Lessons From the Corbyn Years
It’s five years since Jeremy Corbyn resigned as leader of Britain’s Labour Party. In an interview, his former advisor Andrew Murray explains what went wrong for the left-wing leader.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn delivers his first speech as leader of the party on September 29, 2015, in Brighton, England. (Jeff J. Mitchell / Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Stathis Kouvelakis
Five years since Jeremy Corbyn resigned as Labour leader, the British left is in a difficult place. Keir Starmer’s remodeling of the Labour Party, purging or suspending MPs and large numbers of ordinary activists, has worked to stamp out the legacy of the Corbyn era, and his new government’s policies on everything from welfare to foreign policy have emphasized continuity rather than a sharp break with past Tory administrations.
Anti-migrant and anti-Muslim riots last summer, the rise of the hard-right Reform UK party, and Labour’s already sinking poll ratings point to a reactionary wave rolling through British politics. There surely is some pushback on the Left: a smattering of left-wing independents including Corbyn — now expelled from Labour — won seats at last July’s general election, also because of the impact of the Palestine solidarity movement on British electoral politics. But the left-populist surge of the late 2010s has today largely dissipated.
One of the leading figures in Corbyn’s team was Andrew Murray, picked as an adviser to the Labour leader in early 2018. Formerly a leading member of Britain’s Communist Party, the longtime Stop the War Coalition chair and Unite the Union official Murray is also the author of one of the most incisive post-mortems on the failure of the Corbyn project: his 2022 book Is Socialism Possible in Britain? In an interview with Stathis Kouvelakis, Murray discusses the lessons of the Corbyn era, the current state of the British left, and the possibilities of rebuilding.
My first question is about the specificity of Corbynism and what makes it an experiment of broader interest for the Left internationally. In your last book, you point out three aspects of Corbynism that make it a quite atypical brand of social democracy.
The first is that Corbyn appeared not as a pure parliamentarian but rather as an embodiment of the politics of mass protest. The second is that his rise to the leadership allowed a programmatic offer that advocated a clear break with neoliberal policies. And the third is anti-imperialism. This combination sounds like a miracle for anyone who’s even vaguely familiar with the recent trajectory of the Left in Britain. How was that miracle possible after decades of retreats for the Left, of Labour moving rightward, and of the enduring legacy of Blairism?
It was totally unexpected. In its immediate context, it was driven by an exasperation within the Labour membership with the legacy of New Labour, which Ed Miliband, Corbyn’s immediate predecessor, had inched away from, but not really broken from decisively, particularly on questions of neoliberalism and financial discipline. The three so-called mainstream candidates that fought in the 2015 leadership election were all very tepid. They did not really represent a break with the legacy of the [Tony] Blair and [Gordon] Brown years, including Andy Burnham, who was probably the best — I think he now regrets that he was not more forceful at the time.
The other part of it is that Corbyn’s qualities include a natural authenticity, and there is a “market” for that among ordinary people in an age when all politicians seem manufactured, the product of spin doctors, focus groups, and Oxbridge education. Corbyn’s authenticity in a way transcends particular political positions. Nigel Farage is not comparable to Corbyn politically, but he also appears authentic, and gets wind in his sails on those grounds.
In my last book and in the preceding one, I tried to look at how this had come about. Corbyn’s rise had, indeed, followed decades of defeat and marginalization of the Left in British politics. In those years, we’ve seen mass movements rather than parliamentary action. The biggest was the mobilization against the Iraq War, in which I was involved, and also the movements against austerity after 2010.
Corbyn was much more distinguished in those movements than as a parliamentarian before, as he’d always been on the margins of the PLP [Parliamentary Labour Party]. This element is often overlooked and it was one of the reasons why the PLP and the establishment more generally felt so threatened by him. For them, Parliament and elections to Parliament define the parameters of acceptable politics. The idea of mass pressure by people in the streets is seen as almost unconstitutional.
