This blog
is supposed to be on hiatus until September. However, on Wednesday night I
attended the leadership nomination meeting of my own Constituency Labour Party.
I thought I’d let you know what happened there, firstly as a bit of reportage
(my journalism limbs having grown rusty for quite a while) and secondly as a
bid to lay down a teeny, tiny historical document in its own right – one more
bit of the national jigsaw reported by many others from their own nomination
meetings.
I also
thought that the detail should remain anonymous, to allow for a bit of
frankness in the report, so let’s just say that this meeting took place in
England outside London, in a seat with a Labour MP, and in an area fairly
starkly divided between affluent areas to the north of the seat and some
pockets of deep deprivation to the south of the constituency.
We met,
nearly 200 strong, in the early evening of a fairly cool and cloudy weekday
evening, in a stocky old 1930s barn of a redbrick community centre. There was a
huge queue of slightly self-conscious looking Labour people snaking out of the
door; inside, the layout was a load of round tables, like at a wedding or an
open mic comedy night, at which some fairly good-natured chat was well underway
when I arrived, about halfway through the attendees’ filing-in. First
impression: this was a pretty huge turnout for a Wednesday night in the school
holidays. Second impression: the room was overwhelmingly white, and quite old,
with only a scattering of under-30s dotted about here and there. Third
impression: there was quite a lot of energy in this room. Jittery doesn’t cover
it.
The Chair first
announced all the arcane rules that the Labour Party specializes in – that we
had ten minutes to look over the statements of the two candidates, and then
that although we were supposed to have three minutes each to get up to speak
before moving to a vote, she felt that a minute and a half each would give more
people time to speak. Each ‘side’ – Smithites and Corbynites, as it were –
would then speak in turn, one from each camp. Having elicited at least a sense
of assent in the room for that procedure, off we went.
My table
had one of my friends at it, and some young-looking members who were keen to
talk about the European referendum, Theresa May’s likely future problems, and
the wider picture of Britain’s post-Brexit challenges. So far, so good – if you
didn’t have the uneasy sense that everyone was trying not to look at anyone
else in the eye about the leadership bust-up that we were there to actually
address. Still, I thought, when did the British ever come at something
unobliquely? Who wants to get in a shouting match with someone they’ve never
met before?
So.
Speeches started. First up was an Owen Smith supporter, articulate, sharp and
clipped about what she saw as Mr Smith’s speech-making passion, socialism and
commitment. There was a bit of a charged stillness at this point, as perhaps
those supporting Jeremy Corbyn (above) wondered why a first mover advantage had
been granted to the challenger, or were taken aback at the pointed nature of
this first speech’s portrait of Owen Smith’s virtues – an intentional contrast,
perhaps, with ‘their’ man. ‘Do we wish to remain a party of power?’ she asked,
rather nailing one of the central questions before the meeting straight away.
Next was
the first Corbyn advocate. This was a young, tall man who very quickly said
that ‘first we were told that it was Jeremy’s policies that were unelectable,
and now we are told that it’s his personality… it won’t wash with me, and it
won’t wash with anyone else’. He seemed angry but hardly incandescent, perhaps
‘put out’ and nonplussed at most, but he wasn’t exactly what you’d call furious
about it. There were a few scattered cheers at this point, but there was nothing
like any overwhelming pro-Corbyn feeling washing around the meeting.
The rest of
the speeches proceeded in a very similar pattern. The next speaker, a young
woman near the front, said that ‘we need to achieve power to do good’. But
there was a subtle change of mood going on, an emotional and biographical
connection with Corbyn and his ideas that defied the dry and instrumental
reasons so far mostly given for the Smith candidacy. The next person to speak,
a middle age woman, countered with ‘I am a child of the Labour Party… this was
where I feel I belonged’. The past tense was important here, for she was clear
that the Blair and Brown years had lost her to Labour: ‘it’s going to be a long
road and a hard road’, she said, ‘but we don’t need to sell out in order to
gain our principles’.
Some
pushback against this claim to unique moral (and Labour) virtue was inevitable,
and it came fairly rapidly when an older woman argued back that she had been
‘inspired’ by listening to Owen Smith: ‘he is left wing, and you can see it
shining through’. Having to claim that your candidate has the virtues often
seen as uniquely or quintessentially attaching to his opponent, and having to
plead ‘left wing-ness’, did however put Mr Smith’s supporters rather on the
back foot.
The meeting
gradually heated up, though it remained to be honest pretty tepid. It didn’t
look and sound much like a set-piece ideological confrontation: it was more
like a cut-up-rough staff meeting at a fading, failing conglomerate outmanouevred
by nimbler new rivals. The next idea to be highlighted was one of the themes
heard murmured through the hall: that Labour MPs had no right to overturn the
members’ views. The next Corbyn supporter up spoke with some vigour to the
effect that the Parliamentary Labour Party had tried ‘to deny us [our]
democratic rights and deny us our leader’. They had ‘joined the Tories and the
right-wing press in criticizing him’. The point about the media was another
running theme: another pro-Corbyn speaker said in terms that since the media
wouldn’t help Labour anyway, why should we co-operate them rather than building
up our own media?
