- Thu Aug 03, 2023 3:30 pm
#50278
I've been off on one of my periodic thought peregrinations about the Labour Party. I can't remember whether I posted this on here already (I may well have doe), but here it is anyway.
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One of the litany of standard reasons/excuses still being trotted (sorry/not sorry) out by the remaining die-hard rump of Trots for the catastrophic failure of the Corbyn experiment is that Corbyn could not succeed because he was uniquely targeted by hostile right-wing news media – somehow exponentially worse for Corbyn than for any other Labour leader, including Kinnock, Miliband, and Foot - so that voters were blind to his qualities and even actively worried about his sheer unfitness to take on the job of Prime Minister of the UK. The reason for this unique media hostility was, we are assured, that Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister constituted an active threat to the sort of political establishment that has hitherto enabled them and their vested interests to thrive and prosper. Remember- only Jeremy Corbyn, of all Labour’s leaders to date, uniquely warrants this level of news media hostility. No-one else.
Stop and think about this for just a few seconds, specifically in the context of what qualities are required of any Labour leader, and it becomes clear that being someone who uniquely attracts a game-changing amount of hostile news media coverage is not, or certainly should not be, one of the prime qualifying criteria to be in possession of for a successful leader of the Labour Party. I’d go further – it's actually one of the principal reasons why someone like Jeremy Corbyn should NOT have been leader of the Labour Party (there are, of course, many others). It was, of course, one of the things that those of us who supported Owen Smith’s leadership challenge were trying to tell the people who had insisted on electing Corbyn as leader, but which was stubbornly and indignantly rejected by the (by then) cult of Corbyn /Corbynism - who insisted on electing this negative-publicity magnet as leader for a second time.
And consider the threat-to-vested-interests/establishment part of the narrative. Does it make any sense to install someone as leader who is apparently such a clear and present danger to establishment vested interests and those with a grip on power, that they will mobilise all of the considerable resources at their disposal to make certain that Labour cannot succeed in such circumstances? Well, no, it doesn’t, and what’s more, we’ve seen it demonstrated. The 2017 election manifesto was an up-front, undisguised and bald appeal to fairer distribution of wealth and a radically better structure for society (though in reality, most of the manifesto proposals were actually rather mild and in the tradition of mainstream European social democracy). The result? Well, Labour did not succeed, of course and did not "nearly win", at least partly because those vested interests mobilised their resources, just as we knew they would. So we did it again in 2019. This time with a constantly expanding manifesto that Len McCluskey described after the election as “an incontinent mess”, and still with our negative-publicity magnet of a leader (and notably this time in full control of every aspect of the party machine) in place. We all know what happened.
My point is this. If/when we stand on policies red in tooth and claw and easily recognisable as a threat to multiple vested interests (and shout about it), with a leader/candidate for PM easily portrayed as dangerous/traitorous/ threatening to establishment vested interests, we’re on the inside track to defeat every time. So we really ought to avoid this monstrous elephant trap.
Why isn’t this obvious? Labour gets elected to government principally when it is viewed by a majority of the electorate as serious, capable, conscientious, responsible, and, yes, unthreatening. Of secondary import (though not, in actuality, secondary to those who value principle highly) are Labour’s long-defined values of equality and social justice).
By contrast, in 3 years as leader, Keir Starmer has established precisely that public reputation as diligent, conscientious, serious, and highly capable – the obvious alternative Prime Minister in waiting. Labour is again regarded as the alternative government in waiting. Labour’s policy offer is obviously still in development, but it is, thus far, very obviously not up-front socialist revolutionary stuff red in tooth and claw, while retaining socialist principles of social justice and equality at its core. Starmer has developed a clever and successful strategy for delivering victory at the election, something Corbyn never had, nor was capable of conceiving. For those of us who recognise that winning power is the one and only way to deliver social justice, this is gold dust.
Last edited by Abernathy on Wed Sep 06, 2023 1:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"The opportunity to serve our country: that is all we ask.” John Smith, May 11, 1994.
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