The central aim of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters is not to control the British government but to control the British left. If they meant what they said about hating Tories, they would be ashamed to have given them another five years in power. If their sobs and sighs and heartfelt cries about their “passionate” commitment to social justice were sincere, then their political failure would have led them to hide themselves away.
Last week, in the face of all evidence, the Labour hierarchy said, in its official report into the election, that defeat could not be blamed on Corbyn and his policies. Like a malfunctioning Dalek, the left can carry on vowing to exterminate conservatives and centrists, oblivious to the fact that the war is lost and they lost it. Rebecca Long-Bailey and Richard Burgon do not explain how they can succeed where Corbyn and John McDonnell failed. More pertinently, they don’t appear to understand why anyone might require an explanation from them, or how the “Corbyn revolution” became the first in history to change nothing.
“The left of this country has every reason to hope,” chirruped Amy Jackson, Corbyn’s former political secretary. She wasn’t joking or writing under the influence of class A drugs; Boris Johnson was spending more on the police and NHS, she explained, and that was a triumph for “Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership”. Apparently, the left wins by putting a rightwing party in power and giving it five years to govern with an unassailable majority.
Tellingly, the bulk of her argument did not concern the mass of people in this country. Hope for the left lay in the “improved trigger ballot process”, the “increasing power of the membership in policymaking” and “electric” debates about “composite motions” at Labour conferences. Karl Marx once said the point of the left was to change the world. Now it is to change procedures.
A Labour MP told me that her local far-leftists were insisting there was no need to abandon Corbynism. The election had been lost because “Jeremy” was a victim rather than a national leader: a victim of the BBC, a victim of MPs who should have been purged and a victim of “electoral interference” by a foreign power – by which they meant Israel.
Fortunately, if somewhat belatedly, the market for such moral disgrace and political cowardice is shrinking fast. It is hard to be specific but there are clear signs that large numbers of Labour members who supported Corbyn in not one but two – yes, two – leadership elections are moving away. Constituency Labour parties that backed Corbyn in 2015 and 2016 are now supporting Keir Starmer or Lisa Nandy for Labour leader and, by a country mile, Angela Rayner for deputy. The party said last week that 114,000 new members had joined to vote in the elections. Once again there is no definitive evidence. But it is unlikely in the extreme that they are members of Marxist Leninist sects, and more than probable that they are determined to produce an opposition capable of opposing. MPs say that their impression from talking to recent recruits is that they are there to vote for a leader who can win.
The left is further weakened by the low quality of its candidates. Readers who never recognised Corbyn’s charisma will wonder how anyone could have been inspired by him. But to a significant number of Labour members he possessed a passive-aggressive appeal. On the one hand, he was a supporter of the most barbarous and reactionary anti-western regimes and movements. On the other, he championed justice and peace. On the one hand, he presided over a foul civil war that brought anti-Jewish racism and the politics of personal destruction to the heart of the Labour party. On the other, he portrayed himself the perpetual victim of an aggressive establishment.
Long-Bailey just doesn’t have the combination of viciousness, piety, prejudice and victimhood. She lacks conviction. You think you’ve heard her speak but her words leave no impression. At times it seems, unfairly no doubt, as if she is reading from a script written by Momentum.
A cult of the personality was always going to face a crisis when its personality retired. True to form, the left is collapsing into factions. The pro-European left is breaking towards Starmer. Unite, whose leader, Len McCluskey, has done more to keep the Conservatives in power than any other Labour figure, touted Laura Pidcock, Ian Lavery and, of all people, Barry Gardiner as its candidate, before reluctantly settling on Long-Bailey for want of better. The left with a Jewish problem is furious with Long-Bailey for signing up to an action plan from the Board of Deputies of British Jews to tackle leftwing antisemites. They are pinning their hopes on Burgon, a man without discernible political, intellectual or moral competence.
I do not want to overestimate their troubles. The refusal to apologise and explain bestows a kind of strength. The failure of Corbyn and his supporters to engage in honest self-criticism will set the tone for leftwing politics for the next decade. They blame Remainers for forcing poor Jeremy to abandon a lifetime of support for Brexit and endorse a second referendum. It follows that they will not apply what pressure they can to moderate a hard Brexit, and will be unable to help workers whose jobs are threatened by isolationism. They blame the BBC, and it follows that they will not defend the corporation as an emboldened right goes for it. They blame their fellow Labour MPs, and it follows that Corbyn and his allies will do everything they can to undermine Starmer or Nandy should they win.
Cocksure and self-righteous, they will hunker down waiting for the moment in the 2030s or 2040s when they can bid for power again. The rest of us, stuck in the wreckage of post-Brexit Britain, without a clear way out of the mire, should ask them one question: how the hell can you be so damn pleased with yourselves?
• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist
