Last night Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South, announced that she was leaving the Labour Party and founding a new left-wing movement with Corbyn and other independent MPs.
It’s hard to remember now, but 10 years ago, Corbyn was a doomed, token candidate of the hard-Left in Labour’s leadership election to succeed Ed Miliband. His presence in the race was an acknowledgement by the mainstream that unreconstructed socialists still existed, but he only just made it over the hurdles, registering enough support from fellow MPs minutes before nominations closed. Like Diane Abbott in the 2010 leadership contest, Corbyn was a symbol, a polite nod to an outdated creed of Labour politician.
Whether the leadership activated a streak of stubborn arrogance and self-righteousness in Corbyn, or whether he had always been that way, is difficult to say, but his confidence and belief in his own virtue were impenetrable. In 2016, 21 members of his shadow cabinet resigned and the Parliamentary Labour Party passed a motion of no confidence in his leadership by 172 to 40. He sailed on untroubled.
Corbyn was now safe in a bubble of support from his devoted, uncritical, adoring, often young fans. The moral clarity with which he denounced war and poverty and unfairness struck home, and never faced the test of implementation or delivery. Expelled from the Labour Party, he stood as an independent in Islington North last July and beat the official Labour candidate by more than 7,000 votes.
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Corbyn turned 76 in May this year, and has been in Parliament for 42 years. In all that time, he has rarely had to modify an opinion, and he remains committed to nationalisation of industry, punitive taxation on the wealthy, high public expenditure, opposition to any kind of American-led “imperialism” and so on.
Corbyn told a constituent in 2023: “I’ll retire when I die.” For now there is another crusade in need of a leader, more moral high ground to occupy. Reform UK aside, the record of success for new parties in British politics is poor. But that may not be the point for Corbyn. He has never held office nor knows what it entails, but he knows how it feels to be right. In his eighth decade, that will never grow stale. Bring on the cause.
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