After the failed coup
Stuart King writes
Finally Angela Eagle has announced she will stand against Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership of the Labour Party. Only ten months after Jeremy was elected by nearly 60% of the party, with over a quarter a million votes, the LP is plunged into another election contest.
This should come as no surprise for socialists in and outside the LP. The Blairite right-wing of the party has been plotting a coup ever since they were trounced in the September election. Lets not forget Liz Kendall, shield bearer for Progress, received only 4.5% of the votes. The Labour right has been working ever since to undermine Corbyn’s leadership, using their friends in the press and media, and weighing up when they could launch a coup.
And we a should make no mistake, while the right likes to say this is all about Corbyn’s “leadership qualities” it is in fact all about his policies. This can be seen in how the right has mobilised in the PLP and in the media in the past few months, first against Corbyn’s anti-Trident position and then over the bombing of Syria – two key red lines for supporters of the British state as major imperialist player in the world.
Why the coup failed
The plan for the coup that unfolded at the end of June is well known. Waves of resignations from the Shadow Cabinet led by Hilary “bomber” Benn, followed by a vote of no confidence in the PLP on 28 June; accompanied by an all out anti-Corbyn campaign using the TV and print resources at the disposal of right-wing Labour. Whether it was the BBC, the Mail, the Mirror or the Guardian – leader writers and columnists piled in to rubbish Corbyn as leader. Indeed it was a worked example of how an alternative party of the ruling class can use all the levers it has to try and destroy a challenge from the left.
It was a “coup” because there was no intention of triggering a new election for leader. Necessary because the right wasn’t sure it could win a leadership election given the changed nature of the LP membership. The aim was to vilify and destroy Jeremy Corbyn the man, to demoralise him to the point of forced resignation. Thus the harangues and insults at PLP meetings and the open attacks from his own side when he challenged Cameron in the Commons.
Yet the coup failed. They had underestimated the steely determination of Corbyn, and his long time ally John McDonnell, to face down this undemocratic coup. They had also underestimated the outrage amongst Jeremy Corbyn supporters up and down the country, with huge demonstrations and rallies organised spontaneously the week of the no confidence motion. This was followed by hundreds of LP meetings where members, often after a fight with their officers, passed resolutions of confidence in Corbyn and condemned the coup plotters.
Indeed surely this is the most disloyal PLP there has ever been. Picking their moment, when the Tory party leadership was in disarray having just lost the referendum, when the Prime Minister had announced he was resigning, to launch their coup based on a political assassination of Corbyn. Predictably the LP plunged in the opinion polls as the Tories rallied, even taking a lead in the polls.
The right would rather destroy the party
There is a lesson here no one in the LP or socialist movement should forget – the right wing of the LP would rather see the party destroyed than lose control to the left. Historically the right has been as hard as nails while the soft left has buckled under such threats – as Tony Benn did in 1982. Now the right in the PLP has said again “we will split and ruin the party if you, Corbyn, do not step down”. Then it has the temerity to blame Corbyn for threatening the “very future” of the LP! The wheeling in of Lord Kinnock, Ed Milliband and finally Tom Watson was all part of this plot to deny the members their democratic rights to elect the leader. So far it has failed but no doubt there will be further attempts to keep Jeremy off the ballot paper.
The coup failed because Corbyn stood firm and was backed up by hundreds of thousands of LP members sending in messages of support, many of them organised by Momentum. It also failed because the big four union leaders would not play ball with the coup-mongers. This is not because they are great fans of Corbyn but because they have their executives and their members breathing down their necks.
In a perfect piece of bad timing the coup plotters picked the union conference season when it made it impossible for the likes Dave Prentice to declare for the coup days before a Labour Link conference. Tom Watson, who finally gave up the attempt to engineer Corbyn’s departure in the week of the Unite conference, was roundly denounced by his friend Unite leader Len McCluskey for “sabotage” – possibly for sabotaging a McCluskey own plan for an agreement with Corbyn to stand down before 2020.
