Yves here. It’s striking how the UK press professes to be horrified about Nigel Farage, which winds up being Streisand effect visibility and even credibility promotion (if he can amount to such a threat, there must be a there there), So are so socialist so much more dangerous than right-wingers that Corbyn is relegated to The Contender That Must Not Be Named status?
By Paul Rogers, Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies in the Department of Peace Studies and International Relations at Bradford University, and an Honorary Fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College. He is openDemocracy’s international security correspondent. He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers. Originally published at openDemocracy
In May 2017, British Conservative prime minister Theresa May called a snap election three years early, despite having a comfortable majority in Parliament and having told the country she would not do so.
May was polling well and assumed it would be easy to push Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour opposition to a crushing defeat, winning an even bigger majority that would strengthen her hand in Brexit negotiations. Most pundits agreed this was the likely outcome.
But on polling day, May failed dismally. The Tories lost their majority. Corbyn, despite having faced bitter opposition from within his own party since being elected leader two years earlier, somehow managed to reach out over them to speak to a much wider public.
Something had happened to the body politic that had been missed by the media. Now, with the announcement of Corbyn and former Labour MP Zarah Sultana’s new party, a similar shift is underway – and is once again flying under the radar.
As I wrote for openDemocracy at the time, back in 2017, Corbyn was drawing large crowds across the country ahead of the election. When his rallies and meetings were held in public spaces, thousands turned up, often at short notice. If scheduled for indoor venues, these would be full to bursting, and he often had to repeat his speech to those waiting outside.
In one sense, there had already been signs of something going on below the political surface. When Corbyn first ran for the party leadership in 2015 – a contest in which he was the runaway winner – there were early indications that he was attracting considerable support from the grassroots.
A year later, strong opposition from within his own party led to a leadership challenge that he won, again achieving a hugely positive reaction at public meetings in spite of his internal critics.
History is repeating itself. Corbyn and Sultana’s new left-wing offering – not yet officially named but for now known as Your Party – may be a work in progress, but the enthusiasm with which it has been greeted is palpable.
Some 800,000 people have signed up to support the idea. If just a quarter follow through to become members when it is formally established, it may well become the UK’s largest political party by membership overnight, given the collapse in Labour membership.
The idea that a new decidedly left party could come to the fore and acquire serious political power may seem impossible, given Westminster’s First Past the Post voting system, but just look at what is happening across the UK political scene, especially in England.
It’s hard to say how many groups have sprung up across the country to form local concentrations of support for Your Party in the past four or so weeks, but it almost certainly runs into the many hundreds. In the West Yorkshire council where I live, two groups have already met, with two more due to do so in the next week, all with loose coordination yet covering the whole area of the metropolitan council.
In contrast, Labour’s practised and experienced membership bureaucracy is seeing support ebbing away. Accurate, up-to-date figures are not easy to come by, but the party reportedly had 309,000 members six months ago, down from a peak of 532,000 under Corbyn in 2019. Some constituency party treasurers are reporting recent membership losses of up to a third over the past year alone.
There are many factors involved in this decline, not least the Labour leadership maintaining a marked degree of austerity and failing to confront Nigel Farage and Reform UK head-on. But perhaps the key problem is the party’s even greater failure to confront Benjamin Netanyahu and his Israeli government over the appalling genocide they are inflicting in Gaza. This issue, probably more than any other, is leading Labour activists who would normally be at the forefront of projecting its policies to leave the party in droves.
Can Labour’s decline and Your Party’s rise, not to mention the current considerable strength of Farage and Reform UK, lead to a radical re-ordering of the political environment in England? Several things suggest it could be possible.
For a start, we’re likely three years away from a general election being called. That gives enough time for Reform’s weaknesses to show themselves.
The party is substantially trading on fear, principally of migrants, but which commonly extends to a more general ‘fear of the other’. Corbyn is particularly effective at countering this head-on with hope, which is thoroughly appealing and especially so to younger people, as can be seen in new polling showing that one in five 16 and 17-year-olds would vote for Corbyn and Sultana’s new party.
Reform is also vulnerable in its attempts to claim it is standing up for the ordinary person against a woke and distant elite. That simply doesn’t add up; given the considerable wealth floating around the Reform leadership and its funders, it is not difficult to present them as the true elite.
Finally, a serious weakness for Reform and the Tories is their Cnut-like denial of climate breakdown and their addiction to fossil carbon. The folly of that stance may well come to haunt them over the next three years, as more and more ordinary people across the UK experience floods, or wildfires, or other climate crisis-related weather phenomena.
