What is the Labour Party for?

At a time when unruly electorates have persistently and dramatically refused to do what they are told, Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in the Labour Party leadership election of 2015 no longer seems as remarkable as it did at the time. Portrayed with unanimity by the press and his opponents as an eccentric, a joke, a no-hoper, an outsider, the socialist MP nonetheless romped home by a hefty majority of Labour Party members. Despite being manifestly and disablingly unable to command the support of his MPs, and tanking in almost every public poll, he duly increased that majority when chaotically challenged only a year later. How this happened, and what it might mean, are the questions at the heart of three highly enjoyable books, all approaching the Corbyn phenom­enon from different angles. Rosa Prince, in Comrade Corbyn, offers a pacy biographical account, sourced predominantly from outside his circle; Alex Nunns’s The Candidate is a very well-researched narrative, widely sourced but written from a supportive perspective; and Corbyn: The strange rebirth of radical politics by Richard Seymour mostly eschews the personal for a witty and acute political and historical analysis from a position to the left of Corbyn.

There is a preference in the media’s political coverage – and in political campaigning altogether – for symbol and personality over policy and fact. The media coverage of Corbyn, who despite being an MP and unusually active campaigner for over thirty years had not much figured in the press until the leadership contest, has been by any measure persistently negative. We therefore know rather a lot (or think we do) about his apparent eccentricities – his allotment and jam-making, his vegetarianism, the precise degree of his bow at the Cenotaph, his clothes – and very little about his policies. He has been mediated, mostly by his detractors, in a story of remarkable linguistic consistency; he is a “hard left” figure from the old “loony Left”, a friend to terrorists, incompetent and unelectable, yet simultaneously dangerous and threatening.

Prince, who is a journalist herself, nonetheless paints an appealing portrait, in opposition to some of these lines. Frequently throughout Comrade Corbyn, people absolutely opposed to the Labour leader commend him as “principled”: a school contemporary – “I take off my bloody hat to him because he was swimming against the tide”; Lord Bew, scathing about Corbyn’s talks in the 1980s with Sinn Fein but grudgingly conceding that, on the issue of the Guildford Four and other wrongly imprisoned groups, “you’ve got to give the devil his due”; Rupert Murdoch tweeting in 2015 “Seems only candidate who believes in anything, right or wrong”.

The other phrase that reoccurs is “without ambition”. Corbyn comes across as a man of unusually consistent commitment, dogged in pursuit of what he regards as justice, but one who had to be persuaded first to stand as an MP and more recently to stand for the leadership. He floats through Nunns’s narrative as the modest and diffident embodiment of his supporters’ values, while an amateur but energetic team try to organize him: simply getting him on a train seems to have been a job in itself.

The story of how such an other-worldly figure became leader of the party simply by being himself is an oddly electrifying one, nicely told by Prince and better still by Nunns, and worth attending to if only to see how some widespread narratives suppress certain truths. The Blairite faction in the Parliamentary Party was never as large as people thought. Nonetheless, its members had disproportionate influence with the media, and it is largely their lines that are taken as gospel. So the decline of Labour’s fortunes is seen as a result of the departure of Tony Blair; had he not won three elections? And the 2015 general election result was because Ed Miliband was too left-wing. And the election of Jeremy Corbyn was because Miliband had introduced a new way of electing the leader. Following this narrative, all that is required for Labour to win again is the rectification of this error, by hook or by crook, and the subsequent leadership of a Blairite.

All three books, with different degrees of zest, show this narrative to be a fantasy. Blair (and Gordon Brown) managed to lose 5 million votes between 1997 and 2010, many of them from their working-class base; Scotland was lost because the Scottish chose a left-wing party over a Labour Party that had taken them for granted; and the electoral system that in March 2014 handed power to the party’s members, rather than a block vote by MPs, was hailed at the time by Tony Blair himself (“a long overdue reform . . . that [I] should have done myself”) and nearly all of his supporters – Nunns cheekily offers a standalone page of quotations to make that point. (It might be added that whenever Blair or his close ally Peter Mandelson pop up to offer helpful advice these days, the general public ungratefully ignore them. According to a recent YouGov poll, Blair is currently more unpopular across all demographics than Corbyn, which is quite an achievement.)