Corbyn often said he wanted to move his office when he was leader out of Parliament, out to somewhere else in London, near Euston or King’s Cross train stations, so that he’d be in touch with the North and the people. He never did it. But he was seen as a threat and that is what drove him to a surprising victory in the leadership contest, for which neither he nor anyone else was particularly prepared.
To make a comparison with radical-left parties in continental Europe, of the three elements of Corbynism we’ve just mentioned — mass protests, anti-neoliberal agenda and anti-imperialism — the most remarkable is the third. One can find the first two in many other left-wing forces, oriented toward social movements and challenging neoliberal policies, but anti-imperialism has been largely abandoned by the Western left in recent decades, with the partial exception of southern Europe.
How do you explain this anti-imperialist edge not only of Corbyn but also of a whole sector of the British left? We saw that confirmed recently with the size of the movement in support of Palestine, but it was announced already by the size of the protests against the Iraq War, unlike France, for instance.
Yes, this is partly true. Imperialism is more embedded in British political culture than almost anywhere else in Europe, France would be the nearest. If you look at just the last twenty-five years, Britain, again with France as runner-up, but not invariably, has been more aggressive than any other power in the world, second only to the US. The reason we have such an enduring antiwar movement in Britain is because there are always wars. We had Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, nearly Syria, not quite the same but also in Yemen, and now supporting the genocide in Palestine. So, there’s always fuel for that political fire, elements of the Left have always had that orientation, and — especially in the context of the wars that have been fought — there’s been a mobilization of the British Muslim community.
On all these questions — particularly on Palestine, but also on Iraq and Afghanistan — we’ve had a very strong position, reflected in the last general election when four pro-Palestine MPs got elected, quite unexpectedly. Subjective factors played a role, here. The people that led the movement in Britain against the Iraq War and the Afghan War were anti-imperialists and managed to bring [that movement] together on a broad basis. In other countries in Europe, even where there was a big movement against the Iraq War, they didn’t necessarily have that leadership. Corbyn has a strong personal connection to that. He’s very knowledgeable about international politics, Latin America particularly, but not exclusively. His personal sympathies are shared by almost no one in the Labour leadership; people put up with this almost as a personal eccentricity.
There are also elements on the British left that downplay the significance of foreign policy, or say if we’re going to confront the establishment on neoliberalism, it’s too complicated to fight on too many fronts. The establishment wouldn’t push back too hard against a government that nationalized the water industry or set up regional investment banks. But if a government was going to compromise nuclear weapons or NATO or even support for Israel, those would be red lines: that’s when you get into coup territory, even in a political culture as hallowed as Britain’s.
What makes this anti-imperialist orientation different from anything we’ve seen elsewhere is that other left-wing movements in Europe — like Syriza, Podemos, Die Linke, or France Insoumise and others — have emerged either as new movements outside the mainstream or in countries that for a long time had a strong communist tradition. Whereas what happened with Corbyn was a takeover of an established social democratic party of government, which has traditionally been turned to the Right and always pro-imperialist. There’s more of a parallel with Bernie Sanders in the US, even if the Democratic Party isn’t quite like Labour. However, the resistance to Sanders among the Democrats has its parallel in the resistance to Corbyn within the Labour Party. They thought it was just an outrage for the party of Ernie Bevin and Clement Attlee and Tony Blair to be taken over by someone who is opposed to imperialism.
Let’s come now to the reasons for Corbynism’s defeat. You emphasize three of them in your book: first, the level of internal hostility to Corbyn, in other words the fact that the main enemy was inside his own party; the second was the vicious campaign against him based on accusations of antisemitism; and the third was Brexit. Was there any way of countering this?
I think it would have been very difficult. The structural problem is that the Labour Party, whatever its notional constitution, is basically a parliamentary party. Its MPs are the decisive locus of authority in the sense that no effort had previously been made in Labour’s history to run the party against the wishes of a majority of the MPs.
