Corbyn – Radical or Reactionary

Jeremy Corbyn – Radical or Reactionary?

Former BBC political reporter, Kent Barker, questions whether Labour’s most left-wing leadership candidate could ever prove an asset to the party at the next General Election.

Let me take you back 30 years. Neil Kinnock is giving his leader’s speech to the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth. The battle between left and right in the party has been raging since Thatcher came to power six years earlier.  The hard-left Militant Tendency controls Liverpool City Council. Kinnock rounds on: "The grotesque chaos of a Labour council… hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.”  Left-wing Liverpool MP Eric Heffer leaves his seat in protest and marches towards the exit. Which is where I am sitting. I grab my tape-recorder and run down the steps to intercept him, microphone thrust out in front. It isn’t a great interview. In fact he doesn’t say much at all, but his anger tells the story. Also in the hall, at his first Party Conference as a newly elected MP, is Jeremy Corbyn who almost certainly supports Heffer’s stance.

Today’s internecine battle within the Labour Party is eerily reminiscent of the years leading up to that Bournemouth conference in 1985. On the left then, as now, are people who believe the party can only win the next election if voters are given a proper socialist alternative. On the right are those who believe they will never get back into power unless they can attract the swing voters in the centre with moderate, City-friendly policies. The first group looks back to how Attlee trounced Churchill in 1945 and ushered in probably the furthest left administration in history. The second look to how, after beating John Major in 1997, Tony Blair produced Labour’s longest period in power with centrist ‘Tory-lite’ policies.

I remember Jeremy Corbyn from his time on Haringey Council in the 1970s. Back then, calling yourself a ‘socialist’ was a badge of honour not a recipe for electoral suicide. And the left within the party were dominant—angry at what they considered the ‘betrayals’ of the Callaghan Government. The left-wing Michael Foot beat centrist Denis Healey in the 1980 leadership race. Militant members started to infiltrate and dominate local constituency parties. In 1981 the ‘Gang of Four’ split off to form the SDP. Later that year Tony Benn ran for deputy leader with Jeremy Corbyn working on his campaign. 

Just look at the parallels. Labour’s left (and some not so left) are angry at the ‘betrayals’ of the Blair Government. A leftish leader is elected over a centrist candidate—Ed rather than David Milliband. And, when Ed resigns after being trounced at the polls, the left of the party in the constituencies start to flex their muscles to get another—even further left—candidate elected. The only bit of history that hasn’t yet been repeated is a mass defection and formation of a new centrist party (though there are those who predict that could happen if Corbyn does become leader).

Later in the 1980s, Kinnock reformed the party, moving it towards the centre, but he still couldn’t get elected. Only when Tony Blair arrived on the scene and tore up Clause Four—the symbolic socialist backbone of the party’s constitution—did electoral success follow.

So, today, the party member faced with the leadership ballot has an unenviable choice. If they vote Corbyn and ride the momentum of discontent with the Blairite old guard and the regressive Cameron Government, they risk annihilation at the 2020 election. If they vote Burnham, Cooper or Kendall they risk gaining an Opposition leader relatively indistinguishable from the Conservative incumbent, but one who, most statistics and psephologists say, has a far greater chance of being elected than a self-proclaimed socialist candidate.

I have a friend who’s been a Labour Party member for forty years and who is instinctively left-leaning. He agrees with almost everything Corbyn says or stands for. Yet he knows the wider electorate does not. “My heart says vote for Corbyn, my head says don’t. The tragedy is that Labour has failed to convince the voters that an austerity-driven, banker-friendly, greed-based government is downright unfair and unjust, deeply divisive and, ultimately, damaging for society and the country.”

Perhaps what Labour requires is a radical overhaul of the left v right debate. Could a new philosophy not espouse a caring capitalism with the market tightly regulated, working for people not shareholders? Where ‘not-for-profit’ organisations are favoured for public service contracts? Where the state might own, but not run, public services?

So what my friend, along with other party members, has to decide is: could Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Leader provide the catalyst for such a revolution in thinking, or is he just too wedded to the old and now discredited state-centered socialism of the 1980s? In short, is he really a radical or a reactionary and, perhaps more important, is there any way he could prove an electoral asset instead of a liability?