Tag: Jeremy Corbyn

CORBYN: LIB DEM OPPORTUNITY?

FARRON’S LONG JOURNEY

 

 

When I planned my visit this weekend to the Lib Dem’s conference in Bournemouth, it was to see how a party goes from government to irrelevance in one short year. Last autumn in Glasgow the Deputy Prime Minister and members of the Cabinet were present. This year you will be lucky to spot one of the eight MPs amongst the diminished group of activists who will huddle in a hall now far too big for their needs.

It will be a long way back for the Lib Dems but they may have been given a boost by the election of Jeremy Corbyn. The new Lib Dem leader, Tim Farron, is claiming he’s had lots of Labour MPs ringing him up dismayed by the first week of Corbynism. This may be pre conference nonsense and I’m not convinced the despair of right wing Labour MPs is so great that they would leave the sinking ship of Labour (as they presumably see it) to get into the waterlogged rowing boat that is the Lib Dems. Comparisons have been made with the position of Labour moderates after Michael Foot’s election in 1981. Then there were former Cabinet Ministers like Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and David Owen who had enough stature to form the Social Democrats. It is difficult to see who would lead such a defection now except David Miliband and he is over the water, for now.

Anyway the Lib Dems don’t really need defecting MPs, what they need are voters who don’t want to go down Corbyn’s socialist road but prefer the left of centre position of Tim Farron. He was elected as the more radical of the two Lib Dem leadership candidates and unlike his opponent Norman Lamb had not been tainted by serving alongside Tories in the Coalition government.

In his keynote speech next week, I expect Farron to say he is the fresh leader and distance himself from the Tory led Coalition that nearly finished his party off. He might even pledge never to do a deal with them again. In these circumstances his party might start the long road back a little sooner flushed with the support of some ex Labour voters.

JEREMY’S FIRST WEEK.

Not that Corbyn’s first week has been as bad as the

The Tory press would lead you to believe. Prime Minister’s Questions was a refreshing change. David Cameron toned down the Bullingdon Club rhetoric and some ordinary people got their questions answered.

On the issue of Corbyn not singing the National Anthem at the Battle of Britain service, those pilots died to defend freedom of expression. Corbyn is a republican and doesn’t want the Queen to reign over him. So why should he sing it and be called a hypocrite by the Daily Mail, a paper which ran headlines supporting Mosley’s fascists in the thirties?

I think the Spitfire pilots would have been happy with him standing in dignified silence.

 

 

 

FARRON IS WAITING FOR LABOUR DEFECTORS.

LESSONS OF HISTORY

Last time Labour elected a hard left leader in 1980, it was a matter of months before senior figures in the party broke away and formed the Social Democrats under the leadership of Roy Jenkins.

It initiated a very difficult period for the then Liberal Party, particularly when the SDP leader became David Owen. A more arrogant man than the emollient Woy (sic) Jenkins, the TV puppet satire show Spitting Image had little David Steel in Owen’s jacket pocket.

There were rows over which of these two centrist parties should fight which parliamentary seat in the 1983 and 1987 General Elections, after which difficult merger talks took place with much agonising over what was social democracy and what was Liberalism. It left the first leader of the Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown, with what he describes as an asterisk in the opinion polls where the percentage supporting the new party should be.

Why am I boring you with this political history lesson? Because the chances are growing of Jeremy Corbyn actually winning the Labour leadership. Downtown’s Managing Director, Frank McKenna, argues powerfully in his blog this week that the party should be following the advice of Tony Blair to shy away from a left wing course. It may be good advice but should Blair have said it? Frank rightly points to Blair’s recipe for election success but also acknowledges that he is seen as a war criminal by some in his party. I’m afraid he is, and there is a danger that his intervention may strengthen Corbyn’s position not weaken it.

This is another reason why Blair is toxic to many activists. His time as party leader saw a huge centralisation of the party’s internal structure. Party conferences became rallies not occasions for real debate. Regional party officials, who had been a valuable source of authority with the ability to feed back to London what was going on, were neutered. Parliamentary selections were hijacked to put in Blair’s favourites, Ex Tory Shaun Woodward in St Helens being the most blatant. Part of what Corbyn is about is a demand from the foot soldiers to get their party back.

So if Corbyn should win will the newly elected leader of the Lib Dems, Tim Farron, present an appealing alternative for Labour moderates who conclude that their party is out of office for the foreseeable future?

And what will Tim Farron say to them? He should probably welcome them in. He shouldn’t tell them to form a separate SDP Mark Two party. The reasoning in 1981 was that a new party would make more of an impact than just admitting Labour defectors to the Liberals. But as I’ve illustrated above, it led to years of wrangles in the centre of politics while Margaret Thatcher kept getting re-elected.

Farron was the right choice for the Lib Dems in their parlous state. He got over 50% of the vote in his Cumbria seat in May and knows how to campaign from the bottom up. Grandees like Paddy Ashdown and Vince Cable might sneer at his judgement but at least Farron has a chance of being heard. If the other contender, Norman Lamb, had won, opponents would have felt they were being attacked by a dead sheep.

COULD CORBYN ACTUALLY WIN?

 

TORIES WIND UP LABOUR GRASSROOTS.

