Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  Showing no surprise, Corbyn, now a grizzled sixty-six, stood among a small group of allies in Parliament Square. ‘I’m slightly surprised we made it, but there we are. At my age I’m not likely to be a long-term contender, am I?’ He would rely on McDonnell for creating an organisation, and initially on his own credit card to finance his campaign. ‘I’m not making any predictions,’ the 200–1 outsider said. Owen Jones, a Guardian columnist and a like-minded socialist, thought Corbyn would do well to win 25 per cent of the vote. The feeling was widespread. ‘Labour cannot afford another loser,’ wrote Kevin Maguire, the Mirror’s left-wing columnist, anticipating that Corbyn was ‘highly unlikely to wear the crown’. Even the prospect of Corbyn as a candidate horrified those moderate Labour MPs who despaired at the thought of a return to the ‘bad old days of the 1980s’ of Tony Benn and Michael Foot. Corbyn’s platform as the anti-austerity candidate, said John Mann, a fifty-five-year-old former trade union official and examiner of the probity of bankers and civil servants, ‘demonstrates our desire never to win again’. Mann received comfort from the Sun. ‘Corbyn,’ it forecast, ‘has zero chance of becoming leader or – thank God – prime minister.’ Everyone seemed in agreement.

  Days later, Corbyn set off for his first campaign meeting, in Birmingham. His small team included Simon Fletcher, an effective operator who had worked with Ken Livingstone at County Hall; Kat Fletcher, an Islington councillor; Corbyn’s election agent Carmel Nolan, a friend of George Galloway who would be his press spokesperson; and Harry Fletcher, a well-liked expert on probation recruited by McDonnell. (The three Fletchers were unrelated.) Corbyn showed no anxiety. After so many years campaigning, he looked forward to criss-crossing the country by train, and the pleasures of being recognised.

  As he entered the hall, shabbily dressed as usual, he noticed a difference. Not only was the 1,500 crowd bigger than expected, its mood was excited. In front of him sat a broad coalition of public sector employees, minority groups, and then the victims – those dependent on welfare payments, protesters, Marxists in search of authentic socialism, and losers. Most were Labour’s old grassroots, abandoned by the parliamentary party after 1983. For years they had sought a champion to dismantle Thatcher’s legacy and destroy the muscle of the City of London. Like Corbyn, they regarded New Labour’s legacy as a country riddled with hatred, fear and insecurity – a playground for the super-rich who ignored society’s rules. Blair’s grab for power had been followed, they believed, by Cameron slashing away at living standards, the destruction of public services, and greater inequality. Scattered among the Labour veterans were young people enraged by arrogant global corporations which they believed had denied them certainty and an identity in the world, and also the opportunity to acquire a decent home. They fumed that the workers were paying for the City’s greed, that speculators and property spivs were getting rich on scams, and that no banker had gone to jail over the 2008 crash. In their eyes, the worst culprits were corporate directors earning vast salaries despite their poor performance. Above all, they complained of being saddled with the prospect of a £50,000 debt for university tuition fees.

  Standing in front of this audience was an unscripted veteran – ‘unscripted’ because he had repeated the same slogans for forty years, and did not plan to say anything different now. During those decades, Corbyn had participated in so many demonstrations on wet, windswept streets that many would come to Birmingham – and to all his meetings over the following weeks – to repay his loyalty. He stood before them as the true believer who uncompromisingly upheld the gospel with a vision of ‘straight-talking, honest politics’. To his audience, his inexhaustible rhetoric about the immorality of capitalism and his comradeship with the downtrodden won admiration. To the lost souls, he promised to ‘aggressively redistribute’ the ill-gotten gains of the rich. They identified with this self-effacing bearded man who in his thirty-two years at Westminster had submitted among the lowest expenses claims of all MPs, and who spoke enthusiastically about growing potatoes, broad beans, sweet corn and leeks on allotment number 33 in East Finchley. As he spoke, spurred on by the audience’s enthusiasm, his team noticed that the familiar ramble was delivered with new confidence.

