A You
Gov poll last week placed Jeremy Corbyn at the top of the Labour league and
since then every major news outlet has had something to say on why Labour, and
Jeremy are doomed. I have listened to reporters suggest that his success must
be as a consequence of entryism from the hard, or radical, left, or even the
right as the telegraph has been encouraging. I have also read suggestions that,
if he becomes leader, any resulting entity to emerge from a possible Corbyn
victory would be a consequence of said entryism, and this couldn’t possibly
offer enough to the electorate as a whole to beat Cameron’s blue team in 2020.
It would be good to mention
firstly that so called entryism has been an issue for the Labour party in the
past. The Militant Tendency, a Trotskyite group (Another term frequently banded
around rather irresponsibly, intended to evoke a sense of fear amongst
readers/listeners) of Labour members, were the cause of much internal squabble
throughout the 1980’s and into the early 1990’s, and prior to the 1992 general
election this faction of ‘leftist’ members were exorcised from the party. It
was said by the then leader, Neil Kinnock in the run up to the election, that
they were a “maggot in the body of the labour party”. Militant, which later
left behind the Trotskyite tactics of entryism to form their own socialist party,
were blamed to some degree with damaging Labour’s image in the lead up to the
92 election, an election Labour unpredictably lost. But I’m not sure how much
Militant’s tactics of entryism can be blamed for Labours image problem in 92,
just as I am not sure whether any grassroots support for Jeremy Corbyn hurts
Labour’s current image.
The Tories won due to an endless
ream of factors. Famously the day after the election the Sun newspaper gladly
published the headline ‘it was The Sun what won it’, and whether or not this
was true, Labour revelled at the opportunity to blame the press for driving the
public away from Neil Kinnock. The 1992 British
Election study suggests, as they always do, there is no credence to this
particular line of argument. However, the polling leading up to the election
showed that Neil Kinnock was very much seen by the public as a ‘weak’
prospective leader aside the incumbent, John Major, despite scraping out the
maggots of Militant and following what was widely agreed to be aggressive campaigning
from the press against Kinnock’s candidacy.
The British Election Study
suggested that in the 92 election, where Labour lost by approximately 7.1% of
the popular vote, they had lost many of their traditional ‘working class’
voters. According to the study many no longer identified emotionally with the
party as they had previously and consequently, votes were either lost to other
parties or not cast at all.
The working class is a somewhat
flimsy concept. If working class is taken to mean those Labour voters below a
certain percentage of median income then, due to the fact that income
inequality has risen steadily since the 1980’s, disaffection amongst this
group of the population can have only grown in the face of a Labour party that
may seem, as it did in 1992, not to represent the needs of this body of people.
If this section of society, call them what you like, Working Class, Middle
Class, Poor, the economically underprivileged, feel that there is no political trumpeter
playing their tune, then they could represent a massive growing untapped
resource in 2020, an era many may mistake for one of apathy, when in fact it is
one of silent upset.
Unlike the election of 1992,
where Labour lost with more than 11million votes nationwide, the May election
this year saw them lose to a Tory Party that had convinced even fewer to cast in
favour of their prospectus. If Jeremy Corbyn were to win the election for the
leadership of the Labour party, much of the Parliamentary Labour Party suggest
that he could not win the 2020 election. It is said that his innate inability
to convince voters of a centrist persuasion, those that leaned away from Labour
in 2010 and crossed the box under Tory, LibDem or even UKIP, would leave Labour
ineffectual in the fight back to power.
I could not agree less. Authenticity
could very well inspire those who did not vote previously to engage in
politics. Indeed the Corbyn campaign suggests that the rapid increase in Labour
party members and affiliates is a surge of young people and those coming
back to Labour after years of disenfranchisement.
If Corbyn wins the race for the
leadership then it is irrelevant whether or not existing voters throw votes back
to Labour from centre ground. With voter turnout so low Labour need only ignite
the imaginations of a relatively small number of prospective voters and
therefore, competing with the Tories in the centre ground of politics whilst
the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party) drains the Labour movement of its
authenticity, seems like suicide to me. In order for Labour to really win it
must become a vibrant movement, irrespective of entryism from any factionist portions
the PLP may frown upon. The Labour party is a broad church and Jeremy Corbyn said, “You have to open
yourselves up to the public who are not supporters yet. We want them to join
and be part of the movement.”