wants a free market Europe. He has negotiated what he believes is some kind of deal over welfare and the ever-closer union, which is apparently legally questionable, according to Michael Gove.
I want to see a Europe that is about protecting our environment and ensuring we have sustainable industries across Europe, such as the steel industry, and high levels of jobs and social protection across Europe. His agenda is the very opposite.14
This was not in keeping with the tendency of the media to treat the debate as one between two wings of the Conservative Party, with Labour reduced to shoring up the Cameronites. It was also out of step with the emphasis of Labour In for Britain, which avoided any antagonism with Cameron, or indeed any criticism of the EU. Johnson, who had wanted to campaign under the slogan ‘EUphoric’, was furious with Corbyn.
Nonetheless, the Labour leader campaigned vigorously. Angela Eagle credited him for travelling ‘up and down the country, pursuing an itinerary that would make a 25-year-old tired’. He made a total of sixty appearances in the last sixty days, travelling 2,768 miles. Corbyn also outperformed the Labour ‘In’ campaign’s leaders in terms of media appearances, with a total of 123 appearances, according to a study by Loughborough University. As Angela Phillips, professor of communications at Goldsmiths University, wrote, ‘by the end of the campaign, Corbyn had made 6.1 per cent of all media appearances while Johnson figured in less than 1 per cent.’
Corbyn supporters also organised their own ‘Another Europe Is Possible’ front to distinguish the Left from the official Leave and Remain positions, and to campaign for a ‘remain and reform’ position. Given the terrible example that had been made of Greece by the EU, a string of campaign appearances by the Greek economist and former Syriza negotiator, Yanis Varoufakis, was scheduled, to persuade sceptical left-wingers to campaign for Remain.15 It would be easy to take issue with this campaign. Another Europe Is Possible had a perfectly lucid critique of ‘Tory Brexit’, and understood well enough that it would most likely be the hard Right that would set the terms of any exit. They adopted a principled defence of migrants and free movement, when the official ‘In’ campaigns refused to do so. They distanced themselves from the official Remain campaign’s tendency to infantilise voters. And they had a reasonable case that reform of Europe was necessary. Yet it wasn’t clear exactly what these reforms were, or how they were to be achieved. If their campaign wasn’t to be a leftier version of the largely defensive, apolitical Remain campaign, it needed to outline a strategy for an offensive. Another Europe was possible – but how?
John McDonnell was intellectually the sharpest defender of this case. He used a rally to condemn both the paranoid bombast of Boris Johnson, comparing the EU to the Third Reich, and Cameron’s ‘Project Fear’ approach to Remain. The debate, he said, was a perpetuation of the ‘gang warfare of the Eton playing fields’, dragging the country ‘into the intellectual gutter’. He stressed that many of the issues facing the future were transnational and required transnational solutions: climate change, financial malfeasance and tax avoidance, refugees. He stressed that the British had been major beneficiaries of free movement of people in Europe. Finally, he added the strategic perspective:
The question for the Left, then, is whether we can transform the operation of the European Union. It’s the same question asked by the Left about any state institution, whether it’s the local council, the national government, or any transnational institution. The strategy we pursued on the Left in the past, and now, has been described traditionally as ‘in and against the state’. The state isn’t just a set of institutions, it’s a relationship: usually one of dominance of the institution over the individual. Socialists and progressives have gone within these institutions to try to transform that relationship. That is, to transform it into a democratic relationship, where it is the democratic people’s wishes that dominate, not the bureaucracy or the powerful economic interests that the bureaucracy often represents. … Can we, and how can we, democratically reform our European institutions? Well, the optimism is based upon this. For the first time in over a generation, there are movements and political forces mobilised and mobilising across Europe to respond to that challenge. But responding to it, increasingly together.16
In short, then, McDonnell and his allies hoped that the convergence and cooperation of movements across Europe would put pressure on the EU establishment to accept democratic change. This was one of the few occasions on which this question was seriously put on the Left, which had little history of engaging with the subject of Europe. The trade unions, following the grim defeats of the 1980s, had largely abandoned their critical stance toward Europe, instead relying on it to defend a set of workers’ rights against Tory onslaught. Much of the Left, too, had ceased thinking about whether and how to reform, or indeed leave, Europe, and approached the issue from a defensive position. However, the plausibility of McDonnell’s solution surely depended on the EU being democratically susceptible to pressure, in a way that it had not been in relation to Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, or Spain. Far from the EU being accountable to pressure, it was national governments which had buckled to the EU. This did not mean that ‘Left Leavers’ had a more plausible answer. The critique of the EU as an undemocratic bloc committed to neoliberal practices was well founded, but there was, in truth, little strategic calculation about what Brexit would mean in practice, or how it was to be harnessed by the Left.
