Once in a lifetime — once in a very long lifetime — the political stars align. With Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the Labour leadership in the UK, suddenly there is hope. Hope for the chronically sick whose benefits have been withdrawn. Hope for the stressed-out commuter contemplating the latest train cancellation or fare rise. Hope for low-paid workers denied employment rights or union protection.
There is hope, too, for the women and children locked up in Yarl’s Wood because they are poor and desperate. Hope for students and the parents of students who are forced to take on ever more debt. Hope for those in need of social housing and protection from rapacious landlords; for those deemed to have a bedroom too many; for exhausted doctors, nurses and auxiliary staff in hospitals, for overworked teachers. There is hope for the environment.
And there is hope for an end to British involvement in the catastrophic series of military interventions that have destabilised the world and brought nothing but misery, pain and rage to the populations on whom bombs have fallen, places where special forces been given free rein to use their dark arts.
There is hope — I hope — that Corbyn’s election finally signals a desire in this country to turn our backs on the sharp-suited politics of swagger, greed, pomposity, deceit and thraldom to money, hierarchy and privilege.
Is this too much? Are these hopes misplaced? Not to judge from the reaction of what Pablo Iglesias, the Podemos leader, terms “la casta”, the caste — the political class whose sense of entitlement and undisguised condescension betrays its conviction that its members — and its members alone — have the right to pull the levers of power. The caste knows that Corbyn, his very able shadow chancellor John McDonnell and their supporters represent an existential threat to its political monopoly and its way of ordering economy and society.
The Tories responded immediately to Corbyn’s win with apocalyptic warnings that the nation’s security, economy and even the family itself were under threat. This was only to be expected. But what about Labour? Specifically, with the conference under way, what about the parliamentary Labour party? Will MPs embrace the wave of new members and work with Corbyn and McDonnell? It has to be said, the signs are not encouraging.
We know where the grandees stand. They have made their position very clear. When Tony Blair said that Labour party members who were thinking of voting for Corbyn needed a heart transplant he was — from the heights of the grotesque wealth he has amassed only because Labour party members once upon a time put their trust in him — spitting on those outside the caste. What was so shocking about Blair’s intervention on this occasion was that he actually thought he was being funny. Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell and the rest have all piled in against Corbyn. The joke ended up being on them.
New politics
But Blair and his coterie are, if not quite gone, at least well on their way out, their increasingly frantic antics on the sidelines looking ever more ridiculous and irrelevant. What matters now are the women and men on the Labour benches. They would do well to remember that the membership voted for a man who put his message clearly and unapologetically. He did not tack to win votes. He did not, unlike the candidate Julian Barnes described in his New Yorker essay on the 1992 general election campaign, greet the prospective voter with a cheery: “Hello, I’m standing for election and these are my principles — but if you don’t like them I have others.” Instead and refreshingly, Corbyn said: “I’m standing for election and these are my principles — I’ve had them for 50 years and I don’t have any others.” And people responded. They admired him for it. They voted for the candidate of principle.
Labour MPs, all of them, I’m sure, would claim to agree with Corbyn’s proclaimed ambition to see greater fairness, equality and justice. Many have talked about wanting to see a new politics. Well, this is what new politics looks like. New politics backed up by thousands upon thousands of enthusiastic members.
What are Labour MPs going to do?
Some are sulking and some will be actively plotting to get rid of Corbyn. They will not lightly be forgiven by a membership which, let’s not forget, voted overwhelmingly for Corbyn.
Many, I suspect, are simply hoping that he will implode and that the whole horrible, regrettable episode will pass and a suitably shiny PR-friendly replacement will be found from among the caste. But if they think Corbyn is an aberration, they are making a big mistake. I know from having worked with him as a researcher (specifically on the Guildford Four campaign) more than 20 years ago, that Jeremy is a kind, compassionate, principled, generous man whose commitment is not to society’s winners but to those who are battered and brutalised by capitalism. I know he won’t mind my saying that this is not about him. This is about a mood in the country. It is about a mood across Europe. People have been up close and personal with free-market capitalism for a long time now. They know exactly what it is. They know what it does to lives and communities — to whole countries. And they want it gone. That is why they voted for Corbyn.
Last August, I did something I had never done before. I voted in an election. I voted for Corbyn. And within an hour of his winning, I joined the party, and I look forward to playing as active a role as I can in the local branch.
There was for me something profoundly satisfying, not to say moving, in the victory of the man who came from nowhere, the man who was reviled by the powerful, the rich and the mighty. It was almost Biblical: the last became first. What we now hope is that Corbyn and McDonnell will keep their nerve. And we want to see MPs get behind the new leadership, defeat the Tories in 2020 and fight for those who have for too long come last in the free-market rat race.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Ronan Bennett is a novelist and screenwriter who was born and brought up in Northern Ireland and now lives in London.