At least 80 percent of the MPs rejected Corbyn, with different degrees of vehemence and for different reasons. Some didn’t mind him, but just thought he was unelectable, others were utterly against him on principle, but at the end, they all opposed him. They were and are in a sort of symbiotic relationship with journalists. They say some nonsense off the record to a lobby journalist here, it’s in the papers tomorrow, the BBC picks it up, and it’s become truth within twenty-four hours. Then all the other MPs started saying, “Oh no! This is dreadful.”
Mainstream politicians and mainstream journalists work in harmony. It’s not a conspiracy but an organic process. The MPs tried to launch a coup against him nine months after he was elected [as party leader]. They were defeated but never stopped conspiring against him. They also worked closely with the apparatus, which had been basically shaped under Tony Blair. They regarded Corbyn as an abomination and were very obstructive. They tried to sabotage the 2017 election. I was first drafted in to work with Corbyn in 2017, during the election campaign, because I had the authority of coming from Unite, the biggest union in the country. I tried to bring some order into the relationship, it succeeded somewhat but not enough. It became paralyzing, particularly in the last year of Corbyn’s leadership.
About the beginning of 2019, there was a small breakaway of MPs, about eight. They were joined by a few Tories to form a new party, Change UK. It turned out to be completely inconsequential. Then there was a fear that had Tom Watson, the deputy leader, set up a breakaway, he could easily take more MPs with him than would remain loyal to Corbyn. They would be technically putting themselves outside the Labour Party, but would then become the official opposition.
This paralyzed the capacity to grapple with other questions. The front line of defense against political radicalism is the PLP, its entrenched position that allows it to ignore the views of the wider labor movement. They were the main practical enemy that we faced throughout. You feel like an encampment in the middle of enemy fire the whole time, coming from your own side. The Tories we could deal with — but that was debilitating.
On top of this, Corbyn didn’t control the national executive of the party until 2018, two and a half years into his leadership. Before then, it would have been impossible to get anything. Some people said, why didn’t you sack Iain McNicol, the party’s general secretary, straight away, as Starmer did with Jennie Formby [general secretary from 2018 to 2020]? The answer was you could sack him, but the national executive would appoint his replacement, which means you probably get somebody as bad or worse to succeed him. Could more have been done? Possibly, one can be self-critical, but it wouldn’t have been at all easy. In any case, the enemy within the Labour Party was the main problem we had to deal with.
Let’s come to antisemitism. This campaign of smears and lies that targeted Corbyn and the people around him has now become a familiar tune also for the French left. We have seen this hullabaloo repeated against Jean-Luc Mélenchon and France Insoumise since October 7, due to their support of Palestine. Also remarkable, as you point in your book, is that this process started even before Corbyn was elected as Labour leader, when Ed Miliband expressed some very moderate criticism of Israel. Even that caused a furor among Labour’s pro-Zionist wing.
So, do you think this anti-Corbyn campaign on grounds of alleged antisemitism would have happened in any case because of his positions on Palestine, and his anti-imperialism more broadly?
There is now a view that has taken hold of some on the Left that this was the issue that defeated Corbyn. Asa Winstanley has written a book titled Weaponising Anti-semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn. In my view, it was a secondary factor in our electoral defeat because it played into an idea of him being a weak leader. But at that point, a lot of people were just confused about it. Obviously some people believed he was antisemitic but I think these people were probably never going to vote Labour. For the right wing of the Jewish community, any criticism of Israel is antisemitic, so they’re not going to vote Labour under any circumstances, because any version of Labour is not going to be as sure a bet as the Tories for protecting Israel.
However, even if that was not a major factor in Corbyn’s defeat, it did drain a lot of energy from his team and his campaign. It did a sort of moral damage, partly because of the failure to address it in any terms. You can say that it was all a smear, that there is no antisemitism on the Left, and that this has just been got up by our enemies. That’s not exactly my view, as I write in the book.
