Why did Corbyn fail?

It has now been a few weeks since the 2019 general election, people have had time to rest and reflect over Christmas and New Year, and the Labour leadership contest is moving into its early stages. It is, perhaps, now a more appropriate time to offer sober reflections as to what went wrong. I have already written on Labour’s defeat in a previous blog post (https://emptyblogvoices.blogspot.com/2019/12/some-rough-reflections-on-labours-2019.html); however, new thoughts have occurred to me since writing that piece, and it is vital to keep a conversation going if the Left is going to learn why it failed in 2019 and how it can win in the future. In my previous post, I suggested there were three reasons Labour lost in 2019: Corbyn, Brexit, and policy. I want to flesh out the first of those reasons – Corbyn – in this piece; though it is impossible to separate the three reasons, as each informs the other, so some overlap is inevitable.

            Before I focus on Corbyn’s failings, however, one thing must be stressed. After the 2019 election defeat, many Establishment commentators dusted off the articles they thought they would publish after the 2017 election. What these commentators wanted to say, and now feel they can shout with abandon, is that they were always right in their initial analysis of Corbyn – that analysis being that Corbyn was a Left-wing aberration which the British public would never take to and was, therefore, virtually unelectable. It must be said, loudly and clearly, that Corbyn could have become Prime Minister. Corbyn’s significant problems lay in the way he conducted himself while leader; though, this conduct was not inevitable, and it had nothing to do with his socialist beliefs. Indeed, in terms of vote share increase, Corbyn was the most successful Labour leader since Attlee in 1945; the 2019 defeat should not be used to airbrush out this fact, in the same way that the 2017 semi-victory should not be used to airbrush out the 2019 defeat. Corbyn, then, was the right choice in 2015 and 2016. The election of Andy Burnham would have meant continuity Miliband, which had already been demonstrated to not work in 2015 and choosing a right-wing leader in either Yvette Cooper or Liz Kendal would have been even more disastrous. Indeed, many people in 2015 suggested that electing Corbyn was equivalent to electing Foot in 1980 – i.e. that electing Corbyn would mean electing a leader who was out of place in a changing political landscape and who would, consequently, be unable to achieve large public support; however, the ironic truth is that this analysis applied best to Cooper and Kendel – especially the latter. If one re-watches some of the 2015 leadership debates, one sees Kendal using right-wing talking points, like ‘balancing the books’, supporting cuts to welfare and offering unequivocal support to the EU, throughout. These talking points seem so anathema in today’s political context that even Boris Johnson does not repeat them. Had Liz Kendal been elected based on this right-wing platform, Labour would have suffered a worse defeat than it did in 2019.

               Nevertheless, Corbyn did get things wrong. So, what was the biggest, most fatal mistake that he made? For me, it was his failure to recognise and resolve his inability to think long-term. Corbyn was hopeless at devising a strategy which would guide his and the Party’s actions over any length of time. Often, Corbyn worked on an ad hoc basis – coming up with policy and taking major political decisions on the hoof. This worked well in campaign contexts where such skills are needed; however, the inability to think through political positions and how they fitted into a more comprehensive strategy ultimately meant that Corbyn was in danger of making mistakes. Furthermore, Corbyn did make mistakes – some were minor and of little consequence; others, however, were of great significance and, in the end, proved fatal.

            For instance, one of the minor mistakes Corbyn made was saying, immediately after the 2016 EU referendum result, that the UK should enact Article 50 without delay. The point he was making was clear: now that the people have voted to leave, politicians should respect that result. However, just blurting out that the UK should enact Article 50 without any planning looked stupid even in Brexit supporting circles. This mistake also enabled the Liberal Democrats, under Tim Farron, to paint Labour as a pro-Brexit party. In the end, this mistake did not make much of an impact, and in the 2017 election Labour did well while the Liberal Democrats failed hopelessly.

            Other mistakes, though, were of more considerable significance. Take, for instance, Corbyn's claim, after the 2017 election, that he and Labour would ‘deal with student debt’, which sounded to many like a commitment to write off student debt. After announcing this commitment on the fly, Corbyn had to then backtrack on his comments in an Andrew Marr interview. Many people might not remember this event, but it did damage Corbyn’s image, which was so crucial to his success, as a straight-talking, honest politician. Instead of coming across as a populist, no-nonsense politician, his backtracking reminded many of Nick Clegg and his commitments on tuition fees. However, while this mistake was more significant than the Article 50 mistake, there was one mistake, born out of this ad hoc approach to political strategy which, I argue, turned out to be the most fatal: Corbyn’s position on Brexit.