Then there is the other side of the political scales, starting with the election this week of Zack Polanski as the Green Party leader. Polanski has not yet ruled out working with Sultana and Corbyn, and there is time for local electoral pacts to be negotiated in forthcoming elections, especially the many local elections and the Scottish and Welsh national elections taking place next May.
We also should not discount the Liberal Democrats, who have considerable geographical concentrations, north and south of the border. In Scotland, in particular, there are plenty of new, younger politicians coming through, just as there are in the Scottish National Party. Your Party is also likely to lead to the emergence of new political figures on the progressive left in the coming months, while others may decide to defect from Labour to the party.
Of them, Corbyn is key. He is not remotely a rabble-rouser, yet for the past ten years, he has maintained a formidable and dedicated network of supporters – even at very difficult times. It is very easy to dismiss what he stands for as being from the past, but perhaps it is actually from the future.
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Today when doing my mental health walk I almost literally bumped into my local MP. My thought was “why are you not doing a surgery?” Then when I got home and saw the news I realised why. He’s seeing whether people round here would accept another promotion for him (junior minister?). Hmmm. Interesting that he needed TWO very “vested up” police officers to protect him.
For those who haven’t seen my past posts, PURELY BY ACCIDENT I had a national pro bono preference survey in field when May called that surprise 2017 election. I was interested in BREXIT stuff but I realised I could probably repurpose it to make a good prediction as to the surprise general election. NOTHING in the data suggested May was going to increase her majority and in all likelihood would lose it. Guardian? Uninterested. Mail? Uninterested.
So I just went to the bookies and with great odds (since the “experts” were all wrong) I bet on a hung parliament. I made money. Wish I’d bet more but twas first time I’d used my methods to predict a General Election. Wish I’d made a big fat bet…..People liked Corbynism. They just didn’t rate Corbyn as a leader.
The electorate did like Corbynism, and the electorate thought he was a thoughtful, inspiring and courageous leader who had the toughness of mind and the strength of will to take on a vicious and incompetent Tory government week after week without any support from his own backbenches, the vast majority of whom were visibly willing his failure, visibly supported a politically bankrupt, utterly corrupt Labour Party machine led by – I’m ashamed to say – a former full-time official of my own trades union.
Many, many decades ago, I was a full-time official of my union, quite happy to flourish and develop a career in its conformist rightwing culture until the the unofficial strike against the union (not the company) by the 11,000 or so members of its largest branch at Pilkington’s Glass in 1970. The GMWU leadership’s response fot the first month of the stoppage consisted of ill-thought out reflexive attempts to undermine the strike’s leaders by declaring them to be Trotskyists and communists – and by subsequently promoting the branch secretary whose activities triggered the strike to national office as the union’s Vice-Chairman. I quickly realised that I had to seriously rethink my politics and move into a different line of work.
When JC was elected leader, it would have been advisable for his team to clean house starting with the Labour machine from the top down, and pulling in some of Jeremy’s supporters with proven organisational, administrative and communications competence who believed in both Jeremy’s leadership and his project to revitalise British political and economic life.
Despite being a Remainer, I also believed that Jeremy had the capacity to lead an effective, creative and enthusiastic response to the challenges posed and the opportunities offered by the Brexit referendum. I was also one of a small number who felt the Whip should be withdrawn from more than half the PLP when it was clear that the Prime Minister would have to go to the Queen to request a dissolution of Parliament and a general election. We assumed, of course, that a dissolution would not be requested until, at the earliest, 2019 because of the size of the Tory majority and the likelihood that the Brexit legislative process would be done and dusted by then, if need be on Labour votes, and we would have alternative Labour candidates standing by.
The issue of Jeremy’s leadership was not any more significant an issue with the electorate than it was for Mrs. May, Boris Johnson or, indeed, the current prime minister until the Israeli Lobby set to work in conjunction with the MSM, including the BBC, to attack JC on the absurd grounds that he was an anti-semite, an accusation which was repeated day in an day out by members of the PLP, Labour councillors and members of the Labour machine. Given that he had devoted his well-documented life to countering any and every form of racial and religious discrimination, it was very difficult for JC to respond and get a sympathetic audience with a media and a substantial element of his own party which denied his past record of anti-discrimination. Even then, in the 2019 General Election, he racked up more electoral votes than any Labour leader before or since.
I think, on balance, the evidence indicates that the electorate did and does rate JC as an effective leader and that is what scares his detractors. If he were to run as leader of Your Party at any point from October 2027, he will emerge as a self-effacing Prime Minister, an effective Cabinet chairman who will regard himself simply as first amongst equals, and he will be preparing the ground for his successor before the last vote is counted.
