Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  Corbyn had been unaware of Chávez until Alan Freeman, a British Marxist and the editor of Socialist Action, persuaded Ken Livingstone, who was by then London’s first elected mayor, that Chávez was ‘very important’. Three years earlier, Freeman had established the Venezuela Information Centre in Bloomsbury to explain Chávez’s revolution to a largely indifferent British population. Chávez had won popularity by promising to provide new homes, improved medical care, cheaper food and more jobs by redistributing the nation’s wealth from the upper and middle classes to the poor. He removed 19,000 managers of the country’s oil industry, responsible for developing the world’s largest reserves, and replaced them with three times that number of his own loyalists. Few of those high-paid cronies understood the complexity of oil exploration. Simultaneously, Chávez expelled foreign oil corporations and confiscated their assets. Rapidly, Venezuela’s oil production fell by 50 per cent. By 2005 the country’s plight was following a familiar pattern. To satisfy his followers, Chávez confiscated private property and imposed high taxes. Then he began imprisoning critics, and would later ignore a nationwide referendum that rejected giving him dictatorial powers. Despite the oppression, Tariq Ali proclaimed that Venezuela was the most democratic country in Latin America. Its inhabitants disagreed, and staged an unsuccessful coup. In the aftermath, Freeman persuaded Livingstone and then Corbyn to protect socialism in Venezuela. (After their falling out, the two had re-bonded over their opposition to the Iraq war.)

  Later that year, Corbyn urged the annual Labour Party conference to support a motion: ‘Hands off Venezuela.’ He accused America of threatening a democratically elected leader, but his campaigning sat oddly with his poor grasp of the country’s history. George Galloway recalled being with Corbyn as they left Bolívar House in London’s Fitzrovia, a Venezuelan cultural centre since 1986, and pointing at the impressive statue of General Francisco de Miranda outside the building. ‘Who’s that?’ asked Corbyn; he had no idea that Miranda was the Venezuelan revolutionary leader during South America’s wars of independence in the nineteenth century. Bolívar House had been Miranda’s private home, and was where he had designed Venezuela’s flag. Corbyn had walked past the statue dozens of times without showing the slightest interest in Venezuela. Now he embraced Hugo Chávez as his inspiration for the overthrow of capitalism in Britain, and would extol him for ‘seriously conquering poverty by emphatically rejecting neoliberal policies of the world’s financial institutions’.

  Corbyn’s admiration grew during a private visit Chávez made to London in May 2006, organised by Alan Freeman. In a three-hour speech in Bolívar House Chávez explained how, in the name of socialism, his government had nationalised foreign oil corporations, increased taxes, attacked ‘profiteers’ and imposed price controls. He described his tactic of securing popularity by rewarding supporters with thousands of jobs, high wages and increased benefits. His destruction of market capitalism to reverse the conspiracy against the poor was judged by Corbyn to be the heroic path for Britain. Friendly cooperation in the community would replace competition. Corbyn’s adulation was echoed by John McDonnell, who in his book Another World is Possible praised Chávez for creating ‘alternatives to the market economy’. Both he and Corbyn applauded the politics of buying voters.

  Not surprisingly, Chávez had not mentioned in his speech the consequences of expelling foreign oil corporations. As oil production crashed, Venezuela’s budget deficit had grown, inflation was rising and corruption had become blatant. High taxes and the confiscation of farms for the benefit of Chávez’s cronies had persuaded the middle class to flee the country. Inevitably, industry, business and agriculture suffered, as happens in all Marxist states. Venezuela was experiencing the first food shortages in its history, and a sharp increase in murders. Chávez was convinced that his country’s ballooning debts would be covered by a rise in the price of oil from $100 to $250 a barrel. So was McDonnell. Neither understood the old adage: what goes up eventually comes down. In 2009, the price of oil fell to about $40 a barrel. Chávez’s socialism had set Venezuela on the path to becoming the world’s most indebted nation. Unsurprisingly, those developments did not undermine Corbyn’s adulation.