Prince traces Corbyn’s victory back to an incident in 2012 in which the Labour MP for Falkirk, Eric Joyce, headbutted a Tory MP in a bar and ultimately had to resign his seat. The selection process for the ensuing by-election pitted Labour right-wingers against leftist trade unions, and allegations of serious impropriety ultimately led to the Collins review of 2014, an attempt to boost membership and reduce union power, broadly welcomed at the time and spectacularly backfiring later; the ironies around this episode are multiple and comical, the fine detail in Nunns’s account well worth the investment. But the crucial facts are these: that given the opportunity to choose an unashamedly left-wing leader, a huge number of Labour members did so. Twice. These members – who now constitute the largest political party in Europe – are not simply a group of Trotskyite entryists, as all the authors make entertainingly clear. The “soft-left” members alienated by Iraq and Blair slowly returned between 2010 and 2015; Corbyn then pulled in more of the old Left, and also the young single-issue protesters who (understandably) had pursued their politics outside the party – UKUncut, Occupy, environmental protesters. Apart from the Greens, no party had offered these voters any home at all. All the writers agree that Corbyn’s history – consistently appearing on picket lines and protests – made him almost uniquely credible to all these disparate groups.

The refusal of many Labour MPs to accept this result has led to an ongoing civil war, in which symbolic conflicts (over Trident, Syria, Brexit) mask an unglamorous wrestle for control over the party machinery. It is implausible that the party’s dire polling is unconnected to perceptions of Corbyn, and equally unlikely that the party’s internal divisions have had no effect. (Jamie Reed sacrificed his Copeland seat precisely to damage Corbyn: boosting the Tory majority, in his eyes, was a small price to pay.) But Corbyn has shown that he has little appetite to go, and his opponents cannot make him. Unless there is a change in the rules for nomination and voting in a leadership contest, Corbyn is surely safe. The membership remain solidly behind him.

But whoever eventually wins control of the party, no Labour leader, currently, can overcome the damage jointly caused by the three referenda. The loss of the Alternative Vote referendum in 2011 has enshrined an electoral system that will see Labour out of power for the foreseeable; the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014 unexpectedly handed Scotland to the SNP; and the Brexit decision in 2016 has seen hard remainers go to the Lib Dems, who explicitly oppose Brexit, and hard leavers go to UKIP and the Tories, who support Brexit wholeheartedly. On Europe, Labour will lose votes however it positions itself.

Seymour is utterly unsentimental in his analysis. He sees no hope for the Labour right wing to regain power, based on the trajectory of their decline within the party. (This is surely correct; John McDonnell may have been tactless in his description of the plotters against Corbyn as “fucking useless”, but on any metric he was right.) Seymour also sees little hope for the Left, who, even without the distraction of internal conflict, cannot gain enough votes to form a majority government. As he points out, any effort to “transform the party” from the Left could take all their energy until the election. It could take years for the smaller battles – over the selection of MPs, the make-up of the National Executive, the leadership of unions and constituency parties, and so on – to reach a tipping point. During that process, it will be very hard for Corbyn to make the clear radical case which is now his only option.

Does anyone know now what the Labour Party is for? Corbyn’s clarity on this in the leadership contests shone through, which is why he won. (He opposes inequality, which has risen in the UK since 1979 under both the Conservatives and New Labour, and seems to be the topic that, for whatever reason, Corbyn’s detractors will do anything not to talk about.) His opponents’ position is less clear; triangulation by platitude. There is strong recent evidence that people will not be fooled by that stance forever. If there is now any ideological difference between the Labour Right and the Liberal Democrats, it is far from obvious; talk of needing a new party between Corbyn and the Conservatives overlooks the fact we already have one.

Perhaps the only positive for the Left is that their arguments can now be made at all. A large number of voters, clearly committed and passionate, are hungry for a change. They cannot be simply taken for granted (as they were before Corbyn’s nomination – “where else do they have to go?” was the response from Andy Burnham’s camp), nor written off as a handful of naives and Trotskyites. They are unlikely to go away. James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party were merely the punchline to a joke in 1997, when they stood in every seat and lost every deposit; but only twenty years later, they have achieved their objective despite not even existing anymore. Given recent history, no one can confidently predict what Jeremy Corbyn’s legacy might eventually be.