Abstract
There was no shortage of election inquests, both official and unofficial, into Labour’s defeat in the 2015 general election. They included the Fabian Society’s The Mountain to Climb, the party’s official Beckett report in January 2016, an independent inquiry, Labour’s Future, chaired by Labour MP Jon Cruddas, and an internal and private report, ‘2015: What Happened?’ All acknowledged the need for the party to reach out to former Labour voters, but also to win over some Conservative and UKIP voters if it was to have any chance of gaining the seats it needed to win a majority next time.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, J. Cox and N. Coyle, ‘We Nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the Leadership. Now We Regret it’, The Guardian, 6 May 2016.
- 2.
Abbott would point out that in 2010, she polled relatively well amongst the non-parliamentary parts of the election, and well enough to finish in third place had the contest been fought under the same rules as in 2015: ‘I knew there was much more left-wing sentiment in the Labour Party than the lobby thought’, she said. See Stephen Bush, ‘Having the Last Laugh’, New Statesman, 17 January 2017, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2017/01/having-last-laugh.
- 3.
As, for example, in The Guardian headline: ‘Corbyn Becomes Only Labour Leadership Candidate to Vote against Welfare Bill’ (20 July 2017). The reality was that there were two votes, both of which would have blocked the bill: the reasoned amendment saw Corbyn et al. abstain, while the Second Reading saw the Shadow Cabinet et al. abstain. But this was not how the vote was reported at the time or has been seen since.
- 4.
Complaints of media bias were ever-present during the Corbyn leadership. See, for example, the LSE Media Group’s ‘Journalistic Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press: From “Watchdog” to “Attack Dog”’, www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/research/research-projects/representations-of-jeremy-corbyn. See also Alex Nunns, The Candidate. Orb Books, 2017, Chapter 10.
- 5.
Andy Burnham et al., Leading Labour: The Fabian Essays. Fabian Society, 2015, pp. 14–16, www.fabians.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Leading-Labour-the-Fabian-essays-Aug-15.pdf.
- 6.
Mark Bennister, Ben Worthy and Dan Keith, ‘Jeremy Corbyn and the Limits of Authentic Rhetoric’ in Judi Atkins and John Gaffney (eds), Voices of the UK Left: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Performance of Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Or, as Alan Finlayson observed: ‘He is certainly not a great orator but his stumbles and plain style lend credence to his almost exclusively moral arguments.’ See his ‘Why is Corbyn Doing Better on Social Media?’, openDemocracyUK, 19 August 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/alan-finlayson/why-is-corbyn-doing-better-on-social-media.
- 7.
See Peter Dorey and Andrew Denham, ‘“The Longest Suicide Note in History”: The Labour Party Leadership Election of 2015’, British Politics, 11 (2016): 259–82.
- 8.
On Corbyn and Corbynism, see Mark Perryman (ed.), The Corbyn Effect. Lawrence & Wishart, 2017; Richard Seymour, Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, Verso, 2016; and Nunns, The Candidate.
- 9.
For example, Neale Coleman, who was head of policy and rebuttal, and had previously worked for both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson during their time as Mayor of London, quit in January 2016; Anneliese Midgley, a former Unite staffer who was deputy chief of staff, left in April 2016; Simon Fletcher, who also had experience working for Livingstone as well as Ed Miliband, was Corbyn’s first Chief of Staff and then campaigns director, but left in February 2017.
- 10.
Sarah Pine, ‘Leaked List Ranks Labour MPs by “Hostility” to Corbyn’, LabourList, 23 March 2016, https://labourlist.org/2016/03/leaked-list-ranks-labour-mps-by-hostility-to-corbyn.
- 11.
Corbyn added: ‘Now you’ll be saying the things he writes.’ It was, apparently, meant as a joke, but it did not go down well.
- 12.
Tim Shipman, All Out War. William Collins, 2016, pp. 342 ff.
- 13.
Monica Poletti, Tim Bale and Paul Webb, ‘Explaining the Pro-Corbyn Surge in Labour’s Membership’, LSE British Politics and Policy Blogs, 16 November 2016, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/explaining-the-pro-corbyn-surge-in-labours-membership; and Tim Bale, ‘Jezza’s Bezzas: Labour’s New Members’, Huffington Post, 28 June 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/tim-bale/jeremy-corbyn-labour-membership_b_10713634.html.
- 14.
Stephen Bush, ‘Labour MPs are Worried about Momentum. Should They Be?’, New Statesman, 26 October 2015.
- 15.
For example, see Stephen Bush, ‘Victory in London was Jeremy Corbyn’s, Not Sadiq Khan’s’, New Statesman, 20 May 2016, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/devolution/2016/05/victory-london-was-jeremy-corbyn-s-not-sadiq-khan-s.
- 16.
Having analysed the 2016 local elections, the psephologist Matt Singh argued that Labour, as the opposition, should have had more than a 1% lead over the government at that stage of the Parliament and the results would translate to a Conservative lead of 10–12% in a general election.
- 17.
‘Labour’s Connection to its Core Vote is Badly Frayed’, The Times, 27 October 2016.
- 18.
One of those briefing him for PMQs was struck by how, since so much of Corbyn’s career had been spent fighting internal Labour battles, he and those around him had little understanding of how the actual opposition—that is, the Conservatives—might respond to his questions. See also Ayesha Hazarika and Tom Hamilton’s Punch and Judy Politics. Biteback, 2018.
- 19.
It is often said that Corbyn called for Article 50 to be triggered ‘immediately’. Yet the actual phrasing, in a live TV interview with David Dimbleby at 7.28 am on the morning after the referendum, was less dramatic. He said: ‘We must respect that result and Article 50 has to be invoked now so that we negotiate an exit from the European Union.’ As he later explained, although the wording was not as precise as it could have been, by ‘now’ he did not mean ‘immediately’, but rather at some point as a consequence of the referendum. What muddied the water further was that when the next question from Dimbleby asked why he wanted to trigger Article 50 quickly rather than wait, he did not challenge the premise of the question. See, for example, ‘Reality Check: Has Corbyn Changed His Mind on Article 50?’, BBC News, 22 July 2016, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-uk-leaves-the-eu-36866170.
- 20.
Afterwards, several would admit that they were not thinking rationally at the time. ‘I lost the plot’, admitted one.
- 21.
As with so many events in the Parliament, those in the Corbyn team have a very different view on what happened from the MPs involved; as one of Corbyn’s aides said, ‘I don’t believe for one second that [they] had not intended to resign before the meeting’.
- 22.
McCluskey’s reported objective in the talks had been to appease the critics without Corbyn resigning. See, for example, Nunns, The Candidate, pp. 278–79.
- 23.
Shipman, All Out War, p. 482.
- 24.
In a 2016 VICE documentary, The Outsider, Sibthorpe commented that ‘if they want to get rid of him the best thing would be to wait and let Jeremy fail on his own … in his own time’.
- 25.
Steve Howell, Game Changer: Eight Weeks That Transformed British Politics. Accent Press, 2018, p. 76.
- 26.
They had written a hard-hitting anti-austerity blog the previous December, ‘Democracy Demands a Richer Britain’; see www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jem-bendell/democracy-demands-a-riche_b_13348586.html.
- 27.
The Times in an editorial claimed that this had already been accomplished. ‘There is a new party in British politics and it is called the Labour party’, it said. The Times, 26 September 2016.
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Cowley, P., Kavanagh, D. (2018). From Miliband to Corbyn: Labour. In: The British General Election of 2017. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95936-8_4
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