  8

  Lame Ducks

  The four bombs that ripped across central London on 7 July 2005 shocked Britain. Fifty-two people were killed and over seven hundred injured as four British Muslim suicide bombers blew themselves up. In the wake of the tragedy, Blair introduced a Bill with unprecedented powers, including the right to detain suspected terrorists and their sympathisers for ninety days without charge. Having issued no public statement regretting the carnage, Corbyn opposed the move. The threat of rebellion and defeat for the government, he said, had caused ‘an enormous panic’ at No. 10. In the subsequent vote, forty-nine Labour rebels contributed to the government’s defeat by thirty-one. Blair shook his head in disbelief. ‘You do have a group of people who are utterly determined to punch Tony Blair on the nose,’ observed Charles Clarke, the home secretary, about Corbyn and his allies. ‘They’re serial rebels hell-bent to defeat the government.’

  With a renewed sense of self-importance, Corbyn called for the prime minister’s resignation. Failing that, he asked, would Blair stay and bring the temple down? ‘I would much rather we had proper debate and an election within the party,’ he said. ‘After all, these are very important and very serious times.’ His definition of ‘serious’ differed from most. Despite the responsibility of Islamic extremists for the London bombs, he denounced any criticism of Muslims opposed to the government’s ‘war on terror’ as ‘demonisation’. His embrace of political Islam was exceptional, even among the parliamentary hard left. In an attempt to prohibit incitement to religious discrimination, the government introduced the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill to protect Muslims. Corbyn and McDonnell voted against it, and were joined by MPs opposed for other reasons. The government was defeated by one vote.

  Sleaze sapped what remained of Tony Blair’s credibility. A police investigation into the alleged sale of peerages to party donors justified McDonnell’s accusation that Blair had lost his moral authority. ‘This is a defining moment in the history of the Labour Party,’ he thundered. Newspapers published a long list of Blair’s dodgy financial deals, starting with his acceptance in 1997 of £1 million from Bernie Ecclestone to exempt Formula One from a ban on tobacco advertising in sport. The final blow was the vote in March 2007 by ninety-three Labour MPs against the renewal of Trident, which led to the final collapse of Blair’s authority.

  Labour MPs accepted that Blair’s resignation would be followed by Gordon Brown’s coronation, in spite of his constant plotting against Blair over the previous decade. Those who lamented Blair’s failure to bequeath a popular successor to continue the ‘Third Way’ were helpless. David Miliband, their only candidate, was too cowardly to challenge Brown, and was derided by Corbyn as ‘shallow’ because his proposed manifesto failed to mention housing or pensions. Corbyn also mocked Brown, observing that the chancellor’s support for renewing Trident was ‘sad and absurd … Brown has got a reputation for being an Iron Chancellor but now he says that he is prepared to write a cheque for £25 billion for American weapons. His obsession with being more New Labour than Tony Blair is getting the better of him.’ Such criticisms did not resonate with the public – thirty years earlier, 400,000 anti-nuclear protesters had marched through London. Now, only a handful cared. Similarly, despite his worship of bankers, Brown’s management of the economy was judged a success, and only the left openly expressed disgust at his esteem for City fat cats, highlighting the perk of one HSBC executive who received more from the bank for his annual dental care than a cleaner at its London headquarters was paid in a year.

  Corbyn and his supporters decided to make a stand. To oppose Brown for the leadership, the left’s candidate needed nominations from at least forty-four MPs. Although in the aftermath of the Iraq war Corbyn had become the left’s de facto leader, he gave way to John
McDonnell. However, the Trotskyite’s extremism had alienated most MPs. He had pledged his support for IRA violence to defeat Britain, and would tell a rally of trade unionists in 2009, ‘I’m trained in all the dark arts on how to kill a movement, how to destroy a public meeting, how to ensure a march never takes off the ground, all that sort of stuff.’ He was also disliked by journalists for seeking to manipulate the media by giving out statements that he knew to be untrue. ‘I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him,’ said Anthony Longden, the editor of the Uxbridge Gazette, his local newspaper. Longden had been violently berated by McDonnell – ‘the hairdryer treatment’, as he characterised it – for refusing to publish distorted stories. McDonnell never pretended to be other than he was, the journalist recalled: he emanated ‘pure intimidation’. With just twenty-two nominations from MPs, McDonnell failed to make the ballot. Corbyn’s plan to stand as deputy leader had to be abandoned.

