Disillusioned Jeremy Corbyn backers deserve no sympathy

Until last month the Arcola theatre in east London, popular among the bohemians who handed the Labour Party to Jeremy Corbyn, staged a play called Kenny Morgan.

A man on the losing side of a love triangle contemplates suicide. He is variously ignored, abused and indulged. Only a Jewish doctor treats him as an adult. “Your suffering is trivial,” he says, weighing one man’s heartache against the plight of his race (“You may have read something about it”) and stressing the privilege of choice. Some people have no say in their fates.

Labour’s suffering is not trivial: it denies Britain a serious opposition as the government toys with a hard exit from the EU. But it was a choice. Some political parties succumb to social changes they are helpless to affect, as the Liberals did a century ago.

By electing Corbyn, Labour volunteered for near-extinction. None of the chaos, dogma and chicanery that has flowered under his watch should have surprised anyone. He has been exactly as bad as he was always going to be.

This point cannot be stressed enough if there is to be any accountability or learning in the party, though it may be too late anyway. It has become polite to distinguish between staunch Corbynites and soft-left innocents who backed him out of a quest for "something different" and thought they had found it in this outwardly benign fossil, with his folk-music festivals and his Ben Okri novels. If they turned out to be wrong, well, who among us has powers of clairvoyance?

This self-exculpation does not deserve a hearing. Disillusioned Corbyn supporters should expect something harsher than a consoling hug and a, “Oh come here, you big silly.”

Spurious credibility

Last summer, they knew his

métier

was opposition, including to his own party. They knew he had views on economics and foreign policy to which the 20th century was an extended rebuttal. They knew he attracted hard-left activists who specialise in ideological invigilation, often to, and sometimes beyond, the point of physical menaces.

They knew he fused doctrinal stridency with routine technical incompetence, and chose to find both endearingly quaint. And to the extent they did not know, people with functioning senses were trampling over each other to tell them.

Labour's soft left retains a spurious credibility because it fended off Militant entryists in the 1980s. Judged on its recent record, it has become a disaster for the party, choosing Ed Miliband over his brother David in 2010, opening the membership to sundry hotheads from other movements and, in no small number, joining them in the Jeremania of 2015.

Even now their idea of a solution is Owen Smith, a more elegant vessel for the politics of Miliband. Those of us who see a formal split as Labour's least bad recourse against Corbyn must reckon with the breakaway party being dominated by these well-meaning klutzes.

Unrepentant supporters of Corbyn at least know their own minds. They want to assemble the kind of extra-parliamentary left that is familiar on the continent. Labour’s founding commitment to the conventional political process was, for them, a foolish and reversible piety.

Some know they cannot win a general election, others hope they might after 10 or 20 years of movement-building, but hardly any view it as the immediate point of politics. You need not respect this mission or fancy its chances of success to see its internal coherence.

Next to this, Corbynites with buyer’s remorse are a study in confusion. Like those free-marketeers who vote to leave the EU and now blanch at mooted curbs on migration, they cannot believe their succour for brute ideologues has led to power for brute ideologues.

They have a good line against unelectable socialism – that it betrays the people it is meant to serve – but the implication, which is that Labour must be led by a plausible winner, and therefore someone more centrist than they would like, is lost on them. Nobody to the left of Tony Blair has won an election since 1974.

Now, having failed to perform basic border controls on Labour’s left flank, they implore civilians to sign up and help.

Our party is a swamp of decrepit ideas and personal abuse, goes this elevator pitch: join us. Even if sterling is not what it was six weeks ago, £25 is a lot of money to spend on a choice between Corbyn and Smith.

But even if the Corbynites go, the party is still stuck with a base of soft-left enablers, their veneer of respectability cloaking consistently bad judgment, their conduits in the commentariat excusing their complicity in the turmoil. Everything they needed to know about Corbyn was knowable last summer.

- (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016)