Democracy at the grassroots
This raises the question – why were the right and the PLP so impatient to remove Corbyn? Why couldn’t they wait till 2020 if they were so certain Corbyn would lose the election and remove him then?
There is a very good reason. These MPs know what is happening at the grassroots of the LP. Tens of thousands of LP members who joined to vote for Corbyn are now being drawn into the every day struggle in the wards and Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs). The entrenched right wing CLP and ward officers, the “old New Labour Party”, along with their thousands of councillor allies busily implementing Tory party cuts, are desperately holding the line against the new members demanding an anti austerity and campaigning party. They are doing this using every bureaucratic trick in the book – refusing to actively draw in new members, making ward meetings as unpleasant as possible, blocking Trade Union delegates to General Committees and of course organising a witch-hunt to suspend and bar hundreds of LP and Momentum activists.
They know that in one or two years at most this bureaucratic game will have failed. Such is the sheer volume of LP members joining the party and demanding a say and control, the New Labour crowd will be swept away and the last buffer between the members and the MPs will be gone. This will open the road to the de-selection of the disloyalists and for real change in the party. This is what is at stake for them and it is why they are willing to risk all to prevent it. When the ermined Kinnock thumps the table saying it is a “fight for our party” it’s true – it is a fight for their party, their control and their leadership, a fight to keep Labour a trusted instrument of the establishment.
Looking forward
The leadership election battle in the next few months will offer the opportunity to involve and politicise tens of thousands of new LP members. The response to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign, and now to the coup attempt, has been phenomenal with more than a 100,000 new members joining since the referendum. Under Ed Miliband party membership had fallen to 190,000, today it stands at over 600,000 members making the LP the largest political party in Europe.
There are many reasons for this but the over riding one is that Jeremy Corbyn’s anti austerity politics has offered real hope to generations that have suffered from decades of neo-liberal consensus. Whether it’s the housing crisis, poverty wages, insecure employment, the selling off of public assets to the multi-nationals, the creeping privatisation of the NHS, the destruction of local control of schools and housing or the many other results of neo-liberal capitalism, millions have had enough. They are looking for an alternative and Jeremy Corbyn’s LP has harnessed this desire.
Far from being “a failure”, “out of touch with the voters”, “a poor leader”, Corbyn has reached out to people who have never thought of joining a party before, let alone a socialist one. And this is one of our challenges. How do we turn these hundreds of thousands of people into campaigning socialists? How do we, in John McDonnell’s words, turn the LP into a leader of a “social movement” that can change the country from top to bottom? Because this is the only thing that will satisfy the demand for change.
For anyone trying to change the LP and oust the right-wing we know this is not easy. The new members need to be organised, educated in socialist ideas and in the structures of the party itself. They need to be convinced that it is worth the effort to fight in the trenches of the wards, CLPs and GCs, while at the same time turning the party branches into campaigning organisations. Momentum must play a major role in this, but it itself must become more democratic, more responsive to its grassroots branches and less afraid of the right-wing media.
And even if we win the leadership battle a second time – which we will if there is a fair and open contest – the battle will continue within the PLP. Just as the right wing did not recognise the first victory they will not recognise a second. They will go back to their sabotaging methods in the PLP, doing everything in their power to undermine Corbyn and the LP’s popularity.
Discipline must be restored in the PLP. MPs that refuse to accept the vote of the members and attack the leader in parliament and the media should be suspended from the PLP. The membership should be allowed to renew its parliamentary representatives by deselecting the disloyalists well before 2020. Only this will end the infighting and give us a PLP that really reflects the new Corbyn supporting mass LP.
There are enormous opportunities ahead. We have a chance of destroying the neo-liberal consensus and building a mass campaigning party that can undermine the Tories well before 2020 and then sweep it out in the general election. We mustn’t let Angela Eagle and her right-wing backers destroy that opportunity.
