Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  Added to the parliamentary inner core – Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott – was Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s fifty-seven-year-old intellectual consigliere, an alumnus of Winchester and Oxford, and the son of Alasdair Milne, probably the BBC’s best post-war director general. At the next level was a handful of like-minded MPs and old comrades bound by relationships that stretched back over thirty years. Some, including Neale Coleman and Simon Fletcher, had worked with Ken Livingstone at the GLC or City Hall, while others such as John Ross, Jude Woodward and Kat Fletcher had been members of Trotskyist factions. In the background was Jon Lansman, a Cambridge-educated ally of Tony Benn. Steeped in Leninism, he presented himself as an agent provocateur in the vanguard of the class struggle to transform Labour into a revolutionary party. To strengthen Corbyn’s bid for the leadership, he marshalled youthful idealists into Momentum, a new group whose mission was to infiltrate Labour. At Momentum’s heart was Kate Hudson, CND’s general secretary. Bound to Corbyn by a shared admiration for Russia, she had described the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 as ‘a catastrophe for humanity’.

  From his comfortable life in capitalist Britain, Corbyn still discounted the crimes and misery inflicted by Moscow. He had not protested when in February 2014 Vladimir Putin occupied Crimea, and he approved the incorporation of independent Ukraine within the Soviet sphere of influence. He showed no understanding of the legacy of Stalin’s forced collectivisation programme, which had starved about four million Ukrainians to death between 1932 and 1933. Similarly apathetic about Poland’s historic hostility towards Russia, he was against Poland’s membership of NATO, believing that Russia had every right to determine its neighbour’s fate. Like Livingstone, he opposed the threat of sanctions against Russia for providing the surface-to-air missile that pro-Moscow forces used to shoot down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in July 2014, killing all 298 people on board, as ‘an awful lot of pandering to the hysteria that has been whipped up’. Often stuck for the appropriate words, he relied on others to articulate his disapproval of the West.

  None of these allies was more important than Seumas Milne. Known as a ‘Tankie’ when he arrived at the Guardian because he supported the Soviet suppression of the uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, Milne praised Stalin for offering ‘socialist political alternatives’. The fact that he had murdered many millions was seen by Milne as necessary fallout from resistance to Western imperialism. There were lessons to be learned, he wrote, from the Soviet success: ‘For all its brutalities and failures … communism in the USSR, Eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education and job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment.’ Those who equated Stalin with Hitler, he believed, were peddling ‘moral and historical nonsense’. Among them were the historian Robert Conquest. ‘Stalinisation,’ observed Conquest, ‘may be one way of attaining industrialisation, just as cannibalism is one way of attaining a high-protein diet.’ In the same vein, Milne appeared indifferent to Vladimir Putin’s murder of his opponents, suppression of critical media groups and wholesale transfer of billions of dollars of state money into tax-evading offshore accounts. American imperialism was at fault for demonising Putin, whom Milne admired as ‘a powerful counterweight to Western global domination’. For all those reasons, Milne’s political convictions and intellectual eloquence were indispensable to Corbyn.

  The two were particularly bound by their unremitting hostility to Israel. After spending a gap-year ‘holiday’ in Lebanon in the early 1980s, witnessing ferocious battles between Israelis and Palestinians, Milne regarded Zionism as evil, without qualification. He shared Corbyn’s belief that the Islamic attacks of 9/11 were explicable as acts of resistance. As part of the same mindset, he described the murder of Lee Rigby, a British soldier hacked to death on a London street by two Muslims in May 2013, as ‘not terrorism in the normal sense of an indiscriminate attack on civilians’, because Rigby had served in Afghanistan. Similarly, he agreed with Corbyn’s denial that Bashar al-Assad had launched a chemical attack against civilians because the Syrian president had ‘no rational motivation’ for the killings. The video images of dead children with foam around their mouths, he said, could have been fabricated by the West. He was waiting to see the evidence.

