The annual Socialism weekend in November included a discussion, led by CLIVE HEEMSKERK, on the lessons of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. With obvious relevance for current debates around Your Party and the fight for a new mass workers’ party, we are publishing what is a combined version of the introduction and reply.
The first thing to understand about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2019 – ‘Corbynism Mark One’ – is that it was a product of economic and political factors that persist to this day. That those factors resulted in Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in September 2015 was an ‘accident of history’ which could have equally manifested themselves in the formation of a new party. And that is an important context for the debates around Your Party, launched by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana in the summer. Whatever role Your Party may or may not play in the period ahead, the objective factors that are putting the question of a new mass workers’ party on the agenda will remain.
Corbynism One was firstly a revolt against the ‘age of austerity’ ushered in after the 2007-2008 financial crash and the ‘great recession’ that followed. But it was also a reaction against the effective disenfranchisement of the working class, and those big sections of the middle class affected by the crisis, which was the result of the 1990s transformation of the Labour Party under Tony Blair into another capitalist party.
This transmutation of Labour occurred both politically and in its organisation. Politically it was exemplified by the abolition in 1995 of Labour’s historic commitment, in Clause Four, Part 1V of the party’s rules, to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” – replacing it with praise for the “enterprise of the market and the rigor of competition”. As we said back then, this was not just symbolism. Clause Four summarised the collective interest of the working class in fighting for a new way of organising society, socialism, in opposition to the capitalist market system.
And there was the organisational transmutation of Labour too; above all by the systematic dismantling of the trade unions’ collective role within the party structures that allowed workers’ organisations, alongside the individual members, to challenge the leadership and threaten the capitalists’ interests.
So much so that in June 2015 the left MP John McDonnell, who just months later became Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow chancellor, wrote in the Labour Briefing magazine of “the darkest hour that socialists in Britain have faced” since 1951 – with the magazine’s editorial despairing that there were “too few Labour left MPs to mount a leadership challenge under the bureaucratic rules of the party”. Also in June, addressing the 2015 BFAWU bakers’ union conference, McDonnell said that it was time socialists “started to get together to form one common front against austerity… and maybe from that we can get an electoral formation that is more effective” – in other words, the idea of a new workers’ party. But in the absence of such a party – in the continuing vacuum of workers’ political representation – history found its ‘accidental’ outlet.
One of the organisational changes that had been implemented to consolidate the capitalist character of New Labour was the introduction in 2011 of a new category of ‘registered supporters’ into the party structures, modelled on the primary system in the US – with the same idea of ‘diluting’ the influence of active party members and the trade unions.
But in the US registering as a party ‘supporter’ is part of the official process of getting onto the electoral roll and New Labour’s voluntary version never took off – so by June 2015, a month after Ed Miliband had resigned as Labour leader following that year’s general election defeat, there were just 9,115 registered supporters, alongside the 200,000 or so individual Labour Party members. But then Jeremy Corbyn passed the hurdle of getting enough MPs to nominate him for leader, 15% of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) under the rules at that time. This was another safeguard, effectively giving MPs a veto over who could be a leadership candidate, and it was another ‘accident of history’ that some right-wingers ‘lent Corbyn their vote’ to get him onto the ballot – with the hubristic aim of crushing the left in the subsequent election – including David Lammy, Tulip Siddiq, Frank Field, Rushanara Ali, Neil Coyle, Sadiq Khan and Margaret Beckett.
Once he was on the ballot, however, there was a flood and, in six weeks, 112,000 people had paid £3 to be a registered supporter, with Corbyn winning 83.7% of the vote in this category. He also won a majority (57.6%) of the votes in the affiliated members category – members of affiliated trade unions who had to individually register to vote. But, although there was also a 50,000 or so surge of new joiners for full membership in the window before the August leadership vote cut-off deadline, Corbyn still did not win an overall majority amongst the individual full members of the Labour Party, something which is often forgotten. It shouldn’t be. It was above all an inchoate movement that generated outside the established Labour Party membership – but found an outlet – that won Corbyn his initial victory.
A catalyst for a mass movement
Once Corbyn had won the leadership election that in turn acted as a catalyst for the mass movement to develop further, a new wave. Labour’s membership rose from 193,754 at the end of the reporting year in December 2014 in the official figures submitted to the Electoral Commission to 388,262 in December 2015 – a doubling – and then by a further net increase (there were Blairites who left, of course) of 155,383 to December 2016. Effectively a new party was created – but, as discussed later, still within the political and organisational framework of a Labour Party whose class character had been transformed by Blair.
But it was undoubtedly a mass movement, including in its electoral expression. We shouldn’t forget that Labour under Corbyn polled over ten million votes in both the 2017 and 2019 general elections – something that was not achieved by Blair in 2005, Gordon Brown in 2010, or Ed Miliband in 2015.
