My Corbynista shame

I have a confession. When I was a nerdy ingénue at an all-girls’ public school, I went to two Jeremy Corbyn rallies. At one, I drank too much and threw up on my shoes. They were suede brothel creepers.

It feels good to get this off my chest. Being swept up in the Corbyn frenzy of 2015-17 was borderline compulsory for posh teenagers queasy about their own privilege. It gave me some distinction among friends whose only impression of this strange, shabby Islington MP was that he was determined to take away their holiday homes. This was an embarrassing chapter in my life, during which I never left the house without a velvet choker — the fashion at the time.

That first wave of Corbynism, like my predilection for chokers, was doomed. It insisted on ideological positions untethered from reality, its adherents allergic to the views of those outside the morally pure vanguard. The frenzy of Corbynistas was vibes-based, conviction-lite and fact-free. The faces of that movement were young, vital and countercultural; it was them versus the Tory gammons and the square New Labourites. For a teenager, the choice was obvious. Of course, none of those yelling “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” to the tune of Seven Nation Army at Glastonbury had a handle on the catastrophic economic vision of John McDonnell. Nor would one expect them to; how do you find the time to read a manifesto when you spend all day skulking around the Dalston Oxfam?

Now a chaotic new Corbyn party — a venture with the Coventry MP Zarah Sultana — claims once again to have the answers to Great British inequality and division, this time in an even more vicious political landscape as Reform paws at the door. Proving its proletarian credentials, the provisionally named “Your Party” is offering strangers on the internet the opportunity to suggest its official name. Unfortunately this does not appear to be a straightforward voting system – Party McPartyFace would inevitably result – rather, YouGov has listed some of the top suggestions being mulled over by top brass. Among them are The Collective (which sounds like a high-markup coffee shop in Hackney Wick), Arise (a yuppie pilates studio) and The People’s Party. This latter one, the favourite among those YouGov surveyed, is an interesting choice. How many People’s Parties the world over have ended up being brutal authoritarian juntas? Heed the rule of thumb: parties and states with promising names – “people’s republics” and so on – are often anything but. Just saying.

Once christened, the first hurdle, a rite of passage on the hard-Left, will be surviving infighting. Last week, a squabble straight out the gate showed “Your Party”was still in the mire over antisemitism. Sultana had told the New Left Review that during his time leading the Labour Party, Corbyn had “capitulated to the IHRA definition of antisemitism” (Corbyn adopted the definition in 2018). She went on to describe his leadership as, of all things, “conciliatory”. For those keeping score, it is worth remembering Corbyn’s interview with Piers Morgan days after October 7, 2023. “All attacks are wrong,” was his response. Pushed repeatedly to condemn Hamas, he refused. Some conciliation.

If these early tiffs don’t kill it in the cradle, “Your Party” could be a disruptor. It has already had fairly buzzy beginnings: despite the perceived chaos, at the time of writing, more than 700,000 people had signed up on the website to register their support (though it’s worth remembering that unlike other parties, it does not charge for membership). Ipsos found that 20% of voters would be “very or fairly likely” to back the party — and 33% among those aged 16-34. Corbyn told Tribune magazine  that these potential voters were responding to the usual shopping list of gripes: high bills, high rents, sewage in the waterways. He added: “Plenty of good comrades have approached me over the years suggesting that there needs to be a new political voice in this country,” citing his retention of the Islington North seat as an independent. Seen from Upper Street, the future of socialism is bright.

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But the Londoners who cling to Corbyn — he himself admitted they made up an outsized proportion of those who had registered interest in the new party so far — are still the feckless, limp normies voting not for “the many” but against their parents. For them, politics is simply another opportunity for self-expression. Since Corbyn was booted off his perch, these types were left to whinge about gentrification and the scourge of landlordism while moving their Oka furniture into ex-council flats in Mile End and paying £15 for pan con tomate. Feckless, ridiculous, but harmless. It is one thing droning on about cultural imperialism at a flatroofed pub, and quite another being given a genuine political soapbox. Taking them seriously is so 2015. Next!

