Corbyn and After

The Labour Party's disciplinary processes have always been factional. While the party is not, as the EHRC report confirmed, institutionally antisemitic, it is institutionally anti-left. The purpose of the party is to restrain the socialist impulse, channelling it into parliamentarianism. This means it must balance between keeping socialists inside the tent, to prevent the emergence of an electoral challenger (or significant spoiler) on the left, and expelling leftwing members when they become too dominant or troublesome. It doesn't face the same issue on its right flank, where dissidents will be tolerated by the party hierarchy (and lionised by the media) all the way up to the point where they shamelessly turn their coats or even set up new parties with the express intention of burying Labour for good. This asymmetry means that the disciplinary system invariably tends to favour the right, and consequently its focus shifts over time to reflect those issues deemed (whether reasonably or not) to be dividing lines with the "far-left", hence the current focus on antisemitism and the lesser importance accorded to Islamophobia. 

Will an independent complaints procedure change this? No. It will allow the leadership to claim that it is incapable of interfering, but the idea that factionalism will disappear is naive. This will be present not only in the interface between the party and the independent body, i.e. how complaints are initiated and the role of the NEC in judgements and sanctions, but structurally in the likely sympathies of the membership of a panel appointed by the party hierarchy itself. They will almost certainly be middle-class, professional and committed to liberal orthodoxy, which means they will inevitably bias towards the political centre and be wary of left "extremism". In other words, this will simply further institutionalise factionalism, providing a defensive shield against claims of bias and injustice. That Keir Starmer and Dave Evans have immediately interfered to suspend Jeremy Corbyn is recognition that they know they can get away with this pseudo-independence. They now have power without responsibility.

Much of the political spite displayed towards Corbyn this week has repeated the highly personalised judgements that have been made against him since he first became leader, notably that he is thick and narcissistic: qualities he supposedly shares with Donald Trump. But the most telling charge is that he was simply unfit for office, an opinion that even those who oppose his suspension are happy to subscribe to, as this carefuly curated selection of letters to the Guardian shows. This emphasis on Corbyn's inadequate leadership is an indication that the real target of the liberal media's ire is the party membership, who had the temerity to not only elect him in 2015 but to re-elect him in 2016 despite the charge that he had single-handedly murdered the remain campaign in the EU referendum. It is the party members (and to an extent the wider electorate who delivered the "wrong" result in 2017) who are really being told off.

Corbynism was initially an attempt to build a wider social movement in support of parliamentary socialism. Its beleaguerment after 2017 was not simply the result of a decapitation strategy by its factional enemies but a wider campaign by the political centre, notably embodied in the astroturfed People's Vote and the Change UK farce, which aimed to force it to focus on Westminster and media opinion to the exclusion of movement-building. As such, this was a perfect example of parliamentarianism, the idea that all politics outside the Westminster framework is illegitimate, that Labour's first priority is to allay the fears of the establishment and prove its "fitness to govern", and that militancy of any sort is a guaranteed vote-loser. Though Ralph Miliband's Parliamentary Socialism only traced this tradition up to the 1960s, there has been nothing since to suggest it doesn't continue to reflect the thinking of the PLP. If Kinnock's tenure focused on beating down militancy and New Labour majored on fitness to govern, the early signs are that Starmer's focus will be on the illegitimacy of extra-parliamentary action (the comments on the Black Lives Matter protests and criticism of the National Education Union are illustrative).

There is an argument to be made that Corbyn's crime in the eyes of the establishment was not merely being too far left (objectively he was only offering lukewarm social democracy that was well within the bounds of Labour's history), or even of being obsessed with the rights of the marginalised and the interests of foreigners, but of being too disrespectful of the parliamentary system (the lobby as much as the Commons chamber). This was not so much down to his own attitudes (he is arguably one of the staunchest contemporary champions of Parliament as a democratic body, in the mould of Tony Benn), but to his encouragement of organising and pressure beyond Westminster (for the media, an area suitable only for anthropology or ventriloquism, not autonomous politics). The sneering about his historic support for marginal causes, his ready attendance at demonstrations and his insistence that everyone was capable of independent thought and appreciation, bizarrely demonstrated in the hysterical reaction to his admission that Ulysses was a favourite novel, all point to a contempt for someone who doesn't know his place.

Corbyn's elevation to the leadership was an aberration in Labour's history, even if the ethical tradition he represents has been part of Labour since its inception. The question that has to be asked is how he managed to come to power. It wasn't because of his own cunning or resourcefulness, or the strength of the organised left. It can't be attributed to luck or the stupidity of his opponents either, despite those who would later loudly regret enabling his candidacy in 2015 and the ineptness of the 2016 coup attempt. A more plausible answer is that the party right was so bereft of ideas, so intellectually exhausted after the disappointments of New Labour, that some felt the need to support Corbyn's candidacy simply to lend the respectability of ideological contest and variety to what would otherwise have been a depressing executive search process. But even that isn't wholly convincing. 

The answer, surely, is that the party membership wanted a more leftwing leader and programme, something that should have been understood with the election of Ed Miliband but which was dismissed at the time as being due to the malign influence of the unions (a dismissal that seems to have encouraged Miliband's own caution). The introduction of democracy into the election of the Labour leader has been destabilising because it no longer allows the party and union establishments to control the process. The result, in the short-term, has been Starmer's strategy to campaign left and lead right, but this isn't likely to be viable in the long run simply because the membership will quickly tire of such dishonesty. As one-member-one-vote cannot be repealed, the most likely fix will be to raise the threshold for candidate nominations, so preventing a leftwing MP from bypassing the bulk of the PLP to appeal directly to the membership. In the circumstances, further moves to democratise MP selection can be assumed to be off the agenda in the interests of "unity".

Corbyn's failure to radically reform Labour guaranteed that he would never get the chance to radically reform the country. And that failure was as much down to him and John McDonnell being thoroughly institutionalised as it was to any lack of managerial nous. Building alliances and solidarity is the very nature of leftwing politics, but it faces a particular problem when it comes to dealing with the PLP, which is that the latter ultimately has the power of the state at its back and it is also adept at isolating dissent (though the Socialist Campaign Group has 34 members, only 18 have signed a letter calling for Corbyn's reinstatement). This can only be negotiated with from a position of strength, and that strength can only be built outside of Parliament, whether as a movement working through Labour's membership (a la Momentum) or as a ginger group disciplining the party through electoral threat (a la UKIP). As the sneers about Glastonbury and the dismissal of his willingness to ask questions on behalf of ordinary citizens revealed, the establishment's fear was never that Corbyn would dominate the Commons but that he would make it look irrelevant.