Mutya Keisha Siobahn and Saint-Just
Why unifying behind Jeremy Corbyn is not an option
In its closing stages the Labour leadership race went musical with UB40, or a part of UB40 in dispute with the other half, backing Jeremy Corbyn.
The state of the Labour Party has however brought to mind another popular beat combo — the Sugababes. For the uninitiated, Mutya Buena, Siobahn Donaghy and Keisha Buchanan burst on to the scene in 2000 as 16-year-olds with their self-written hit Overload. After replacing Siobahn with former Atomic Kitten Heidi Range, they went on to be the most successful British girl group of the 2000s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dMNhXQMlHw
What have the Labour Party got in common with the warblers behind Round Round and Too Lost In You? Well it’s the nature of their fall from grace. Mutya left the band in 2005, leaving only one original member. The hits were fewer, the writers different and more dubious, but About You Now still stands out as a pop classic. In 2010 however Keisha left the band and, with no original members left and an entirely different musical style, they were not the same pop group even those of us huddled into the Astoria awaiting another Pete Doherty no show begrudgingly liked.
A similar process has now happened to the Labour Party. The only poll of the current Labour leadership election shows Jeremy Corbyn cruising to victory, but astonishingly shows Corbyn getting utterly thrashed 68% to 32% by the challenger Owen Smith among members who joined before May 2015. In short, the Labour Party has undergone a hostile takeover and is no longer the same party it was less than 18 months ago. Like the Sugababes it’s now got an entirely new membership.
Other analogies are of course available, Theseus’ ship, Trigger’s broom but the choice of an act who conquered the British charts at the turn of the Millennium only to falter at the end of the decade as simile feels apt.
The astonishing shift also helps explain some of the dynamics of the leadership campaign. Swamped constituency meetings endorsing Corbyn. Mass rallies followed by by-election defeats. Major Labour figures stating their opinion that Jeremy Corbyn is not up to the task of being leader, and not just being ignored but booed as traitors to the party they’ve served for decades longer than those doing the booing. Those who have been on the phones will be able to tell you of conversations with members who backed the leader last year but are now horrified by him. Yet despite the undeniable toxicity his leadership has unleashed, Corbyn it seems likely to win and win well.
I suspect Corbyn supporters would happily agree with the idea that Labour is now a different party. It was, after all the entire point. The problem is, the hostile takeover has changed Labour into something it has never been in its 116 year history. It was never founded as a radical socialist movement but as a parliamentary party which would seek power by drawing on all parts of the left and governing for everyone. By its very definition Corbynism cannot do this — Jeremy was elected leader on the premise that he was the one true carrier of the flame. Compromise would defy the entire point of the project. If you doubt this, then what is the point of his leadership? Why not resign when 172 out of 230 MPs say they have no confidence in you but campaign for a candidate who takes forward the bits of your program that the party could unite behind? Because as has been shown time and time again the Corbyn project is to create permanent revolution within the Labour Party.
Why is this? It’s surely not beyond the realms of logic that if you’re driving people who’ve knocked on doors, stood as candidates and in many cases devoted their lives to Labour into despair, it might be tough to win over sceptical voters. In a General Election no one can hear you scream, “Respect The Mandate!”
While the much publicised Trotskyists may be providing organisational muscle and nous to the likes of Momentum, they are hardly the majority. Why then have Corbyn and his advisers shown a singular inability to make concessions in the name of party unity? Why, in his first 10 months as leader did he antagonise those sceptical of him so much 80% of them felt unable to express confidence in him? Why now, with the party on the electoral precipice, does the leadership still seem to regard replacing party officials and MPs as something well on the agenda when doing so has caused the former to threaten to strike, and doing the latter would turn a likely electoral massacre into a racing certainty?
When actions defy practical logic, it tends to be for philosophical reasons. It would after all have been far easier for Bishop Berkeley to kick a stone than claim it didn’t materially exist. It is the case with Corbynism. To admit to major imperfections in the project would destroy its main justification as the sole claimant of virtue. The moment other views are accepted as justified within left-wing tradition, whether it be Syria, the economy, NATO or the NHS, the leadership loses its moral and intellectual power. Once you admit complexity the spell is broken. If the PLP are not neoliberal shills but people desperate to help the poorest who have through experience and expertise come to a very different conclusion on how to do so, then the edifice cracks and the virtue of implacable adherence to dogma falls away. Jeremy Corbyn is suddenly not an embattled socialist saviour but a vaguely inept man who’s not very good at working with his colleagues. Conversely, once the concept of the Sugababes becomes more important than its imperfect, dissenting members they become dispensable.