The bigger problem, however, was that the Left was barely a factor. The media weren’t interested in what it was saying. Corbyn arguably only got the coverage he did, which was limited, because he was Labour leader. The top six figures reported in the news were David Cameron, Boris Johnson, George Osborne, Nigel Farage, Michael Gove and Ian Duncan Smith. Of these, four were Brexit campaigners. Taking the entire media into account, and factoring for viewership and readership, the Brexit campaign received 80 per cent of the coverage. Corbyn’s campaign focused on trying to outflank the media by building grassroots support, while Labour In for Britain muddled along in obscurity – in a BBC article on the campaign, it was mentioned as an afterthought. On the day of the referendum, in a last-minute effort to reach voters, they hired propeller jets to fly banners over London and other major cities with the tepid slogan, ‘Labour says vote Remain’.17
The Leave campaign won by a narrow margin of 52–48. Almost immediately, Johnson and Hilary Benn went on the attack against their leader, claiming that Corbyn had ‘sabotaged’ their campaign. He was taxed with raising the supposedly ‘esoteric’ issue of TTIP and being ‘critical of the EU in tone’.18 John Mann, MP for Bassetlaw, observed that the high Brexit vote in northern constituencies showed that the party was ‘out of touch’ with voters. The pro-Remain Economist, a magazine for company directors and owners, asserted with characteristic insight into Labour politics, ‘Mr Mann’s critique must be particularly worrying for Mr Corbyn, as it comes not from his old foes on the right of the party, like the Blairite Lord Mandelson, but from the trade-union core.’ The fact that Mann was and is on the right of the party, and had been a voluble, vitriolic, at times volatile opponent of Corbynism from the start, had evidently missed the editors.19 Indeed, the chorus of complaint that arose from within Labour was the prelude to the long-brewing coup.
Chicken Coup
In the weeks before the European Union referendum, I was touring the UK with the first edition of this book, mainly visiting local Momentum and Labour members. I began to hear from activists that they were expecting a coup against Corbyn in the days after the referendum – no matter what the result was.
This didn’t seem to make sense. Corbyn had only been on the job for nine months at that point, while the backbench opposition didn’t have either a candidate or a programme or an answer to the crisis of social democracy. The Tories would be in some sort of crisis whatever the outcome, with their majority small. Already, they had been forced to make a number of concessions to Labour. Any attempt to blame Corbyn if the Remain campa
ign failed would surely look tendentious at best, given that the Blairites had the run of Labour’s campaign, and at worst like a gift to the government.
It looked even worse once the results were broken down. As psephologist John Curtice wrote, following the vote, the biggest movement in the final weeks before the referendum was a collapse of the pro-Remain position among Conservatives. Phil Wilson claimed that ‘an honourable leader would bear the responsibility for the failure to persuade Labour voters to vote remain.’ But Labour voters were as pro-Remain as the SNP, with two-thirds voting to stay in the EU. Peter Mandelson alleged that Corbyn was ‘most of the time absent from the battle’, yet Corbyn was more present in it than Labour’s leading Remainers.20 Would that have been the case had Corbyn merged with the Tories as Labour had disastrously done during #indyref? Could left-wing voters have turned out to vote for such a campaign with a clean conscience? What about those Brexit-voting northern seats? Would Corbyn have appealed to them more by being less critical of the EU?
