Despite Corbyn’s leadership, Labour remains committed to regressive, corrupt politics
In the months since Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the emergence of Momentum and the promise of a new type of politics, many Greens look on enviously.
Labour have successfully relaunched their party as a progressive and inclusive social movement, and the result of this has been a tidal wave of support from passionate young activists – the type of activists that were joining our own party by the thousands just seven or eight months ago during the ‘Green surge’. It’s perhaps understandable that a collective paralysis has set in, the energy and enthusiasm of early 2015 having evaporated as we all attempt to come to terms with what Corbyn’s leadership means for us as a political party.
Despite the rhetoric however, little has changed on the ground – and in Labour-controlled local authorities up and down the country, their policy-making remains as regressive and corrupt as ever. Arguably one of the most disgusting policy initiatives to be proposed at a local level in some years is the idea of utilising Public Space Protection Orders (PSPO’s) to effectively criminalise homelessness – not a policy dreamt up by the Conservatives as you might well expect, but an idea that has been given serious consideration by Labour-controlled councils in areas as far afield as Manchester, Newport, Liverpool, Cheshire West & Chester and Hackney. For all the rhetorical flourish of Corbyn’s “new politics”, this looks and smells much more like the rancid, rotting corpse of New Labour than anything particularly fresh or revolutionary.
Since the general election a few months ago, the local Labour Party in Merseyside where I live have also been busy putting plans in place to sell a significant portion of green space in Liverpool to property developers, so that they can build yet more luxury yuppie apartments, following a farcically green-washed consultation process headed up by a former Brookside actor. What better way to outsource a potentially unpopular decision than to bring in a soap star, and give the whole process a showbiz-friendly public face?
In recent months Liverpool Labour have also been busy cutting the majority of funding for libraries in the city, forcing most of them to be run on a voluntary basis only – and even more insultingly have re-branded this as a victory for “community run public services” – propaganda the Tories would be proud of.
In the same short period of time, my local Labour Party have also conspired with the Conservative Communities and Local Government minister Greg Clarke to force through a quasi-presidential “metro mayor” agreement encompassing the whole of Merseyside, further eroding democratic accountability in the region, and significantly entrenching Labour’s position as stewards of a deeply undemocratic one party state as a direct result of the broken First Past The Post electoral system we’re forced to tolerate in English local elections. Proposals from the Liverpool Greens to consider more democratic alternatives such as a regional Merseyside assembly fell on deaf ears, and dissenting councillors subjected to vitriol and abuse both inside and outside the council chamber.
And yet so many of my friends and colleagues in the Green Party continue to heap praise on Jeremy Corbyn, despite the fact that all of this has happened under his leadership. This is simply not good enough. As a committed democratic socialist, I mean this in the most constructive possible way: we need to wake up and stop participating in the ludicrously counter-productive worship of Jeremy Corbyn as the left-wing messiah, and concentrate instead on getting more Greens elected in our target wards and constituencies.
As far as the day-to-day operation of the Labour Party is concerned, nothing has fundamentally changed since the general election. They are still a regressive political organisation, and they are still an obstacle to genuine change. Greens need to stop fawning over the leader of another political party, and start committing themselves to constructive activism that will produce more Green councillors over the next five years, and more Green MPs in 2020 – that’s the only way we’re going to achieve genuine change for the better both locally and nationally – and the only way we can continue to take positive steps towards delivering a true alternative to austerity, tackling climate change, creating more robustly democratic structures, and all the numerous other vitally important issues that we all care so passionately about.
It’s not just that Corbyn hasn’t so far been able to change the Labour Party. Corbyn himself, decent and honourable though he is, isn’t Green. Many people of Green-leanings joined Labour in the hope they could “educate” Corbyn and the Labour Party to a Green way of thinking. This I’m afraid is delusional. Corbyn himself has a growth fetish – his economic plan as publicly outlined aims to build almost indiscriminatly to generate growth “to grow ourselves out of trouble”. There is no realisation from him that this is incompatible with a finite planet. Greens put the environment before economic growth. Corbyn does not. French Greens made this mistake when they joined Francois Hollande’s Government in coalition. They have since quit in disgust. Leading french Green Cecile Duflot said: “I thought I could convert Hollande to ecology…Hollande has never been an environmentalist…as a genuine productivist he believes that growth is the only answer.”
Ross speaks as he finds, but here in Bristol, I’m not seeing any sign of collective paralysis and neither has our energy and enthusiasm evaporated. The surge may have passed, but that rate of expansion was never sustainable. We now have a much larger party to mobilise towards May’s campaign and are in no way running scared of Labour.
The message we need to get over to supporters tempted away by the promise of a new politics is that they risk voting for anti-Corbyn Labour candidates who are opposed to everything he stands for and will do all they can to depose him. The Corbynista on the ballot paper is more likely to be the Green candidate.
As a member of Momentum (anyone can join, and nobody wants Corbyn for PM more than me) I attended a meeting on Tuesday (wearing my Green Party badge) and can report that there was little sign of a “tidal wave of support from passionate young activists.” There were some, but most of those in attendance were middle aged or older, and the most common refrain from the floor of the meeting were recollections of the date in which the speaker was expelled from the party.
So I entirely agree with Ross’ final paragraph. Don’t be spooked by any stories of a Labour surge, if we continue our constructive activism on the ground then we will continue to progress.