The right wing fight to ditch Corbyn is already underway - January 2016

Another day, another sharp attack on Jeremy Corbyn in the Guardian, this time from Peter Mandelson. Mandelson heaps half-truths upon untruths and tops them up with venomous red baiting:

“But Corbyn is now in a position to impose his views on the party, and he is doing so by very unconventional means. To secure his support base and grip within the party, Corbyn has created Momentum, a trade union-funded organisation run in conjunction with hard-left networks outside the party. This differentiates it from the moderates’ Progress organisation, which has no outside allegiances…..You would expect Corbyn to recruit loyalists to his office in parliament, but this is largely staffed from two further far left entities: Socialist Action, a Trotskyite group most closely associated with Ken Livingstone, and Labour Representation Committee, which was founded by John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor.” (1)

Mandelson accuses Corbyn of wanting total dominance of the party and a total marginalising of the centre and right. This may be part of the campaign to avert a reshuffle of the shadow cabinet, but it is symptomatic of something else: the campaign to remove Corbyn is already underway.

What Mandelson underestimates of course is that the Corbyn phenomenon is a function of something much bigger than the many thousands who've joined Labour or registered to vote in the election. It's a crystallisation of the opinions of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, fed up with pro-austerity politicians including New Labour. This phenomenon will not go away with a successful leadership coup against Corbyn, but it can suffer an important political defeat.

Capturing the leadership of the Labour Party was not jusdt a fluke, it was an extraordinary skilful political achievement.Immediately after the leadership election commentators speculated that Labour MPs would have to give Jeremy Corbyn a year or two to succeed or fail, given the huge size of his majority. Some have talked about Corbyn leading Labour into the 2020 election and only being thrown out after he loses it.

This medium or long-term perspective for the Corbyn leadership is wildly unrealistic. Events are propelling a more and more vitriolic campaign to dump Jeremy sooner rather than later. Egged on by the media and New Labour, those with longer are timescales are being outflanked.

In fact there are only two possible outcomes to the Corbyn leadership process. Either the left will establish a semi-permanent hold on the party leadership, in which case a right wing split is certain: or Jeremy Corbyn will be summarily ejected from the party leadership, in which case tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, will walk out of the party – to the delight of the right wing.

Peter Mandelson makes clear that for him (and this goes for the right in general) many of the new recruits and supporters are not the type of people they want, not ‘real’ Labour supporters. The right wing wants these people to leave the party: they do not want or need this type of mass membership.

He says: “Welcoming new recruits is a good thing, and most are principled and idealistic, which will strengthen Labour’s campaigning base. There are former members who resigned, honourably, over Iraq; feeling vindicated by events, they have returned under Corbyn. No one should question their commitment to the party.

“But the affinity of very many others is not for Labour as a party but for the leader as an individual. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong in this but they seem to have little appreciation of the party’s history and, most importantly, the political balances that need to be struck within it.”

In other words these are people we can do without.

A permanent or semi-permanent hold on the Labour leadership by the left is absolutely unacceptable to the Labour right (including the big majority of MPs), big sections of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy and of course the capitalist ruling class (represented by most of the daily press and TV commentariat) which can absolutely not accept the main opposition party being led by the militant left for any length of time.

For the bourgeoisie and the core of its state apparatus the idea of the main opposition party being anti-nuclear, probably anti-NATO and certainly anti-neoliberal is stunningly outside its framework of acceptability. That would be to challenge Britain’s role in the world and question the present political and economic set-up in the country.

Probably some of the New Labour MPs are looking to a year-on-year schedule. They are looking to a poor Labour showing in the May elections, followed by a new election for Labour leader in which Corbyn is prevented from standing by not getting 35 MPs’ signatures. There appears no requirement that the existing leader has to be allowed to stand.

This would cause uproar of course, and Mandelson alludes to the difficulties, but for the New Labour right uproar is going to happen anyway. They have to fight or go under.