There was an issue there, and we needed to talk about how we deal with it without compromising our principles on Palestine and Israel. But in the end, neither of those things happened. Jeremy was paralyzed by this campaign. He found it very hurtful and it made him very angry. It’s a feature of Jeremy’s personality that he never responds to personal attacks on himself. He takes a very passive approach and doesn’t feel he ever gets on the front foot.
Paradoxically, if the tragedy of Gaza had happened while Corbyn had still been leader, the whole debate around antisemitism would have been recast. Gaza forced people to focus on this issue and think about it. It isn’t just an abstract discussion about the right way to think about or speak about or relate to Jewish people. It’s connected with the crimes of Israel in a profound way, which Jeremy would have been able to deal with. I don’t say the issue would have gone away, but it would have sharpened it in a way that could have been productive.
Don’t you think that even at that moment, it would have been possible to mount a counterattack by organizing left-wing Jewish voices supporting Corbyn and a principled position on Palestine and on the rights of the Palestinian people — a position that would be, if not straightforwardly anti-Zionist, at least critical of Israel and advocating the rights of Palestinians and international law?
Many things could have been done and weren’t because of this paralysis at the center. There was a group set up, Jewish Voice for Labour, which supported Corbyn. Unfortunately, their implantation in the Jewish community was very weak. They were mainly — although not entirely — Trotskyists of very long standing, and never been really involved in the Jewish community. Not all of them, but some of them, only decided they were Jewish when they intervened to support Corbyn. They’ve got every right to do that but they weren’t terribly plausible for becoming an alternative Jewish voice.
Besides, the balance of the Jewish community in Britain is certainly much more right-wing than it is in the US where 70 percent of American Jews vote Democrat. Many of them are still very pro-Israel, of course, but they are otherwise liberal. It’s not the case in Britain. The anti-Zionist, or non-Zionist part of the Jewish community is relatively small also because it’s a small community anyway. So, you’re not fishing in a very big pond to take any initiatives.
Could a broader one have been developed? I think that would have been possible, but it needed a political will to do it, rather than just a hope that this issue would go away or that Jeremy’s repeated and completely sincere avowals of his opposition to antisemitism would somehow break through. Whenever the issue was raised in the media, you could see Jeremy tense up. Normally he’s very empathetic with almost everyone. But on this, he couldn’t communicate what he felt as plausibly as he wanted to.
Let’s come now to Brexit. I agree with you that it was the crucial factor of Labour’s 2019 electoral defeat. Broadly speaking, the Left around Europe considered Brexit as a purely reactionary, racist, and right-wing move, possibly a bit less so in France, because of Mélenchon’s quite critical attitude vis-à-vis the EU, or in Greece, due to the experience of the previous decade.
Your approach emphasizes that the British left, and particularly the component supporting Corbyn, shared liberal illusions about the EU being something of an anti-nationalist and progressive entity, and even a guarantee of basic social rights. So, opposition to the EU was left up to people like Nigel Farage and part of the Tories. This led to a break within Labour’s base, with working-class constituencies in the North and indeed almost everywhere outside London voting in their majority for Brexit, thus decisively weakening Corbyn’s position.
I think it’s important here to stress how Corbyn had managed the result of the 2016 referendum in its immediate aftermath, how this played in the 2017 election, and how it was reversed by this relentless campaign for a second referendum with the outcome that we all now know.
That was the critical factor and it mirrors what is going on, as far as I can see, in almost all “first wave” capitalist countries in Europe and North America. There has been an alienation of the Left from working-class communities, which endure the consequences of capitalist globalization. In some cases, there are even deeper roots than that. Communities that were structurally embedded in the labor movement no longer are and, in some cases, haven’t been for probably decades. They saw Brexit as an opportunity to vote for change. There had always been more Euroskepticism, as it’s called, in Britain than probably in most places in continental Europe. There are probably many historical reasons for that, including chauvinism and a divide within the British ruling class on this issue.