I wouldn’t mind betting that both the Tories and Labour will get together and rig things so that votes go to Reform rather than Corbyn’s new party. They can both work with Nigel Farage but with Corby, not so much.
I don’t disagree. However the big unknown is whether the sizeable chunk of Labour MPs who want FPTP gone is ready to throw down the gauntlet. Some are undoubtedly just supporting electoral reform out of self-preservation rather than real conviction but there are a LOT of them.
The closer we get to 2029 and see just how Reform is doing in GOVERNING (across swathes of local councils including mine – and they are looking worse by the day), the better we’ll know whether Reform is real or paper tiger. If real but not “a complete shoe-in”, then I wouldn’t be surprised if Reform, a majority of Labour MPs plus all the other parties force an electoral reform bill via a back-bencher to move the goalposts for 2029.
The issue MPs have is the following. The UK is wedded to “single representative constituencies” (as in Australia) yet we rejected the Aussie AV in 2011 so nobody thinks we can really try that again. Labour (for Mayors) is going for Supplementary Vote. Another “only semi-proportional” system but NOT the only option. I’ve drawn attention to another option they won’t discuss (and which I had nothing to do with developing) but its outcomes could be rather odd……thus partly why I won’t unequivocally endorse it myself but want it “discussed”. It might prove interesting and in line with how people are thinking these days…….
The closer we get to 2029 and see just how Reform is doing in GOVERNING (across swathes of local councils including mine – and they are looking worse by the day) ….
The closer we get to 2029 and the British see how badly the US is collapsing under Trump, too, should change some minds about the wisdom of voting for the Trump-adjacent Farage.
I’m surprised, in fact, that Farage isn’t trying to put in more distance, and can only assume it’s because first and above all he wants the American money.
Agreed. I don’t know whether enough Brits will see this for what it is or follow right-wing and MSM narratives and vote Reform anyway,
I know of people who want to vote Reform even though all services regarding “on the spectrum” kids of theirs will get no more funding so I’m hesitant to say we’re any better than USA in terms of recognising voting for things that DIRECTLY hurt us.
I suspect Farage would hate to win. That would involve actually doing something if he did.
The ongoing New York City mayoral election is instructive. Rumors are afoot (published in Politico, so not quite rumors) that in order to stop the surging “corbinist” Mamdani, the (right-wing) Democrats and the (equally right-wing) Republicans are trying to unite behind the (right-wing Democrat) Cuomo. Offering (the other right-wing Democrat) Adams a bribe in the form of a post in the Trump Administration – Politico specifically cites a job somewhere in HUD (Housing Urban Development) – and possibly just giving the cold shoulder to the actual Republican candidate in the race, Sliwa.
Whether this gambit succeeds or not is…questionable. But they are at least trying. So I suspect that if Corbin 2.0 gets anywhere at all, some sort of an unholy alliance between New Labour, Tories, and, of course, the Libdems (basically affluent tories who won’t admit it) to chip away at key constituencies may well be effected. I would also pay attention to the new leader of the Greens, specifically to see if he actually agrees with the corbinists on policies, or instead is playing the role of a trojan horse diluting the movement’s populist platform.
We are only at the first stage of establishment backlash. Next they’ll ridicule them, then they’ll fight them. It will be interesting to see what the reaction will be once they start winning elections and getting MPs and councilors, my suspicion is that it will be similar to what we have seen with Zohran Mamdani in New York. The problem is that establishment media has lost its information monopoly and is not able to make the issues disappear like in the past. Palestine and the associated crackdown looms large over both establishment parties, it might spell the end of the Labour as we know it.
On the other hand, Farage is a sheep in wolfs clothing, he’s an establishment designated vent for people on the right who want to overturn the status quo and a boogeyman for people on the left. It’s natural that he is pushed by the establishment media, he can’t play his role properly if he is not.
The current context is that Reform have only 4 MPs – same as the Greens.
That Labour are playing the same immigrant cards as Farage and his fellow travellers is a major tactical error.
Today the deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner has resigned over a stupid error in tax avoidance, though Farage successfully performed exactly the same avoidance trick by putting his new Clacton house in his partner’s name without raising any eyebrows whatsoever …
I’d contend that the dominantly UK right wing press, Daily Mail etc., have actually created positive openings for Farage and the biassed editorial policies within the BBC have added to his media profile.
(It is no accident that Farage has had a massively disproportionate number of QT appearances – the 6th highest with 38 up to 2024 – equivalent to a major party leader/deputy leader, not an also ran.)
