Fuck the rich: a portrait of Jeremy Corbyn

'We have to address the problems of society by redistributing wealth,' explained Jeremy Corbyn at a 1997 rally, before getting down to the real nitty gritty of his message: 'Fuck the rich.'*

I quote from that speech, because it's both characteristic and unusual. Unusual because it's rare to hear him indulge in coarse language in public; but characteristic because he never was much of a phrase-maker. 'Fuck the rich' is as pithy as he's ever got, and it's not a startlingly original phrase.

Jeremy Corbyn differs a little from the previous eight candidates who I've written about over the last fortnight - though not entirely, since he's similarly done nothing but politics from an early age. He is, however, considerably older (born in 1949) and he doesn't have a degree: he went to the North London Polytechnic to do trade union studies, but left before completing the course. Instead he did a couple of years voluntary work in Jamaica and returned to become an official with the National Union of Tailors and Garment Makers (quite a big union at its peak, but long since merged into the GMB).

There was some surprise, incidentally, when Corbyn revealed at a hustings last month that he'd never smoked cannabis. But it was typical of the left of his generation: there was an austerity that verged on the puritanical. He may have been at a poly in the 1960s, but that didn't mean he was to be confused with a load of bourgeois hippies.

He was elected to Haringey council in North London in 1974 and stayed there till he entered Parliament in 1983 as the MP for Islington North. In that election, he beat not only the Tory and SDP candidates, but also the former Labour MP, Michael O'Halloran, standing as Independent Labour.

Even before he arrived in Westminster, Corbyn was well known in Labour politics, described in The Times as 'the veteran left-wing campaigner for squatters' rights'. The paper further pointed out that he'd be difficult to expel from the party: 'Mr Corbyn, like Mr Livingstone, is no "entryist". He has been a Labour Party member since his youth.'

The early 1980s were exciting times for the left in London, for while the party was floundering nationally, it was making substantial headway in the capital. And Corbyn was a key part of that. He was never the front man, but he was the kind of figure that anyone who encountered the left at the time would recognise: the man who worked indefatigably in the back office, emerging only to sit through interminable meetings, the one whose corduroy trousers bore telltale signs of Gestetner ink from hours of duplicating newsletters.

His greatest contribution to the cause was running London Labour Briefing, the journal that effectively coordinated the left's capture of the capital in the 1980s. Unusually for a socialist publication of the era, Briefing concerned itself with tactics not ideology, and concentrated on local government, where the resistance to Margaret Thatcher's government was at its most effective. It was a clearinghouse for information, not a theoretical journal. Ken Livingstone's coup against Andrew McIntosh to take control of the GLC in 1981 was plotted in the pages of Briefing.

The same year the journal published an article by Peter Tatchell, arguing: 'We must look to new, more militant forms of extra-parliamentary opposition which involve mass popular participation and challenge the government's right to rule.' And it was Michael Foot's hysterical response to that article that turned Tatchell briefly into the tabloids' favourite leftie villain.

The Tatchell episode ended in farce and failure, but mostly Briefing was an impressively successful enterprise. The politics of diversity that it championed were denounced at the time as loony left, but they seeped into alternative culture and have since taken over the mainstream.

Corbyn went on every demonstration, and he normally spoke, but he was no orator like Tony Benn. He supported every strike, but he was no firebrand like Arthur Scargill. He attended every meeting, but he was no thinker or innovator like Ken Livingstone. In short, he was one of nature's corporals. And he was very good at it. The fact that he currently has the best organised campaign of any of the leadership candidates should come as no surprise at all: it's what he does - those rallies don't organise themselves, you know.

In Parliament, he was a keen defender of the Bennite principles enshrined in the 1983 manifesto, but it was immediately obvious that the party, under the leadership of Neil Kinnock, was moving in another direction, particularly after the defeat of the miners' strike and Kinnock's conference speech denouncing Militant.

'What is clear,' observed Corbyn in 1988, 'is that the Labour Party decided a long time ago, in 1985, that the official party policy was a vote-loser and that something had to be done about it.'