The meeting
gradually built up towards a pro-Jeremy crescendo. I was at this point prompted
to speak myself (something I hadn’t intended, since I have to do it all the
time as a job anyway, and wanted to remain an observer). But the number of
Smith supporters willing to speak seemed to dwindle pretty quickly, and I got
poked in the ribs and given the microphone. I made two points: since the breach
between the PLP and their leader seemed irreparable, and given the terrible
things that had been said, how did anyone expect us to reunite if Jeremy was returned
to the leader’s office? Further, if people wanted a say over the Brexit
negotiations – and perhaps a second referendum on the terms of separation –
they should vote for Mr Smith, not Mr Corbyn, who had ruled out any return to
the polls on the issue. Anyway, a few points of process like that made not the
slighted impression in the room, and perhaps they shouldn’t have anyway when
the choices before members were on this scale.
Two further
contributors stuck out for me. The first such speech, from a woman near the
back of the room, said that she hadn’t felt able to be a Labour member because
of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; that she’d moved instead into trade union
social activism via Unite; and that she felt that something more truly Labour
and representative was now in place under Mr Corbyn. Then a passionate,
fired-up and emotional speech came right at the end, from a woman who said of
Corbyn that ‘he’s just changed everything. I’ve got hope. I’ve got something
for my sons. If we move away from Corbyn now, the kite that we’ve put up will
just deflate, we’re going to lose this moment, and I don’t care how long it
takes’. There was a real sense of fervour here, a visceral hunger for social
change, a deep attachment to one man as a transformative figure who just might
change British politics forever.
These
deeply-felt and highly-charged feelings centred and carried the room easily,
with an energy and vibrancy all of their own that pushed the anti-Corbyn voices
to the margins of the acceptable. You could basically argue until you were blue
in the face, but the tide was going in only one direction. So it proved in the
final vote: Owen Smith gained only about a quarter of the votes. It was a
pro-Corbyn landslide.
I was able
to see, here at the grass-roots, exactly those themes that will almost
certainly carry Mr Corbyn to victory nationally. In the background was anger at
New Labour’s ‘betrayals’: ‘part-privatisation', PFI and a perceived widening of the
gap between rich and poor, as well as fury about Iraq, that paradigmatic
betrayal and summation of all that is seen as wrong with the New Labour years
of media management, spin and sterility. At one point Mr Smith’s smooth
delivery and ‘sharp’ suits (and his previous career at the pharmaceuticals
giant Pfizer) were held against him: what people seemed to mean was that he
seemed to herald a return to business as usual, and perhaps that he reminded
them a little of Tony Blair.
There was enormous
anger at the actions of Labour MPs, who were felt to have acted
anti-democratically and in an underhand, hidden, dishonest manner. Clearly
present also was a sense almost of desperation – that this was a last chance
for a more honest, decent, true, moral and above all socialist politics that
may not ever come back. There was a once-and-for-all millenarianism in the
room, a sense of hope and expectation, a deeply-held faith that something many
members thought would never return– ‘true Labourness’ – had suddenly,
unexpectedly, by chance and even magically, been returned to them.
What there
was not was any claim of electability. Almost all the pro-Corbyn speakers
deployed forms of words that said that they knew that the next election was
lost, and had accepted it perhaps long ago – leading, all the more inexorably,
to the idea that you might as well say (with Jeremy) what you meant in the
first place. All the urgency, the ‘truth’, the moral drive, was with that side
of the argument, just as it still is with the SNP in Scotland.
There was,
however, little outright confrontation. Many members seemed to make a point of
applauding speeches from both ‘sides’: there was only a little bit of groaning
or murmuring at some statements; there were no grotesque claims made or slurs
cast (unlike in some other nomination meetings, if reports are to be believed).
Younger pro-Smith members, who mainly spoke with feeling about how betrayed
they felt at the Labour leader’s half-hearted commitment to the European cause
during the referendum, were particularly well-received even though the general feeling
of the room was against them.
One
supplementary: as I filed out of the hall, one of the pro-Corbyn speakers came
up to me, praised what I had said, said he’d think over the point I’d made
about a second European referendum. We shook hands. I said that the challenge,
Jeremy or no Jeremy, was to harness all the thirst for change we’d seen in the
room – and that the party’s new leftwards lean had encouraged. We parted on
good terms.
Overall,
there was still some comradeship on display here. Labour was still just about glued
together. But there was also an undertow of anger, even fury, that the Corbyn
experiment – defined as ‘natural’, ‘real’, ‘old’ and ‘true’ Labour – wasn’t being
allowed to take root or even being given a chance. That feeling will only grow
as the Corbyn leadership struggles unhappily on over the next few months. It
may explode if MPs do stage an even more audacious revolt (such as seizing
control of the party in Parliament), or if Labour is routed in an early General
Election, an event which will cause many members to blame the MPs. Labour
definitely isn’t disintegrating, if we go just by this one meeting: but it is
probably heading at full tilt towards a very, very dark and bitter place
indeed.