Add the emergence of GB News and other oligarch funded right wing media platforms and he is having an easy ride with little critical media cross examination.
There are no equivalent favourable media opportunities for Corbyn/Sultana. If the new party can organise an effective social media profile then that might well counterbalance the dominantly conservative British MSM, especialy with younger voting cohorts, but the system militates against new parties – perversely including Reform’s underperformance at the 2024 GE.
Nobody knows how the vagaries of the FPTP electoral system might favour an insurgent party – either Reform or Your Party.
Starmer had 600k fewer votes in 2024 than Corbyn did in 2017 but has 150 more MPs.
The system is designed for two party hegemony and even the Lib Dems couldn’t break through with almost 6m votes, though that vote share facilitated Blair’s successes after his first win in 1997.
All true. However, I remain utterly disgusted that an alumnus of my school (and there have been LOTS of major political figures in the last 40 years from my school) – Ed Balls – went unquestioned when saying the bond market rules us.
Yes that is what we were taught in the 6th form. Yet I “relearned” economics and know this is tosh. Yet he trots it out on the ITV morning program and is never challenged. You don’t need GB News to be fed slop with people like him around putting it out on “MSM”. Plus I’m not even going into the scandal of him interviewing his Ministerial WIFE on prime time TV and claiming this is unbiased. On social media I got a LOT of traction for pointing this out *ahem*.
Good points. The FPTP (winner takes all) electoral system usually results in minority rule, which is not what most people believe. Most don’t give a second thought about electoral systems, but I believe it is very important to at least understand the basics. This clip was posted in the comments a couple of months ago.
If you live in the US or UK (Ireland uses IRV aka STV voting) this video is very helpful to understand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&ab_channel=CGPGrey
I’m fine with STV. However, I also recognise “institutional” stuff we Brits like. Thus for Westminster we seem wedded to single member constituencies, which make “more proportional” systems like STV impossible to implement in their proper form (requiring larger multi member constituencies).
Thus we’re stuck with choices between semi-proportional systems and deciding which is least bad. As I say above, AV has been rejected, Starmer is steamrolling Supplementary Vote through to precisely reverse the last Tory policy on election of Mayors.
Yet what worries me is that the “choice set of alternative systems” has not been explored let alone debated. It’s NOT that I’m wedded to another system, merely that there are alternatives that deserve exploration and piloting since they might, just might, be appropriate for our current punch-and-judy politics.
PS lots of members of the commentariat (especially those in USA) have been clear “a plague on both your houses” and used words like uniparty. Arrow shows you must sacrifice at least one social objective if you have a preferential electoral system.
So maybe it is time to discuss a voting system that EXPLICITLY uses this as its philosophical basis. I won’t bore people further about it but it is there and deserves debate (and for the record if used where I live it’d elect a candidate from a party I hate) but my personal views don’t count.
It is about giving the public a choice of voting system that might resonate with huge numbers.
Just cut the Gordian Knot and go full blown Athens and use sortition…
Thanks JonnyJames. This short, entertaining clip is very instructive indeed, and I second your recommendation that people in the US and UK watch it.
The transparent and palpable hostility toward Jeremy Corbyn from the British mass media is well-noted. They will try to ignore, then they will resort to laughable shenanigans like this one.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/may/11/bbc-rejects-complaints-newsnight-corbyn-russian
Maybe they can use some AI to create images where Corbyn is embracing President Putin.
Or they can go full boat and put a red star on his “Russian hat” with the Kremlin in the background. So pathetic you have to laugh!
Perhaps the real point is that the so-called mass media no longer understand their audience and have discredited themselves with obvious biases in political reporting and they they lack the communication skills and editorial ability to recover lost ground and to appeal to anything beyond steadily declining audiences.
The attacks on JC in the second phase of his leadership, the reporting of the obvious bollocks of the Steele report and Russiagate, the ludicrous reporting of the reasons for the SMO in the Ukraine and the tales of the inability of the Russian military to fight its way out of the proverbial paper bag, not to mention the despicable editorial arse licking of the crazed genocidal leadership of the settler colonial make-believe theocracy in the Levant and their British detachments in 10 Downing Street and the Labour Friends of Palestinian Genocide, have pretty much done for the MSM as serious and trustworthy vehicles of information about the world outside the front doors of those amongst us who are not yet homeless.
Where does Your Party stand on immigration?
What about the Workers?
Why does Dr. Rogers fail to mention the Workers Party? It features socialist stalwarts like George Galloway, Chris Williamson and Craig Murray. Contested many seats at the general election. Didn’t win any, but ‘our’ party hasn’t won any either, nor even settled on policies or a name.