He and the rest of the left were increasingly isolated under Kinnock, then under John Smith and most notably under Tony Blair. Throughout, Corbyn could be found voting according to his conscience rather than following the whip.

When he got reported - which was seldom, for the media found nothing of interest in him - he tended to be speaking against party policy. 'Most people are not opposed to raising the top level of tax,' he said just before the 1997 election, even as Gordon Brown promised no income tax rises. 'And those who made lots of money under Thatcher should pay more.'

He was also attracted, and lent his weight, to any cause that seemed to be opposed to the British, American or Israeli states. This led him, and much of the left, into some very dubious company.

It also allowed some notable omissions. There's a revealing entry in one of Tony Benn's diaries in 1989 when he goes on a protest against the massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, and notes: 'It was the first time I had ever spoken in public against a communist government.' You have to say that he left it a bit late; this was only five months before the German people began to dismantle the Berlin Wall.

Corbyn's associations with groups like Sinn Fein/IRA and Hamas will undoubtedly come back to haunt him, should he be elected leader. And I don't think there's any mileage in the leftist argument that it's all about trying to find peaceful ways forward, because it's not true: the motivation was and is political, not humanitarian.

In the run-up to the 1992 election, Conservative Central Office commissioned an analysis of Labour MPs and their expressed support for 'extremist views'. It concluded that in joint first place were Bill Michie and Bob Parry, but Corbyn came in an honourable third place, level pegging with Harry Cohen and Dennis Skinner, and just ahead of Tony Banks, Eddie Loyden and Max Madden, followed by a further group of Harry Barnes, Tony Benn and Alice Mahon. (Congratulations, by the way, if you recognise all those names - you'll do well if they ever introduce a politics spin-off from Pointless.)

None of this has done Corbyn any harm in Islington North, where he is reckoned to be a good constituency MP. During his thirty-two years there, the constituency has changed completely, gentrified beyond recognition, but it's turned out that the newly arrived affluent liberals rather like him; he's become as much part of the Emirates era as he had once been of the Highbury years. The majority of 5,600 that he inherited had risen to over 21,000 by the election this May.

As the reforms of the Kinnock years became embedded, he warned that the abandonment of ideology was damaging Labour's membership. This is him in 1990:

People are not coming into the party, fewer people are coming to meetings, and there is a very low level of public activity in general. The party has not got a healthy base. It is all very shallow. We do our opinion polls, find out what people want and say, 'Okay, you can have it,' without asking what kind of society we have now, and what kind of society we want to replace it.

Just to make the point again that Corbyn was no inspiration as a wordsmith, compare this with Austin Mitchell's rather more striking formulation the previous year, saying that Labour had become: 'a mass party without members, an ideological crusade without an agreed ideology, a people's party cut off from the people.'

But Corbyn worked hard. And that work is reflected in his current standing. A lot of people have a great deal of respect for him, in trade unions and campaigning groups around the country, and particularly in London. There are also tens of thousands who marched with him on demonstrations over the years but who didn't stay the pace, and gave up on political activism, burnt out and disillusioned; many of these have returned to Labour in the last few weeks.

He is not the leader that anyone would have chosen. But, as I've discussed here before, he was the last man standing when the left decided it should try to field a candidate in the contest, in the seemingly absurd hope of having a say on the future direction of the party. And once he got up and running, it turned out that he had more support than anyone had imagined.

His effect on the campaign has been transformative, changing entirely the terms of the debate. And it has been for the better. This discussion - essentially over the legacy of New Labour - needed to be had, however painful and disagreeable it is. When he was leader, Ed Miliband was praised for keeping the party together, but it seems that he just delayed things for five years.

Corbyn himself has improved over these weeks. He's still no great speaker, but he looks like he's relaxing a little and consequently communicating better. He's developing some ability at handling the media that has never been apparent before. (Perhaps he's been getting tips off Ken Livingstone or Diane Abbott.)

