How Corbyn Wins

The Weekly Standard, December 11, 2015

"Cameron moved so far to the left," a journalist told me in London, "that he pushed Labour into the sea. Then it reemerged as a monster." That's not really why David Cameron's Conservatives won the May general election, but the vivid description of what happened next illustrates how bleak the political landscape looked to Britain's center-left after Jeremy Corbyn became Labour's leader in September. But if those moderates had any consolation, it was their conviction that Corbyn wouldn't last at the top. Dour, dim, and ostentatiously shabby, Corbyn, 66, is a stalwart of the far left with a weakness for ideologically correct thuggery from Belfast to Caracas and beyond. His obvious unelectability would, argued optimists, quickly bring the party to its senses: Corbyn would fall on his sword or be pushed onto someone else's. A more suitable replacement would then take the helm.

Such hopes were knocked on December 3 by a by-election in Labour's deindustrializing northern heartland. Despite the party's advantages—longstanding strength in the constituency, a solid South Asian voting bloc (roughly 25 percent of the electorate), and the selection of Jim McMahon, a likable local moderate, as candidate—there was speculation Labour would be run close by UKIP. The populist Euroskeptic party now focuses much of its attention on the white working class, a strategy that delivered votes, if not parliamentary seats (it only has the one), at the general election and had led to a near miss at a by-election in a nearby Labour stronghold last year.

But it was not to be UKIP's day. Labour actually grew its slice of the vote by some 7 percentage points, to 62 percent. Denied its breakthrough yet again, UKIP increased its tally from 20 to 23 percent, while the Conservatives, a vanishing presence in the north of England, saw their share halved, to 9 percent. Yes, Corbyn was a very small presence in McMahon's emphatically local campaign, but it's also a good rule of thumb in U.K. politics that even the best local candidate will only add a thousand or so votes to his party's total. Whatever else can be said about this result—by-elections can be deceptive—it was not the resounding rejection of Corbyn his critics had doubtless (if discreetly) been looking for.

So what now? Corbyn may stumble from controversy to gaffe and back again, but he is appreciated by his party, if not his members of Parliament. A November YouGov poll revealed that two-thirds of Labour voters thought their new leader was doing "well." With this by-election safely behind him, Corbyn is not scheduled to face any potentially embarrassing electoral tests until May, which is bad news for any unhappy Labour MPs praying for a crisis to send him packing.

Thanks to the new voting rules that landed them with Corbyn in the first place, such a crisis could take a long time to arrive. These rules provided that any candidate for the Labour leadership had to be nominated by at least 15 percent of MPs. A (much) wider electoral college made up of party members, "registered supporters" (who had paid a princely ¢3 for this status), and "affiliated supporters" (mainly trade unionists, who did not have to pay anything at all) then chose the leader. Corbyn was held in so little regard by his parliamentary colleagues that he was set to fall at the first hurdle until a few of them—presumably possessed by their inner Menshevik—"lent" their nominating votes to Corbyn, not because they wanted him as leader but, they explained, to broaden the debate. The suckers gave him an even break. The consequences were catastrophic.

Interest in the contest and excitement over the possibility of a previously unthinkable Corbyn victory attracted huge numbers of new members to the Labour party, a surge that continued after Corbyn's triumph. Between May and early October, party membership nearly doubled, to 370,000 (the Conservative party has maybe 150,000 members). Just under half of the full members who voted opted for Corbyn, as did 84 percent of over 100,000 "three pounders," and 58 percent of the 72,000 "affiliated supporters" who voted, generating a majority that comfortably eclipsed his rivals. Corbyn's mandate is about as democratic as it gets. A revolt by MPs—by definition Westminster insiders—to try to reverse it wouldn't look good, and it's hard to imagine it would succeed: Labour's new wider electorate won't be willing to dump Jezza. It's even harder to imagine that enough moderates could be convinced to join the party to secure a change of course.

That means Brits—highly averse to divided parties—will continue to be treated to the spectacle of a leader at odds with much of his parliamentary corps (over a quarter of Labour MPs voted with the Tories to extend British airstrikes against ISIS to Syria, for example) and appealing over their heads to the constituency that gave him the top job (which, incidentally, opposes the bombing). Throw in the fact that Corbyn has yet to resonate with voters outside the Labour camp and the deep suspicion that much of the electorate feels for his attitudes to issues such as defense, terrorism, and immigration, and it's easy to see why the Tories are chuckling. If things don't change, they are forecast to be a shoo-in for the next general election, due in 2020.

That's very probably right, but it ignores the deeper game that Corbyn is playing. Until just a few months ago, opinions such as his were largely kept to the political fringe; now they are center-stage, and there is every chance that the result will be to drag Britain's public debate to the left, something that he would surely count as a win.  

Or consider this: Less than six months ago, Corbyn struggled to persuade more than a handful of MPs to support him as Labour leader. Now, according to recent polls, 30 percent or so of Brits say that they would vote him into 10 Downing Street. That's some 10 percentage points behind the Tories, but it's roughly the same percentage as voted for Corbyn's predecessor in May. The fact that Corbyn now heads one of Britain's two great political tribes matters.

 And his leadership is reshaping that tribe into something more in accord with his views. The inflow of so many new members, many of them younger and including a number of former Greens and Liberal Democrats (both parties are longstanding asylums for the utopian disaffected), must, if they stay, mean the growing Corbynization of Labour, a process that will only be accelerated by the departure of moderates with no taste for a fight. As incompetent as Corbyn and his comrades may sometimes seem (and are), they have the hard left's understanding of power. Corbyn's campaign tapped into popular resentments of a depth that his opponents struggled to deal with, but it was also cleverer and far more effective (trade union backing helped) than they had anticipated.

 After the revolution come the enforcers. Corbyn is inserting his people into the party's structure and, still gingerly (the Corbynista Twitter posse is not so diffident), trying to whip his MPs into line. In doing the latter, he will be assisted by the support of groupings of the pur et dur, such as the one named Momentum, now beginning to move into local parties. The (public) talk is of a broad church; the reality will be rougher. The sword hanging over moderate Labour MPs will be the threat of de-selection by their local party—meaning that they will no long-er be the candidate at the next election—something that would promise not only political disaster, but unemployment too. The fact that there is likely to be a redrawing of constituency boundaries (and a reduction in the overall number of parliamentary seats) before 2020 will only hand more power to the local activists who will decide who gets to stand where. Under the circumstances, many moderate MPs will feel constrained to keep dangerous thoughts to themselves, and as for mounting a challenge to Corbyn's leadership, well .  .  .

  If this is right, the party will change, but it will, more or less, hang together. There will be defections, but the great Labour split that some expect will not happen. And so, by 2020 Britain's principal opposition will be well on the way to becoming a party of the hard left, a transformation that would be yet another win for Corbyn, even if it costs him support for now: Current polling indicates that this radicalized Labour would be extremely unlikely to prevail in 2020, either alone or in conjunction with the leftist Scottish Nationalist party. But if, between now and 2020, some fresh catastrophe hits, say, the economy, or, for that matter, the Tory party, Corbyn's Labour will be there, ready to take advantage of what former Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan famously described as "events."

 That's not something to chuckle about.