            Though Corbyn was lauded during the 2015 leadership election and the 2017 general election as being a politician who had not changed his views on core issues during his years in politics, he was more flexible than this image suggested. Corbyn was/is a Bennite – he looked up to Tony Benn as a friend and political hero. Benn was passionately against the EU, and Corbyn was no different. Corbyn voted to leave the Common Market – as it was then – in the 1975 referendum. Indeed, during the 2015 leadership election, when pressured, Corbyn did not say how he would campaign in the then-upcoming EU referendum. However, after becoming leader, Corbyn decided that his position over the EU was not one he was going to waste political capital over and decided to go along with the pressure from the PLP and campaigned, somewhat reluctantly, for Remain. This might have felt like the right position at the time, but as Brexit grew to dominate the political debate, it proved to be the biggest mistake of his leadership. That is, Corbyn’s ambiguous support for the EU laid the seeds for his ultimate defeat, especially as it meant that his position on Brexit forever changed based on the pressure coming from the PLP and the centrist Establishment press. Indeed, the 2019 election and the polling in its aftermath demonstrate, empirically, that it was Corbyn’s changing position on Brexit – starting with support for a hard Brexit, which changed to support for a custom union, which changed to support for a custom union with regulatory alignment with the single market, which changed to support for an election and then a second referendum, which changed, finally, to support for a second referendum with Corbyn staying neutral – which caused Labour to lose chucks of its Northern heartlands – gifting the Conservatives a majority – and which destroyed his reputation as being a different type of politician.

            Some may say this was inevitable either way – that is, if Labour had come out in favour of Leave, it would have lost an equal number of seats in the south of England. There is reason to doubt this claim, as most seats in England voted to leave the EU and the support for parties like the Liberal Democrats was always overemphasised. However, the point I wish to make is that this scenario was not inevitable but was instead a result of Corbyn’s inability to think long-term. If Corbyn had decided as he did over the issues of austerity and foreign policy, that he was not going to compromise his beliefs concerning the EU – which was a euro-sceptic position at heart – and if he developed a long-term strategy based around that fact and got control of the Brexit narrative, he could have changed events in such a way which might not have proven beneficial for Labour, but at least would have proved less fatal. That is, if Corbyn had clarified his position on Brexit, explained Left-wing reasons why one might want to leave the EU, and then, after the vote, stated clearly that he would never support anything which could reverse the 2016 decision, Corbyn could have carried enough of the membership with him to weather future Brexit storms. Instead, he never had a clear sense of direction. He was instead buffeted around, which caused him to look weak and ultimately meant he triangulated on Brexit – the most significant political issue of the day – in a populist epoch when triangulating politics is anathema. This failure was born from Corbyn’s inability to engage in long-term strategy, rather than the position on Brexit Corbyn finally settled on. However, for Corbyn to stay true to himself, which is what enabled him to appeal to so many people, he should have supported a position on Brexit he was intellectually and emotionally invested in. I do not think that position would have been anywhere close to the final, second referendum position Labour ended up adopting.

            So, why say this now? Well, if what I have said above is anywhere near right, we can conclude that Corbyn’s 2019 defeat had little to do with the radicalness of his policy platform. Instead, it was, in part, Corbyn’s inability to plan long-term and the connected failure of him not picking Brexit as one of the issues he and the Labour Party would refuse to compromise on. Thus, any future socialist leader of the Labour Party, in order to avoid the failures of 2019, do not need to tame their policy pitch; instead, they need to think about how they are going to narrate their policy pitch within the context of a broader, long-term political strategy which takes into account the political age we find ourselves and the nature of the problems facing working people today. Moreover, they need to choose which political issues they will refuse to compromise on. Every political leader only has a limited amount of political capital which restricts their room for manoeuvre and their ability to stand firm on specific issues. Corbyn, in 2015, decided that the main political issue he was going to refuse to compromise on was austerity. This was the right choice and helped Labour do well in 2017. The problem is that by 2019, for many voters, Brexit seemed more critical than austerity. Corbyn, in other words, did not invest his political capital in all the right places. If he had a better, well-thought-out long- term strategy on Brexit from the start of his leadership, this might not have happened.  

Thus, the real tragedy with Corbyn’s leadership is not that it was always doomed to fail, but that it could have been so much more; it could have resulted in a scale of progressive change this country has not seen since the 1945-51 Labour government. It is the Left’s job now to continue to work out what went wrong so that the failures of 2019 do not repeat themselves. The Left, in this country, gets very few cracks at the whip of political leadership; we cannot afford to mess up when we do get those chances. 

Jack Lewis Graham