In a section of The Rebel examining the French Revolution, the philosopher Albert Camus details how a political project which defines itself as virtuous by its constancy to inviolable principles, follows an inevitable logic. When the principles fail, either to unite the people or in practice, it cannot be the fault of the principles or the rigid adherence to them, but the people themselves.
In one passage, he paraphrases Saint-Just, the revolutionary leader behind the terror as saying:
“From the moment that laws fail to make harmony reign, or when the unity which should be created by adherence to principles is destroyed, who is to blame? Factions. Who comprises the factions? Those who deny by their very actions the necessity of unity. Factions divide the sovereign; therefore they are blasphemous and criminal. They and they alone, must be combated. But what if there are many factions? All must be fought to the death. Saint-Just exclaims: ‘Either the virtues or the terror.’”
Now, no one is accusing Jeremy Corbyn or his supporters of dragging recalcitrant MPs off to the guillotine, but it’s fair to say he and his allies would like to see the political executions of a fair few MPs, officials and councillors through deselection campaigns and sackings. Camus’ characterisation fits perfectly to the prevailing attitude in Labour- its state is not the fault of Jeremy’s principles or failure to practically expand bromides into solid, workable and popular policy, but the MPs. The flaws in Jeremy’s policies, such as they are when it is rare we hear more than exhortations to end great evils, are not at fault because they cannot be, it must be the fault of the people pointing out the problems. The terrible logic of purity leads to people with noble aims supporting political suicide and excusing any awfulness because they dismiss deviation from sacrosanct doctrine as heretical. Unlike in revolutionary France, it is impossible to deselect the electorate.
Thus we see the, if you’ll pardon the bourgeois pun, momentum of the Corbyn project. If there is to be peace it will only be on their terms, and like the Sugababes, Corbyn’s party will still be called Labour but it will no longer be the same entity led by Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair in anything but name.
It’s important to elucidate why this new party should be unacceptable to anyone on the centre-left. Corbyn often says he doesn’t do personal so let’s go on policy. No Labour MP or member who believes NATO has been invaluable in keeping the peace in Europe over the past 70 years can seriously advocate a man who thinks it should, “pack up and go home” becomes Prime Minister. They can vacillate, change the subject or remain silent and be diminished by doing so but they will not be able to honestly say they have any confidence in the man they’re asking the nation to vote for’s ability to perform the first basic duty of a leader. If you believe that for all its faults and the need to rein in its excesses, capitalism has time and time again proved the most reliable method of raising living standards for the poorest then you cannot honestly stand up and say that John McDonnell, with his record of strangely “joking” about overthrowing it, should be in charge of the nation’s finances. Nor can they tell people to trust in men who as recently as last year were lauding Venezuela as a model for their own socialist Utopia rather than a humanitarian catastrophe. It is asking the impossible and the morally undesirable — you are asking MPs and members to lie and say a man is decent and capable when they believe his policies and statements show him to be the opposite.
With Corbyn thought almost certain to retain the leadership though, this hasn’t stopped soft left writers sympathetic to Corbyn making calls and pleas for unity once the result is announced. One, the journalist Abi Wilkinson, has issued a particularly well written and heartfelt plea, complete with a nice Peep Show analogy. The problem is, for those on the centre-left the Labour party stopped being a comedy following an egotistical man named Jeremy and long ago became a horror film. Those urging unity are like the characters in Sam Raimi’s cult 1981 classic The Evil Dead who tell their friend Cheryl to ignore the deep feelings of horror at what she feels is present in the remote house they are holidaying in.
