The Corbyn-exit story: probably fabrication, surely dead-end

Submitted by AWL on 11 January, 2022 - 3:07 Author: Martin Thomas
Corbyn

According to the Telegraph and the Daily Mail, Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle is thinking of quitting the Labour Party and standing Corbyn as an independent in Islington North in the general election likely in 2023 or 2024.

It looks like malicious “stirring “by those papers. The Corbynista blog Skwawkbox claims Labour right-wingers have been feeding those Tory papers. Though Skwawkbox is unreliable, that is plausible.

An exit would be a foolish move by Corbyn. His feeble “Peace and Justice Project“ does not provide the groundwork for a new party.

Corbyn might gain local support (he has a good record as a constituency MP), and attract some of the scattered tens of thousands of Labour activists who have quit, been pushed out, or lapsed to inactivity since early 2020.

The prospects for positive achievement in educating and organising for socialism would be poorer than for Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party in 1996 or George Galloway’s Respect in 2004, both of which started with sizeable contingents of left activists, and with better political markers (defence of the old Clause Four, opposition to the invasion of Iraq) than “our boy wants to keep his Parliamentary seat “.

Corbyn merits more respect than the chancer Galloway, but a break from Labour figureheaded by him would depend for its core on hoovering up left “antisemitism-deniers“. A venture in which former Corbyn ally Chris Williamson, now linked with George Galloway, and former Corbyn officials like Seumas Milne, would be part of the core, promises little good.

Even in these bleak times under Starmer, the left will do better to continue to battle against the odds within Labour.

Some socialists have speculated about what we might say if Corbyn’s local Labour Party, Islington North, votes for him to be parliamentary candidate and has a right-wing official Labour candidate imposed on it from above. That prospect is several steps down the road, and we understand that it is not at all clear that Islington North would want to court exclusion from the Labour Party. Even in that case, though, my own view is that, after the debacles of 2017-9, a Corbyn splinter-party would be a dead end.

Corbyn was suspended by Labour in October 2020 after his dismissive response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission report on antisemitism in the party. He was quickly readmitted to party membership, but not to the Labour parliamentary whip.

As we understand, other left Labour MPs have urged Corbyn to apologise for his October 2020 response, which would at least make it harder for Starmer not to restore the whip, but Corbyn has refused.

Rumour has it that some people in Corbyn’s inner circle are indeed open to the idea of a Scargill or Galloway type move, but from that to an actual move is a long step.

Corbyn himself has been in Mexico, speaking at a government press conference to boost sort-of-populist (but scarcely leftist or green) Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The Morning Star, the nearest (in its way) to a “Corbynite“ newspaper, has not commented.

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