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WITH Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour taking its fair share of fire, it is easy to forget how much worse things were earlier this year, and how far we’ve come.
Labour membership was stagnant. The recovery of party finances was set back by a costly general election campaign. The party was under attack at all ends of the spectrum.
Ukip cut Labour’s majority from thousands to 600 in Heywood and Middleton, while the Green surge soaked up tens of thousands of leftwingers.
The collapse of the Lib Dems was small recompense for the fallout from a disastrous Better Together campaign that kept the Union but cost Labour most of its Scottish support.
Promising to be tougher than the Tories on benefits earned scorn from the left while failing to mollify the right, and carving “controls on immigration” on a headstone was probably the nadir.
When a Conservative majority was returned and Labour’s ensuing leadership contest looked lacklustre, British politics seemed hopeless.
Other left parties were either regionally specific or didn’t translate their support base into seats, and the prospects for popular movements from below seemed bleak.
Friends who’d given up on Labour and friends who’d given up their weekends doorknocking for Labour were united in dejection.
When Jeremy announced his candidacy I was one of many who said: “Great, but they won’t nominate him.”
And yet he was, partly due to the new crop of talented left-wing MPs, like shadow climate change minister Clive Lewis, former NHS worker Kate Osamor or trade union lawyer and shadow treasury minister Rebecca Long-Bailey.
“Great, but he won’t win,” I continued. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
At the time, Tory journalists had no idea what to say. “He thinks Ed Miliband was good” remained the best the Sun and Express could manage.
“A real debate. Is that a really real debate? Or a really unreal debate? Labour desperately needs a really real debate,” added a malfunctioning Dan Hodges at the Telegraph.
Meanwhile, I volunteered to campaign for Jeremy, and then missed a phonebank one night.
“Don’t worry,” Jeremy’s redoubtable volunteer organiser told me. “We had nearly 400.”
A week later I talked to a slightly shell-shocked journalist as thousands of people thronged Camden town hall, filling several overflow rooms plus a rally outside, which Jeremy addressed from a Fire Brigades Union engine. I like to think this foreshadowed the FBU’s return to Labour.
We enjoyed some summer silliness — knitted Corbyn decorations on Etsy and “Kittens for Corbyn” Facebook pages.
But the levity belied more serious issues. In-work poverty skyrockets. Youth centres, GP surgeries, libraries, support for disabled and vulnerable people, or meals services for elderly people continue to close, with councils due to be deprived of even more funding to maintain services they are legally obliged to run.
Women and minorities are hit doubly hard. My generation are unable to afford rental deposits on tiny flats — let alone the magic mortgage deposits Cameron promises — a squeezed job market, spiralling debt and bans on claiming benefits.
For five years we had an opposition that gamely nodded along with much of this. That’s why #jezwecan represented a desperate aspiration for a fairer economy and a kinder politics.
We need public services in public hands. We need greater democracy in our workplaces and communities. We need the new politics.
That chilly morning in September when our team of London volunteers cheered Jeremy’s victory at a little pub by Queen’s Gate, the Sun ran the headline: “The lunatics are taking over the asylum.”
It fired the starting gun on a smear campaign worthy of Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup — where lobbying was called bullying, where peacemakers were branded terrorist sympathisers and where having principles was taken to mean giving up on elections.
Labour has since won its first by-election with an increased majority, plus its had a string of council wins, including from a Tory in Essex and a defecting Lib Dem in Richmond.
Popular campaigning and tough parliamentary opposition forced a partial rollback on tax credit cuts, two-thirds of Labour MPs held firm against another war in the Middle East and Labour membership continued to soar, bringing back mass politics.
The party of organised labour, there to empower people and communities, is finally realising its aim.
A few days before Jeremy won, someone remarked to me that he didn’t want to be leader. A little over 100 days later, he has faced down barrages of slander from the political Establishment with dignity and candour.
Whether he wants to be leader or not isn’t the question — Jeremy Corbyn sits where he is because a mass movement put in place someone who was in it for the soul of his party and the future of his country. There’s something to celebrate this winter.
- Nathan Akehurst is a recent Labour Party member, history graduate, communications worker and writer.