4 comments
4 responses to “After the failed coup”
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Excellent article, Stuart. However, the presence of this article on the Left Unity Site is rather strange – given that the entire logic of your very good article is that , today, one absolute key priority for socialists (alongside a myriad of anti austerity struggles of course) surely has to be the struggle now underway to turn the Labour Party (for the very first time in its very chequered history) into a radical Left anti austerity, mass political party with retained and deepened organic links to the trades union movement.
The current civil war within Labour is fast approaching a crisis point around Jeremy’s continued leadership. If we win – the Labour Right will most likely decamp to a new well-funded SDP mark II (Shirley Williams is already working on this – and tying to entice Europhile Tories to join it too), and the UK will have a serious anti austerity to build mass resistance around . If we lose – OK it’s back to the drawing board – but Left Unity will now clearly NOT be the nucleus of a new mass Left party with trades union backing.
All of which calls seriously into question as to why Let Unity still exists (in its now much reduced membership state) . Time surely to call it a day – a great , relevant, idea when Ken Loach first proposed it – and the Labour Left were dormant in a totally neoliberal party – but now irrelevant in today’s reality. Come and join us comrades – the more socialists in our branches and CLP’s the better .
John, many of us are active in Momentum and hundreds like me are barred, suspended or expelled from the LP by the right wing controlled Compliance Unit. What will come of your socialist transformation of the LP if Corbyn is barred from the ballot ? No one should be under any illusions, a new leader will be followed by a massive purge and crack down on democracy and the outflow of tens if not hundreds of thousands from the LP.
Never put all your eggs in one basket John.
I’m not sure the membership is ‘much reduced’; we lost a fair few, but we were bound to at some point. Any new movement is going to attract the political butterflies, and they were off the moment they saw a new sensation. You can’t keep that sort for long. Then there are the people who, at bottom, were yearning to be back in the Labour Left. But many of us recognise that the LP isn’t the best thing since sliced bread after all. It’s been a broad coalition of left and soft right since its inception, and has always, inevitably, ended up with a compromise between the two. In the past, the left has tended to give ground for the sake of unity, while the right has never done so. The resulting tendency has been to drift to the right. Corbyn has, rightly, refused to budge, and the result is that the right is now close to breaking the party altogether.
The one thing we’ve needed for generations is a democratic socialist party to the left of Labour which can provide a strong antidote for the rightward drift, and avoid the authoritarian sectarianism of parties like the SWP. To do that effectively, we’d have to break the two-party system, but that seems to be on the verge of breaking down as it is, so maybe our time has come. We don’t know where the LP will go, but its historical record says we can never rely on it. Had the sort of party I’m thinking of existed thirty years ago, Blairism would never have taken hold, for fear of losing votes to the left. We’re late on the field of battle, but not too late, and it’s no good disbanding at the first cannon shot. It’s going to be a long haul, and, inevitably, some won’t be up for it. We won’t build a new opposition party in under a decade, maybe it’s take two or three. But it’s worth doing!
We, now need ‘Left Unity’, or something similar, to provide an electoral challenge to Labour, and the other, incorrigibly, right-wing parties, more than ever before.
But, sadly, there has never been any left unity. The left has always been split, at least, three ways. – Between anarchists, who refuse to ever have anything to do with electoral politics, authoritarian leftists, who believe in, so-called, ‘democratic centralism’ (tight control of the party and its publications, from the top) and ‘libertarian socialists’ (so named before the concept of ‘libertarianism’ was hijacked by the neoliberal right), who would prefer some sort of Luxemburgist, Council Communist, or Syndicalist, form of internal democratic organisation. Until this situation has been resolved, we will have no unity on the left, and we will never get anywhere (with or without Corbyn).
I, personally, have been having these problems with the Labour leadership since 1964, when (aged 14, and too young to vote) I stood in the streets of Newport, Isle of Wight, selling CND’s newpaper (called ‘Sanity’) whilst shouting ‘Get your Sanity ‘ere’ and ‘vote for Harold Wilson cos ‘ees going to ban the bomb’. Labour MPs did promise us, in 1964, that, if Labour won the election, they would scrap Polaris.
