Corbyn or not Corbyn? That is the question.
How will I vote in the Labour Leadership Election?
Having been a card-carrying member of the Labour Party for around 20 years, I’ve taken part in three leadership elections and one coronation. I voted for Tony Blair after the death of John Smith. I concurred with the installation of Gordon Brown. I voted for David in the battle of the Millibands. Who will get my vote in this latest contest? Burnham, Cooper, Corbyn or Kendall?
I’d like to answer that question with two more. Why is this the most dispiriting Labour leadership campaign I have witnessed? And why won’t I be voting for Jeremy Corbyn? There are three reasons for the first of those, and one reason for the second.
Dispiriting reason number one. There is no doubt that all the candidates want my vote. I get numerous emails every day, inviting me to attend meetings, watch videos and read pledges. My vote is sought after. This is no bad thing, but sadly none of these communications expresses what I would call a big idea or a compelling philosophy. Cooper seems disinclined to commit herself to any position of note. Burnham appears to say only what he thinks I want to hear. Kendall and Corbyn say nothing that hasn’t been heard before. Either these candidates have no big ideas, or the language of politics has become so banal as to be meaningless. Neither of these is an encouraging explanation.
Dispiriting reason number two. Many of the most vocal commentators on the election are neither Labour Party members, Labour Party voters, nor political activists of any persuasion. They throw their brickbats from the sidelines, secure in the knowledge that they’ve never given up a moment of their own time to promote a political conviction of their own. I joined the Labour Party in the early 90s, convinced that if people like me – young, professional, educated, relatively affluent – didn’t make the effort to commit to and act upon our beliefs about the importance of social justice and inclusion, we only had ourselves to blame if we found ourselves living under perpetual Tory rule. If you are between the ages of 35 and 65, and were not staffing the phone banks at some point before the ’97 landslide, I don’t think you understand the trajectory from unelectable, to seemingly natural party of government, to apparent unelectability again.
Dispiriting reason number three. Too many people, including many from the party itself, characterise this as a simplistic battle between left and right, between Blairite and Bevanite, between New Labour and old Labour. They miss the point – deliberately so in the case of those who seek Labour defeat, myopically so in the case of those who profess to seek a socialist settlement – that this is actually a battle not for the minds of Labour members, but for the heart and souls of British voters, a battle between moderate strands of libertarianism and state-backed social justice. Those on the left of the Labour party, and those on the right of the Tory party, all want the same thing – a defeat for the Labour centre: the lefties because they think it will herald and/or reflect a shift to the left in the UK’s political landscape, the Tories because they know it will do no such thing.
Which brings me to the single reason I will not be voting for Jeremy Corbyn. He will never be Prime Minister. He will never win a General Election. He will never lead a Labour government. He negates the reason I joined the party all those years ago: to make change possible. I do not for a minute believe Labour will win the next election with Jeremy Corbyn as leader, on a Corbynite manifesto. Labour’s leftward tendency and Labour’s electoral success are negatively correlated. As the party moved towards the centre, from Foot, to Kinnock to Smith, power edged closer. As the party has moved away from the centre, from Brown to Milliband, power has slipped further away. Blair represents the top of the bell curve; no other Labour leader has won an election in the last 40 years. Yes, four zero years. For those who see Blair as some kind of Thatcherite anti-Christ, I have a simple question. How many socially inclusive policies would have been implemented in Britain in my lifetime if he had not been Labour leader? The answer is none. Nada. Zero. Labour in opposition can do nothing to advance its agenda, not even with the connivance of the mischievous anti-Europe wing of the Tory party.
Of course Corbyn is articulate, and passionate, and his position as an honest broker of social justice is alluring. As a New Statesman-reading teenager, I shared many of his views, and believed all other right-thinking people did the same - and that Britiain was populated by a majority of right-thinking people. But that was in the 1980s. These views were attractive then, and are clearly still attractive now for an element within and without the party. But they have never come close to winning a mandate from the British public - who are right-leaning rather than right-thinking.
I’ve heard people suggest Corbyn’s success in increasing his Islington majority can be replicated at a national level. Seriously. Islington! That caricature constituency of champagne socialism. Somehow I’m supposed to believe that’s a national bellwether. It would be laughable if the consequences were not likely to be so dire, for the party, and by extension the country – decades of uninterrupted Tory government.
I remember sitting in party branch and constituency meetings in the 1990s, as those on the left announced their intention to quit the party, feeling betrayed by the centreward shift under first Smith then Blair – the introduction of one member one vote, and the abandonment of Clause Four. Some of them may have recently returned to the party fold, enticed by Corbyn’s Clause-Four-Lite, and fondly imagining the rest of the electorate share their view. Well, for what it is worth, this is my announcement. If Corbyn becomes leader, I’ll be handing in my membership card. I won’t be stuffing envelopes, knocking on doors, hitting the phones or handing out leaflets – all the dull legwork of political activism that actually wins a modern election. I joined the party because in the main I shared its political philosophy, and because it represented the only realistic alternative government. If Corbyn wins, that will no longer be the case. Labour will not be a potential party of government, it will be a party of protest. A UKIP for the left. I want no part of that party. There are numerous more effective single issue protest groups that could do with my support. Like Tony Benn quitting the Commons, I’ll be quitting the party to get more involved in politics.
