By Asa Winstanley on Middle East Monitor
It has been the story of the summer, but there are still almost three weeks left to run in the Labour Party leadership election, believe it or not. What initially looked like it was going to be the dullest leadership election ever was electrified after the entry of left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn in June.
Initially dismissed as the rank outsider allowed into the contest as a sop to the more leftist activist base of the party, Corbyn’s campaign soon gathered momentum. It has become a genuine phenomenon, and he has been packing out meeting halls for rallys all over the country. He leads the polls, and looks likely to become the leader of the opposition next month.
Nobody (including myself) saw this coming. Now it is happening, it’s not too hard to see the reasons why.
Corbyn has long been a stalwart of many campaigns, especially the Palestinian cause and the anti-war movement. He is a patron of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and chair of the Stop the War Coalition. He’s been an inveterate outsider within his party for decades, serving on the backbenches as the consummate rebel – he has reportedly rebelled against the Labour Party whip more than 500 times.
He has certainly never served in a shadow cabinet (unlike his three rivals in the leadership race), let alone as a government minister (Any Burnham and Yvette Cooper both served in the Gordon Brown government). But, ironically, it seems that it is exactly this outsider status that is now endearing him to so many Labour Party members at the grass-roots level. And this seems to be the case for longer-standing members, as well as the floods of new people who have more recently joined the party either as full members or as supporters (who can pay £3 to register and have a vote in the internal party elections).
What is clear now, is that Corbyn is riding a wave of popular support, sick of years of neo-liberal and pro-war orthodoxies. Whether this momentum can be carried on through to the relatively remote general election of 2020, and onto the wider electorate remains to be seen. But what seems certain now is that, whether or not Corbyn wins the leadership on 12 September, things have changed for good. He has already succeeded in changing the narrative.
Burnham has sought to emulate one of Corbyn’s more popular policies: renationalisation of the rail system. Burnham’s plan falls short of Corbyn’s more comprehensive plan, but his aping of Corbyn shows the effect the MP for Islington North has had on the Labour Party already.
The party is moving to the left. This is happening at the grass-roots level, thanks to a massive democratic uprising of people fed up of 20 years of Blairite orthodoxy. It is happening despite the resistance of the party “grandees” such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Milliband, Neil Kinnock and now Betty Boothroyd, who have all come out and condemned Corbyn as supposedly stuck in the past.
But in reality it is these right-wing extremist elements of the party that are stuck in the past. What they are too arrogant to recognise is that the world has changed irrecoverably since 1994, when Blair started his take over of the Labour Party. It is beyond ironic that the establishment media continues to portray has-beens like Blair, David Milliband and Liz Kendall (the leadership candidate considered closest to Blair) as “modernisers”.
“Modernisation” always was a euphemism for moving the party to the right and discarding its socialist principles. But even for those party members who were fooled by this narrative the line will no longer wash. None of the other three candidates have come up with a coherent narrative, or even many concrete policy announcements.
Corbyn’s campaign, on the other hand, has made regular, detailed policy announcements of what he would do in opposition or in government. And Corbyn always phrases this in terms of “proposals,” which is indicative of his genuine commitment to inclusiveness and democracy.
His decades of campaigning against injustice and war meant that Corbyn has been able to draw on the practical support of activists involved in all those campaigns over the years. Corbyn needed no introduction to us: we know he is a man of integrity and principle. More importantly, his principles reflect our principles.
For those of us in the Palestine solidarity community it will mean that we must hold Corbyn to his word should he come to power as leader of the opposition. This does not mean I expect him to renege on his word. I know he is a genuine person, and I know that the cause of Palestine and the fight against the injustice of the Israeli occupation is close to his heart.
But Corbyn will face massive and systemic resistance to the changes he wants to bring, first to the Labour Party, and ultimately (fingers crossed) to the country. We see this starting already, with a sustained media campaign of smears against him, even outrageously slandering him as an anti-Semite.
What the experience of Scotland during the referendum campaign and that of the people of Greece in their battle with the EU and IMF over unsustainable debt shows us is that entrenched systems of power will do all they can to resist needed systemic change.
It will be up to us as a Palestine solidarity movement (as it will be up to all the other different movements over their separate but often related issues) to provide a counter-force to these entrenched systems of power.
For once though, if Corbyn wins the leadership, we have the promise of an ally at high levels of power. What the experience of Latin America’s popular democratic movements over the last two decades teaches us is this: once you have your leader in power, that is only the beginning. Genuine changes have to come from below.
An associate editor with The Electronic Intifada, Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who lives in London.