Yet, within days of the Brexit result, Labour MPs, led by members of the shadow cabinet, instigated the planned coup attempt. Hilary Benn, who had set himself up as a potential leadership contender during the Syria debate, fired the first shot. But the resignations were carefully staggered, choreographed for maximum impact. By and large, the resigners were people who had never supported Corbyn’s leadership, and they were followed by a string of statements from Labour grandees, including former leaders such as Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband, calling on Corbyn to ‘do the right thing’. A vote of confidence was arranged in which the majority of Labour MPs declared that they had ‘no confidence’ in their leader. Gloria De Pieiro took to the pages of the Sun to call for mass entryism of the Right to help defeat Corbyn. Jamie Reed published a letter to Corbyn, via his Twitter account, in which he accused the leader of having ‘sought to inject an unprecedented poison into our party’, by ‘inciting’ supporters on social media against MPs from the party’s centre and centre-Right.21
This had not been entirely unexpected among the leadership team. While most of the plotting took place on a series of Whatsapp groups, the whispering was loud and stagey enough on the backbenches for left-wing MPs to get wind of it and start spreading the word. Did they understand why it was coming? Marsha-Jane Thompson, currently Labour’s campaigns manager, argued at the time,
They wanted to find a hook, and it didn’t matter what it was. We knew it was already planned, we knew that they were just waiting for the nod, and it didn’t matter that it was for a really spurious reason … They’d leaked a number of times before and backed off. But, in going for him this time, they completely underestimated him personally. They thought that if they organised these resignations and put him under pressure, that he wouldn’t be able to cope. And it wasn’t just that he’s an amazingly strong person, but that for every MP who said they didn’t have confidence in him, five or six hundred people said they did. People were emailing him, sending him messages on social media supporting him. When we had the first campaign for the leadership, part of the message was welcoming activists home, that this was their party: and that’s how they felt, they weren’t going to be driven out.
In the early days of the coup, the Corbyn leadership team held a staff meeting at which Corbyn made it clear that he would not resign. He was committed to the project of changing the Labour Party, and understood that if his opponents were allowed to drive him out, there wouldn’t be another left-wing candidate on the ballot, and the Left wouldn’t get another chance at this project. Corbyn’s stolid refusal to ‘do the decent thing’ and resign led to speculation about who might be a plausible candidate. Evidently, the coup plotters had reasoned that Corbyn would collapse under pressure, and that any left-wing challenger could be kept off the ballot next time. Finally, after several bluffs, Angela Eagle let it be known that she was ready to put herself forward as a leadership contender. At that point, it was noised abroad that Corbyn could be kept off the ballot paper by a decision of the NEC. If they ruled that Corbyn was a challenger for his own incumbent role, he would need the nomination of 20 per cent of Labour MPs. If the parliamentary party was given a veto on this scale, which exceeded even the 15 per cent share of MP nominations Corbyn needed as a candidate in 2015, Corbyn would not be elected. Eagle, for her part, indicated that she would not be unhappy were this to be the ruling.
