by Tom Bower
Just as some Tories were losing self-confidence, Corbyn’s economic advisers Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower complained that he should have quit after the 172 MPs voted against him and announced their own resignation. Corbyn, wrote Blanchflower, had ‘no chance of winning a general election’. And if there were the ‘slightest prospect’ of him becoming prime minister, ‘the bond and equity markets would eat him for lunch’. Although he never met Corbyn and encountered McDonnell only once, Blanchflower was appalled by their idea that the dividends of any company found guilty of failing to pay ‘a living wage’ would be subject to additional taxes. That, he said, would encourage corporations to move abroad. Nobody in their right mind, he wrote, would serve as governor of the Bank of England under a prime minister who failed to understand the realities of capitalism.*
The desertions of his two advisers had no impact on Corbyn’s re-election rollercoaster. This time Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Neil Kinnock did not speak out against him. With no enthusiasm for Owen Smith, they accepted Corbyn’s victory. Instead of delivering a bloody nose, the challenger had given Corbyn a blood transfusion. Nevertheless, some critics refused to be cowed. The leaders of several London Labour councils voted for Smith, as did mayor Sadiq Khan, who called Corbyn a ‘disastrous’ leader who should take his share of blame for Brexit. ‘I’m afraid that we simply cannot afford to go on like this,’ he wrote. Corbyn’s ratings were ‘the worst of any opposition leader’. Khan’s criticism was repeated by the Newcastle MP Chi Onwurah, one of two shadow cabinet ministers for culture. ‘There’s nothing socialist about incompetence,’ she scoffed, adding how she had been singled out for discrimination. After her appointment, Corbyn had refused to speak to her, and had simultaneously given the same post to Thangam Debbonaire. ‘No one knew what he wanted us to do,’ complained Onwurah. In reply, Corbyn’s spokesman denied that she had been ‘singled out’. Certainly everyone was suffering from the same ineptitude, even if that was not what the spokesman had meant.
The day after Khan’s denunciation, Corbyn spoke to a huge crowd in Kilburn, north London. His mention of Khan’s name provoked loud boos, and the converted roared their adulation of their leader. He was noticeably thrilled. The party was being refashioned in his image, and his critics were being silenced.
With Shami Chakrabarti’s report, critics of Jews and Israel were given renewed licence. After the report’s publication, Grahame Morris, the Labour MP for Easington and chairman of Labour Friends of Palestine, posted images of Israel’s flag with the caption ‘Nazis in my village’, and compared British Jews serving in Israel’s army with British Muslims joining ISIS in Iraq. In the past he had hosted an event with Sameh Habeeb, who had edited a journal which contained Holocaust denial material (which Habeeb said he had not approved, and had removed when it was discovered). Morris was not reprimanded.
Chakrabarti’s reward was a peerage, which critics described as ‘a shameless kick in the teeth for all who put hope in her wholly compromised inquiry’. Baroness Chakrabarti explained that her elevation to the Lords had been discussed over the past decade, and that the party required a young, qualified lawyer prepared to spend time in the upper chamber. Few saw the appointment so benignly, not least because Corbyn had pledged not to nominate anyone to the upper house. ‘The whitewash for peerages,’ said a Jewish critic, ‘is a scandal that raises serious questions about the integrity of Ms Chakrabarti, her inquiry and the Labour leadership.’ The once respected Chakrabarti, said John Mann, had ‘sold herself cheaply’. She continued to protest her innocence. ‘Jeremy Corbyn,’ she said, ‘is not a corrupt man and I am not a corrupt woman. There was nothing remotely transactional about it.’ Initially she refused to disclose when Corbyn had offered her the peerage, before finally claiming that it was on Cameron’s last day in the Commons. Corbyn refused to confirm this. He was fed up with all the whiners.
Only the complaints kept mounting. Tom Watson had heard that officials at the party’s headquarters had spotted suspected Trotskyists applying to join Labour – still officially forbidden. Sifting through ‘180,000 new applications’ for membership, the staff noticed ‘entryists’ sponsored by left-wing constituencies. In a lengthy submission to Corbyn, Watson enclosed a newspaper published by the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty with the headline ‘Flood Into the Labour Party’. The Alliance had officially disbanded in November 2015 to allow its members to join Labour, radicalise young people and attack older, right-wing party members. Other Trotskyists were infiltrating Labour as members of the ‘rabble’ called Momentum. Did Corbyn approve of identified Trotskyists – who opposed parliamentary democracy – joining the party, contrary to its rules? ‘Some old hands are twisting young arms,’ wrote Watson. ‘That’s how Trotsky entryists operate. Sooner or later, that always ends up in disaster.’