Which brings onto the demons his leadership has unleashed. The full specifics need not be gone over in depth again, purely because its sheer scale is astonishing and it is impossible to keep up with each fresh outrage. A Jewish female MP has received 25,000 abusive messages and requires police protection from her own party’s supposed supporters. 40 female MPs wrote to the leader outlining their concerns and were publicly told by their leader to ignore it. We could go on, but the disgusting and indubitable thing is that under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership all this has happened, and happened to such an extent it has become normalised. Just two years ago a Labour councillor caught being anti-Semitic would’ve been major news. Now the leader appearing at a rally with a woman who openly said the Jews were responsible for the slave trade is a mere footnote among the many things MPs are supposed to forget about and rally round the leader.
The question those on the soft left who feel they can and should come to an accommodation with or support Corbyn should be asking themselves is why all this has happened under Jeremy and whether this is because of something inherent about the leader and his allies political beliefs. If there is, then unity is not member’s duty, opposition is.
To answer this question clearly, one must first state what is not the case. It is not true that a majority, or even a large minority of Corbyn’s supporters are abusive zealots. In fact most are well meaning and full of concern for society. The charge against Corbyn on anti-Semitism is not that he himself is a raving anti-Semite. Nor is it, despite his apparent friendliness with those who have behaved repugnantly, that he deliberately panders to those who are. If they were, then in some ways Labour’s toxic atmosphere would be easier to fumigate. Instead it is that the simplistic nature of his worldview creates the conditions for a deeply unpleasant politics to thrive.
In every Jeremy Corbyn speech I have seen there are lines apparently pinched from Elvis Costello cast-offs. They will go something like this, “What’s so wrong with wanting peace and equality?” or its cousin, “Surely this societal ill can’t be right.” The words are innocent enough but the implication is not. It is that those who do not agree the leader’s methods are plausible or desirable, do not do so in good faith because they are motivated by similar compassion. When the solution to a problem is presented as will, then those who disagree can only not back the cause out of treachery or cowardice.
The old Marxist distinction of oppressed and oppressor is part of what fuels Corbynism. You are either in the Corbyn camp and on the side of the oppressed or a part of the conspiracy against them. It is why MPs who when Labour Party politics didn’t resemble a video nasty were hyper-critical of Tony Blair are now called ”Blairites”, and others who fought the Tories for decades are now told to go and join them. It is also why Owen Smith’s key tactic — appealing to Corbyn supporters’ better nature and arguing he shared socialist values but would be more competent and likely to put them into practice, seems to have failed. You’re either with Jeremy or you’re suspect and with the oppressors, even if your political programme is one specifically designed to be conciliatory and hold together the party’s warring factions and provide the anti-austerity politics supposedly a key motivating factor for those who wanted Corbyn as leader.
Alongside the tendency to follow Saint-Just, this directly causes the toxic atmosphere within Labour. Of course most Corbyn supporters are decent people and these distinctions don’t cause them to hurl abuse at MPs. The dichotomy may cause them to dismiss inconvenient facts, believe conspiracy memes and put their faith in delusional thinking about the world beyond the Labour Party, but nothing more. However if your entire political project is sustained by the idea that those who disagree are not motivated by principle but by bad faith, others will believe the end justifies unpleasant means. Worse — the former group, the nice, decent people, will seem to legitimise the nastier elements by then not believing their targets’ understandable outrage when the leader ignores or dismisses their concerns.
The oppressed/oppressor distinction also helps explain Corbyn and the hard-left’s penchant for excusing vile regimes and those guilty of anti-Semitism. Corbyn appeared on Iran’s Press TV after they were accused of broadcasting the words of a coerced torture victim. As the actions of a ‘decent man’ it doesn’t make sense — until you realise the U.S. is the oppressor so their enemies’ actions are always excusable. Israel similarly, is the tool of Western Imperialism, so even those who see wrong and right on both sides and qualify their support for Israel’s existence with a recognition its government can behave badly are siding with the oppressor against the oppressed.
All these factors mean that Corbyn led Labour will eventually not be the Labour Party. It will be the Nasty Party, and though it will be heart-wrenching a party many of us who hold left-wing values cannot support.
For voters, the response to this is easy — rejection. As the polls and results show. Like the millions who bought Sugababes records because they just liked the tune, they will find somewhere new. Nearly half of Labour voters are disatisfied with Corbyn as leader. 71% of those who voted Labour in 2015 but would not now say the problem is Jeremy Corbyn.
