Half an hour before Nottingham’s “Jeremy for Leader” rally was due to start on Thursday night the queue snaked round the Albert Hall and down Maid Marian Way for 200 yards. Too late! The 900-capacity auditorium was already full to bursting. But the 300 people left on the pavement were not left entirely bereft. The man of the moment stopped to address them on a loudhailer for a full 10 minutes before his ecstatic reception indoors.
As everyone – even in London – now knows, similar well-organised events have been hastily arranged all over the country, including SNP Scotland, with similar results. The Labour grassroots, or a significant section of it, is in revolt against New Labour’s compromises with globalisation and the tech revolution.
It is not hard to see why grassroots revolts exist, in Britain or elsewhere. People feel let down, left behind, badly treated. It is less obvious why Jeremy Corbyn has become the improbable repository of their hopes of something better. But he has. This is love. His Iraq war apology promise in Friday’s Guardian will only intensify that feeling, at least for some.
In his prime Tony Blair persuaded them grudgingly to trust him – they don’t any more – but it was never quite like this. Perhaps Neil Kinnock’s ill-fated eve of poll rally, just up the M1 in Sheffield in 1992, was the last occasion when a Labour leader hit such a soft spot with the activists.
For Labour leader Corbyn will be, when the votes are counted on 12 September. With 600,000 signed up members and union muscle behind him, there can be little doubt of it now.
As usual, the Trots were out in force last night – the SWP, Spartacist League and the rest – peddling their news sheets and a workers’ republic. At £3 a vote this is payback time for such people, who dismissed brave Kinnock as “the new Ramsay Macdonald” from day one.
But the elegant Albert Hall’s audience was clearly predominantly Labour: well scrubbed, both men and women, young and (more) old, much whiter than Nottingham’s overall demographic, probably more public sector too (it is a university city), happy to feel included again by a party which it has seen lose two elections and its way.
“Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour party, I am going to say that again,” roared Manuel Cortes, fiery leader of the white-collar transport union TSSA. And he did. The crowd roared. Several speakers also invoked “our next prime minister”. More roars: this hall believed it.
Corbyn himself was more circumspect. Don’t take victory for granted, he said several times. Don’t vote and then leave the hard work to someone else while you get angry at the TV news. Get involved via social media (“completely bypassing what Rupert Murdoch says, thinks or does”) because Labour is going to become a bottom-up, not a top-down movement again. “Together we are very, very strong ... We can make a massive difference. Let’s stay together for the long haul.”
Talk of the long haul puts him in a more honest place than Tony Benn, who used to promise that all sorts of difficult things could be achieved within two weeks of winning power, let alone Alex Salmond – whose referendum rallies were as rapturous – who glibly promised that Indy Scotland would be “one of the richest countries in the world”.
But homely modesty and self-deprecation are part of Corbyn’s appeal. He is the authentic bearded leftwinger who has never changed his views in 30 years as an MP, never been a minister or careerist. Untainted by such experience, he is the leader of many activists’ dreams.
Yet his own 35-minute, unscripted contribution was arguably the least slick on last night’s programme. Two teenage speakers, Nadia Whittome and Umaar Kazmi, attacking the “lies, deceit and warmongering” of the Blair/Brown era of their childhood, and the Cameron era’s zero-hours contracts, were startlingly fluent, New Labour even.
Annmarie Kilcline from Unite (which helped pay for the hall) spoke of 30 years of post-Thatcher struggle for decent jobs. Cortes mocked the Labour “realists” crawling out of the woodwork to say it could not be done.
Corbyn’s economic adviser, Richard Murphy, chartered accountant turned “tax justice” campaigner, made Corbynomics sound easy: investment in decent jobs and skills, in social housing and the NHS, in growth, not austerity or bankers’ bonuses. “Businesses only succeed when they satisfy the customers, Corbynomics will do the same,” he said. I’ve run businesses, George Osborne hasn’t.
Faced with scepticism – in this week’s Private Eye and elsewhere – Murphy seems to have modified the £120bn unpaid taxes a Corbyn campaign might yield (£1bn invested in 20,000 tax staff would deliver £20bn). Corbyn himself later said that raising corporation tax by just 0.5% “would be enough to pay for university [tuition] fees”.
It wouldn’t, but, as they kept admitting, Corbynomics and much of “Jeremy’s plans” are a work in progress. It scarcely matters in a euphoric atmosphere like last night’s. Corbyn is not witty, but he is warm and naturally funny. When he knocked his glass of water off the podium he remarked: “Newton was right about gravity.” He deplored personal abuse and “yah-boo politics” and kept to his word. No rival candidate got a mention. They were off the radar.
Yes, there had been good things in Labour’s election manifesto, but it had failed to acknowledge that the economic crisis had not been caused by greedy nurses but by greedy executives, unregulated banks and “crazy investments in the US and other places”. People are “thirsting” for a proper debate about all this in unequal Britain, that is why he has been doing well, he told them.
They cheered attacks on the 1% elite, on tax avoidance and evasion, on what Corbyn called “cold and nasty” campaigns against those seeking legitimate benefits or “merely trying to improve their lives” in the camps in Calais.
There were rounds of applause for the benefits of immigration, for renationalisation of rail, water (“if it’s good enough for Berlin and Paris”), for an end to zero-hours contracts and neoliberal austerity, for attacks on the war in Iraq and on Trident missiles. When Corbyn promised to bring all schools back inside “the family of local authorities” that was cheered too.
Where does all this energy go after 12 September? That is the big question and it would be unduly cynical simply to dismiss last night’s wholesome event as an aberration in hard times. Just look at Syriza or the SNP.
Camp Corbyn asks many of the right questions about the shortcomings and outright scandals that deform British society. The issue is whether it has many of the right answers, let alone ones which the wider electorate, Labour voters too, can be persuaded to embrace.
Decidedly smarter than he used to be (thinner too), Corbyn is giving it his best shot, probably as surprised as anyone to find his token candidacy on the edge of victory. Robin Hood may be a local champion of the downtrodden, but Nottingham is a mainstream Labour city – 52 of the 55 councillors, all three MPs as usual, their share of the vote increased on 7 May.
Candidates representing the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), now part of the Corbyn coalition, managed to overtake the Elvis Turns Green party this time (1,577 to 123 in council votes), but the party surging to third place this time, in Nottingham and elsewhere in the east Midlands, was Ukip. What does Jeremy say to them?