And it’s actually more significant than that. In 2017 Labour’s vote under Corbyn increased by 3.53 million – 9.6% – the biggest increase between elections by any party in both the absolute number of votes won and the percentage share of the vote since the 1945 general election. With the exception of 1997, Labour in 2017 won its biggest share of the total electorate – in other words, of those eligible to vote, so taking into account non-voters – since ‘the Conservatives versus the miners’ 1974 elections. According to the Ipsos-Mori How Britain Voted survey, published after every general election since 1979, Corbyn won 60% support amongst the one-in-eight voters in 2017 who were previous non-voters.
The 2017 general election also saw a ‘youthquake’. The same Ipsos-Mori survey estimated the turnout of 18-24 year olds as 16 points up on 2015 – although still only 54% – and 55% for 25-34 year olds, up eight points. The Ashcroft election day exit poll found that two-thirds of 18-24 year olds voted Labour and over 50% of 25-34 year olds.
Of course it was not a continuous unbroken wave, as we know that no mass movement ever is or will be. Remember the ‘ebb’ of the Tories’ Copeland by-election victory in February 2017 – which was the first time since 1982 that the government party had won a seat from the opposition. The Economist magazine wrote, without irony: “Not since Tony Blair at his peak has a prime minister seemed so dominant”. This was referring to Theresa May! Meanwhile, the ‘radical’ journalist Owen Jones, in despair, called for Corbyn to make a deal with the PLP to “stand down in exchange for a guarantee of an MP on the ballot paper who is committed to the policies that inspired Corbyn’s supporters in the first place”. (The Guardian, 2 March 2017) This, remember, was just 15 weeks before the general election.
But ultimately, of course, Corbynism was defeated. By 2019 the Hansard Society political engagement audit report found that 47% of people felt that “they had no influence at all” in national affairs – a new high of disempowerment in this annual survey – even though 63% agreed that the “system of government is rigged to the advantage of the rich and powerful”, Corbynism’s core message.
In other words, there had been a movement that had raised the sights of workers and young people but followed then by disillusionment – a telling indictment of four years of Corbynism. This was not an inevitable outcome – but we need to understand why it happened and draw the lessons for the future.
A ruling class reaction was inevitable
What was inevitable was that the ruling class would react to Corbyn’s Labour leadership and use every weapon available to them to try and undermine and ultimately to overturn it.
The transformation of the Labour Party into New Labour under Tony Blair had changed the balance of class forces since the 1990s to the advantage of the capitalist ruling class. So, for example whereas in 1975 the share of gross domestic product (GDP) which went to wages was 65%, by 2008, just before the financial crash, it had fallen to 53%. Which means, materially, that every year the working class loses £334bn in wages that it would have otherwise received if the balance of class forces was the same as it was before the victory of the Thatcher-Blair settlement, including the transformation of the Labour Party – which averages out at about £10,400 a year lost wages for every worker.
That historic gain for the capitalists was threatened. Not so much by the content of Jeremy Corbyn’s actual programme. An Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis of Labour’s 2019 public ownership manifesto commitments, for example, estimated that they would have led to a change in control of just 5% of the total UK assets held by private companies. That was certainly more than enough to irritate the capitalists – while still leaving them with decisive control of the commanding heights of the economy which they would have undoubtedly used to sabotage a Corbyn-led government. But their main fear was of the hopes and expectations that would have been unleashed amongst the working class, with its appetite whetted.
So they mobilised every weapon to hand. That included, for example, legal preparations to deal with even the limited nationalisation plans. Two of the then owners of Britain’s gas and electricity transmission networks, National Grid and SSE, transferred their UK businesses to Luxembourg (and Hong Kong) to protect shareholders’ compensation rights under the European Union (EU) energy charter covering ‘European-owned’ companies – an illustration, by the way, of the role the EU bosses’ club would have played in subverting a Corbyn-led government. Water companies agreed ‘make whole’ clauses with banks on their debt – then totalling £49bn – making the principal sums due immediately if they were nationalised.
The capitalist establishment media, of course, were willing accomplices, in a systematic smear campaign. We have seen the recent furore over the ‘edit’ of Donald Trump’s January 6 speech, which resulted in the resignation of the BBC director-general. In contrast, to give just one example, Panorama’s infamous July 2019 ‘Labour antisemitism’ programme made it onto the shortlist for that year’s British Journalism Awards. This was the BBC hatchet-job in which a deliberately distorted e-mail from the party’s Corbyn-supporting communications director Seumas Milne made it appear he was condoning antisemitism, by deleting the words “but if we’re more than very occasionally using disciplinary action against Jewish members for antisemitism” from before the phrase, “something’s going wrong, and we’re muddling up political disputes with racism”.