More so than ever being on the hard-Left is now an empty identity marker, almost guaranteed never to be tested. This is precisely what makes it so appealing to the middle classes: it is a shortcut to radicalism without any personal risk. The movement is emotionally seductive, an imitation of Seventies socialism with the reading comprehension of today’s youth. And with no answers on immigration, welfare abuse and feminism — “trans people are human beings” was Corbyn’s glib response to the Supreme Court decision on the definition of biological sex — it is structurally hollow. One gust of realism on any of these issues, and it topples.

A decade on from the initial wave of Corbynism, Your Party wants to meet Britain’s new challenges with a suspiciously 2015-esque agenda: Sultana has proposed a “resolutely anti-racist and pro-trans socialist programme”. So let’s look at what’s on the to-do list as summer winds down in the UK: protesters surround hotels filled with migrants; pedestrian crossings are painted with the St George’s flag; Nigel Farage announces plans to introduce “mass deportations”. Directives to be kind can no longer mollify the working-class communities — Labour heartlands — inflamed by demographic upheaval. Corbyn’s metropolitan socialist movement is disgusted by the concerns of those communities, disappointed that they have strayed so far from his tutelage, that they are not the “good comrades” of Soviet fantasy. What’s the plan, Jezza?

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Predictably, this time round Corbyn continues to be paranoid about a conniving press (maybe he and Donald would get on?). He told Tribune: “Many in our media struggled to understand the idea of letting ordinary people shape the future of our party. For the 650,000 people who signed up, it wasn’t so hard to understand.” It is the same reasoning which scuppered the project in 2017 and 2019; again, the real villains are the newsrooms stuffed with cackling hacks throwing darts at Corbyn’s photograph, too venal or too stupid to admire his gleaming vision for a fairer world. And again, we get the same old utopian twaddle about “ordinary people” as a benevolent, uncorrupted but misled mass. These peaceable working men and women just want affordable housing, clean rivers and for everyone to get along, yeah? If they’re angry about the small boats, it’s only because of that dastardly Lord Rothermere. Ordinary people have simply been led astray, and their unsavoury concerns can be wafted away with a stick of incense and a bung of Universal Basic Income. , Your Party is bringing a water pistol to a civil war, and in so doing will split the Left and hand the keys to Farage. For this, the migrants will not thank them.

Until then, the movement will serve its true purpose: to make its members feel good about themselves while letting “ordinary” communities roil with discontent. Criticism from the mainstream will only enhance the pleasure. It’s already starting: to crack open the comment section of Jezza’s Instagram page is to be hit with the stench of self-satisfaction. It’s a dumpsite of half-baked sloganeering: “United we rise. Decided we fall,” writes one typomaniac (it’s hard to text one-handed); another, responding to a mini-debate on the efficacy of wealth taxes, trumps their opponent with the scorcher: “Carry on [as] cheerleaders for the big guns… it makes you look great.” How politics looks, remember, is its most important metric. “You think a man who fought Apartheid is worse than the current PM who has allowed genocide?” bleats another, perhaps the only Briton who still believes our leaders can sway global policy. Starmer, why the hell haven’t you just told Bibi to pack it in, you massive fascist? It’s no small irony that one of the issues that killed Corbyn off is the one that’s breathing new life into his insurgent party.

Your Party begs a fundamental question for our time, one also being posed by Reform: what’s the benefit of a political movement “run by the people” when those people are so fatally misinformed? And why lean on the “ordinary” masses when they never chose you at the height of your powers? That the party is emerging from its shell as immigration once again becomes a national flashpoint is a grim omen. Once again, the hard-Left will ponder itself to death. Launder your class guilt elsewhere, Corbynites. We’ve seen this film before, and we all know how it ends.

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