winning 56 out of the 59 Westminster seats. Their arrival
in the Commons has certainly woken the place up and as a group of people they have
already made a considerable impact and there will be much more to come from
them in the coming year. I have met a handful of their MPs and I am impressed
by their confidence, skill and determination. They have a clear sense of
purpose and a vision of why they have been sent in their dozens by the Scottish
people to Westminster. There’s been a bit of a lull over the summer break and
not much has been heard from the SNP but don’t be fooled by their relative silence.
.
At the same May General Election the Liberal Democrats came close to
being wiped out losing 48 MPs and their vote declined by 4.5 million. After the debacle the party circulated a detailed
and lengthy questionnaire for members to complete as to what happened last May
and why. Indeed it is to be discussed at the party conference in Bournemouth
this coming Saturday,
My response was quite brief because it was a clear to me by 2012 what
would occur come the election in 2015. Throughout the years the party lost
around 2,000 councillors, and even at the 2014 European Parliament elections it
lost 10 of its 11 Euro MPs. Going into coalition with the Tories baffled many
who had voted for the party in 2010 and in fact more or less from that moment millions
of them deserted the party as opinion polls showed throughout the years of the
coalition. Then came with it the student
fees betrayal and Clegg was doomed from that very moment. Credibility and trust
had gone – never to return.
In earlier blogs I have outlined the series of poor miscalculations that
took place including those on voting reform and the reform of the House of
Lords both key and long standing Liberal Democrat issues. Unbelievable that Clegg
presented proposals that were not even Liberal Democrat policies. However the
final nail in the coffin was that an exit strategy from the coalition had not
been put in place some nine to twelve months before the General Election.
After the SNP in Scotland the next winners of the May election was UKIP
not in parliamentary representation but in their level of support in the
country – 4 million. If any party should be campaigning hard now for electoral
reform it has to be them. Trouble is Farage is obsessed with Europe and
immigration. At the election UKIP ended up being the third largest party in
England and Wales and hurting Labour quite badly in some of its heartland areas
in England and most worryingly for Labour and Plaid Cymru even in the South
Wales Valleys. There were several seats
in South Wales where they came a strong second - a party that is essentially
English in character breaking through in Wales’s heartlands!
Within twenty four hours Miliband and Clegg had resigned as their respective
party’s leaders. Miliband was visibly shell shocked and Clegg, whatever gloss is
put on it, looked a broken man and had indeed lost pretty much everything. I
know he has his group of loyal supporters inside the party but quite honestly
for the good of the Liberal Democrats he is best forgotten. Notice how the
Labour Party hardly mention Ed’s name well the Liberal Democrats need to do the
same regarding Nick.
So the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats set about choosing new
leaders. There was a very good leadership campaign between Farron and Lamb and
the former deservedly won through. Over the summer the party also benefited
from a substantial surge in membership. Tim is ideally suited to lead the party
to where the Liberal Democrats need to go which is to quickly return to its
progressive, reforming and radical inheritance. No more talk of the soft,
middle and centre ground that was so much a feature of the Clegg years.
The Labour party leadership campaign has been something else. Firstly
Miliband left the party with a new voting system that would widen democracy
inside the party and indeed resulted in some 600,000 people being able to
participate in the election of the party leader. That in itself was a major
change to the way the party leader was to be chosen, even bigger than Blair’s
ending of the Trade Union block vote. However I think Miliband’s reform was the
correct one because enhancing people’s participation in the democratic process
is a positive and necessary happening for all parties.
I doubt if the description ‘historical’ is sufficient to begin to
describe the outcome of and the impact a Jeremy Corbyn victory has already made.
It is monumental in its consequences for the Labour Party and certainly life
changing for Corbyn himself. I don’t think in his wildest dreams he ever
thought he would end up one day being Leader of the Labour party and so did no
one else – certainly not Mandelson, Kinnock, Blair and Brown.
I think it was Andy Burnham who ‘lent’ some of his MP supporters to Corbyn
to enable the latter to even get on to the ballot paper in the first place. Party
grandees clearly thought that it would be a good idea to have all ‘wings’ of
the party on the ballot so as to give the membership as wide a choice as was possible
to choose from. Of course the thinking was that Corbyn would be way down at the
bottom of the poll so he was not going to be much of a problem! What is more it would show how weak was the
support for the ‘hard left’ inside the party. Even the bookies agreed with that
thinking for when the betting opened Corbyn was at 500-1 some people I reckon
put speculative bets on because quickly the odds rapidly dropped throughout the
campaign.