  Convinced that Western liberalism distorted the truth in order to conceal exploitation, Milne praised Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor as president of Venezuela, as ‘a lesson to anyone interested in social justice and new forms of socialist policies’. This was in lockstep with Corbyn, who had tabled a motion in the Commons in 2013 congratulating Maduro on his election and his promise to ‘continue Hugo Chávez’s socialist revolution’. Corbyn spoke as an eyewitness, although on a recent visit to Venezuela with Diane Abbott he seems to have ignored the fact that the country was suffering 500 per cent inflation, and that Chávez’s socialism was leading its people towards destitution. Maduro’s dictatorial tendencies were likewise irrelevant to Corbyn. Anything was preferable to capitalism. In his opinion, Taliban rule in Afghanistan was perfectly acceptable, military intervention to protect Christian Yazidis in Iraq was unnecessary, and he would not protest against the oppression of those demanding democracy in Iran.

  All these opinions, shared by Milne, attracted more admirers to Corbyn. Labour moderates, even as they understood the forces being unleashed, panicked. The party, warned the Blairite MP Tristram Hunt, would be ‘hammered’ at the next election. ‘If Corbyn wins,’ said John Mann, ‘it would be catastrophic for the Labour Party. I don’t think he will win. I don’t think he wants to win. He wouldn’t have a clue what to do. He has never run anything.’ The mood, admitted one insider, was misery and depression. The opinion polls prompted Liz Kendall to warn, ‘It would be disastrous for the party, disastrous for the country – we would be out of power for a generation.’ Margaret Beckett admitted that she had been a ‘moron’ for having nominated Corbyn. Emily Thornberry, another nominee, said she would vote for Yvette Cooper. David Lammy, Sadiq Khan and Tulip Siddiq, the MP for Hampstead, also withdrew their support despite having nominated Corbyn. But Tony Blair’s renewed criticism only enhanced Corbyn’s status. ‘His rivals,’ complained Abbott, ‘are trying to paint him as the political equivalent of the bubonic plague.’ Her defence was unnecessary. Teflon appeared to protect Corbyn from his critics, and to the metropolitan middle class his image remained that of a polite, scruffy gardener who posed them no threat.

  Corbyn’s own behaviour was hardly dignified. When asked on Channel 4 why he called Hamas his ‘friends’, he sneered: ‘Thanks for the tabloid journalism.’ Despite his supposed hatred of promotional spin, he allowed his spokesman to peddle exaggerations: he loved cricket, enjoyed reading Oscar Wilde and Yeats, and was a devoted Arsenal fan. Despite that one Cup final visit with his sons, his attachment to Arsenal was questionable: in 2006 he had urged fans to boycott the club because of its commercial relationship with Israeli tourism.

  The division between party members and Labour voters had widened. An opinion poll reported that 86 per cent of Corbyn’s supporters described themselves as left-wing, compared to 33 per cent of the country; 60 per cent were against the monarchy, while nationally only 22 per cent were republican; 85 per cent of Corbynistas wanted the redistribution of wealth, compared to 29 per cent of the electorate as a whole; and 86 per cent endorsed his demand for the renationalisation of the utilities, compared to 31 per cent of the public. Since the working class had no votes in the leadership election, their mistrust was irrelevant, and as Lenin had chillingly directed, their suspicions would anyway be cured by re-education.

  To establish his credibility for a wider audience, Corbyn sought to rebut the impression that he was ignorant of economics. Inevitably, he concealed the consequences of mismanaging his own money – no one outside his innermost circle knew about his financial crisis in 1996. Towards the end of July he told a BBC interviewer: ‘We ca
n learn a lot from Marx. Marx analysed what was happening in a brilliant way.’ Next, in a speech at the Royal College of Medicine, he presented himself as a financial expert, albeit reliant on Richard Murphy, an accountant specialising in combating tax avoidance who would become an architect of ‘Corbynomics’, and on the economic plan John McDonnell had composed in 2012. A Labour government, McDonnell had said, should impose a 20 per cent wealth tax on all Britons, plus additional income taxes on the top 10 per cent. ‘We’re saying,’ he explained, ‘just collect the money and make those who created the crisis pay for the crisis, and that way you overcome it.’