If you go back to the 1970s, when I first became politically active, the labor movement was overwhelmingly opposed to the European project because of what it was even then, a capitalist structure designed to ensure the functioning of the market economy irrespective of national intervention. But as the labor movement got beaten here in Britain, it saw the possibility of intervention from Brussels as a panacea. This was the illusion, but it wasn’t shared by most working-class people.
Obviously, definitions of the working class are always contested, but according to the available statistics about two-thirds voted for Brexit. There is a cleavage right there between the workers that have been Labour’s mass base for a hundred years and more liberal metropolitan voters who are often, but not entirely, more middle-class. Even black workers or workers with a migrant heritage weren’t all supportive of the EU, such as is sometimes presented. Many of the black bus drivers in the union I was in, Unite, were worried about competition from drivers coming in from countries of Eastern Europe. It was not a clear picture, but this cleavage expressed itself in different ways. Again, most dramatically in the US, it appeared as a cleavage between liberal, bicoastal elite and the industrial heartlands. But it’s true everywhere.
Jeremy was well-placed to straddle this divide as he was really a Euroskeptic. Had he not been leader, I am sure he would have been voting for Leave. He told me he actually did vote to Remain because he thought it would be dishonest to act differently. But he is impeccably liberal in his attitudes as well, as shown by his empathy for migrants, his attitude on human rights, and on all similar issues. Of course, had he been in a position to lead the Leave campaign, it would have been a very different story.
But as it was, people aren’t wrong. Many people in Europe and indeed in Britain, see Brexit as racist because it was led by Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. However, the hegemonic view, which is to say that all 17.5 million people who voted for it are racist or reactionary or, in a minority view, in favor of an ultra-neoliberal deregulated economy, is completely false. In the latter case, I think very few were voting for that.
Jeremy was not only trying to reconcile Labour’s position with his own views, but also leading a party which was culturally overwhelmingly inclined toward Remain and trying to win an election with part of a Labour electorate that was otherwise pro-Leave. In 2017, we were able to get through that. We simply said, “We will respect the referendum result, we will deliver a Brexit but it will be different to the one [then prime minister] Theresa May is doing.” So, that was definitely a component to making people in those areas in the North stay on board [in the 2017 election].
He even said that there are some advantages to Brexit, that you can implement an industrial policy and other points of the program much more easily.
Even John McDonnell said that in one famous speech, although he subsequently rowed back on it. Everyone knew that that was always an argument within Corbyn’s team; there were people saying, we can do anything we want, even if we’re in the European Union. And others, including John Trickett, saying the opposite.
The Greek case clearly demonstrates that the second holds true.
Yes, of course. The difference with Greece is that we were never in the euro. I read Yanis Varoufakis’s book Adults in the Room and you see a lot of the pressure that Greece and he personally were under.
Varoufakis has almost completely changed his views on the EU since writing the book. Now he’s in favor of a break, which he sees as inevitable for any sort of left-wing policy.
Well, even in writing his book, and this perhaps is a tribute to his honesty, his naivety is evident, he does not conceal it. However, in Britain, we’d had an austerity program that wasn’t actually much to do with the EU but with the City of London, under David Cameron and [his chancellor,] George Osborne. So, it was a different situation, but in 2017 it went well. But even then, we lost six seats that we’d held in 2015, and you could see that our position was fragile.
The first discussions we had in the Corbyn leadership after 2017 were all about how we need to target older voters in left-behind working-class areas. The reason is that there was an opportunity in 2017. Even the MPs shut up for a while after that general election. Corbyn had done so much better than expected, he had the capacity to take the party where he wanted to, but he didn’t. I proposed: we have to try and get Brexit over the line. That would have meant working with Theresa May, who had lost her majority trying. It would have been risky. But getting that over the line would have put us in the best position to focus on our domestic program and advance to the next general election.