Most importantly, he's found a winning formula, offering socialist authenticity as the man who never compromised his beliefs, but also indulging in terminology so vague that it might be mistaken for the theme song to Neighbours. Socialism, he says, is simple: 'You care for each other, you care for everybody, and everybody cares for everybody else. It's obvious, isn't it?'

Obvious perhaps, but still it's quite a long way from 'Fuck the rich'. Maybe the man's mellowing with age.

At the time of writing, Jeremy Corbyn is the clear favourite to be elected leader of the Labour Party next month. And that sentence represents, I think, the single most extraordinary political fact that I have ever recorded.

And that concludes my round-up of the four candidates for the Labour Party leadership, drawn - as ever - from newspaper reports. Tomorrow I shall stop procrastinating and decide who I should vote for.

* Additional note: After the 'fuck the rich' speech was repeated in Newsweek, following this post, a message was tweeted by the TimesArchive Twitter account:

Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition

The word that keeps coming up in the profiles I'm writing of the Labour candidates is 'loyal'. Of the nine candidates for the leadership and deputy leadership, eight have repeatedly been described as loyal. And in this context, loyalty means voting as the whips tell you. By contrast, the ninth candidate is Jeremy Corbyn, best known for ignoring the party whip on hundreds of occasions, and therefore being disloyal.

But this is a very limited version of loyalty. Traditionally, it was loyalty to the party that was cherished, rather than simply walking into the right lobby at Westminster. And, traditionally, it's been the political right that has been far less loyal than has the left or the trade unions.

The clearest example was the creation of the SDP in 1981, led by Roy Jenkins (who'd previously led the great parliamentary rebellion to ensure British entry into the European Community). When the right had control of the party, the left went along with it, even if they did grumble and moan. As soon as the left seemed to be in the ascendancy, the intellectual right split from Labour altogether.

The arrival of the New Labour right added a new dimension. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson simply plotted endlessly. Blair tried to get John Smith to stage a leadership coup against Neil Kinnock. Then, when Smith did become leader, Blair and Mandelson schemed against him as well. And eventually, they all descended into plotting against each other. Despite the supposed iron discipline of New Labour, there was no loyalty at all to individuals, leaders or the party.

Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, has been an MP for thirty-two years, for perhaps thirty of which he has been in a beleaguered minority. He may not have always done what he was told, but he never threatened to leave if he didn't get his own way, and he has never (as far as I'm aware) plotted to stage a coup against the leadership.

This is relevant, of course, in terms of the current leadership election. Should anyone but Corbyn win, there will be demands for unity, discipline and loyalty. Should Corbyn win, don't expect the right to display any loyalty whatsoever.

One of the disappointed: a portrait of Angela Eagle

PLEASE NOTE: A fuller and much better version of this can be found here on the Lion & Unicorn site, where I now post.

I've long thought that one of the most clear-cut illustrations of Britain's lack of democracy was the case of Lynda Chalker. She was the minister for overseas development in John Major's government until she lost her seat as MP for Wallasey in the 1992 general election. At which point, she was promptly given a peerage, so that she could continue in the same job, where she remained until the government fell in 1997.

Just to be clear: Chalker was a perfectly competent minister. But really, what's the point in democracy if you can't actually vote someone out of office?

But this isn't about Chalker. The important figure here is the Labour Party candidate who took Wallasey in that 1992 election.

Born in 1961, Angela Eagle studied PPE at Oxford, after which she worked first for the CBI and then COHSE (a health service union, now part of Unison). Whilst in the latter post, she co-authored a Fabian Society pamphlet which called for all-women shortlists when selecting candidates for safe Labour seats.

Her own selection for Wallasey was not dependent on such an arrangement, though it did attract some controversy. The existing Labour candidate was Lol Duffy, a shop steward in Birkenhead who'd come within 300 votes of winning in 1987. But he was deemed to be a supporter of the Trotskyist group Socialist Organiser, so the National Executive Committee intervened and deselected him for the 1992 election.

Seizing the opportunity, Eagle navigated the ensuing selection process with ease, beating into second place Mike Groves, a former member of Liverpool folk group the Spinners. (If you don't remember them, you're too young to have watched light entertainment television in the 1970s.) On a swing that matched the national average, she then took the seat from Chalker and entered Parliament at the age of thirty-one as, in the words of the Guardian, 'a potential bright youngish Labour thing'.

