Corbynite Greens beware: a Corbyn-led Labour is unlikely to benefit the Green Party

I have a mix of thoughts and feelings about Corbyn and the Labour leadership campaign generally.

From a broadly leftist perspective, I feel an excited pull towards the Corbyn crowd. I joined the Green Party in 2012 after giving serious consideration to joining Labour. The decision I weighed up was of joining a Party that explicitly campaigned for policies I agreed with (Green Party), or a Party that had a reasonable shot at forming Government within which my voice would be a political minority (Labour).

As it happened, the extensive abuse I received on twitter from the then chair of Bristol Labour for being an overeducated middle class latte anarchist trendy dad Green helped that decision. If I was weighing up that same decision now and, instead of tirades of abuse, was receiving reasoned argument for joining Labour, I’d likely sign up as a supporter, vote for Corbyn, then become a full member if he wins.

I feel fortunate to have avoided that trap, as it would have doomed me to either wasting years trying to change the Party from within, or to a bitter exit for the Greens once it became clear I’d been suckered. Consequently, I am concerned that there are Green supporters and members looking to Corbyn, and therefore to Labour, for leadership at this time.

My original thought when Corbyn got onto the ballot was that he would win, and then be deposed by Blairites within a matter of months. When I looked into the leadership voting process in more detail, I amended this view to a Burnham victory in the second round. The Welfare Bill vote seems to have blown that idea out of the water, with a Corbyn victory looking plausible, and Cooper seeming to be the likely alternative.

In the short-term, then, there are three scenarios to consider: Corbyn emerges as leader and is quickly deposed; Corbyn emerges as leader and is not deposed; Corbyn doesn’t emerge as leader, losing out to Cooper or Burnham.

The problem for the Greens in all three of these situations, is that we are vulnerable to losing support to Labour from people who still look to them as some kind of natural guardians of the left. Strategically speaking, I think that the best situation for both the Greens and the left generally is for Corbyn to win and be deposed. This scenario is possibly the only way that the UK left will finally acknowledge, collectively, that Labour is no longer its home.

If Corbyn wins and is not deposed (quite likely if he agrees to stand down in 2018, ensures leading right wingers sit in his shadow cabinet, and starts increasing Labour’s position in the polls), then a body of support that could have been drawn towards the Greens is likely to go over to Labour. That will set us back in the London Mayoral and Assembly elections, and likely impact the Bristol Mayoral and Council elections, both of which are taking place next year. Then, in 2018, the Parliamentary Labour Party will take care not to allow another Corbyn on the ballot, and the Labour looking left, as disgruntled as it may be, will revert to its traditional strategy of trying to drag the centrists as left as possible. 2020 will become a re-run of 2015.

If Burnham or Cooper wins in the 2nd or 3rd round, then the fact Corbyn came so close will convince the Labour looking left that there is still a chance for them, and so the attempt to drag the centrists leftwards will continue.

My belief is that the development of the UK left is largely stunted by its continued attempts to turn the Labour Party as it is into the Labour Party the left wants it to be. So much so, that someone like Corbyn can defy the whip 500 times, and never conclude that he is simply in the wrong Party. The reason for this is understandable; Labour has, for decades, been the only alternative to the Tories, and clothes itself in the romance of a workers’ struggle it abandoned a long time ago.

If Labour were to split, it would no longer make more sense for the left to invest energy in trying to transform it than in developing an alternative. There would suddenly be an abundance of creative political energy available, and maybe the People’s Assembly could facilitate the forging of a formal Progressive Alliance between smaller Parties. Instead of relying on a single Party gaining a majority, an Alliance of Parties could command the confidence of the Commons. This may even be easier to achieve considering the Tory majority is only 12 seats, and an Alliance could agree vital non-aggression pacts constituency by constituency, campaigning under a broad, in-principle Coalition agreement.

After all, the Tories win in many constituencies because of a split in the non-Tory vote. As Caroline Lucas has pointed out, the only way round this is to game the system by finding a way for that non-Tory vote to collaborate. The biggest block to that happening is the Labour Party’s pursuit of a Commons majority.

Both Derek Wall, and Bristol’s own Deb Joffe, have argued recently that Greens should be supportive of Corbyn (see Derek Wall in Morning Star, and Deb Joffe on Bright Green), and that a Corbyn win would benefit the left in general. The argument being that the advancement of left policies is more important than which Party advances them, so even if Green support is impacted, this is for the common good.

My problem with that argument is that Labour have been using it for years to accuse the Greens of splitting the left, demanding that we essentially join Labour en masse and be a green stall within the big tent. And for years, Greens have argued against this, pointing out that we are the only Party that integrates left wing polices with environmental policies, understanding the two to exist in necessary balance with each other.

The Greens’ anti-austerity stance is as much an expression of environmentalism as it is of left wing politics. Austerity measures directly threaten attempts to mitigate climate change. For example, reduction in people’s incomes at the same time as rising living costs drives demand for cheaper food, which can only be provided through ecologically harmful processes. Greens are often lampooned by Labour as middle class finger waggers demanding that working class people buy organic fair trade food they can’t afford. This is a false accusation. Greens locate the source of the problem not in individual choices, but in the systems that shape those choices. Greens want all food to be produced in an ecologically sustainable way, and this requires system change. Ecologically sound food production is only expensive because it takes place within a system that privileges ecologically harmful norms.

