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There's no conspiracy against Jeremy Corbyn. There doesn't need to be
The Labour leader's bizarre behaviour is best explained by the assumption that he is controlled by a cabal of his enemies. But he isn't
Some (if certainly not all) Labour members are spending their time seeking answers to the current plight of their party.
While a majority of members, so polling tells us, are intensely relaxed about their party’s historically low levels of support at this stage in a parliament, a significant minority are anxious to diagnose its seemingly terminal condition.
It would be comforting indeed for them to invoke Robert Conquest’s third law of politics: “The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”
On the face of it, this fits rather well. I remember being utterly convinced, in the early 1980s, that Arthur Scargill must surely be on the Conservative Party’s payroll, given the amount of damage he was doing to the official opposition to Mrs Thatcher’s government. And when Derek Hatton and his Trotskyite pals were heckling Neil Kinnock in Bournemouth in 1985 for pointing out that it really wasn’t on for a Labour council – a Labour council – to make massive numbers of redundancies just to prove a political point, I entertained theories as to the identity of the people behind “the party within a party” that was Militant. Perhaps Alan Bleasdale had a point in depicting his Trotskyite characters in the early ’90s TV drama “GBH” as direct employees of MI5.
Talk of Militant and Trotskyite entryists inevitably brings us back to the modern day Labour Party, whose leadership had far more sympathy with those expelled in the ’80s than with those who were doing the expelling. The Corbyn takeover is undoubtedly good news for whoever succeeds David Cameron as Prime Minister before the next election, for the Conservative Party, and for anyone who doesn’t want to see a centre-left progressive government any time soon. But that’s a happy coincidence of events, rather than a conspiracy.
As with Scargill, as with Militant, so with Corbyn: what you see is what you get. Yes, every time the Labour leader talks about the Falklands, or Trident, or trade union legislation, or places inverted commas around the word “terrorism”, he nails another dozen nails into the coffin lid of his party. But a lone gunman killed Kennedy, the moon landings actually happened, 9/11 was the work of Islamists based in Afghanistan, and Jeremy Corbyn genuinely believes what he says.
We’re often told (implausibly, in my opinion) that today’s young people are just as enthusiastic about politics as their elders – they’re just more interested in single issues like climate change and anti-capitalist protest than they are in party politics. That sounds eerily close to where Corbyn stands. He needed the Labour Party label in order to get him elected to Parliament in 1983 and re-elected seven times since then. But he is not a tribal politician; he has no emotional loyalty to the Labour Party. Such loyalty would encourage him to mellow his spoken opinions, to search for compromises, to promote the Labour Party at all levels in the understanding that you can’t always get what you want, but half a loaf is better than no loaf at all.
Instead he impresses those who voted for him in last year’s leadership election (and no one else) by verbalising every far-Left opinion he has ever held. He doesn’t (he claims) dissemble, he doesn’t prevaricate. He tries to convince himself and those around him that voters will support him because he is honest and principled, even if they’re not impressed by his actual views.
Yeah, good luck with that.
To understand Corbyn’s real political motivations, you have to look at his activity and alliances outside parliament.
Corbyn is Vice-President of CND. Until last year he was the chair of the Stop The War Coalition. He is known to want to protect the Green MP Caroline Lucas’s parliamentary seat in Brighton from the threat of Labour campaigners. He is far more comfortable dealing with Labour’s opponents on the Left: the Socialist Party (formerly Militant), the Socialist Workers Party, who set up and control Stop The War, and the Green Party, where the influence of Marxists with precious little to do since the Wall came down a quarter of a century ago have made their influence felt.
He shares with those allies a contempt for the “betrayal” of previous Labour governments: Blair, Wilson, Callaghan – even Attlee approved the UK nuclear deterrent – they were all guilty of betraying the Left. Why would true socialists offer such governments their support?
Labour moderates still hoping for a future in the party should remember that Labour’s opponents are not exclusively on the Right. Cameron doesn’t need to conspire to control the Labour Party. The same end is achieved when the cabal with influence over the leader is led by the leader himself.