  ‘The neoliberal era is in its death throes!’ shouted Corbyn with the same certainty as that with which Karl Marx had predicted the imminent collapse of capitalism 170 years earlier. Responsibility for the world’s ills was pinned on money-hungry entrepreneurs: ‘The market will never provide a secure, dignified life for the vast majority,’ ran his sermon. He promised the ‘end of the era’ of greed, shelter from moguls, control of globalisation, and curtailing mobile capital. In short, his audience found a champion pledged to build a country in their interests.

  On the return journey to London, Corbyn joyously anticipated more admiration on the long campaign. ‘Anything else arranged?’ he asked. ‘You’re speaking later today at a gay pride march in Trafalgar Square,’ replied Harry Fletcher. To join the marchers, they got out of the Tube at Oxford Circus. As he walked down Regent Street – beneath a banner proclaiming ‘Jeremy for Leader’ – Corbyn was grabbed time and again to pose for selfies: the activists who mobbed him also worshipped the very digital revolution he threatened to suffocate. ‘Something’s happening,’ said Fletcher, struck by the adulation. Not surprisingly, none of the national newspapers or TV stations highlighted the day’s events.

  Political leadership contests are civil wars, but this one was markedly different. Corbyn’s three rivals – Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall – were lacklustre performers, unable to escape their pedestrian pasts. All three had served as senior ministers in Blair’s government, and all three refused to admit that its guiding ideology was discredited. Lacking imagination, they misjudged the membership’s mood, and resisted taking the risk of redefining themselves. In the wake of the 2008 crash, all three had failed to fashion an alternative vision for living standards, homes and public services. All three did, however, understand one legacy bequeathed by Ed Miliband. In his bid to retain Len McCluskey’s support, he had altered the party’s rules. Anyone paying £3 could vote for the leader, even non-party members. The impetus behind the change was placed on McCluskey, a former Militant sympathiser who was intent on shifting power away from MPs to his Unite trade union.

  The MPs’ loss of control had started two years earlier, when Unite officials rigged the ballot for the new Scottish parliamentary candidate for Falkirk in favour of a former nurse, Karie Murphy, who just happened to be McCluskey’s current partner, and the mother of his son. Without their knowledge, Unite members had been registered to join the Falkirk party, and had ‘voted’ for Murphy. Curiously, at that very moment, McCluskey was the target of allegations of corruption and vote-rigging by Gerard Coyne, a union executive who would soon challenge McCluskey for his post. In the uproar of allegations about Falkirk, Karie Murphy’s candidature had been abandoned, and in exchange Ed Miliband had allowed himself to be persuaded by McCluskey to change the party’s constitution. Instead of Labour MPs alone deciding, the party leader would be elected by the entire membership – one member, one vote. Since Miliband owed his own election victory to Unite, and since Unite contributed a fifth of Labour’s income (over 80 per cent of Labour’s funds came from trade unions), he ignored repeated warnings that the proposed new rule would allow the unions to overwhelm the party. Any undesirable consequences, he promised, would be solved later. Few anticipated the surge McCluskey had planned. At the beginning of June 2015, Unite and the other unions began to enrol 140,000 new members, then over the following weeks another 100,000.

  In the leadership election, McCluskey initially supported Andy Burnham, the favourite, despite his monosyllabic style and colourless timidity. Corbyn was endorsed only by the two major rail unions, the RMT (Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers) and Aslef (the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen), and Unison, which had incorporated NUPE. Burnham’s prospects slipped after the first televised debate be
tween the four candidates. Unwilling to condemn Blair, he came over as a contaminated relic. By contrast, Corbyn fed his congregation’s hopes. ‘We have been cowed by powerful commercial interests,’ he told them, promising to reverse Blair’s ‘promotion of the market economy rather than a planned economy’. Damning everything Blair had done, Corbyn asked: ‘Why is it in Britain that the hundred richest people equal the total wealth of 30 per cent of the population?’ His praise of immigration and of a planned economy provoked wild cheers from an audience packed with hard-left supporters. Compared to Corbyn’s image as a free-spirited, romantic anti-politician, his three opponents seemed leaden and lock-jawed. The next opinion poll slashed his odds from 200–1 to 12–1. ‘Would it scare you if you won?’ he was asked. He closed his eyes. ‘Scare me? It would be a challenge.’ He would still cycle or take the bus to the Commons, he said, and he certainly wouldn’t use the official car. Nor, he added, keeping up the image of shy reluctance, would he abandon his old clothes and dress up in a new blue suit. Although he still did not sense that he might be victorious, he played the modest leader-in-waiting for whom life would not change.

