When Theresa May called her vanity election in April 2017 Jeremy Corbyn's leadership was hardly looking healthy, but May's hubris handed him a lifeline and ended up crashing any hopes that anti-democratic Labour Party right-wingers had of staging another Anyone But Corbyn coup.
Theresa May's decision to call the opportunistic snap election that she'd repeatedly said that she wouldn't gifted Corbyn the chance to do what he does best and snap into campaign mode. It also allowed the Labour Party to mobilise their new weapon, a membership of over 600,000 as activists, online campaigners and canvassers.
Corbyn was obviously helped by Theresa May's insipid campaign and her manifesto of misery that offered nothing to ordinary people in favour of lavishing even more handouts on corporations and the mega-rich. But Labour's rise from the mid-20s in the early polls up to 40% on election day had a lot more to do with Labour providing the electorate with an actual alternative to hard-right orthodox neoliberalism for the first time in decades, which would never have happened under any of the so-called "centrist" Labour politicians.
A look at the May 2017 local election results that were massively over-shadowed by the general election campaign reveals a very poor Labour performance that would have had the Blairite/Progress faction of the Labour Party braying for a new anti-Corbyn coup plot had they not known that such a move in the middle of a general election campaign would surely have lost them most of their own seats in the resulting carnage.
Had May not called her vanity election then there would have been no such self-interest stopping the right-wing faction of the Labour Party from seeking to topple Corbyn, because make no mistake about it, the May 2017 local election results were very poor indeed with Labour dropping 382 council seats and losing control of seven councils.
Looking at the absolute bile that has been spat by Labour right-wingers like of Chris Leslie and Jess Phillips, and their tireless cheerleaders like JK Rowling, even after Jeremy Corbyn became the first Labour leader to actually gain seats at a General Election since 1997, just imagine the undiluted hate they would have been spewing had Theresa May not handed Jeremy Corbyn the ideal opportunity to inject a huge amount of momentum into his leadership.
The majority of Labour's 600,000 members support Jeremy Corbyn's policies and leadership, and there's a huge groundswell of approval for a move to democratise the Labour Party by giving local parties the opportunity to remove unsatisfactory Labour MPs. But without the gains made in Theresa May's vanity election, Corbyn would have struggled badly to democratise the party against the visceral objections of the anti-democratic Labour Party right-wingers who would have been pointing to the local election debacle and dismal results like the Cumberland by-election as evidence that Corbyn needs to be ousted as leader at any cost.
Thanks to Theresa May's hubris Jeremy Corbyn suddenly looks like an authoritative Prime Minister in waiting, and she's ebded up looking like an bedraggled and emotionally ruined placeholder PM who is only still there because the Tories (who absolutely detest her for what she's done) are afraid of losing their grip on power completely if they move to bring her down now.
Now that Corbyn has withstood the most savage mainstream media smear campaign any UK party leader has ever faced in order to achieve the biggest upsurge in the Labour vote since 1945, the chances of Labour transforming into a truly democratic party that properly reflects the will of the party members look stronger than ever.
The craziness of this situation is that Corbyn would never have found himself in such a strong position to democratise the Labour Party if it weren't for Theresa May's vanity and hubris. And furthermore Theresa May would never have been lured into such extraordinary complacency that she called a needless election if it weren't for the huge public opinion damage inflicted on the Labour Party by the right-wing Labour mob and their ridiculously ill-timed and unbelievably divisive Anyone But Corbyn coup in the summer of 2016.
It's amazing to think that Corbyn's path from the most unlikely political outsider ever to lead the Labour Party to Prime Minister in waiting owes as much to the people who tried to destroy him (the coup-plotter Labour MPs and Theresa May) as it does to the hundreds of thousands of Labour Party activists who worked tirelessly to create the biggest General Election upset in decades.
Corbyn owes a measure of his success to those who tried to destroy him because without the self-serving hubris of the former, the latter would never have had the circumstances they required to allow their hard work and dedication to pay off.
"The more they attack him, the stronger he gets" - I said it very early in Corbyn's original leadership bid in 2015 as the likes of Tony Blair, Jack Straw, John McTernan, and Peter Mandelson massively fuelled Corbyn's popularity with their hyperbolic attacks on him, and in light of the current circumstances it stands truer than ever.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
No comments:
Post a Comment