Jeremy wouldn’t do it. And we drifted into a policy that went exactly in the opposite direction. But in 2017, there was no mass movement for a second referendum. It was like a fringe thing. What Remainers wanted was a so-called “soft Brexit,” they didn’t really think it was possible to reverse it. But in the vacuum caused by no initiative from Labour and, more seriously, by the inability of the Tory government to get Brexit over the line, this mass movement for a second referendum sprung up. This was the first pro-EU mass movement in Britain’s history. There were big marches, by any standards. In most of them there were probably generally Labour voters, and it just completely spooked the leadership. You also had these online petitions for a second referendum, which could tell you how many people had signed from your own constituency. Jeremy was sitting there looking at it going up: 8,000, 10,000, 15,000 from Islington North [Corbyn’s seat] alone.
So, it got to a point where, by 2019, you couldn’t move without really causing a problem. Still, John Trickett and I produced papers arguing that if we go against the second referendum, i.e., we basically repeat the 2017 position, we will lose votes to the Greens or the Liberals, but we won’t lose many seats, if any, because in the seats we might lose are either in London or Manchester or Brighton where we have monumental Labour majorities. And in the southern seats we have no realistic chance of winning anyway if we go in the other direction. But if we go for a second referendum, we will lose.
I produced a list of about sixty seats that we would lose in the end. I think we lost about forty of them, as well as some others that weren’t on my list. You could see what was going to happen. The enduring point is that it reflects a cleavage at the heart of a progressive electoral coalition.
Jeremy actually did pretty well in transcending that until we got to this Brexit problem. He spoke for a radical social democratic program that made as much sense in old industrial areas as it did in inner London, which is his natural environment. He had a capacity to bridge this cleavage between the metropolitan and the traditional working-class electorate, far more than Kamala Harris or anyone else. But Brexit tripped him up.
That was one of Jeremy’s problems as a leader. Nothing in his life had prepared him for being a leader of the Labour Party and he was passive, afraid of, or found it challenging to make decisions when there were conflicting views among his supporters. He always said that the Labour Party should be led by its members. What the members want, the members get. And since a clear majority of the membership wanted Labour to oppose Brexit, he felt he had to give them what they wanted.
But I think that was asking the wrong question. If you said to the membership, do you want to stay in the EU or do you want a Labour government in Britain led by Jeremy Corbyn — because the way things are in the world, you can’t have both — which would you go for? Almost everyone other than those who are inveterate enemies of Corbyn anyway, would want his government, whether they were in the EU or not.
Even the people running the Labour Party now would go for the Corbyn government. When that question was ever put, that was always how it went. Lisa Nandy — now in the government as culture secretary — was quite cautious on Brexit because her constituency in Wigan, an old mining seat in Lancashire, was very pro-Leave. She was invited to speak in 2019 in Starmer’s own constituency, in Holborn and St Pancras [in central London], to about four hundred people, and she asked that question at the end: “Which would you rather have: Britain in the European Union or Corbyn in Downing Street?” Every single hand was for Corbyn in Downing Street, but Jeremy never found a way to formulate the question like that, but nor did we. It’s not fair to blame everything on Corbyn’s passivity, there were other problems, too, to say the least.
Now let’s talk about the way ahead for the Left in Britain. Where are we now with Starmer winning? It appears to me as a sort of Pyrrhic victory, with a very limited vote share and turnout, which explains both why Starmer’s popularity is already sinking and how come Corbyn was reelected as an independent MP, along a few others.
There is now a discussion about the possibility of creating a new party, or at least a new political space on the Left. Other people maintain that we should stay in the Labour Party and wage a battle there. What is your take on this? Should the goal be a new space, or to try to repeat the “miracle” of 2015?
I don’t think the miracle of 2015 can be repeated in time, if at all. We just had an opinion poll that shows that Labour is now in third place, behind not only the Tories, but also behind Reform UK. Tories and Reform UK, both of them under hard-right leadership, have now got 50 percent of the vote. Of course, it’s four and a half years to the general election, but we’re moving toward a tipping point where Reform UK is going to suddenly become very credible. It will probably be the Welsh elections in 2026 — if it’s not earlier — where they might win a lot of Labour seats, and that will then constitute a sort of breakthrough in credibility.