An extraordinary NEC meeting was convened at the last moment in circumstances that suggested that a secret ballot would be used to allow delegates to participate in a stitch-up. In the final vote, the meeting went in favour of Corbyn being automatically included on the ballot. However, in a petty and vindictive gesture, many of those present waited for Corbyn and some of his supporters to leave the meeting, and immediately passed a new ruling excluding over a hundred thousand members who had joined since January from participating in the leadership election – a move that ITV reporter Robert Peston said ‘looks and smells like gerrymandering’. This last-ditch effort to fix the vote was followed up by an attempt by members of the Blairite ‘Progress’ faction in Labour to illegally mine membership data for anti-Corbyn canvassing, before the Information Commissioners’ Office slapped down the ploy.22 Perhaps most egregiously, the party management intervened in a number of cases to suspend meetings of constituency parties from Brighton to Manchester during the leadership election campaign on the supposed ground of preventing intimidation and bullying. Finally, all local party meetings were suspended, following an incident in which a brick was thrown through the window of Angela Eagle’s constituency office by an unknown vandal. Even assuming that all allegations were true, and as serious as described, it was an extremely odd idea that the solution to some people trying to prevent others from speaking freely was to prevent everyone from speaking freely.23 All of this only undermined the anti-Corbyn faction further. Their legitimacy had depended on their reputation, cultivated in the media, as sensible, moderate, and working within accepted parameters. No objective observer, witnessing this brazen corruption and partially successful offensive against party democracy, would come away with that impression intact.
The media, just as they had for Hilary Benn only months before, began a pattern of talking up the contender, covering her political past in a largely admiring light, and exploring her suddenly mesmerising personality. This is part of a pattern that is worth briefly commenting on. Throughout Corbyn’s leadership, media outlets have eyed numerous possible candidates for his replacement, and each time have larded them with an embarrassment of praise. But this has always been short-lived, and the same outlets have always found at least similarly marvellous qualities in the next big thing. In psychological terms, this is known as ‘love bombing’, a practice used by pimps, gangsters, and cults to manipulate people and win their confidence. As the expression suggests, what is presented as affection and positive attention is actually an aggressive exercise. It exploits the insecurities and aspirations that most people have, but which ambitious politicians have by the bucketload.
The Telegraph, for example, not known for its sympathy to Labour politics, ran a column by former Blair advisor John McTernan arguing that Eagle was ‘exactly what Labour needs’, and radiating warmth about Eagle’s qualities: ‘Intelligence. Passion. Eloquence. Humour. Authenticity.’ McTernan’s praise was patently insincere. Eagle, in one of the only signs she had entered his radar, was among the class of ‘career politicians’ lacking ‘character and charisma’ that McTernan had criticised when she was part of Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet. The Telegraph for its part began to intersperse its online pieces about the leadership challenge with a video segment titled ‘Angela Eagle MPs’ best moments’. In a profile box, it affirmed that her ‘reputation as a fierce public debater with a quick wit helped her become the unity candidate’.24
The Guardian offered both Angela Eagle and her sister, Maria Eagle, a predictably soft-soap interview, accentuating their ‘working-class roots, their Stakhanovite work ethic and self-confidence
to spare’.25 The Mirror carolled her virtues as a ‘unity candidate’ who was loyal to her party, had ‘wiped the floor’ with opponents in parliamentary debates, and – crucially – was admired by the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde.26 ‘Eagle Dares’, the Sun exulted, quoting a number of MPs supporting her stance and none of her critics. It ran an article by Hilary Benn supporting Eagle’s bid which, with borrowed Churchillian tones, repetitively extolled her ‘courage’. Not known for being especially supportive of women in politics, the paper also made fun of Eagle for her campaign launch debacle, in which journalists abandoned her to cover Andrea Leadsom’s bid for the Tory leadership: ‘The Eagle Has Crash Landed’.27
The problem with the lionising, whatever elements of truth the praise might have contained, was not just its patent insincerity. It was that Eagle increasingly didn’t look like someone who would wipe the floor with anyone. It was hardly her fault that on her campaign launch the media abandoned her, leaving her red-faced. That was just a symptom of how insincere the love bombing was. But she didn’t appear to have a coherent critique of Corbyn, or an articulate agenda. She sounded defensive about her politics. When one BBC Radio 4 interviewer brought up her support for the Iraq war, she accused him of pandering to a ‘Corbynista meme’.28 Uncomfortable with specifying political differences, she was more at ease trashing Corbyn’s competence. To that extent she merely magnified the mantra coming from the Labour Right, for whom – the cliché went – Corbyn was a decent and honourable man, but not a leader.
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