Corbyn’s landslide victory has devastated the ruling Labour Party
grandees and establishment. All the dire warnings they issued during the
campaign of the consequences for the party of a Corbyn victory probably made
matters much worse for Andy, Yvette and Liz. Just as in the Scottish referendum
the right wing press joined in the scare mongering and they also hounded Corbyn
and his family. In fact everything but the ‘kitchen sink’ was thrown in his
direction.
It is indeed quite remarkable that the man who was seen by the powerful
ruling classes as having little hope, someone with ‘unsafe’ views, that had kept
company with ‘dangerous’ people, had been thought to have supported ‘extreme’
movements and was in their eyes a bit of a joke broke has smashed all the
political conventions.
I have commented in detail on the reasons in earlier blogs but in
essence after 30 years and more of compromise politics the grassroots that had
been kept squashed by Kinnock and kept at bay in the Blair and Brown years had
reached the end of the road. They really had tolerated enough and with a much greater
democratic voting system rate it was never going to be ‘same old same old’ this
time.
The Labour Party has always been a very broad coalition of views and has
only been able to be kept together through compromise politics. Since the days
of the SDP and Mrs Thatcher the centre/right held sway and eventually came the
‘New Labour’ project. Well after last Saturday all that is no more and what is quite
astounding is the realisation that it only took a few minutes to kill off New
Labour.
All the talk that went on over the weekend about the consequences of
senior people not willing to serve in Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet, that Labour
Members of Parliament will rebel and that indeed he won’t be leader for long is
frankly now immaterial. Just imagine what would happen to a Labour MP brave
enough to go back to his or her constituency soon and say ‘I am going to
campaign to topple Corbyn’
Jeremy Corbyn has been given a democratic and popular mandate to lead
that no other leader has ever been given and that has provided him with almost total
authority within the party. But he will exercise that power in a subtle, clever
and inclusive way. He has had plenty of time to mellow and also has had to accept
many times over defeat and rebuttal so he will not be fazed by setbacks and
opposition. He will not deal with such matters in conventional ways.
Yes a few notables have refused to serve under his leadership but as I
keep on saying ‘the graveyard of British politics is full of indispensable
people’. Within hours MPs’ that did not
vote for him and indeed who warned of the dangers of a Corbyn victory such as
the Shadow Welsh Secretary and Rhondda’s Chris Bryant are now on board. Surprisingly
Wales’s First Minister has also uttered favourable comments.
The way Jeremy Corbyn has built his Shadow Cabinet says a lot about him
and his close advisers. Firstly he has had plenty of time to think about the
appointments since given the scale of the victory he must have known for at
least a couple of weeks what was likely to happen.
His shadow cabinet contains plenty of able people from across the wide spectrum
of opinions within the party and it is worth recording that it is the the first
time that a shadow cabinet has more women than men. Not only did he have time
to decide who to choose but also but also the portfolios they have been given. Five
stand out firstly a Woman First Secretary of State reminiscent of when Barbara
Castle held such a role when Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, Chris Bryant as
Leader of the House, Lord Falconer as Shadow Justice Secretary, a Shadow
Minister for Mental Health and finally the appointment to shadow Constitutional
Convention. The latter is a significant and far seeing appointment and I
welcome it wholeheartedly.
Of course there are going to be hurdles along the way for Corbyn. There
will be a hostile press and media because he will refuse to play it by their
rules of the last fifty years and their attacks on him will be remorseless. He will
continue to disturb all the norms and conventions of Westminster politics. Then
issues such as Europe, the replacement of Trident, EVEL and the economic policy
he and John McDonell will pursue will loom large over the coming months. Also
he will have to be able to face up to Cameron but my hunch is he will have a
few surprises up his sleeve on that one. Remember Jeremy Corbyn has been around
a long time and he is certainly battle–hardened to have survived so long in New
Labour for a start.
Without doubt in the short term he is a potential threat to four
parties. Corbyn will speak the same language as Tim Farron on a number of
social justice, fairness, human rights and welfare issues. He will be a threat
to Plaid Cymru’s support in the South Wales Valleys; to UKIP also because many
of the disgruntled and disaffected former Labour voters will return to the fold
and that could well go for maybe Scotland too.
Only time will tell of course but the 2016 elections in Scotland and
Wales will be Corbyn’s real test and an indicator as to how long he will remain
Labour leader. Mind with such overwhelming grassroots support it is difficult
to see how he can be replaced unless of course the Labour Party will have
another 1981 moment.
Improving on Labour’s past performance and doing better in those 2016 elections
will be his initial goal. He is certainly not to be taken lightly and Liberal
Democrat politicians will do well not to over attack him as some have in recent
days. The party lost over 4.5 million voters at the General Election we will be
in a contest to win them back that is for sure.