Corbyn and the Folly of a ‘Broad Left’

The news that Jeremy Corbyn had been elected as Member of Parliament for Islington North was met with whoops of approval by the remaining disciples of Jeremy of Islington as their ‘rebel’ was returned to the backbenches of Westminster from whence he came.

Opinion polls from just a week or so before the General Election placed Corbyn’s opponent, the Labour candidate Praful Nargund, ahead of him. This article was originally drafted as a political obituary of a man whose political demise from the disastrous volte-face on Brexit in late 2019, to the worst General Election performance for Labour since 1935 later that same year, to being stripped of the Labour whip in 2020 to being dumped out of the seat he’d occupied for over forty years, was both rapid and substantial. Yet Corbyn, no doubt with the late assistance of dozens of foot soldiers once part of the now scattered remains of the Corbyn Project and big chunks of the trade union movement, did enough to get him over the line.

At first, it seemed to be something to be celebrated – as Sir Keir Starmer’s loathsome and not in the least bit popular Labour party stumbled into the biggest parliamentary majority since 1997 – Corbyn’s win was a crumb of comfort on what was a miserable night for anybody who opposes the dictatorship of the ruling class, alongside the election of pro-Palestine candidates in seats like Blackburn and the valiant but ultimately failed attempts to win seats in Ilford South and Birmingham Yardley and overthrow the disgusting and repugnant Labour individuals Wesley Streeting and Jess Phillips.

But, as the dust settles and Labour form their first Governmental cabinet since 2010, including women who at the last time of asking were not too sure what a woman even was, that Corbyn’s parliamentary career did not end wrapped in a neat bow of defeat on July 4th 2024 is, to be blunt, a little disappointing.

The evidence on which I base my assertion is the reaction of many modern leftists on social media in the six-odd days since July 4th 2024. For them, Corbyn’s election was a vindication of the politics for which Corbyn stood, whatever that means, while for others it was yet another possible dawn of a new party, based on Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project, a project notable for having achieved absolutely nothing since its foundation in 2021, which could be a real alternative to the Labour party. In fact, neither of these things are true and are never likely to be.

Corbyn’s political reputation has taken a severe battering in the years from 2015 to date, with the possible exception of his ever-dwindling band of loyal disciples. He was originally nominated to stand as leader of the Labour party in 2015, not because he intended to win, but because there were key influential figures within the Parliamentary Labour Party and the wider Labour party who knew that, had a token lefty not been thrown into the mix for the sake of variety if nothing else, then the line-up for the 2015 leadership election would have been the most insipid and bland collection of imperialist autocrats ever assembled in one election. Corbyn’s role in the leadership election was to add a little leftism to the largely Blairite proceedings. However, what Labour’s dim-witted and feckless PLP hadn’t calculated was how popular Corbyn was, at least then, amongst the wider party membership.

Corbyn had built his reputation since 1983 as the left’s rebel-in-chief in the Parliamentary Labour Party – he supported popular left-wing causes, like Irish unification, the miners in their struggle against Thatcher, Labour and the bulk of the trade union movement in their 1984-85 strike and was a sworn and vocal opponent of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. From the backbenches, Corbyn became something of a talisman for the left and large sections of the trade union movement. Once he was nominated to stand as leader, what followed in 2015, from the mass support he won from the trade union movement (with notable exceptions being rotten organisations like GMB and USDAW) to his landslide victory in September 2015, was inevitable. In fact, it was very straightforward. Corbyn won with almost 60% of the vote at the first time of asking – even more impressive given that he only enjoyed the support of 15% of the entire Parliamentary Labour Party in terms of nominations.

What wasn’t clear at the time on that Saturday afternoon in September 2015 when Corbyn was announced as the leader, and people like me thought that he really would usher in a complete transformation of the Labour party, was how this was going to be the high watermark of his reign as Leader and it would get way worse over the next four years or so.

In simple terms, Corbyn is not a leader and never has been. He was reluctantly pushed forward to stand for Labour Leader by the rotten cabal of ‘socialists’ which make up the Socialist Campaign Group, with one account claiming that straws were drawn, and Corbyn lost. A reluctant ‘hero’, he rode upon the crest of a wave of enthusiasm and support amongst a sizeable number of people who were sick to the back teeth of five years of brutal austerity, of swingeing cuts to public services and pay freezes for workers, as well as with Ed Miliband’s Tory tribute band being utterly vanquished in the 2015 General Election. Corbyn’s campaign signalled something new, something that people could actually believe in. But it was the mistake of many people, including myself, that when we saw thousands of people clambering to see Corbyn give speeches at Glastonbury, or football grounds, or even from the top of a fire engine, what he was doing was not leadership, but petty bourgeois-style rabble-rousing.