Among those ‘old hands’ was Jill Mountford of the Trotskyist Alliance, suspended from Labour in February 2016. As an official of Momentum’s steering committee, she was organising the telephone banks for Corbyn’s re-election campaign and addressing rallies in his support. Corbyn dismissed Watson’s complaint. Mountford, he said, was welcome in Labour’s big tent. Even Corbyn’s brother Piers, despite campaigning in May’s council elections for Michelle Baharier, a Marxist standing against the official Labour candidate in Peckham, was allowed to join the party. Nothing had changed in Jeremy Corbyn’s world since the early 1970s – his dislike of Jews and favouring Trotskyists to set up their own organisation within Labour. Similarly, he resurrected his old habit of knifing his enemies. Watson, his elected deputy, was criticised for being a ‘Trot-hunting … straw man’ peddling ‘absolute fantasy’. Watson, he said, as a product of his ‘vivid imagination’, was promoting ‘baseless conspiracy theories’ that 300,000 new members were ‘sectarian extremists … who have suddenly descended on the Labour Party’.
The vilification of Watson increased. Len McCluskey’s Unite was financing Momentum. Together, the union leader and Jon Lansman controlled Labour, and by extension Jeremy Corbyn. When Watson made his discovery public, McCluskey accused him of inhabiting ‘a world of skulduggery, smears and secret plots’. At the same time, McCluskey was accused by Gerard Coyne, his challenger as Unite’s leader, of using exactly the same tactics. The battle to control Labour was brutal.
Corbyn was remarkably consistent in the way he fought his campaigns. As well as adopting the same tactics he had crafted during the 1970s, he championed the same policies, including renationalising the railways. But in promoting that radical change, he revealed two particular characteristics: he ignored the facts, and he was starkly dishonest. Investment in the rail network had gone up by 900 per cent since privatisation in 1997, and the daily experience for some travellers, on new trains and in refurbished stations, had improved. Corbyn ignored key statistics: the number of passengers had increased from 750 million to 1.6 billion a year; British trains were faster and safer than most of those in Continental Europe; fares had risen much less than under nationalisation, while the state subsidy was about the same;† most delays were caused by Network Rail, which was owned by the state; and ticket prices had to be approved by the government. He was convinced that if French and German nationalised rail operators could run British Rail, then British civil servants could perform the same task, and the privatised rail companies would not pocket profits of no less than £240 million in 2014. There was a madcap consistency in Corbyn’s ignoring such figures. Put simply, privately financed modernisation offended him. Just as he had objected to the renovation of King’s Cross and St Pancras stations, he opposed the construction of HS2, the high-speed train from Euston to the north, because ‘it benefits the few and not the many’.
To prove his point, on 11 August he boarded Virgin’s 11 a.m. train from London to Newcastle. He was accompanied by Yannis Mendez, a TV director, and Anthony Casey, a writer. Together, they would produce a campaign film to illustrate Corbyn’s promise of a ‘clear plan for a fully integrated railway in public ow
nership’. Although this plan was never made public, he guaranteed that, once renationalised, British Rail would never cancel a single train.
As the train left King’s Cross, the three men walked through a fairly empty carriage, then a carriage of reserved seats that were also unoccupied, until they reached a third carriage. There, Corbyn sat on the floor outside the lavatory to recite a prepared piece for Mendez’s camera about overcrowding on that particular train: ‘This is a problem that many passengers face every day … Today, this train is completely ram-packed.’ Mendez posted this fabrication on the Guardian’s website, with his report of Corbyn joining ‘twenty other seatless commuters [on the floor] on a three-hour journey’. In truth, after Corbyn had been filmed for about fifteen minutes he had got up, returned to the carriage he had just walked through, and sat in one of the many unoccupied seats for the remainder of the trip.