  His first obstacle was Labour’s MPs. Here he was fortunate to be presented with an open goal by Harriet Harman, the prim acting party leader. Her misjudgement began when George Osborne, the chancellor, blamed Gordon Brown’s tax credits for creating a dependency culture. High welfare benefits, he said, deterred people from accepting offers of work. As part of his £12 billion cuts to the annual welfare bill, Osborne targeted the work-shy to save £4 billion. Government statistics suggested that a quarter of the 2.1 million people who had received £135 billion in incapacity benefits over the previous ten years were bogus claimants. Corbyn ridiculed that suggestion. Similarly, he was outraged by the Tory plan to target those receiving more in benefits than people in work earning the average wage. To highlight that anomaly, several newspapers featured photographs of an unemployed single mother living with her six children by several fathers in a multi-million-pound house in Kensington, and relying on taxpayers to fund her weekly £2,000 rent and overheads. Under the government’s plan she would receive no more than £500 per week – equivalent to an annual income of £35,000 after tax. If taxpayers were expected to live within their means, argued Osborne, there was no reason why the unemployed should enjoy standards of living higher than those at work. The woman and her family would be relocated from Kensington to a poorer area. That policy, countered Corbyn, was ‘inner-city social cleansing’. He refused to explain why the feckless should enjoy an advantage over working people who limited their expenditure to what they could afford.

  Harriet Harman was in a dilemma. A clear majority of Labour voters supported Osborne’s plan to limit child tax credits to two children. Ed Miliband’s refusal to cut benefits was partly why Labour lost the 2015 election. Accordingly, she ordered Labour MPs to vote for Osborne’s plans. Corbyn claimed that cuts would ‘push more children into poverty’. The work-shy, he said, were not ‘scroungers’, and deserved to receive benefits. He would in good conscience therefore vote against Harman and the party.

  As traditional loyalists, Burnham, Cooper and Kendall were also torn. Although all three recognised Osborne’s trap, none was brave enough to say outright that a future Labour government should not make life better for skivers than for honest citizens. Burnham temporised, and was jeered. Finally, he ‘flip-flopped’, backing the spending cuts and pointedly refusing to accept money from trade unions. McCluskey switched his support to Corbyn, the favourite among Unite members. At hustings in Birmingham, Liz Kendall was booed for justifying austerity, and was written off. Yvette Cooper stood paralysed, as ever incapable of making a decision. Not one of them could describe an alternative to Marxism, or dared accuse Corbyn of tolerating moral corruption. Untainted by any ideological confusion, he was emerging as the champion of his tribe.

  On 20 June, thousands of people gathered outside the Bank of England, for them the symbol of the guilty money merchants and shady property-owners. Under placards proclaiming ‘Defy Tory Rule’ provided by the Socialist Workers Party they marched to Parliament Square, where Corbyn would address them. The disgruntled and dispossessed had unexpectedly found a passionate luminary with a chance of becoming the Labour Party’s leader. Alongside him on the platform was Martin McGuinness. ‘Austerity,’ shouted the IRA killer, ‘is devastating communities.’ He urged the crowd to support Corbyn to ‘save ourselves from decades of yuppie rule’. While anarchists set off smoke bombs and daubed graffiti on the square’s walls, the Welsh singer and TV presenter Charlotte Church warned that the Conservative government planned to sell off Britain’s schools and hospitals. Corbyn, she sang, was their saviour, the anti-politician fighting the establishment.

