THE recent vindictive and factional assault on Jeremy Corbyn by the Labour Leader Keir Starmer, part of a wider attack on the Labour left, has intensified calls for a new workers’ party, as have the “dog-whistle” attacks on the Tories on crime. It is difficult, given the situation, not to feel sympathetic to this, but socialists need to take a long view.

The Corbyn Project

The proximate cause for calls for a new left party is the collapse of the “Corbyn Project,” although that description gives it a sense of uniqueness, purpose even, that do not match its origins. 

Jeremy Corbyn agreed to stand as Labour leader in circumstances that no-one thought were likely to lead to him being on the ballot paper, never mind win the leadership of the party, not once but twice. 

To the surprise of many on the left, a layer of activists, some in the Labour Party and some not, tired of the neoliberal cliches of the would-be Labour leadership, quickly realised that the contest gave them the opportunity to make a political difference. 

In this regard the mobilisation around Corbyn resembles the 2014 referendum in Scotland and the 2016 Brexit referendum. It was a lightning rod for pent up frustration and yearning for a better Britain, or in Scotland 2014, a better Scotland.

Corbyn’s road to success in the Labour Party was not, then, based on a widespread, coherent, pre-existing movement. Indeed, as Andrew Murray has argued, the absence of such a movement in the country was a major stumbling block to success for the political advance of the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party.

The limitations of such a one-legged warrior were at least partly addressed by the support of some of the largest and most influential unions and their leaders, in particular, Unite and Unison. 

Without their support it may have been impossible for Jeremy Corbyn to win and sustain leadership of the Labour Party. 

Union leadership support, though, did not necessarily translate into support among union members or even union activists at branch and workplace level.

It is worth recalling that 10 months into his leadership in 2016, a YouGov poll reported that only 32 per cent of Labour-affiliated union members thought he should lead the party at the next election; 58 per cent said he should quit before the next election and 45 per cent were in favour of his immediate departure. 

Asked about his performance during his 10 months in charge, 63 per cent said he was doing badly and 76 per cent did not believe he would ever be prime minister.

It will be argued, with some force, that support for Jeremy would have been higher had it not been for the campaign of vilification. 

While this is true, the argument that neither in the wider community nor in the trade unions was there a rank-and-file movement, that was capable of building support for a mass campaign for fundamental social change, is incontrovertible. In fact, Labour did not do well in its appeal to working-class voters in 2017. 

Ipsos reports: “The middle classes swung to Labour, while working classes swung to the Conservatives — each party achieving record scores.” 

While Labour did have an increased vote share and a four-point lead among C2DEs, the Conservatives increased their vote share in that group by 12 points.

It will also be pointed out that the Labour manifestos of 2017 and 2019 were not that radical, even if the policies they contained were popular. 

The specifics of those manifestos were less the target of the right inside and outside the Labour Party, than the danger of having a future prime minister whose loyalty to queen, country and by extension Nato, was at the very least questionable and consequently made him unacceptable as prime minister. 

Although Corbyn never argued for leaving Nato as leader, the BBC was able to find a Morning Star article that “condemned” him: “Writing in the Morning Star newspaper in 2012, he [Corbyn] argued that Nato’s mission had been ‘thwarting the Soviet Union,’ and that the collapse of the bloc was ‘the obvious time for Nato to have been disbanded’.”

This problem only deepened in the run-up to 2019. The party impaled itself on an position on Brexit which was both opaque and unpopular with sections of the working class who had voted for Brexit.  

And by then, of course, the right of the party had seized on the anti-semitism jugular and sunk their teeth in with a viciousness that made the left defence seem at times anaemic and unconvincing, despite its veracity. 

But, to return to the central theme, the fundamental problem was the absence of a mass campaign for socialism where an electorally successful Labour Party was the vehicle for the advance of a popular socialist programme.