In June 2017, Jeremy Corbyn caused a political earthquake when he came agonisingly close to winning a general election on a promise of up-ending 40 years of neoliberalism in Britain. On its fifth anniversary, Jonny Jones assesses the true legacy of that day.
By Jonny Jones. Cover image by Steve Eason
The general election of 2017 was never supposed to happen. It was an event that seemed to take the entire political establishment unawares; they have spent the last five years trying to eradicate it from memory. For any socialist, however, it is crucial that the essential lesson of the election is kept alive. It was an example of what Slavoj Žižek has described as “authentic politics”, that is, “the art of the impossible”, which “changes the very parameters of what is considered ‘possible’ in the existing constellation.”
Just two years earlier, David Cameron had unexpectedly won a small outright majority, bucking the polling that showed Labour and the Tories neck and neck. Labour came out of the election with 26 fewer MPs after collapsing in Scotland. Labour was punished north of the border for aligning with the Tories to oppose Scottish independence as part of an establishment bloc. Elsewhere, Miliband’s cautious, vacillating, and half-hearted steps away from the excesses of New Labour were not enough to tip the scales in his favour.
After Miliband stepped down as Labour leader, a safer pair of hands was anticipated – perhaps Andy Burnham, maybe Yvette Cooper. Instead, the shock of a Tory victory, the exhaustion of the post 2010 anti-austerity movements, and a series of unlikely and unwise decisions by the Labour establishment saw many left-wing activists move towards the party to support the eventual landslide winner, Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn’s first 18 months as leader were parlous, embattled by a party apparatus who despised him, a media class who treated him with sneering contempt, and an establishment who saw him as nothing less than a danger to national security. In the wake of the Brexit vote, Cameron resigned as Tory leader and was replaced by Theresa May.
The PLP used the referendum result as a pretext for a coup attempt against Corbyn, but it failed. Nevertheless, within months, with Corbyn tanking in the polls and former allies beginning to turn on him, May sought to capitalise on Labour’s weakness and increase her majority in parliament with a snap election.
YouGov gave her a 24-point lead in the polls. Pundits were falling over themselves to prophesy Corbyn’s demise. “Was ever there a more crassly inept politician than Jeremy Corbyn, whose every impulse is to make the wrong call on everything?”, asked Polly Toynbee. “Will there be 150, 125, 100 Labour MPs by the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then halve it”, came the sage prediction of Nick Cohen.
How did they get it so wrong? It’s not simply that they are idiots, though they certainly are that. Yet even some of Corbyn’s supporters were wavering. Just before the election was called, Owen Jones suggested that Corbyn should step down in exchange for a guarantee that a young left MP be given a place on the ballot paper for his successor. The situation was bleak.
What changed? It would have been easy in the context of this dire situation to batten down the hatches, defend what they could and hope the rout could be limited. Instead, rather than an overtly defensive campaign, Corbyn gambled that it was possible to use the campaign to make a major political intervention; to wage an argument and shift the political terrain.
A manifesto that the Labour machine thought would bury Corbyn set the election alight. A break with 40 years of neoliberal orthodoxy gave voters a real choice at a general election for the first time in decades. It was more than the manifesto, though. The confident mass rallies around the country, the huge numbers of campaigners, many of them not members of the Labour Party, brought out by Momentum to canvass, everything came together to make this more than just an election – it was an insurgent campaign built on mass involvement.
At decisive points, Corbyn stuck to his principles. After the Manchester bombing and later the London Bridge attack, Corbyn highlighted the role of British foreign policy and its alliance with the US in the “War on Terror” in making such violence more likely. He warned against a decent into Islamophobia and defended Muslims against a racist backlash. May’s attempts to attack Corbyn over this failed to land, and Labour’s polling went up and up.
On election day, the result was seismic. Corbyn had gone from 24 percent in the polls to 41 percent, trailing the Tories by just 2.5 percent. It was the biggest swing to Labour since the Second World War, and Labour won more votes than it did under Tony Blair in his victories in 2001 and 2005. The Tories were deprived of their majority and survived in government only through a stitch up with the DUP. All of this was possible because Corbyn and the movement around him fought to change the terrain of politics, not adapt to it.
Yet electoral success was a double-edged sword. Now that government seemed close at hand, changing of the terrain of politics became riskier. The left was just one more heave away from office. The assault on Corbyn was ferocious and multipronged: On the one hand, he was monstered as an antisemite, in a horrifying campaign that cynically manipulated the fears of Jews in Britain while silencing Palestinians on their oppression by the Israeli state; on the other, he was pushed into embracing a second referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.
On both these issues, the Corbyn who refused to mince his words over the Manchester bombing was absent; the idea that a political argument could be had and won was too much of a risk. Instead, Corbyn was traduced as a racist even as he apologised for antisemitism and drawn further into parliamentary machinations designed to obstruct Brexit. By the 2019 general election, Corbyn looked to many like just another politician who would say anything to keep his head above water.
The 2019 general election was a disaster that still hangs heavy on the left. Following the event, a significant section of Corbyn’s support lined up behind Keir Starmer, who lied his way into the leadership by promising to keep much of Corbyn’s manifesto. It was no surprise that Starmer’s actual mission, and the only one he has had much success at, was to lay siege on the left and to neutralise it as a force within the Labour Party. Despite this, a significant number of people cling to the idea that Labour can be reclaimed by the left.
This seems extremely unlikely. Corbyn’s initial rise to the leadership was based on contingent events, in particular a change in the leadership election rules, brought about by an attempt to weaken the unions, backfiring, and the nomination of Corbyn by MPs bitterly hostile to his politics in the name of keeping the left onside and quiescent. It is unimaginable that the organisation will allow something like this to happen again. Already, rules have been changed, decisions overruled, members expelled. Corbyn himself sits as an independent MP after being kicked out of the PLP by Starmer.
Much of what Corbynism achieved was predicated on it being bound up in the Labour Party and able to contest an election as a viable force. Even as tens of thousands leave the party, there is no obvious alternative organisation. So, in Britain today, we face a paradoxical situation in which huge numbers of people see themselves as socialists but are scattered across the battlefield, pursuing either divergent strategies or gripped by the pessimism of defeat. The political terrain has again shifted under our feet.
In this context, it is crucial to seize all opportunities to unite everyone who wants to fight against this divided government. There are several fronts on which we can and should be active, such as mobilising against the cost-of-living crisis, racist deportation policies, and escalation of the war in Ukraine, while building support for strikes and action to stave off climate catastrophe. These are not things that can be deferred, that we can hope will come out in the wash after a potential future Labour victory. They are generating both anger and activism in the here and now, and they are things that we can win over if we again hold to the art of the impossible and fight to shift the terrain of politics in our favour.
* Jonny Jones is an activist based in London. Originally from Merthyr, he researches trade union organising in the logistics industry and tweets at @jonnyjonez