Twelve days later, Virgin Trains exposed Corbyn’s lie. The proof was in its CCTV footage. The company’s chairman Richard Branson personally accused the Labour leader of hypocrisy and spin. Corbyn’s staff struggled to establish a rival version, but he was not there to help them explain away his conduct – he was at home making jam. Eventually, Labour’s spokesman said that Corbyn had been ‘unable to find unreserved seats’ and that he was later seated ‘after a family were upgraded … after the first stop’. That was untrue, because the first stop was an hour after Corbyn had sat down on the carriage floor. At a press conference at the end of that day, he still refused to admit what had taken place. ‘Can we move on, please?’ he said, plainly irritated.
Assuming that the electorate shared his own hatred of Branson, Sam Tarry, Corbyn’s campaign director, threatened to renationalise the ‘tax exile’s’ trains. To Tarry’s misfortune, his attack provoked newspaper exposés of his own life. As a councillor in Barking, Tarry was required to live in the borough, but neighbours at his registered flat there said a female tenant was the actual resident, while he was regularly seen with his wife at their own house in Brighton. A councillor failing to live at his registered address in the borough – which Tarry denied doing – was acting illegally. To divert attention from this embarrassment, John McDonnell turned on Branson, who as a tax exile, he said, should be stripped of his knighthood for ‘not acting in the spirit of our country’. Some Labour MPs wondered whether McDonnell’s support for the IRA was in the ‘spirit’ of Britain. Corbyn’s paid appearances on Iran’s Press TV were equally open to criticism.
Corbyn finally spoke – not about his deceit on the train, but to explain that the reason for his appearances on Press TV was to ‘address issues of human rights’. That was also untrue. On none of the available tapes had he criticised Iran’s mistreatment of women and children or the regime’s political opponents. Two months later, the Guardian apologised for publishing Corbyn’s fabrication. After a year of crises – rebellions, resignations and mockery – he was exposed as an unrepentant liar.
On the eve of the leadership election, Corbyn’s team met at Esher Place, a conference centre in Surrey owned by Unite. McCluskey, the host, was still under pressure from Gerard Coyne for his alleged unethical behaviour. Also present were Karie Murphy, Andrew Murray, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Seumas Milne, Jon Lansman and the former BBC TV journalist Paul Mason. Their agenda was to consolidate the hard left’s control over the party. McCluskey suggested that disloyal MPs should be ‘held to account’ and deselected. That strategy was agreed, and a new list was drawn up: thirteen MPs who had ‘abused’ Corbyn would be pressured to resign.
Among them was Ben Bradshaw, the MP for Exeter. After the list was exposed, Bradshaw denounced Corbyn as a ‘destructive combination of incompetence, deceit and menace’. John Woodcock, another on the list, reviled Corbyn and McDonnell for having ‘set themselves up as the high priests of honest and straight-talking politics. Yet as soon as they are challenged, their operation squirms, spins and distorts like the very worst of anything that came before.’ As usual, Corbyn would deny any involvement in the proposed purge. ‘As you know,’ he said, ‘I never abuse anybody, tempting as it sometimes is.’ Tongue in cheek, he continued, ‘I’m very keen on providing olive branches,’ and then revealed that he was growing an olive tree on the balcony of his office. ‘It’s doing very well. It’s thriving.’ But he refused to discipline those who abused the thirteen MPs. To save themselves from deselection, the listed MPs were instructed in Soviet style to pledge their loyalty to Corbyn – even if they disagreed with his policies.
In that vexed atmosphere, on 24 September a dribble of Labour MPs headed to the Labour Party conference in Liverpool to hear the election results. Outside the security gates, Trotskyists demanded the deselection of ‘traitors of our Labour Party’. Inside the dimly-lit, half-empty hall sat the defeated old guard, watching with renewed despair as history repeated itself. Corbyn won 61.8 per cent of the votes, up from 59 per cent in the previous election. The cheers were muted, not least because most of his supporters, disdainful of old-style party conferences, had gone instead to a Momentum rally that same day featuring the Sex Worker Open University and Black Lives Matter. ‘We are all part of the same Labour family,’ said Corbyn to his cowed audience. He promised to wipe the slate clean if everyone united behind him. ‘We certainly can’t carry on as we did,’ he said with a hint of menace. His old life had been in opposition. Now he was perfecting his skill as executioner.