The situation is so dire for Labour that I’m wondering whether Corbynism was actually Labourism’s last gasp. Corbyn did create a mass enthusiasm around the Labour Party, and in 2017 he got 40 percent of the vote. Since 1970, Labour has got 40 percent or more only three times: twice under Blair and once under Corbyn. That was a huge achievement, it breathed new life into the Labour Party. Starmer has devoted his whole leadership to squeezing that life out of the party again.
Labour is now hollowed out politically. It got elected with a pitiful vote. No British government has ever been elected on a smaller vote share. At the start of the election campaign, I wrote that I bet anyone that Labour would get fewer votes under Starmer than Corbyn got in 2017. But I never thought it would get even fewer votes than Corbyn got in 2019. The vote share was slightly higher, but only because of Scotland where different dynamics applied.
Labour is now having to fight on so many different fronts. There are eighty-nine seats where Reform UK is the runner-up to Labour and sixty where either a Green or an independent candidate of the sort you referred to is the runner-up. In Scotland, it’s the Scottish Nationalists almost everywhere. Only in about half the seats that Labour hold did the Tories come second.
So, you have a party in government that superficially has a very large majority [of seats in the House of Commons], but actually it is besieged on all sides. What Corbyn did until Brexit was to overcome those divisions, some of which long predate Starmer, they may even predate New Labour. It was only in 1997 that Blair held a traditional Labour vote, it fell away very fast after that.
What does this mean for the future? After the defeat of 2019, everyone was wandering around the battlefield shell-shocked, and no one could try and rally the troops or find a line, particularly when Starmer, for his first year and a half as leader, was very vulnerable because he wasn’t making much headway. He could have been either forced to at least back down or even forced out, but that didn’t happen. Now you have a polarization between a bankrupt, neo-imperialist, neoliberal centrism and a surging right-wing populism. The only problem for the right-wing populists is they are divided between Tories and Reform UK. There’s no easy way for them to overcome that, but it’s not impossible that they will.
There is not a left-wing pole at the moment. Since World War II, the record of parties to the left of Labour in Britain has been abysmal. Only the Communist Party had any electoral impact, and even that only briefly. The other attempts were all a wreckage of false starts and failed initiatives. None of them, even at the beginning, had any substantial substantive politicians involved in them. George Galloway with Respect was a bit of an exception, but he was on his own. He’s very much a loner and very controversial.
Now, you have the five independent MPs that you referred to. Unfortunately, they’re all men. Four of them are Muslims, so they’re not typically representative of the electorate or the whole working class, but that’s where you start from. There were a number of other candidates who polled very well in the general election, very nearly got elected, or made an impact, like Andrew Feinstein standing against Starmer in his seat. There are more than a hundred local authority councillors who’ve left the Labour Party since Gaza, either solely because of Gaza or because that was the last straw. So, there is a base there.
What is lacking at the moment is the catalytic factor that can bring it together. There isn’t an obvious leader. Jeremy is a symbol, but his leadership capacities, whatever they were, are exhausted. There would have been possibilities in the unions, but not at the moment. I think it has to come from the five: they have the legitimacy of being elected and have among them some quite effective leaders, charismatic people.
Add to that the now seven Labour MPs suspended from the party [among them John McDonnell, Rebecca Long-Bailey, and Zarah Sultana] because they voted against the two-child benefit cap, which is a limit on how many children you can claim benefits for if you’re in poverty. They were all removed from the whip, which means, as things stand, they can’t be Labour candidates again. Of course, they could be reinstated before the next general election. Some of them may not get the whip back or may not want it back. If they ally with the five, you’ve then the beginnings of something that will look credible and viable.
You also have, right now, this huge movement of solidarity with Gaza, which is hardly diminished after twenty-three national demonstrations in over thirteen months. That’s really extraordinary. There’s a reservoir of a movement there that, given a lead, can open up a new possibility.