 

Tory papers, perhaps out to make trouble, are reporting this weekend that veteran left winger Jeremy Corbyn is ahead in private polling for the Labour leadership.

I don’t think it will happen but the speculation has been fuelled by the sort of thing that happened on the Victoria Derbyshire debate on BBC 2 this week. In front of an audience of potential, former and current Labour voters three of the four candidates faced a struggle to convince the audience that they were worth voting for. Time and again Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall set out their policy stances, but back came the same response that they weren’t inspiring people to vote Labour. Only Jeremy Corbyn got real gutsy rounds of applause when he called for a fight against austerity.

Sadly Liz Kendall seems to be trailing badly with her pro business stance and insistence on cutting the deficit. Andy Burnham is campaigning against the London based elite that he says has run the party for years, but he’s burdened by his past record on letting private firms into the health service. Yvette Cooper is banking on saying little, relying on her Cabinet experience as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

The problem for these three is that they are swimming against a left wing tide in the party that we have not seen since Michael Foot was elected leader in 1980. It was not a rational response to the election of Margaret Thatcher then, and is unlikely to be the right response to Cameron’s victory now. However the activists in the party have a right to express their views and elect who they want. Corbyn is catching that mood and the other three candidates are struggling with their various policy nuances, but with the basic belief that the deficit must be reduced and the Tories have caught the public mood on benefits.

Harriet Harman has hardly put a foot wrong in her long career. She has always kept in touch with the party mood and been popular with her commitment to women. It was therefore quite startling that at the very end of her time in front line politics she should have advocated a humiliating cave in to the Tories welfare reforms.

It posed one of the most difficult questions of our time, what is Labour for? Corbyn has his answer, fight austerity, support large families and ban nuclear weapons. The other three candidates have more complicated answers because they believe that is where Labour has to be to win back middle England.

Middle England, the elusive prize for Labour. What would they feel about Jeremy Corbyn leading the Labour Party? They would be more comfortable with a telegenic Burnham or perhaps a woman leading the party for the first time in Kendall or Cooper.

Meanwhile the Tories drive support to Corbyn with their latest proposals on strike ballots and having to opt into levy payments to the Labour Party. That goes down well in Middle and South East England where the tube strike wrecked havoc with people’s lives last week. But it angers grass roots Labour who feel they want to lash out, perhaps elect Corbyn and to hell with the consequences.

LABOUR: BAD TO WORSE.

 

THE LEADERSHIP CAMPAIGN.

As if the heavy election defeat was not bad enough, the Labour leadership contest seems to me to have compounded the party’s problem. There is no sign of the fundamental debate Labour need. There is merely the usual rush by MPs to get behind one candidate or another. And a pretty uninspiring bunch of candidates they are, and I’m not the only one who thinks that. There are calls for a constitutional break clause so that if after three years the new leader isn’t doing the business, they can be sacked. That says it all about the quality of the field.

If we are talking about interim arrangements, Alan Johnson should have realised his duty and led the party for a couple of years to sort things out.

In the first place it was wrong for both Ed Miliband and Harriet Harmer to announce their resignations. In 2005 Michael Howard stayed on as leader of the Conservative Party for six months after his General Election defeat so that the Tories could hold their inquest. Hustings were held at the party conference and voting took place afterwards.

Labour has rushed into a leadership contest were the focus is on the personalities and not on the huge questions the party should be discussion. They include, should there be a separate Scottish Party with a similar relationship to Labour as the SDLP in Northern Ireland, and should feelers be put out to the Greens and Lib Dems about a grand union of the left.

If that’s too bold they need to work out how they are going to appeal to left leaning Scots, UKIP leaning blue collar workers in the north, and aspirational voters in the south all at the same time. Do you hear any of the leadership candidates addressing that multi headed question?

THE CANDIDATES.

If it wasn’t to be David Miliband in 2010 then I thought Andy Burnham would have been the right choice. He remains a really nice bloke that every Mum wants to cuddle but it pains me to say that he would be the wrong choice this time. I’ve reached this conclusion because of the scale of Labour’s defeat in Scotland and the South. In Scotland Burnham will just be seen as another English leader whilst in the South there will be suspicion about his union links. His declaration that he is “Labour through and through” plays well for a leadership election but not in Oxford, Swindon and Southampton. His insistence that the NHS played such a central role in the campaign didn’t work and he will always be encumbered by introducing a measure of privatisation when he was Health Secretary.

Yvette Cooper is probably counting on coming through the middle as most people’s second choice. This may explain her colourless campaign. The plan seems to be say as little as possible. My problem with Cooper is that she is colourless and lacking in ideas and would be wholly unsuited to be leader at this time of great challenge for Labour.

Jeremy Corbyn had to be helped into the contest by MPs nominating him although they have no intention of voting for him. What a daft system! At least Corbyn is not colourless but his left wing views disqualify him from consideration.

So we come to Liz Kendall who I very reluctantly support because of the absence of Dan Jarvis, Chukka Umunna and Alan Johnson. The party in England has to move back to the centre and she represents that position. She is relatively untainted by Labour’s past. It is a gamble as she lacks stature big time. But then again when Michael Howard finally stood down in December 2005, how many saw the posh boy from the Bullingdon Club as a two term Prime Minister.