In the ensuing Labour leadership election she nominated Bryan Gould, against the winning candidate John Smith, though she was critical of the expense and length of the contest. 'If we carry on like this,' she argued, 'we will become the party of the perpetual ballot, frantically spending our time and money organising elections for everything under the sun. We will have no money left to campaign except in our own internal elections. And the Tories, who have no internal democracy, will laugh all the way to Downing Street.'

Eagle served her parliamentary apprenticeship during the slow-motion suicide of John Major's government. She attracted some attention for her fierce attacks on the likes of Cedric Brown, the 'fat cat' head of British Gas, and Neil Hamilton, the Tory MP who came to epitomize sleaze, but still found time to vote in support of a deeply controversial pay rise for MPs in 1996.

Early on she attracted the attention of Tony Blair and, following the Labour landslide of 1997, she became a junior minister, at thirty-six the youngest member of his government. By the time the party left office thirteen years later, she had risen to become pensions minister under Gordon Brown.

In public perception, however, her political career counted for very little. Much more interesting were her inclusion in the Commons cricket team (a former member of the Lancashire Schoolgirls XI, she was said to be a useful bowler), and the fact that her twin sister, Maria, was also elected to Parliament in 1997.

Even better was the interview she gave later that year to the Independent, in which she announced that she was in 'a long-term and very happy relationship' with a woman. As reported in the Daily Express, and elsewhere, this made her 'the first woman politician to publicly admit she is gay'.

She wasn't - that would have been Maureen Colquhoun, the Labour MP for Northampton North, back in the 1970s - but even so, it was a big deal at a time when there were vanishingly few lesbians in public life. But this was the late 1990s and the tide was turning. 'Attitudes have changed,' Eagle said. 'I think people are a lot more sensible than we sometimes give them credit for.'

Coming out was a ground-breaking move that saw her receive a message of support from, inter alia, Chrissie Hynde, a note she later cited as her most treasured possession (she's a big Pretenders fan). It also saw her ranked #7 in the Independent on Sunday's list of Women of the Year, two places behind Ann Widdecombe, and only one place behind Dolly the Sheep.

Little since then has excited the same level of media interest. Which is unfortunate, because Eagle was no New Labour robot. She was critical of the mishandling of Ken Livingstone's bid to be the London mayoral candidate in 1999, she heckled Blair when he was explaining to the Commons why we needed to invade Iraq, and in 2003 she co-founded the New Wave Labour group, arguing that the party was on the wrong political track. 'The third way has failed to present any genuine alternative,' she said, pointing out that markets make 'good servants, but poor masters.'

This was no way to make progress in her career, and may explain why she never built on her early promotion to the extent that might have been expected. Or possibly it was because she had already been sacked from the government in a reshuffle in 2002, and it took her some time to clamber back. 'I take Angela with a pinch of salt,' noted Chris Mullin in his diary the following year, 'since she is one of the Disappointed.'

The facts of that dismissal remain a little murky. At the time, the Guardian's Simon Hoggart reported that 'she was sacked because [David] Blunkett finally agreed with his civil servants and decided that she was not up to the job'. A decade later, though, Damian McBride claimed that: 'Tony forgot Home Office minister Angela Eagle existed, gave someone else her job and effectively sacked her from the government by mistake.'

In any event, she's back now. She's been shadow leader of the house for the last four years and is standing for election as deputy leader of the Labour Party. Even if she doesn't win, her centre-left politics should ensure that she becomes a key figure in the coming years. Depending, of course, on where the party chooses to go.

And on that note: 'The Labour Party has changed,' she declared in 2007. 'Our members are pragmatic and they want us to be in government.' We'll soon see how true that remains.

This is the third in a series of posts in which - God willing - I shall be looking at each of the candidates in the current Labour Party elections for leader and deputy leader, with portraits drawn entirely from their media coverage.