It was only when he sat his bum in the chair of Labour Leader that we really found out how lacking in real leadership and principle he was. The man who was, throughout all of his political life, deeply sceptical of the European Union and its predecessor the European Economic Community, an opponent of nuclear weapons and a staunch supporter of the people of occupied Palestine. Yet Corbyn led the Labour campaign to remain in the EU during the 2016 referendum, stood down from his position as vice-Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, to be handed a nominal vice-President role instead and allowed himself to become embroiled in a completely confected campaign to link him with antisemitism in the party, which resulted in his General Secretary, Jennie Formby, leading a brutal witch hunt of some of Corbyn’s closest allies, including people like Mark Wadsworth, Jackie Walker and Ken Livingstone.

But what he seems to have been in the 41 years that he has been the Member of Parliament for the Islington North constituency is a good ‘old-fashioned’ MP: The sort of MP that takes the issues of individual and groups of constituents and does the work to at least try to address their grievances. It is arguably this, as well as his strong reputation amongst the petty bourgeois activists which live in the area, which helped Corbyn to victory in his constituency. However, for far too many on the modern left in Britain, Corbyn retaining his seat isn’t enough: He has to lead some sort of leftist fight back from the backbenches of the House of Commons.

Which brings us to France. The results of the French parliamentary elections essentially split the House of Representatives into three roughly equal sections, of which no single group won a majority: Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble alliance, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and the coalition which won the most seats, the leftist coalition Nouveau Front Polulaire. NFP is a loose and fast coalition of some of the most disparate sections of the French left, from the French Communists (who are social democrats), Trotskyites (who are also social democrats) to the Parti Socialiste (who are also social democrats) to Jean Luc Melanchon’s La France Insoumise (who are also social democrats, but have been labelled ‘far-left’ by other social democrats). Macron, who can appoint his own Prime Minister, now has to try to cobble together a working governing coalition and the odds are that France will be stuck in political stasis, as he appears to have discounted forming any coalition with the involvement of either Rassemblement National or La France Insoumise.

The result from France was met with some of the most shallow and misguided proclamations amongst the liberal left in Britain and elsewhere as a win for the French left and a jab in the eye for the rising far-right there as they didn’t win the majority of seats in the house that many had expected. However, Marine Le Pen’s party is continuing to rise in popularity in France, despite the fact that they did not win a majority, and the resulting gridlock of the parliament with Macron already looking to peel away the most moderate sections of the NFP from the most leftist ones in terms of potential coalition partners can only work to the advantage of Le Pen at the next Presidential election, as she will point to this seizing-up of the parliamentary democracy and claim that only a majority party can bring the change that the country needs.

For these British leftists, the NFP, with its agreement to not stand candidates against Macron’s Ensemble outfit in order for them to have a clear run in defeating Le Pen, is an example of how a left-leaning coalition which agrees to not only not stand candidates against each other but also avoids contestation with the best-placed party to keep out the likes of Reform or the Conservatives, or perhaps even Labour, then a broad-left coalition in our own Parliament can be formed. These same leftists have also put forward Jeremy Corbyn to lead this coalition, or at least form a part of it. One politician who has forwarded the suggestion that a broad left coalition be formed and that Corbyn lead it is George Galloway, leader of the Workers Party of Britain, who suffered a deeply disappointing General Election as the party overstretched itself in terms of the number of candidates it stood, at their own expense, with the vast majority of candidates losing their deposits and the WPB eventually winning no seats in parliament.

Of course, the moment that Galloway called for a loose left coalition led by Corbyn was the moment that many of Corbyn’s supporters said that they would have nothing to do with it. Galloway remains and will always be a deeply polarising figure on the modern left and, for somewhat differing reasons, so too is Corbyn, particularly after his performance as leader of the Labour party. One has to speculate whether the forming of a broad-left coalition in Britain is even possible at a time when the modern left is do deeply fragmented, so beset with petty bourgeois activism and so unable to find common ground on practically any given subject.

And it is on this point that we must give some deep thought and reflection: It is appearing increasingly obvious that the age of ‘leftism’, or social democracy to give it its better name, is stone dead in Britain and across the majority of the western world in 2024. We must reject the political forces which claim to be anti-imperialist and yet will do nothing to destroy the imperialist order, we must spurn the opportunists, the social democrats, the fools who believe that Labour can be somehow saved from itself and instead build something new.

In order to create a true working class and anti-imperialist political force that will not simply adorn capitalism with the tinsel of socialism, but will seize power for itself, we need to study the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao and learn from not only from the theories that they formulated but the actions that they took to help us create for ourselves a new, socialist world.