The Saga of the Fighter

Tony Blair: Even if you hate me, please don’t take Labour over the cliff edge (Tony Blair, The Guardian, 8/13/15)

If Jeremy Corbyn becomes leader it won’t be a defeat like 1983 or 2015 at the next election. It will mean rout, possibly annihilation. If he wins the leadership, the public will at first be amused, bemused and even intrigued. But as the years roll on, as Tory policies bite and the need for an effective opposition mounts – and oppositions are only effective if they stand a hope of winning – the public mood will turn to anger. They will seek to punish us. They will see themselves as victims not only of the Tory government but of our self-indulgence.

Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t offer anything new. This is literally the most laughable of all the propositions advanced by his camp. Those of us who lived through the turmoil of the 80s know every line of this script. These are policies from the past that were rejected not because they were too principled, but because a majority of the British people thought they didn’t work. And by the way, they were rejected by electorates round the world for the same reasons.

Even more so today, they do not think their challenges can be met by old-fashioned state control as the way to personal or social empowerment; they do not think breaking up Nato unilaterally is sensible; and they realise that a party without a serious deficit-reduction plan is not in these times a serious contender to govern them.

What is Jeremy Corbyn’s programme for government? (BBC, 8/14/15)

Mr Corbyn has also said he would consider introducing a “maximum wage” to cap the pay of top executives and he would renationalise the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The Bank of England would be allowed to print money – People’s Quantitative Easing – for “new large scale housing, energy, transport and digital projects”. Mr Corbyn says this would create “a million skilled jobs and genuine apprenticeships” with knock-on boosts for the supply chain. {…}

Mr Corbyn has called for a “radically different international policy”, based on “political and not military solutions”. In the Middle East, Mr Corbyn says you have to “talk to everybody” to secure peace. He would look to withdraw from Nato and is opposed to air strikes against so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. {…}

A National Education Service, following the NHS model, would be established. State-funded academies and free schools would be forced to return to local authority control. Mr Corbyn would look to end public schools’ charitable status, although he accepts this would be complicated and may not happen immediately. Tuition fees would be scrapped, at a cost of £10bn, and replaced with grants. His 10-point plan also pledges universal childcare. {…}

Rent controls in places like central London would be introduced to help families on benefits to pay their rent. Mr Corbyn has also called for the right-to-buy scheme, which allowed tenants in council and social housing to purchase their homes at a discount, to apply to those living in privately-rented accommodation, although it’s not quite clear how that would work. By 2025, he is promising “decent homes for all in public and private sectors”. {…}

Britain’s railway network would be renationalised. He is opposed to the HS2 scheme linking London with the north of England, claiming it would turn northern cities into “dormitories for London businesses”. {…}

Energy companies would be renationalised. Mr Corbyn has said he would be “much happier” with a “regulated, publicly run service delivering energy supplies”. There would be a moratorium on fracking, which Mr Corbyn has called “dangerous to the environment”.

How Jeremy Corbyn became the Labour frontrunner (The Economist, 9/10/15)

BRITAIN’S opposition Labour Party will announce the result of its leadership election on September 12th. Both the polls and the betting odds suggest that Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran of Labour’s far left and a record-breaking opponent of his own party in parliament, will win. That threatens a damaging row. Only 20% or so of Labour MPs are thought to want Mr Corbyn as leader. Having lost badly earlier this year under an unpopular, leftish leader, Ed Miliband, they are united in not wanting to repeat the mistake. So how did he become the frontrunner?

Mr Corbyn’s path so far has been smoothed by a series of accidents. He entered the race at the last minute, scraping half of his 36 nominations from fellow MPs who had said they would not themselves vote for him, but were uninspired by the rest of the field and wanted a more lively “conversation” among the party. Unexpectedly, that conversation turned out to be almost exclusively about Mr Corbyn, who surged ahead among the wider party “selectorate” of party and union members. That is one accident. Another is that, as a result of new election rules introduced last year, MPs are now largely powerless to stop him. The new system abolished Labour’s electoral college, whereby three groups—MPs, unions and party members—all counted in equal measure towards the final result (see chart). This time, all votes are counted individually, which means the MPs’ votes are just 232 among some 550,000 in total. Nomination being the only power MPs still have, using it to nominate Mr Corbyn now seems especially frivolous.

Marx admirer Corbyn elected UK opposition Labour leader (Reuters, 9/12/15)

Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran left-winger who professes an admiration for Karl Marx, was elected leader of Britain’s opposition Labour party on Saturday, a victory that may make a British EU exit more likely and which one former Labour prime minister has said could leave their party unelectable.

Greeted by cheers from supporters in the room and hailed by radicals across Europe, Corbyn’s triumph opened up the prospect of deep splits within Labour with some fearing he will repel voters with radical policies that include unilateral nuclear disarmament, nationalization and wealth taxes.

“Things can and they will change,” Corbyn, who when he entered the contest was a rank outsider, said in his acceptance speech after taking 59.5 percent of votes cast, winning by a far bigger margin than anyone had envisaged.

“I say thank you in advance to us all working together to achieve great victories, not just electorally for Labour, but emotionally for the whole of our society to show we don’t have to be unequal, it doesn’t have to be unfair, poverty isn’t inevitable,” the gray-haired, bearded 66-year-old said.