Officially, the chaos was over. The threat by the 172 MPs had been overcome, the Blairites buried. Tom Watson’s appeal to the conference that ‘capitalism is not the enemy’ and ‘we need to win elections’ was jeered, and his denunciation of the folly of trashing Blair’s achievements drew heckles. Now Corbyn would dictate the agenda. For a start, he did not formally object when the NEC forbade the conference to discuss anti-Semitism, and did not impose a ban on the distribution of leaflets advocating the expulsion of the Jewish Labour Movement. He ignored appeals for help from abused women MPs. However, at the last moment he did allow Seumas Milne to alter the text of defence spokesman Clive Lewis’s statement about Trident. Only as he stood in front of the autocue on the stage did Lewis spot how Milne had blurred the party’s commitment to renew the missile. Lewis, a passionate Corbynista, was incandescent. But the lesson was explicit: ideological purity superseded electoral politics. The party would unite on Corbyn’s terms.
In his own well-structured speech, delivered with confidence and some humour, Corbyn declared that the state knew best how to manage the economy. Labour would fight the next election, he said, to remove all controls on immigration: ‘It is not our objective to reduce the numbers.’ He blamed ‘repeated Western military interventions’ for immigration, although the migrants coming to Britain from Nigeria, Somalia, Albania and Pakistan were not escaping ‘invasions’. There would be no compromise: ‘We cannot abandon our socialist principles because we are told this is the only way to win power. That is nonsense.’ He basked in the loud applause.
Next stop was a Socialist Workers event. Among Trotskyites, Corbyn condemned American intervention in Syria and repeated his opposition to ‘Prevent’, the government programme aimed at dissuading Muslims from joining terrorist groups. It wrongly obstructed their radicalisation, he said. Britons travelling to Syria to join ISIS should not be demonised as terrorists, because that was a value judgement. They were merely ‘expressing a point of view’, and were not a threat to Britain’s security. ‘Islamic terrorism’, he went on, was an unconscionable label. Those who wanted to return to Britain after fighting with ISIS should not be prosecuted as terrorists.
Among those Corbyn would have readmitted without redress was Imran Khawaja, a British jihadist who had travelled to Syria, where he posed with several severed heads before faking his own death. After his surreptitious return to Britain he had been convicted under the 2006 Terrorism Act, which Corbyn opposed. Similarly, on his website Corbyn praised Marwan Barghouti, convicted of attacking Israeli citizens and sentenced to five life terms, as ‘an i
con’, and similar to Nelson Mandela. The Trotskyists applauded all those sentiments, as they did Corbyn’s eulogy for Fidel Castro, by then close to death. Like Corbyn, they refused to recognise the failures of Cuban communism, and expected every opponent to be deposed. Accordingly, in a telephone call the day after the conference, Rosie Winterton, the chief whip, was fired. Insulted by Corbyn’s apparent misogyny, she insisted that after six years’ service she was at least entitled to a personal meeting. He agreed, but the dismissal remained in force. To underline Corbyn’s appeal for unity, she was replaced by Nick Brown, Gordon Brown’s former henchman. Although not of the hard left, Brown could be trusted to twist arms where necessary.
The new shadow cabinet included Diane Abbott as shadow home secretary, Shami Chakrabarti as shadow attorney general, and also some MPs who had earlier resigned in protest over a ‘catastrophic’ leader. That left Kezia Dugdale, the moderate Scottish leader, as an exceptionally free-spirited opponent. Ever since her promotion after the 2015 general election debacle, Dugdale’s relationship with Corbyn had been tempered by Labour’s humiliating wipe-out. Neil Findlay, a Marxist Member of the Scottish Parliament, had organised Corbyn’s leadership campaign rally in Aberdeen. After hearing him speak about socialism, Dugdale realised that he regarded Scotland as a foreign country. He had refused to campaign there during the EU referendum, and neither understood nor cared that Scottish Labour rejected the far left and was preoccupied with maintaining the Union. To her dismay, on a visit to Glasgow he would say that a second independence referendum was ‘absolutely fine’. Blasted by Dugdale for contradicting Scottish Labour’s opposition to a new vote, he somersaulted three times over two days, finally opposing a second referendum unless the Scottish Parliament came out in favour. ‘A gift for the Tories,’ complained a Dugdale adviser. ‘How dare you preach unity,’ Dugdale asked Corbyn after he had tried to get her expelled from the NEC, ‘and try to undermine me as Scottish leader?’ For the moment, she survived. In due time, he calculated, she would be pushed aside. The fact that Labour could never secure a Commons majority without winning in Scotland was irrelevant to him. As in all matters, ideology, not political calculation, was decisive.