  Brown not only won the leadership, he survived his first year despite 103 Commons rebellions. In the name of the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG), Corbyn led the dissidents to oppose any restriction on trade unions’ power to call strikes, and they also contested the commitment to fight in Afghanistan. The left was failing, but at least he was the leader in their failings.

  In 2008, Brown’s second year as prime minister, Corbyn again saw hope. During the summer, banks across the world crashed. Capitalism’s long predicted crisis, he assumed, would persuade the working class to switch allegiance to the left. The poor would expect the government to let banks go bust rather than pay for the City’s blunders. Instead, Brown diverted £850 billion to the banks, and was hailed as a saviour of international finance. The public was less impressed. One year later, Brown arrived at the Labour Party conference in a bad temper: opinion polls were giving the Tories, under David Cameron, a steady 15 per cent lead. Corbyn voiced no sympathy. Earlier that year, he had been one of Brown’s most vocal critics during an attempted coup by cabinet ministers. ‘There has to be a change in policies as much as individuals,’ he said. ‘Clearly if the party leadership and Gordon in particular are not prepared to move at all on policy, then other options become more [sic] inevitable.’ When the general election was called for 6 May 2010, Corbyn hoped that the Tories would win, as that would trigger changes within Labour.

  During his own election campaign, Corbyn praised the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists and other socialist heroes. He criticised Brown’s lack of socialist commitment, but said nothing about the soaring debt that Brown had accumulated before the 2008 crash to pay for public services. He also ignored the protests in Labour’s heartlands against Blair and Brown’s unannounced admission of over four million migrants to Britain, particularly non-EU citizens from the Indian subcontinent. Like the prime minister, Corbyn had not foreseen the collapse of Labour’s traditional vote in the north of England, Wales and Scotland. Brown’s unguarded description of a Labour voter in Rochdale as a ‘bigoted woman’ because she criticised uncontrolled immigration earned Corbyn’s approval. But he was soon back on the attack, describing the plight of poor children in Islington who had never travelled by Tube and seldom left their decrepit housing estates. ‘They feel insecure,’ he said, ‘because they do not have enough money, or because they feel opportunities are not for them.’ Like Hugo Chávez, he recognised low-income families, especially the migrant community, as his core vote. ‘We can’t win without them,’ he said, contemptuous of middle-class citizens demanding value for their taxes. As in his personal life, he never considered financial realities.

  On election day, Labour won just 29 per cent of the vote, its lowest share since 1983. Nationally, although the Conservatives failed to secure an overall majority and had to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, the swing to the Tories was 5.1 per cent, but in Islington North Corbyn won a 3.3 per cent swing his way, with a majority of 12,401 over the Lib Dems. As usual, he sang ‘The Red Flag’ after his victory, and thanked his party workers. While Ukip had collected nearly a million votes nationally, in Islington North its candidate received just 716 votes. Corbyn’s popularity did not extend beyond his constituency, however. In the metropolitan south, traditional Labour supporters who identified themselves as ‘English’ demanded a limit to immigration, and voted Tory or Ukip. Corbyn blamed the racist media and the Tories for misleading the working class by blaming migrants for their problems. But at least the political divisions were clearer with David Cameron as prime minister. In health, education, housing, immigration and defence, the nation’s new leader adopted Blair’s legacy and perpetuated his errors, failing to appreciate the disarray he had inherited.

  Brown duly resigned as Labour leader. In the election to replace him, John McDonnell was deemed a non-starter. Not only had he failed twice to be nominated, but he had made important enemies: Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB, regarded him as ‘a duplicitous bastard’, and he was not alone. Kenny alleged that McDonnell was ‘manipulative, a mixer and masquerader who tried to entrap me. He was not straight.’ McDonnell wanted ‘to be the emperor, and he would sacrifice any principles for power’. Beyond those characteristics, his pronouncements had become more extreme. Asked what he would do if he could go back in time, he replied that he would like to return to the 1980s ‘and assassinate Thatcher’. At a seventieth-anniversary commemoration of Trotsky’s death organised by a group banned from the Labour Party, he had spoken about ‘the importance of Trotskyism for the struggle against the bosses and the Tories’. Shortly after, he told a ‘Unite Resistance’ conference that Tory MPs were ‘social criminals’: ‘I want to be in a situation where no Tory MP, no coalition minister, can travel anywhere in the country or show their face anywhere in public without being challenged by direct action.’ Those exhortations gave credibility to the pastime he had listed in Who’s Who – ‘generally fermenting the overthrow of capitalism’. His enthusiasm for direct action, even violence, remained undiminished.