And in the background were the state forces. From the first days of Corbyn’s leadership in September 2015 – when the Sunday Times quoted a senior serving general saying “there would be mass resignations at all levels and you would face the very real prospect of an event which would effectively be mutiny” if Corbyn became prime minister – to the reports in 2019 of Parachute Regiment soldiers in Afghanistan using a poster of Corbyn for target practise.
Less seriously, but still chipping in, was the Green Party – which, incidentally, Zack Polanski joined in 2017 at the peak of Corbynism (having left the Liberal Democrats after not being short-listed as a candidate for the 2016 Richmond Park by-election). At one point in 2019, when Boris Johnson was facing a no confidence vote in parliament, the Green Party’s then sole MP Caroline Lucas proposed an all-female ‘government of national unity’ to replace Johnson – including the Tory Justine Greening, the Liberal Democrat Jo Swinson, Anna Soubry of the ‘Independent Group for Change’ MPs, and various Blairite Labour MPs – rather than agree to Corbyn’s proposal that he should head an interim government to organise a general election should Johnson fall.
The biggest threat was in Labour
All the forces of capitalism were mobilised. But the most potent weapon the ruling class had was in the Labour Party itself, in the Parliamentary Labour Party, the party officialdom, and the caste of 7,000 or so Labour councillors – of whom just 400 declared for Corbyn in the 2015 leadership election – who dominated local parties.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously said of the 1871 Paris Commune uprising that the one thing that was especially proven by it was that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes”. And that should have been the watchword of ‘the Corbyn insurgency’ too – a mass movement as we have seen – towards the rules, structures and personnel of the ‘ready-made’ capitalist Labour Party that he now led.
But this wasn’t the view, of Jeremy Corbyn himself unfortunately, and certainly not of the coterie of advisors, academics, ‘sympathetic’ journalists and commentators etc around him, many of whom have been subsequently involved in the shaping of Your Party. They sought instead, on almost every occasion, to conciliate with the forces of capitalism within the party rather than confront them.
The lack of understanding by these ‘Corbynistas’ of the class interests involved, and how ruthless the capitalist representatives within the Labour Party would be, had been summed up at a previous Socialism event, in 2012 – and in a Socialism Today interview that preceded it – in a debate we had then with Owen Jones about the crisis of working class political representation since the triumph of Blairism. The Socialist Party did not exclude the theoretical possibility of a struggle within what was now for practical purposes a capitalist party – and theory should always be a guide to practice – but, in the debate with Owen Jones, we argued that it was “extremely unlikely that a successful struggle could be conducted”.
“Unless”, we went on, “it was literally to ‘re-register’ the parliamentary party – probably throwing out 90% – to restructure the Labour Party from top to bottom”. (Socialism Today No.162, October 2012) To which Owen Jones responded: “You don’t have to throw out the parliamentary Labour Party – I mean I know them. You wouldn’t have to purge them. You just need pressure from below to drag people kicking and screaming… people change under pressure from below”. But of course they can also succumb to pressure from above, which the ruling class would inevitably apply.
This was not to call, by the way, for top-down administrative measures to accomplish political tasks. We stand for the widest democratic debate in the workers’ movement. But the parameters differ even between, for example, trade unions – which historically have only excluded organised fascists from their ranks – and a mass, working class party, which would inevitably contain a range of even sharply contradictory opinions, but around a broad programme and ideological tradition. The task, having won a ‘bridgehead’ within the Blairised New Labour party framework through Corbyn’s leadership victory, was precisely to mobilise the mass support generated to politically re-arm and organisationally restructure Labour ‘from top to bottom’. But that was not what happened.
Political retreats
The retreats began almost immediately. In the 2015 Labour leadership election debates, for example, Corbyn had said he would oppose the then Tory prime minister David Cameron promoting a “free market EU economy that tears up environmental protection, social protection, and workers’ rights” in the planned referendum on Britain’s EU membership. If he ignores Labour’s demands, Corbyn argued, “at that point we go back to our movement and decide what we do. We don’t give a blank cheque now in advance for Cameron to do whatever he wants to do”. (The Guardian, 8 August 2015)
Yet within days of his election, following an ultimatum from the shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn and Europe minister Pat McFadden that they would resign otherwise, Corbyn issued a joint statement with Benn saying that Labour will “be campaigning to stay in regardless of the outcome of the government’s renegotiation” – a dictionary example of a ‘blank cheque’.
This set the template for a systematic campaign by the right. When the chief of the defence staff, General Sir Nicholas Houghton, said in November 2015 that he would “worry” if Corbyn’s unilateral nuclear disarmament views were “translated into power”, the shadow defence secretary, the Blairite Maria Eagle, defended Houghton as being ‘within his rights’, with no comment from Corbyn. When Cameron organised a Commons debate on Syria, Hilary Benn was allowed to sum up for Labour in support of a bombing campaign. Momentum, ostensibly set up to support Corbyn’s leadership, responded by saying that “we will not campaign for the deselection of any MP and will not permit any local Momentum groups to do so”.