Why don't you do it again?

Following Labour's  massive defeat in the 1983 general election, the party began the long, painful march back to electoral success. A new leader, Neil Kinnock, was elected, senior figures stepped back from the front-line, and policies associated with the 1983 manifesto began gradually to be dropped.

And, just fourteen years later, the Conservative Party was finally removed from government.

The election defeats in 2010 and this year are not on the scale of 1983. Not quite. But there are, I think, echoes of the 1980s to be heard. In particular, there is an attitude within Labour that harks back to that long period of opposition.

In my book Rejoice! Rejoice! (available in paperback from all good retailers), I argued that the radicalism of Margaret Thatcher 'threw the left on the defensive, so that the Labour Party seemed constantly to be fighting rearguard actions, seeking to protect a status quo from which support was fast draining away.'

Every change made by the government, I said, was 'opposed until it had been implemented and had been seen to win popular approval, at which stage Labour accepted it. The impression given was that the party was hidebound and dogmatic, and yet paradoxically lacking in principle.'

And that, I fear, has been the impression that the party has again given in recent years. Because, under David Cameron, the Conservatives have rediscovered a Thatcherite zeal for reform, and Labour still hasn't worked out how to respond.

Those on the left often cite the achievements of Clement Attlee's government, the great changes that were wrought even at a time when the nation was in massive debt and struggling to cope with the aftermath of the Second World War. Against all the odds, and against conventional political wisdom, a new world was built. 'We were, as Winston Churchill said, a bankrupt nation,' reflected Nye Bevan, 'but nonetheless we did these things.'

The same may one day be said of Cameron's governments. In the face of a huge economic recession, the coalition set about the radical restructuring of the NHS, of education and of the benefits system. And Labour's reaction has been, as in the 1980s, simply to oppose every change that is mooted, to denounce it as unnecessary, vindictive and wrong, possibly evil. After which, the truth is gradually acknowledged - too late to be of any use - that maybe change was necessary after all.

Put another way: If a Labour government were to be elected in 2020, how many of the Tory reforms to education and welfare would it actually reverse? Precisely.

As acting leader, Harriet Harman (elected to Parliament in 1982) has at least tried another tack: of accepting large swathes of the government's benefits agenda as soon it was announced. Inevitably this has caused some tension in the party, with both the front-runners for the leadership - Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham - distancing themselves from her approach.

They're probably right to do so. Apart from any question of morality and principle that Labour might wish to articulate, this isn't normally a successful political course to steer. When in opposition, the cry of 'me too' does not tend to get heard, no matter how loud you shout. This is particularly the case in the immediate aftermath of an election defeat, when no one is listening.

But there is an alternative. It starts by recognising that change is necessary, that there are no sacred cows and that things are going wrong. Which can be controversial, but shouldn't be.

To suggest that the NHS is failing to deliver the service that it should deliver is not the same as demanding that we abandon the institution entirely. It's merely to point to an obvious, if not often articulated, truth: the NHS isn't good enough. It really isn't. Its efficiency and patient care could be considerably improved, and the public has a right to expect better.

And the same is true elsewhere. Educational standards in the state sector are not high enough, and the public has a right to want improvement in the performance of Britain's schools. The benefit system has developed too many flaws to be allowed to continue unchallenged, and the public has a right to feel that its tax contributions could be better targeted.

When William Beveridge and the other great reformers of the 1940s set out to change society, they identified the five giant evils as squalor, ignorance, want, idleness and disease. Progress has been made, but you'd be hard pushed to claim that these giants have been slain.

Reform is necessary and inevitable. But by simply adopting a defensive position, Labour has - in the post-Attlee years - chosen not to participate in shaping that reform.

There have been exceptions, of course. There was James Callaghan as prime minister, for example, launching his great education debate in the 1970s, though it was a subsequent Tory government that actually made all the running, culminating in the Education Reform Act of 1988. Better yet, there was Frank Field, with his thinking-the-unthinkable transformation of the welfare state, which Gordon Brown point-blank refused to fund.