For long-term members it is more difficult. Many feel a deep personal connection to Labour and have spent years knocking on doors, boring friends with their passion and attending meeting after meeting. There is despair and anger and in many a determination to hang on to a party that was a part of themselves and keep it out of the hands of those they perceive as wreckers. However, eventually many will be forced to admit their party is dead and channel their efforts towards charity, family, work, going down the pub or even another political party.
For MPs it is more difficult still. These are people who have devoted their lives to changing things through politics, through gaining and exercising power. Often first as councillors, then as MPs then, they will have hoped as ministers in a Labour government. They are also on the frontline and have to deal with the toxicity in a way that even the most vocal members will not have experienced.
Unlike Labour’s lay members and voters they cannot walk away from the Tarantino-esque Mexican stand-off between hard-left and the rest and tell those backing Corbyn that it’s their funeral.
The way forward for them is far from clear but it is not “unity”. The most harmful intellectual conceit the left has indulged in since Corbyn got on the ballot paper in 2015 has been that his politics are morally acceptable to those who oppose him. Each time people on the left have called him “decent and principled”, or pretended the problem is competence and electability it has legitimised him and taken Labour further down the rabbit hole. Yes, he is unelectable and incompetent, but these are not sui generis concepts — they are products of the bad, wrong things he believes and the bad, wrong ways he plans to implement those beliefs. As David Miliband put it, the problem is not that Corbyn is undesirable because he is unelectable it is that he is unelectable because he is undesirable.
So if not unity then what? Honesty. MPs should refuse to serve him and level with members about what his leadership means and why to them it is not just a bad idea but immoral. One of the problems with MPs’ opposition to Corbyn so far is that attempts to brush disagreements under the carpet for unity’s sake has led to them looking underhand. They have had to tell the TV cameras everything is fine only to later outline the situation was quite the opposite. It makes deep, principled opposition look like opportunism. Doing so again will look doubly disingenuous to voters, as every interviewer will ask them what’s changed since June when they declared him unfit to be leader. They will be forced to defend every inevitable outrage Corbyn inflicts, like hostages paraded on his beloved Press TV or risk the whole cycle of recrimination starting again. Minor quibbles about strategy can be suppressed, the fact you think your leader would make a disastrous Prime Minister cannot.
Instead they should ape Corbyn and McDonnell, who were members of the Socialist Campaign Group, and form their own internal caucus within Labour setting out an alternative direction for the party. The new grouping would provide a forum for policy and hope to Labour members who find Corbyn’s politics reprehensible and should not give up the fight. The new group could ape the leadership’s tactics in another way by drawing on the Saving Labour campaign and encouraging those who re-joined Labour in an attempt to oust Corbyn to keep up the fight and recruit members centred on this group. Of course, they will initially receive criticism for dividing the party and not “taking the fight to the Tories”, but these accusations ignore a truth and an opportunity. The truths are that the party is horrifically divided and will be whether they choose to park principle for unity or not and that while divided parties don’t win elections, neither do ones led by people like Jeremy Corbyn. The opportunity is that they could prove themselves far more effective in fighting the Tories than a leadership whose primary concern is remaking the party. They would still be walking into the lobby to oppose Tory policy and could unite with the leadership where there is common ground, on say grammar schools. They could also table amendments and private members bills on key campaigning issues and win credibility for their approach, as well as putting motions to conference.
Such an entity would provide hope and a focal point for the foot soldiers hoping to win back the party inch by inch, member by member, CLP by CLP. MPs and members would politely inform those backing Corbyn that just as the leader stuck to his principles they planned to stick by theirs and advocate the course of action they thought best for Labour and the country. If the leadership wanted to declare war on those who shared those principles, then it would be them who opted to escalate the civil war and tear the left asunder, not those who were open in their belief that they were sticking to the values of the party founded as Labour in 1900.
The story of the Sugababes does have a happy ending of sorts. The three original members reformed ‘Mutya Keisha Siobahn’ in 2012, and after several years of legal battles which have largely thwarted the release of new material have now reclaimed the Sugababes name. A new Sugababes album is scheduled for release next year, and if their only single as Mutya Keisha Siobahn, ‘Flatline’ is anything to go by, should be rather good. It must be hoped restoring Labour doesn’t take this long but the alternative, unity behind a leader whose values would turn it into an unpleasant imitation of Britain’s great party of the left, is far, far worse.