  Corbyn and McDonnell favoured the tax policies of the Callaghan era, when the country’s richest paid 98 per cent in tax. Although the top 1 per cent of British taxpayers already contributed 27 per cent of the nation’s total tax, and the top 10 per cent paid 59 per cent, making British rates higher than Germany’s – and higher than under Gordon Brown’s government – Corbyn rejected a calculation by the independent Office of Budget Responsibility that increasing taxes would reduce revenue, or that the Tory cut from 50 to 45 per cent of the top rate of tax had generated additional revenues. Both Corbyn and McDonnell scorned the experience of France and Venezuela, where high tax rates had persuaded the rich to flee. Rather, Corbyn proposed ‘People’s Quantitative Easing’ as the ‘sound economics of public investment’. Under this system, the Bank of England would simply print sufficient money to finance the government’s requirements. He denied the obvious consequence: hyperinflation. Just as in Weimar Germany in the 1920s, Zimbabwe after 2010, and Venezuela at that very moment, Britain’s currency would be destroyed, and wages would be worthless. He also was deaf to the derision that the Tories heaped on Richard Murphy, who had predicted that a crackdown on fraud and tax evasion would raise an extra £119 billion a year. After scrutinising his calculations, the Inland Revenue (HMRC) found that Murphy had double-counted VAT and used the wrong tax rates, leading to his claimed revenue increase being exaggerated by £75 billion. Moreover, HMRC’s aggressive tax collection had already increased revenues to a record amount.

  At the heart of Corbyn’s message was the proposal that Britain should replicate the 1970s arrangement whereby a new national investment bank pumped hundreds of millions of pounds into Britain’s motor industry. He did not mention that all that money had been wasted, because the car factories were either closed down or sold off for a pittance. ‘The route to prosperity,’ he said, ‘is a collective purpose between workers, public investment and services, and yes, often innovative and creative individuals.’ He derided as a myth the suggestion that wealth creation was ‘due to the dynamic risk-taking by private equity funds, entrepreneurs or billionaires bringing their wealth to the UK’. He also dismissed the evidence that new jobs and wealth had followed the privatisation of BT, British Airways, BP and the road haulage industry, and that many iconic British companies had been sold to foreign corporations because British tax laws prevented individual Britons from accumulating sufficient wealth to buy them. None of the voters attracted to Corbyn were concerned by those lessons from history. They focused on his pledge to renationalise the railways, an increasingly popular option as fares increased and trains’ reliability was degraded by strikes and mismanagement. (In 2016, although only 10 per cent of all travel in Britain was by train, there were 1.718 billion journeys on National Rail, making the British network the fifth most used in the world.)

  To Corbyn, every industrial disagreement was a justified expression of working-class rebellion against capitalism. Aslef and the RMT, the two major rail unions, had instantly donated money to Corbyn’s election fund, knowing that he would support a twenty-four-hour London Tube strike opposing the introduction of all-night services. On the strike day, 8 July, Corbyn described the government’s treatment of Tube workers as ‘disgraceful’, and said that it should not dictate to the unions. ‘It’s for them to determine their rules,’ he said. The unions should manage the Tube. He dismissed as insufficient the Tube drivers’ annual pay of £49,673 for a thirty-six-hour week, plus forty-three days’ holiday. In his opinion, although Britain’s six million public sector workers earned on average 13 per cent more than the twenty-four million in the private sector, their pay was inadequate. Unsurprisingly, the national media was unimpressed by Corbynomics.

  To bolster the credibility of Corbyn’s plans, John Ross, a Trotskyite, drafted a letter of support from eminent academics. Among them were Thomas Piketty, a best-selling French economist; Yanis Varoufakis, the charismatic Marxist who as Greece’s finance minister for five months had contributed to the collapse of his country’s banks; Joseph Stiglitz, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, who in 2007 praised Hugo Chávez’s management of Venezuela’s economy, in 2010 advised Varoufakis as Greece plunged into crisis, and in 2014 encouraged the Scottish government to believe that an independent Scotland could flourish rather than collapse into bankruptcy, regardless of falling oil prices; and finally David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary committee who in 2009 predicted that George Osborne’s policies would push unemployment to five million (instead, nearly 800,000 new jobs were created in 2014 and unemployment fell to a record low). In 2011 Blanchflower wrote: ‘Britain now looks as if it is headed back into recession … too bad the government is in such deep denial.’ The following year, Britain’s growth was the highest of the G7 nations.