At very least, the Workers deserve a mention.
Or two or ….
Here in Toronto we have a William Lyon McKenzie museum and it has one of those old style printing presses where you would press one sheet at a time from letterpress – pretty much the focus of the museum. He was one of those unfortunate people who in 1837 was calling for the then United States to invade Upper Canada. I guess nowadays we’d call him a Conservative in the style of Poilevre, among other things.
Anyway, one of the lessons given to children at the museum, at least when I was a kid, was that in those days in order to be a politician you needed to own a newspaper and printing press. No printing press, no voice.
Is this the modern version of not having your own printing press?
This is the kind of polling it is smart to run as a new party:
IPSOS
“Would consider” is weaker then “would”, so “would consider” gets a higher number. Which is precisely why it is smart to run such polls, because in order for people to state in ordinary polls (“Which party would you vote for if an election was held today?”) that they would vote for a new party, lots of voters need to feel that the new party has a shot. Also, the pollsters need to add them as an option, or they just end up in “others”.
Looking at the poll averages for the next uk election on Wikipedia, Labour keeps going down but the last two months there has been no major uptick among the other parties that has a trend line. Could be “Your party” starting to eat Labour support from the left.
No. This “would consider” is copium which I myself fell victim to in my side bet in 2017. I ignored my data and put side bet on JC majority, losing me the winnings from my data led primary bet.
A good survey (discrete choice experiment) should match the actual poll as closely as possible whilst displaying incentive compatibility. It should also be supplemented by a second independent dataset to break the confounding between mean and variance in likelihood function (see my guest post a while back). In practice I need evidence that beyond some good ground games in certain university dominated constituencies, these JC young supporters will not just talk the talk but walk the walk. Young people on the high street round here laugh in your face. Plus watch which newspapers sell out in local ASDA supermarket. Frankly the levels of support, however defined, for JC are nowhere near high enough to make me think he stands a chance. I doorknocked 2 weeks ago to remind people of the local government reorganisation. I didn’t express my preference for which option but plenty offered theirs.
So in practice I won’t believe the JC support is real until I see evidence of the statistical variance of young people changing (i.e. voting rather than signing online partitions & staying home election day). Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Within 18 months or so we get (final?) elections in unitary city authorities like Nottingham under existing boundaries. I’m very tempted to bet huge swing toward Reform and not toward JC from current elected dictatorship of Labour council. The gerontocracy is mad as hell and the young uns won’t vote. The Nottingham Westminster MPs have been pleading for course correction. Says it all really.
On the off chance that you would see such a late answer: My experience from politics are that the primary function of all published opinion polls before an election are to drive future results, not to measure future results. From the perspective of driving results a higher number is better, therefore for a new party asking “would consider” is better because it yields a higher number.
I am not saying it is a good measurement, I am saying that it is good campaign strategy. My compliments are therefore to the party strategists for getting such a poll into the public mind to try to set the narrative.
Elections are huge group psychology experiments, how people think other people will vote has a great impact. I have no studies to back this up, but lots of practical experience.
Germany: Serious reporting about UK is almost non-existent.
“Who is Corbyn?” many readers less savvy will ask…
The “antisemite” disclaimer still the best known attribute attached to Corbyn, I can only hope that critical Gaza reporting slowly bleeding through to German national level might be of educational effect to those Germanic minds who think parroting the antisemite allegation means being informed.
Big SIGH
Serious reporting about anything is non-existent in the UK if you rely on the MSM so it’s quite difficult to criticise a country which has the political nous to elect a Chancellor who insists on prodding and poking the Russian bear seemingly in the belief that the Russians don’t really notice or, if they do, they will soon forget.
An oldie but goodie:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/07/the-war-nerd-amateurs-talk-cancel-pros-talk-silence.html
Thanks very much for this.
ditto
Perfidious Albion.
I’d never voted labour and never would until Corbyn took over and ‘dared’ to question Israel. I even took note of his shadow chancellor briefing the city on his financial plans and they didn’t see a problem. I ended up supporting Farage due mainly to brexit but now am unconvinced by him. It was patently obvious to me at least that the Zionist lobby took Corbyn out and I’d vote for him again even if his assistant said he’d gone a bit soft due to the incessant Zionist pressure.
The time is now to cut Israel adrift when the majority of the country are sickened by them as long as they don’t end up here which is what worried the establishment in 1916 ending up with a bunch of even more radical Eastern European Jews.
I think that we are going to be living through “interesting” times with governments much like the present and last ones. That is, groups that know how to win elections but haven’t a clue about how to govern the country.