Greens recognise that the struggle for social justice must occur within a wider struggle to safeguard the global ecosystem that enables human existence in the first place. The struggle to liberate workers from exploitation is meaningless if the world those workers are liberated into is unable to support human life. Not only do Labour not understand this, they are, as a Party, unable to understand this. The clue is in the name; Labour is the Party of work, but we now live in an age where the form of work Labour understands is rapidly becoming redundant, and in fact needs to be made redundant if we are to seriously address the environmental challenges we face.

Jeremy Corbyn’s biggest ongoing challenge if he becomes leader will be remaining leader. If he isn’t deposed by Labour’s right, then he will spend his entire time as leader responding to press speculation about plots to depose him, and fire fighting anti-Corbyn briefings that prevent the vast majority of his policies from taking root. Remember, Labour’s right view Corbyn as an existential threat to the Party. If your starting point is, “if Corbyn is leader, we will be out of power for a generation”, you aren’t going to respond to Corbyn becoming leader with, “oh all right then”. No, you are going to plot and scheme and oppose, and hope that either a viable plot to depose him emerges, or that you can get him to resign.

My biggest concern about Greens investing their hopes in Corbyn is that it is an investment in an outdated form of leadership that is unable to tackle the systemic issues we need to address. It reveals that many people are still self-defeatingly waiting for Labour to rescue us from a neoliberalism that Labour itself spent 13 years nurturing, and to which the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party are still committed. Green politics isn’t about being rescued by strong leaders, it’s about developing resilient communities that champion themselves through collective leadership. Ironically, out of the four Labour leadership contenders, it is Liz Kendall who seems to most support Proportional Representation (YouTube; skip to 24:00); Corbyn is weary of PR for the explicit reason that he thinks he would lose his (safe) seat.

Corbynmania should demonstrate that there is a significant proportion of the Labour membership who belong in the Green Party. This is the perfect time for Greens to emphasise to those members that everything they want Labour to champion under Corbyn’s leadership is something the Greens were championing throughout the last Parliament, and are still championing now. This is particularly pertinent here in Bristol, where the Bristol Northwest and Bristol East CLPs, along with Kerry McArthy MP, have nominated Andy Burnham, whilst Karin Smyth MP and Thangam Debbonaire MP have both nominated Yvette Cooper. Several hundred people turned out to Corbyn’s Q&A at the Malcolm X centre (brilliant write up from Ursula Writes here), but it is Bristol Green Party, not Bristol Labour, that actually embodies the politics those people want to see.

Ursula uses the most wonderful phrase in her write up of Corbyn’s Bristol visit, experiencing the crowd at Malcolm X as “a movement in search of a leader”. My experience campaigning for the Greens’ Bristol West campaign makes me want to modify that phrase, as I don’t think it’s quite right. A movement in search for a leader would have joined the Greens, and voted in a Green MP in Bristol West. This didn’t happen because people wanted to keep the Tories out, so voted Green locally and Labour nationally (see my counter-post to Thangam Debbonaire MP’s Welfare Bill stance for some of the stats on this).

The crowds turning out for Corbyn aren’t a movement in search of a leader, but a movement in search of the Labour Party. There is now evidence that there was a movement in search of the Labour Party at the election, who stayed at home because the Labour Party they found wasn’t the Labour Party they wanted. It is a movement that continually never quite becomes a movement precisely because it holds out for a Labour Party that will never be, even under Corbyn.

This is why, in the end, I hope Corbyn wins, and Labour is forced to work through its tensions. However, I think it is a mistake for Greens to think that a Corbyn-led Labour Party would become our ally. In the event of a split, I expect we would be able to negotiate with the leftist side. But if Corbyn is able to hold the Party together, the level of appeasement he will need to provide to the right will make any kind of progressive local pacts impossible. Corbyn might be able to command the support of Labour’s membership, but it’s the Parliamentary Labour Party he needs to be able to lead, and that is the group that least wants him as leader. And until Labour’s local membership starts triggering selection ballots for their sitting MPs in order to replace them with Corbynite leftists, a left wing Labour leader remains a logistical impossibility in practice.

The conclusion I would like pro-Corbyn Greens to reach is that we should be preparing a campaign for recruiting disillusioned Labour members and supporters in the event of the Corbyn bubble bursting. Now is the time to be blogging about how Corbynites belong in the Green Party. It is a time to be raising awareness of Green Party policies that either match or go further than the policies Corbyn is speaking up on. We need to be able to make the convincing case that this movement in search of the Labour Party should join the Greens and put its energy into campaigning with us.

The greatest challenge facing our generation is climate change. It is the poorest people who will suffer most as climate change starts to impact our way of life. Austerity needs to be viewed as a political doctrine that reinforces and intensifies the economic forces that are causing climate change. This makes the anti-austerity position a natural extension of the measures we need to take to mitigate climate change.

The Green Party is the only Party that is willing and able to organise itself around the principle of addressing climate change not just in a socially just manner, but through social justice itself.

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Image credit: Jeremy Corbyn leaps into second place in race for Labour leadership supporters