Labour frontbenchers rule out serving in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet (The Guardian, 9/12/15)

A victorious Jeremy Corbyn vowed “things can and will change” as he was handed the clearest electoral mandate of any Labour leader, but he also faces the challenge of forming a shadow cabinet after at least seven members of the party’s frontbench indicated they would not serve under his leadership.

Yvette Cooper led the group of shadow cabinet members declaring they could not serve under his leadership in the hours after it emerged that the MP for Islington North had won 60% of the vote in the first round, winning in every part of the electoral college including among party members.

Their decision is a risk, because if Corbyn has a political honeymoon, they may find themselves marginalised in a party otherwise united behind its new leader, who won a slightly higher share of the vote in the first round than Tony Blair did in 1994. {…}

The new leader now faces the task of constructing a broad-based shadow cabinet, pulling out of a major TV interview with Andrew Marr on the BBC on Sunday to start the process. Within two hours it was clear that Rachel Reeves, Emma Reynolds, Tristram Hunt, Chris Leslie and Liz Kendall as well as Cooper would not serve under his leadership.

Corbyn Quiet As He Forms ‘Top Class’ Team (Sky News, 9/13/15)

The immediate resignations of a string of senior figures underlines the task Mr Corbyn faces uniting the party behind his anti-war, anti-austerity platform.

After his resounding victory in the party’s leadership contest, Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper, Tristram Hunt, Rachel Reeves, Emma Reynolds and Shabana Mahmood ruled out being part of his frontbench team.

Shadow chancellor Chris Leslie and shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna are also expected to go.

Len McCluskey, boss of the UK’s biggest union Unite and key Corbyn backer, says he is not concerned about the resignations.

He told Sky News the new team will be “top class” and “maybe the best we’ve had in a long time”.

“There’s no need for any of us to lose sleep over this,” he said.

Yes, Jeremy Corbyn actually is the most dangerous man in British politics (Alex Massie, The Spectator, 9/13/15)

No, Nicola Sturgeon does not have much reason to be worried about Jeremy Corbyn. But the rest of the country does. To borrow from the tabloids, Corbyn is The Most Dangerous Man in Britain because, though no-one in London seems to appreciate this, he could be the man whose leadership of the Labour party leads to the end of Britain as we know it.

Now I know people in England have tired of Scots banging on about the constitution. And I know that some things don’t have to be viewed through the prism of the constitution. Nevertheless, it’s a much more important issue than anything anyone says about trains. Or the health service.

Corbyn tells the Herald today that he’s not a Unionist, he’s a socialist which, frankly, does not come as much of a surprise. Everything we know about Corbyn’s worldview leads one to suppose that, had he been in Scotland last year, he’d have voted in favour of independence. That, after all, is what many, perhaps even most, of his fellow-travellers on the far-left did. Not, of course, that Corbyn has demonstrated any interest in this subject, one of, I remind you, considerable importance, at any time in the past. His constitutional thoughts have been confined to a long-standing support for a United Ireland.

In any case, the problem – for Corbyn and for Labour – is not Scotland, it is England. And the Union can be lost in England just as surely as it can be in Scotland. Even now, this is something of which too few people in London seem aware.

Jeremy Corbyn: is he really unelectable as prime minister? (The Guardian, 9/12/15)

1. “Leftwing” is a catch-all label that covers many aspects of Corbyn’s politics, some of which are more popular than others. Corbyn is happy to call himself a socialist, and no one has objected to him being called leftwing. It is not always a helpful phrase, however, and his supporters have objected to him being described as far left because it implies he is extreme, and at the margins of public opinion.

In some respects he probably is, but in others he isn’t. His support for expansionary economic policies has more mainstream support than is commonly assumed and some of his ideas, such as nationalising the railways – a policy often dismissed as irresponsible lefty wishful thinking – have overwhelming popular support.

2. “Leftwingers” can win, but it does not happen often. The Blairite rule that Labour loses general elections when it heads left has generally been true in recent years, but Ken Livingstone offers Corbyn some hope, as he said himself this morning. Dismissed as being on the lunatic fringe, he won two elections as London mayor and ran the capital very effectively.

It is interesting to speculate on what would have happened if Corbyn had stood for the mayoral nomination. While his chances of becoming prime minister may seem remote, given the support he is attracting now, if he had entered that contest he would probably be a dead cert to replace Boris Johnson next year. {…}

4. A lot depends on how well a leader can change public opinion, and as yet there is little evidence that Corbyn will be a great persuader. He has, of course, had a remarkable election victory, but that does not seem to be because he has changed minds. As he has suggested himself in interviews, it is more because he became an outlet for voters fed up with the Labour establishment who had at least found a candidate who represented their views.

He has shown little interest in what a Labour leader might have to say to win over voters who don’t already agree with him. Indeed, his victory speech on Saturday was notable in that it contained almost nothing aimed at appealing to the classic, middle England floating voter.

5. Corbyn’s “expand the electorate” strategy may be flawed. Asked how he could win an election with his policies, Corbyn has highlighted the large number of votes Labour could win by mobilising a leftish coalition of people who either did not register or turn out in 2015, or who voted for other progressive parties because they found Labour uninspiring.

It is true that there are plenty of votes in this pool, but a Fabian analysis looked at this strategy in some detail and concluded that the prospects of it providing a route to electoral victory were bleak.