On Scotland Corbyn initially took the position that Labour would not vote against a Section 30 order at Westminster permitting another Scottish independence referendum if it was backed by the Holyrood parliament, a commitment repeated in a Radio Four interview in March 2017 for example. But what appeared in the 2017 manifesto was: “Labour opposes a second independence referendum”. Not surprisingly, Labour’s vote in Scotland rose by just 9,860 in the 2017 general election, contributing just 0.2% of the all-Britain wide 3.53 million increase; and the Tories’ 13 Scottish seats – up by twelve – were the difference that enabled Theresa May to form a minority government propped up by the Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist Party.
This was an example of how Corbynism’s repeated compromises with the capitalist representatives within the Labour Party not only disorientated activists – and allowed the right to regroup – but had an impact on broader consciousness, feeding that sense of disempowerment identified in the Hansard survey.
Nowhere more did the retreats have this effect than in relation to local government austerity. The arch-Blairite Guardian journalist, Polly Toynbee, during the 2015 leadership election, fearfully anticipated councillors “encouraged by Corbyn, demand[ing] illegal budgets as in Liverpool and Clay Cross”. (4 August, 2015) But within weeks Corbyn, with John McDonnell, had signed a circular letter to local council Labour groups effectively urging compliance with central government austerity dictates.
There was lots of talk about ‘grassroots resistance’ to local austerity, and when the Momentum co-founder Jon Lansman was elected to Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) he said his focus would be on transforming the party into “a community organising movement”. (The Guardian, 16 January 2018) A Labour Party ‘Community Organising Unit’ was launched that year with the aim of encouraging local parties to establish ‘food clubs’, clothes banks, volunteer advocates, social events for young people, adult education classes, community libraries, and so on. But where Labour controlled local councils these were precisely the services that were being cut. That was the face of ‘Corbyn’s Labour’ that working class communities saw, even though the vast majority of Labour councillors making the cuts were right-wing Blairites, and disillusionment grew.
A stalled revolution
Corbynism Mark One was a mass movement with millions mobilised at the ballot box, a surging growth in Labour’s membership, and tens of thousands attending rallies and meetings. But it did not ‘restructure the Labour Party from top to bottom’, with the working class and its organisations taking its central role. The ‘ready-made machinery’ of what had become the capitalist New Labour party remained.
The Fire Brigades Union, having disaffiliated from Labour in 2004 after the national strike against the Blair government, reaffiliated in November 2015. But the militant RMT transport workers’ union, having been expelled from Blair’s New Labour in 2004, rejected an ‘offer’ from Labour’s NEC to re-affiliate, after a full branch consultation and a special general meeting debate. With the qualitative changes to the character of the Labour Party that had gutted the role of the trade unions still in place, the members were not convinced that working-class interests would be best served by abandoning the union’s political independence – another indictment of Corbynism.
How little the structures of the Labour Party had been changed can be shown by how little Keir Starmer had to change to consolidate his counter-revolution after his ascent to the leadership in 2020. The threshold for the number of MPs nominations needed to be a leadership contender, cut from 15% to 10% of the PLP under Corbyn (but still giving MPs a veto), was raised back, to 20%. The registered supporters category, critical in Corbyn’s initial victory, was abolished – and a six-month membership qualification was introduced for voting in leadership contests. And the threshold to trigger an open constituency reselection contest was increased from 30% of branches and local affiliates demanding one to 50%. Corbynism was, tragically, a stalled revolution.
But could Corbyn really have used his leadership position to transform the party, given the ferocious opposition and outright sabotage of the ‘ready-made machinery’? This was perhaps most clearly exemplified by the 124 to four vote by Labour Party staff members around the time of the Panorama ‘Labour antisemitism’ programme – to condemn, not the BBC’s smears, but the party’s press office for challenging the smears! But actually the answer is yes, he could have done.
In 2017 Corbyn went over the heads of the PLP to present his radical general election manifesto. If, as the Socialist Party argued at the time, he had done the same for proposals to completely democratise the party – appealing directly to the new membership, trade unionists, and registered supporters as in the 2015 and 2016 leadership contests – the Blairites would have been powerless to resist.
At every stage, however, the leaders of Corbynism, including many of those now shaping Your Party, sought to find ‘common ground’ with the capitalist wing of Labour rather than mobilising to remove them from their base in the PLP, the council groups, and the party machine. Yet the interests of the capitalist class and the working-class majority are diametrically opposed. What the working class needs is not a party which attempts to conciliate its interests with those of capitalism but instead that organises an unbending struggle for its independent goal of a new, socialist, society. That is as true today as it was under Corbynism Mark One.