The Labour party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) has voted to prevent Jeremy Corbyn from standing as a Labour MP at the next general election in a final insult to the former leader.
The motion was brought forward by Sir Keir himself, and passed with 22 votes to 12. Representatives from Aslef, the CWU, the FBU, and Unite were amongst those who voted against the motion, while GMB and Usdaw voted in favour.
The motion claims that Labour’s “standing with the electorate in the country, and its electoral prospects in seats it is required to win in order to secure a parliamentary majority and/or win the next general election, are both significantly diminished should Mr Corbyn be endorsed.”
In other words, Corbyn has been blocked from standing as an MP for Islington North, which he has represented for forty years having first been elected in 1983, on the grounds that he is unelectable and that his candidacy is likely to diminish the party’s public image.
The decision was met with outrage from activists within the party, with campaigning group Momentum labelling the motion an “anti-democratic stitch-up.” Backed up by the Socialist Campaign Group, Islington North Constituency weighed in on Twitter, reaffirming the “democratic right of all constituency parties to choose their prospective parliamentary candidates.” Corbyn has since offered his own comments, calling the decision a “shameful attack on party democracy.”
Labour’s National Campaign Coordinator Shabana Mahmood backed the decision however, citing Corbyn’s tepid response to the EHRC report on anti-semitism within the party as a threat to Labour’s parliamentary ambitions.
It is worth recalling that Corbyn welcomed the findings of the report, making it abundantly clear that “anyone claiming there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party is wrong.” He rightly added that the “scale of the problem,” had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party,” and was subsequently suspended.
In light of Corbyn’s comments, the anti-semitism argument appears patently ridiculous. Sir Keir himself has displayed little regard for jewish Labour members –– according to Jewish Voice for Labour, over 40 jews have been investigated for anti-semitism under Starmer’s watch and several, including veteran campaigner Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, booted altogether.
Whilst hammering jewish activists, Starmer has adopted a light touch on issues of islamophobia, a fact that should make Mahmood – one of the UK’s first female muslim MPs –– deeply uncomfortable. Former chairman of the EHRC Trevor Phillips, for instance, has been quietly readmitted to the party following a brief suspension despite his claiming that a muslim family adopting a non-muslim child would be “like child abuse.”
Those who voted in favour of the motion to block Corbyn’s candidacy were no doubt quick to highlight Labour’s disastrous showing in the 2019 General Election as further evidence of his being unfit to stand. As the mainstream media likes to remind us, Corbyn was at the helm when Labour achieved its worst result since 1935 losing sixty seats. But that’s only half the story.
Although they lost more seats to the Tories, Labour’s vote share in 2019 (32%) was greater than in the 2015 election under Ed Miliband (30%). Of course, Starmer isn’t calling for Miliband to be ousted from the party (Incidentally, Ed was quick to join in the anti-Corbyn dogpile, despite the Islington MP having defended Ed’s Marxist intellectual father Ralph Miliband from racially-tinged attacks by the Daily Mail in 2013).
Labour’s showing in the 2017 election shatters the illusion of unelectability even further. The reality is that Corbyn received more votes in 2017 in England than Tony Blair ever did in the glory days of New Labour, increasing the party’s vote share to 40% – the largest increase since 1945. The 2019 result was in large part due to Labour’s calamitous decision to back a second referendum, an about-face that Starmer was instrumental in implementing.
But Corbyn’s legacy is not merely the number of votes he secured for Labour. Rather, his enduring significance is the sheer volume of young activists that his optimistic message drew into the party and the wider labour movement. Under his leadership, Labour gained an unprecedented number of applicants, making the party not only the largest in the UK, but the largest political force in Europe. For many YCL members, campaigning for Corbyn was one of their first political acts, and the fallout from the 2019 election helped radicalise a huge swathe of Britain’s youth by revealing the dead end of bourgeois electoralism.
What then is Starmer’s real motivation for ousting Corbyn from the party that he has served for decades? The move to block Corbyn’s candidacy is yet another attempt by storming Starmer to demoralise and diminish the left wing of the party. The current Labour leader is certainly concerned with appearing electable, but Corbyn’s success at the polls and his enduring popularity within the labour movement and amongst the general public demonstrates that it isn’t the electorate that Starmer is courting. Rather, Starmer wants to appear ‘electable’ to the big-business interests that have helped fund his rise within the party, positioning Labour as pro-business.
As principled Marxist-Leninists, we should oppose the ongoing witch-hunt that is being conducted by Starmer, not merely because the election of a left government is an important aspect of our party’s programme, Britain’s Road to Socialism, but because the struggle for democracy – even within the context of a bourgeois parliamentary system – is an important one. As Lenin points out in his iconic work “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder, revolution is “impossible without a change in the views of the majority of the working class, a change brought about by the political experience of the masses, never by propaganda alone.”
By fighting against Keir Starmer’s purge, a generation of young Labour Party activists and supporters are gaining vital political experience. We should support them in their efforts by calling for Corbyn to be reinstated, but we must also be ready to welcome them into our ranks when the pitfalls of parliamentary socialism become too great to ignore.
Seán O’Connell, is a member of the YCL’s London branch