‘Labour chaos’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy that is difficult to avoid. There is a symbiotic relationship between the press and the Labour right – the latter attacks Corbyn over Trident, Syria or whatever and the press cries ‘chaos’. Next May’s local council (and London Assembly, Scottish parliament, Welsh Assembly, London mayor etc)  elections will be held in a climate of huge media hostility to Corbyn that is likely to impact on Labour results. Because the Corbynistas have remained obdurate on the national question in Sccotland, Labour is anyway unlikely to make much headway north of the border.

We should be aware that a future leadership election could take place in very different circumstances to 2015. Last year Unison’s Dave Prentis was compelled to back Corbyn because 9 of the union’s 15 districts voted in favour of that option. Prentis and many other union leaders (probably excepting Unite and the CWU) are likely be much more cautious about backing Corbyn, especially in the wake of poor election results.

Whatever the outcome of the Corbyn leadership, no scenario justifies the organised militant left going into the Labour Party at this stage.

In the first place, very large numbers of members of the SWP, Socialist Party or Left Unity would never get in. The bureaucracy has acquired a substantial list of names of leftist and community activists and generally the names of these people are known at local level.

The Corbyn leadership is absolutely not going to fight on the terrain of the right of the Marxist left to be in the Labour Party. Already under demagogic attack on this front, they will not provoke a media storm by appearing to sanction leaders of Left Unity, the Socialist Party or the SWP being allowed in. Indeed they will not want to be seen as sanctioning the participation of Marxists in Momentum.

Socialist activists will have many opportunities to mix it with the Corbyn levy, in Momentum where possible, but also in mass campaigns against the cuts, against austerity and against war. Only if the Corbyn levy were totally domesticated into the Labour routinism of canvassing and leaflet distribution would it be possible to wall them off from the militant left.

In addition many people who affiliated to Labour to vote in the leadership campaign have not joined the Party, and indeed thousands of attempted registrations (especially among students) have been rejected.

Neither should we underestimate the symbiotic relationship between these mass campaigns and the socialist left. My own area (Walthamstow) is a case in point, where the Whipps Cross hospital Unison is heavily influenced by the Socialist Party, where the community health campaign and anti-racist activism is heavily influenced by the SWP, and where activism on housing is likely to see Left Unity, SWP and SP activists involved. This is far from a complete list.

Often it is the socialist left that holds up these campaigns. For the militant left to give up their organisations, their newspapers, their networks and other resources for an attempt to get into the Labour Party for a short stay would not be a good deal. The stronger the mass campaigns against austerity and war, the stronger will be the position of the Corbyn leadership. While giving full support to those fighting inside the Labour Party, militant socialists should stress that the best outcome of that fight will be prepared by the strength of the mass campaigns outside the Labour Party.

Second, in broad terms we outlined two possible scenarios. The consolidation of left leadership means a right-wing split, possibly with a majority of MPs and councillors. In this case Labour would de facto become a ‘new’ party – a left social democratic formation. In this case the whole issue of its relationship with the organised left would be recast and then the issue of the militant left being in the party would be a different matter. Then everything would be up for grabs.

Much more likely is the defeat of the Corbyn leadership and thousands of left-leaning members pouring out of the party. Make no mistake, if this happened there is no chance of Corbyn and McDonell calling for the formation of a new party. They would call on supporters to ‘stay and fight’ – in a situation of renewed left marginalisation and demoralisation. Calls to ‘continue the fight’ after major defeats have a depressing history.

If tens of thousands leave the party in the wake of Corbyn’s defeat, the key issue is where they go. Many of course will go out of politics. But many will want to continue in political radicalism.

The many thousands who registered to vote for Corbyn and the thousands who subsequently joined the Labour Party represent something new. Many of them have little or no experience of the labour movement, and represent the same kind of radicalisation as those who joined the Green Party before the general election. It is the political future of these people that is crucial and for which the militant left must prepare.

The existing socialist left organisations of course have their own weaknesses, especially the sectarian factionalism of rival leaderships. Cynics and those who have had bad personal experiences with the SWP or Socialist Party tend to say it would be a step forward if they disbanded. But that is subjective and absurd. Only in the event of the emergence of a broad left party on a much stronger level than Left Unity today would it be justified to call for existing organisations to disband.

1^st January 2016

(1)               Dianne Abbot’s reply to Mandelson is here