That latter case illustrates Labour's problem. If the entire system of benefits needed to be re-examined - and it did and does - then it's important to have the Labour Party coming up with some ideas. Because if it doesn't do so, then it simply hands over the whole thing to the Tories to make whatever changes they deem necessary. And the Conservatives may not have the same priorities. Which leaves Labour bleating on about Iain Duncan Smith's 'hated bedroom tax'.

The problem with not accepting the need for change - and therefore failing to initiate new thinking - is that it passes the agenda to your opponents. And it can take an awfully long time to recover from that.

I don't know if you remember Ed Miliband's speech to the 2011 Labour conference. Possibly not, though it was said to be enormously significant at the time: 'the most radical analysis of Britain's plight offered by any Labour leader since 1945,' according to the post-match punditry of Patrick Wintour in the Guardian. It was the speech that was going to reframe the public debate of capitalism, with its distinction between predators and producers.

But perhaps the most striking section of that speech was when Miliband dwelt on the past. There had been speculation that he was going to apologise for the mistakes made by the last Labour government. But he had much older fish to fry. 'Some of what happened in the 1980s was right,' he told conference. 'It was right to let people buy their council houses. It was right to cut taxes of 60, 70, 80 per cent. And it was right to change the rules on the closed shop, on strikes before ballots.'

Thirty years on, and Labour was still trying to get over its failed strategy in the 1980s. Before straightening its tie and going out to make the same mistakes all over again.

Black sections

The noisy controversy over Rachel Dolezal’s self-defining ethnicity in the last few days reminded me of the furore about black sections in the Labour Party in the mid-1980s. This is an extract from my book Rejoice! Rejoice!:

The conflict between the new identity politics and the Labour leadership was evident in the issue of black sections that arose in the middle of the decade. Black activists, particularly in London, began to call in 1983 for separate sections to be organized within constituency Labour parties, based on the model of the existing women’s sections.

They met with immediate opposition, both from the left – Eric Heffer and Militant were opposed in their own ways – and from above: ‘It would create significant problems of racial definition which could lead only too easily to endless unproductive acrimony,’ pronounced Neil Kinnock in 1984.

The following year, two of the leading campaigners, Sharon Atkin and Diane Abbott, met Kinnock to press their case, but again found themselves rebuffed. He asked who would be eligible to join, and was told that the sections would be open to anyone who considered themselves black. ‘Can I consider myself black?’ he asked, and they replied: ‘Patently not, because you’re so obviously white.’ He later told the press: ‘I consider, and so do most other people, the idea of a segregated section on the basis of colour or racial origin to be repellent.’

Despite the opposition, several local parties did set up unofficial black sections, starting with Vauxhall and Lewisham East in London, though their contribution didn’t always seem to be characterized by compromise and comradeship.

‘The Labour Party itself perpetuates racism,’ claimed a booklet produced by the Vauxhall branch for the 1984 conference. ‘It is an institution rooted in a racist society and its own routine practices, customs and forms of organization exclude black people from the structures of power as effectively as if they were barred from membership.’ A conference resolution that year to set up official black sections was rejected by the union block votes.

It was a contentious issue and one that produced a series of anomalies. The Enfield and Barnet branch of the far-right National Front passed a resolution welcoming the idea ‘as the first stage in the realignment of British politics on racial lines,’ adding that: ‘These sections clearly indicate both the inability and unwillingness of blacks to integrate into British society.’

Meanwhile a selection meeting in the Brent South constituency chose Paul Boateng as its parliamentary candidate, but was faced by a demonstration led by Sharon Atkin because the local party didn’t have a black section, even though all those on the shortlist were themselves black.

The controversy died down almost as swiftly as it had arisen. The gradual adoption of leading black figures as parliamentary candidates – Diane Abbott, Bernie Grant, Keith Vaz, Russell Profitt (who had been the party’s only black candidate in 1979) – took much of the steam out of the campaign, leading some to conclude that all along it had been, in Roy Hattersley’s words, ‘really a vehicle for promoting the parliamentary ambitions of metropolitan, middle-class professionals’.