  Corbyn’s success depended on tapping into images of misery, yet the usual grievances – high unemployment, inflation and industrial strife – were not mentioned, and for good reason. Unemployment was falling towards 1.65 million, the lowest for many years, and work opportunities were attracting thousands of migrants to Britain every week. Nevertheless, Corbyn claimed that his reforms would create a million new jobs. To a sophisticated audience, the image of a government generating wealth-creating employment was illusory. At Rolls-Royce’s factory in Tyne and Wear, machines were running between twelve and forty-five hours at a stretch without any human intervention. Robots were producing parts in a quarter of the time of workers. Corbyn’s supporters did not question his silence about the digital revolution. Rather, they responded to his favourite statistic, which he had borrowed from Oxfam: one person in five in Britain lived below the poverty level. The government’s figures told a different story – the actual number was one in fourteen, meaning that about 4.6 million people were in long-term poverty. The Rowntree Foundation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies confirmed that the higher minimum wage and improved in-work benefits had reduced income inequality. Verified statistics showed that Britons had never been healthier, richer or more equal. The real truth that life had never been better for the majority passed over Corbyn’s audience. Distrusting the torrent of unexpected data produced by the government and think tanks, they moaned that the world had become too complex, volatile and unpredictable. Global disaster was imminent, and here was a man of principle to confirm their gloom.

  A poll of 12,000 people on the day of the general election, commissioned by the Tory peer Lord Ashcroft, showed that while 86 per cent of Tories optimistically believed that ‘If you work hard, it is possible to be very successful in Britain, no matter what your background,’ 62 per cent of Labour supporters took the opposite view. Corbyn supporters equated free markets with poverty, and doubted that creative innovation depended on a free market. In general, the left was pessimistic and disliked consumerism, home ownership, foreign holidays and Britain itself. They assumed that greater wealth for some meant inequality and increased poverty for the majority. While 71 per cent of Conservatives thought life in Britain had improved since 1979, 51 per cent of Labour voters thought life was better three decades ago. That was Corbyn’s appeal: he offered to turn the clock back.

  Against him, Andy Burnham offered no ideological certainty. In the welfare vote, he abstained, as did Yvette Cooper, a buck-passer in government. Instead of agreeing to unite against Corbyn, she and Burnham pursued a parallel course. Neither directly addressed the coalition of communists, Trotskyites and Greens joining Labour as members to vote for Corbyn. Both were silent about the entry into the party of Mark Serwotka, the Trotskyite general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, previously barred from membership. ‘Naughty people shouldn’t join Labour,’ Corbyn said on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour, but he welcomed the entryists. ‘We will see what happens,’ was his oft-used escape phrase. He showed the same nonchalance over his supporters’ undisguised threats of violence against Cooper and Kendall. Two days later, a poll put him firmly as the future victor, nearly 20 per cent ahead of Burnham, his nearest challenger. After years in the wild
erness, the lonely prophet gleefully approved his reincarnation as the left’s catalyst to lead his flock to the Promised Land.

  Fearing a repeat of Tony Benn’s near-destruction of the Labour Party after 1979, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Alan Johnson each appealed to the party’s social democrats to reject an unelectable Marxist. ‘Even if you hate me,’ wrote Blair, ‘don’t take Labour over the cliff edge.’ Abandoning the centre, he lamented, when Labour needed to win an additional ninety-four seats or achieve a 12.5 per cent swing to get a Commons majority, would be fatal. But he misjudged Labour’s mood. Corbyn was appearing among crowds of fans wearing T-shirts with the slogan ‘Jez We Can’. The resurgence of the left generated more media coverage, more converts, more celebrity endorsements and intense messaging on Twitter, Facebook, Google and Instagram – all this exposure provided by tax-avoiding American giants – with the headline: ‘Warning: contains a new kind of politics’.

  Older Labour members did not recognise anything new. Working from his Commons office filled with memorabilia from previous campaigns on issues including Palestine, CND, Stop the War and Ireland, Corbyn spoke about peace, the anti-apartheid movement and a return to Clement Attlee’s state controls. His bookshelf was overflowing with works by or about Hugo Chávez – unread, but Corbyn’s symbol of resistance to America. ‘The thing about Corbyn,’ observed the Guardian inaccurately, ‘is that he is nearly always proved right – after the event.’ In reality, he joined many campaigns long after they had started, and his ‘new’ approach was a repackaging of old policies. Around him were veterans who epitomised the truism that the hard left never disappears but, in their lifelong mission, regroup after every defeat to look for the next silver lining.