  Ever since McDonnell became an MP, his bond to Corbyn had been growing closer. Corbyn lived up to his self-description as an ‘anorak’ – dull and dedicated – whereas McDonnell, more intelligent and better educated, was the firebrand who proclaimed Corbyn’s unspoken sentiment, ‘You can’t change the world through the parliamentary system.’ While Corbyn was uncertain how Marxist ideology fitted in with lip service to capitalist democracy, McDonnell admitted that he was a member of Labour only as ‘a tactic’, because it was a ‘useful vehicle. I’m not in the Labour Party because I’m a believer of the Labour Party as some supreme body or something God-given, or anything like that. It’s a tactic. It’s as simple as that. If it’s no longer a useful vehicle, move on.’ Discounting the ballot box as a means to change the world, McDonnell explained, ‘There’s another way too which in the old days we called insurrection. Now we call it direct action. It’s when the government don’t do as you want, you get in the streets or you occupy and you take direct action against them.’

  He was at least being honest. ‘Change,’ he said, ‘doesn’t come from people having tea at the Ritz. It comes from people storming the Ritz.’ In 2014 he wrote, ‘The elite will only become fearful when our talk moves on to action.’ His support for violence included approval of Ed Woollard, a student jailed in 2011 for throwing a fire extinguisher at police from the roof of the Conservative Party’s HQ on Millbank in the midst of a riot. In McDonnell’s opinion Woollard was ‘not a criminal’, but had been ‘victimised … The real criminals are the ones actually cutting the education services and increasing fees. We’ve got to encourage direct action in any form it can possibly take.’ He praised the protesters who had ‘kicked the shit’ out of the Conservative Party’s building: ‘We’ll come into your offices, we’ll come to wherever you are to confront you.’ His reliance on others to undertake mob behaviour raised the unanswered question of whether he himself had ever been personally violent. Those searching into his past found a gap in his biography during the years before he came to London in 1976. All evidence
about his time in Great Yarmouth and Burnley had disappeared. Forty years later, Natascha Engel and other moderate Labour MPs believed that McDonnell would have ‘no problem signing death warrants for people he disliked’. Corbyn would no doubt have agreed with him. He had lived his career supporting violence for the right causes.

  The left’s baton for the leadership election was passed to Corbyn’s old flame Diane Abbott, a politician unusually insensitive to the antagonism she awakened. Like McDonnell, she had no chance of attracting sufficient nominations to reach the ballot. Astutely, the left played the diversity card. The party, said Corbyn, should allow a wide debate. To deny Abbott the chance to participate would discriminate against her race and sex. Despite Abbott’s unpopularity, this appeal to fairness persuaded David Miliband, the outright favourite, to direct the necessary number of his supporters to nominate her, and she duly won a place on the ballot. However, the contest was focused on Miliband and his brother Ed, so exposing a division within the party magnified by the fallout from Tony Blair’s controversial profiteering after leaving Downing Street.

  Against David Miliband’s pledge of undiluted Blairism, Ed Miliband minimised New Labour’s supposed achievements and renounced its architects. In terms approved by Corbyn and supported by Len McCluskey, the Liverpool-born leader of the Unite trade union, representing 1.2 million employees in the engineering and transport industries, Ed Miliband blamed Blair for destroying Labour’s values by appealing to the electorate’s conservative instincts. Even New Labour’s introduction of a minimum wage and statutory human rights, and its huge expenditure on public services, were disavowed by Ed Miliband. He characterised Blair as having capitulated to greed, and promised a left-wing programme to rebuild the party from the grassroots. That resonated with McCluskey and other trade unionists, and although David Miliband won the most votes from Labour MPs and MEPs, and from the party membership, the union vote meant that Ed was elected by a 1 per cent margin. After Abbott won a derisory 7.4 per cent vote, the leadership of the left was transferred by default to Corbyn.