The reason that they didn’t do so was because, since 1964, every new British PM has been required to fly to Washington DC to make a secret deal to subordinate UK policy to US policy. (see;- Clive Ponting, ‘Breach of Promise: Labour in Power, 1964-70’). That is the origin of the reason why Labour (or any other party who wish to be in Westminster office) have to be profoundly, internally, undemocratic.
I was a Labour Party member when Tony Benn stood as a candidate for the deputy leadership, whilst promising to make Labour internally democratic. Benn did not ‘cave in’ because he was ‘soft left’. He was defeated by the same forces, within the Labour Party, as are destroying it again now. Afterwards he was always confined to the back benches.
Then Neil Kinnock (who had previously been in CND and who was, probably, paid by the CIA), completely destroyed any semblance of democracy within Labour. Kinnock’s close friend, Joan Ruddock (Labour MP for Lewisham, and Chair of CND) persuaded CND that they didn’t need to demonstrate against nuclear weapons any more – but that, all we had to do, was wait for a Labour government and they would abolish nuclear weapons.
The rest of the story of Labour betrayal is too long to be detailed here (I might write a book about it some day).
I attended an inaugural meeting of ‘Red Pepper’ magazine at Manchester Town Hall, where Hillary Wainwright argued that we should be “simultaneously inside and outside the Labour Party”, whilst I argued that we should be entirely outside the Labour Party.
I have, almost entirely consistently, held that view, ever since I resigned from Labour, in 1991, in protest against Labour support for the first Gulf War (and my local Labour council’s support for the poll tax).
The only exception to this was when I registered as a £3 supporter to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and then rejoined the Labour Party, on the day that Corbyn was elected leader, with 60% of the vote.
That was a mistake on my part. It soon became apparent that party had not changed, despite promises of internal democracy and that Labour MPs would, still, have complete contempt for grass-roots Labour democracy. Within less than a month I had resigned from Labour, again and demanded my £3 back, because we were ripped off by false promises (again). I’ve now heard that it will cost £25 for anyone wanting to do the same, again. If they let Corbyn stand as a candidate, at all, we will only have a repeat performance of the same betrayal, if he wins again.
Even my own constituency MP, Clive Lewis, who is Labour’s Shadow ‘Defence’ Secretary (ie Shadow Minister for War), a founder member of ‘Momentum’ and a prominent member of Labour CND, will not promise me that he will vote against Trident renewal. Recently he has also made speeches in parliament accusing Putin of, allegedly, trying to destabilise Europe (this is a warmongering lie, the reality is that NATO is aggressively trying to de-stabilise Russia, and putting us all in danger of nuclear war).
Right from the start the ‘Momentum’ campaign dropped any mention of Corbyn’s peace movement concerns, including his opposition to Trident renewal. Len McCluskey promised union support for Trident renewal and opposition to Corbyn’s anti-Trident views (although the ‘Unite’ union, who McCluskey claims to represent, is affiliated to CND), and (like David Cameron) McCluskey made a speech at the BAE Warton factory promising to expand the arms trade, so that a few union members can have more wage-slavery (I have actively campaigned against weapons production at Warton, including in support of women who damaged a Hawk jet, that was to have been sent to Indonesia there) . Clive Lewis, also, asked a local (Norwich) CND group to stop campaigning against Trident until “after the local elections”. These people are supposed to be Corbyn’s loyal supporters! If these are his ‘supporters’, what chance has he got against his enemies?
In less than a years time, the Labour Party, either will not exist at all, or it will exist as an organisation of right-wing Labour MPs, in alliance with the current eight liberal-democrat MPs, funded by right-wing, warmongering, trade unions and the CIA.
That is why we desperately, need a left-libertarian, eco-socialist, alternative, capable of putting up candidates, especially in the constituencies of those right-wing Labour MPs who are opposing Corbyn. It is why, after I resigned from Labour the last time, I joined Left Unity, hoping to find such an organisation. But, I fear I will be disappointed, yet again.