Corbyn prepares to lead UK Labour Party amid socialist surge

The quote in a British newspaper last weekend was hardly likely to inspire confidence for many Labour supporters about to hear news of who will be their next party leader. “Perhaps we will wake up on Saturday afternoon and find it has all been a bad dream," an anonymous British Labour politician told The Observer.

On Sept. 12, at a specially convened conference, the Labour Party will elect a new leader, after the resignation in May of Ed Miliband, who, in the general election that month, presided over a heavy defeat to the incumbent Conservative government.

But far from being a friendly contest between comradely rivals, the Labour Party has instead plunged into a fractious civil war that has pitted left against right and grass-roots members against parliamentarians and seems set to elect a winner who at the contest’s beginning was a rank outsider.

That person is Jeremy Corbyn, a 66-year-old socialist and veteran parliamentary backbencher with no executive experience and a long track record of party indiscipline. The leadership contest has propelled him in a few months from an obscure politician to leader-in-waiting of one of Europe’s oldest and most established left-wing political parties.

Critics of Corbyn believe that his likely victory on Saturday will ruin Labour’s chances of regaining power not just in the next general election in 2020 but in subsequent elections as well.

“Labour is in danger more mortal today than at any point in its existence,” former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair — whose lingering unpopularity with the party’s left-leaning base has helped fuel the Corbyn surge — wrote in August. “[We are] walking eyes shut, arms outstretched, over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below.”

For the anti-Corbynites — a faction that includes Corbyn’s three centrist leadership rivals, Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall — Corbyn, the MP for Islington North, represents an outdated far-left tradition within Labour: statist, anti-business, soft on welfare claimants and weak on defense.

But Corbyn’s supporters argue that their candidate will breathe new life into British socialism. They say his air of rumpled authenticity, coupled with his staunch opposition to Tory-imposed spending cuts, chimes with the populist mood sweeping European politics that has seen leftist parties win power and influence in countries like Spain and Greece.

“Jeremy is winning because he offers something different, something Labour members can campaign for and believe in,” said Andrew Smith, a Labour activist and former local council candidate in northern London.

“He represents the idea of power as an instrument of change, rather than power for its own sake … It is telling that he’s the only candidate to inspire people to join the party in large numbers.”

But Corbyn never expected to find himself driving an insurgency at the heart of British politics. “I suppose it’s my turn,” he is reported to have said in early June, when first drafted to stand as the candidate for Labour’s radical left, with no realistic chance of success, in the race to replace Miliband.

Yet during the summer, an influx of new Labour Party members, combined with a huge increase in registered supporters — ordinary voters entitled to cast a ballot in the leadership race in exchange for a fee of about $5 — catapulted Corbyn from fringe candidate to prohibitive front-runner. In scenes rarely seen in modern British politics, Corbyn toured the country to increasingly large crowds at packed out public meetings, often addressing the throngs outside his rallies as well as those crammed inside.

If things unfold as expected this weekend, these activists will prove crucial to securing Corbyn’s long-term survival as leader, something large sections of the British press seem determined to undermine. Throughout the leadership contest, Corbyn’s campaign was adept at using social media to circumvent traditional media channels and communicate directly with supporters.

“Corbyn’s lack of a conventional political personality is one of the things that appeals to all those tens of thousands of new activists,” said Glasgow Herald columnist and author Iain Macwhirter.

“There’s something curiously fitting about this: The new media is rediscovering old politicians. Now that the conventional press are losing their grip and people are forming their opinions based increasingly on social media networks, the old has become new.”

One of Corbyn’s first tasks as leader will be to appoint a shadow Cabinet. This won’t be easy: A number of high-profile Labour politicians, including Cooper and Kendall, have already ruled out serving as part of his front-bench team, and his lack of authority within the parliamentary Labour Party means that he may have to build an opposition Cabinet from a small group of left-wing allies.

However, there are signs that the Labour hierarchy has begun to reconcile itself to Corbyn’s impending victory. According to The Guardian, Blairites have abandoned recently floated plans to reintroduce elections for shadow Cabinet posts — a move that would have allowed the parliamentary Labour Party to elect MPs from the right of the party to speak on key policy issues, thereby restricting Corbyn’s ability to carve out his own, distinctively radical, platform.

At the same time, some of Corbyn’s most vocal opponents seem to have adopted a more conciliatory approach toward him. Chuka Ummuna, an staunch New Labour modernizer who in June berated the Labour membership for “behaving like a petulant child,” recently urged Blairites to “accept the result” of the leadership election and “support [the] new leader in developing an agenda that can return Labour to office.”

So by midday on Saturday afternoon — and barring a late, unforeseen surge from one of his competitors — Corbyn will become one of the most left-wing leaders in the Labour Party’s 100-year history. He will carry a substantial mandate from the party’s membership but command little support among its parliamentarians. He will have a brief opportunity to introduce himself to the British public but only against a backdrop of intense media scrutiny.

But, as Ummuna’s comments showed, with the threat of an anti-Corbyn insurrection from within the party having retreated, Corbyn should be free to spend his weeks as Britain’s official opposition leader shaping his public image. In order to offset claims that his appeal is limited to a small chunk of the British electorate, Corbyn’s backers believe that he should make a prompt bid for middle-class as well as traditional progressive working-class votes.

“We desperately need policies that transform the lives of the 1 in 5 workers who earn less than a living wage [and] who lack an affordable home,” the influential socialist columnist Owen Jones argued in a recent article.

“But empathy for the worst affected alone will never win an election. Jeremy has begun outlining policies to support self-employed people and entrepreneurs … This has to be built on, with a direct appeal to both middle-income and middle-class people that goes beyond being asked to empathize for the poorest people in society.”