  Six weeks before the new Labour leader would be proclaimed, Corbyn had become the outright favourite. ‘It is still probable that Mr Corbyn won’t win,’ wrote Philip Collins, The Times’s Blairite columnist. And anyway, ‘if he wins, he will soon be gone’. Collins, a member of Corbyn’s Islington North branch, could still not believe the mounting evidence that his local MP had become the party’s hero. ‘It is hard to imagine,’ he wrote, ‘a serious party doing anything more stunningly self-harming than picking a reluctant leader running on a programme that was out of date thirty years ago.’ The truth was hard to digest. Addressing packed meetings across the country, Corbyn enjoyed a massive lead in the polls – over 20 per cent in some reports. ‘It is pleasantly surprising, the way in which the campaign has grown so fast,’ he admitted. Yet one poll reported that only 10 per cent of his supporters believed that ‘he understands what it takes to win an election’. In interviews with the Spectator, critics spoke about ‘the suicidal charge of the red brigade’. ‘Off a cliff and into oblivion’, predicted Jack Straw. ‘Suicidal and madness’, said Alan Johnson. ‘A potential catastrophe for Britain’ and a ‘car crash’, foresaw Alastair Campbell. Peter Mandelson called the prospect ‘Zimbabwe-style ruin’, and ‘the sad and possibly final chapter’ of Labour.

  No Blairite wanted to acknowledge that Corbyn’s popularity was caused by revenge directed against them personally. New Labour had created the crime of the Iraq war, while Corbyn had championed the truth. ‘The tribal Labour culture retains a residual attraction,’ wrote Collins in desperation. ‘Labour won’t split or die. We are witnessing the prelude to paralysis.’ To stave off that fate, the Guardian urged its readers to vote for Yvette Cooper, even though at that point only 7 per cent of its readers supported her. Similarly, the Mirror ignored the evidence and endorsed Andy Burnham. The editors of both newspapers knew the truth, but could not bring themselves to acknowledge the horror. The MP for North Antarctica was heading for the winner’s enclosure.

  10

  The Takeover

  The climax of the four-month campaign was staged on Saturday, 12 September in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Westminster. The few Labour MPs who attended looked morose. Dressed in black, the staff of Labour headquarters appeared similarly depressed. Only Jeremy Corbyn had the air of a satisfied man. Dressed in a dark suit and open-necked blue shirt, he spoke with conviction about the ‘huge democratic exercise’, then repeated himself over five minutes about the ‘change’ prompted by his victory. Just forty-eight hours before the official result was declared, his rivals had conceded to the land
slide. Out of the 422,664 votes cast, Corbyn won 59.5 per cent, Burnham 19, Cooper 17 and Kendall 4.5. Just 0.5 per cent of Britain’s population had resoundingly rejected Blairism. The Blairite MPs in the hall were jeered amid chants of ‘Old Labour not New Labour.’ ‘The party is on a road to nowhere,’ retorted David Blunkett, one of those present. ‘It’s a party deserting the voters.’

  Fearing permanent destruction, the Old Guard shuddered at the inevitable move by Abbott, McDonnell and other Marxists from the back seats onto the front bench. Welcoming that prospect, Ed Miliband hailed ‘a great opportunity for our party’. Writing in London’s Evening Standard, David Hare judged Corbyn’s supporters as ‘united by a visceral loathing of David Cameron [who] belongs in a separate class of nastiness’. They voted for Corbyn, wrote the playwright, who occupied a large house in Hampstead, ‘because he belongs so unequivocally to those who hate Toryism from the gut’. ‘All piled in against Corbyn,’ gloated Ronan Bennett, the pro-IRA Irish writer once employed by Corbyn, ‘with frantic antics by Blair and Mandelson on the sidelines looking ever more ridiculous and irrelevant. And the joke ended up being on them.’ Before leaving the building, Corbyn took a call from Cameron. He politely accepted the prime minister’s congratulations and pledged to work with the government as leader of a loyal opposition.