Jeremy Corbyn’s new politics goes nuclear
Keeping up with Jeremy Corbyn’s “new politics” is a struggle even for him, it seems. This morning, in the spirit of straight talking, he said he would never press the button for the nuclear deterrent.
Problem is he is the leader of a party that currently backs the continuation of the nuclear deterrent. That could still be party policy if he was elected prime minister. One of the first thing that happens when you walk into No. 10 is that you have the nuclear deterrent procedures explained.
By saying he wouldn’t press the button many feel Jeremy Corbyn is either saying he wouldn’t be prime minister or he’s saying he would over-rule party policy and effectively disarm unilaterally if he was prime minister.
Union leaders exploded, as did some frontbench Labour MPs I spoke to this morning, and they weren’t exploding with fizz.
After the traditional singing of the Red Flag at the end of conference I bumped into the GMB General Secretary Sir Paul Kenny. He repeated what he’d said on the BBC World At One programme about how Jeremy Corbyn would have to decide whether he wanted to be leader or not if Labour held on to the nuclear deterrent. Who knows, he said, he might not be leader in 2020 anyway.
I asked him what odds he put on Jeremy Corbyn getting all the way to the general election in 2020 and he said he really couldn’t say as beyond the “fluff” of the conference, it wasn’t clear Labour’s (brand new) leader was reaching voters beyond the committed.
Other senior union figures I’ve spoken to this week have said they are convinced that Jeremy Corbyn will not lead Labour into the general election. “He’ll go in 2017 or 2018 I would guess,” one said. “He won’t have to be told.” One senior union source said “we’d replace him with someone with less left pedigree but on the same sort of policies “.
I bumped into John McDonnell as he left Brighton and he appeared to say that Jeremy Corbyn could be prime minister of a multilateral party because his unilateralism, acknowledged and known when the party elected him, trumped the later shift of policy.
Shadow defence secretary Maria Eagle said Mr Corbyn’s comments were “unhelpful”. One shadow minister said it risked unpicking a careful compromise whereby pro-Trident MPs were going to vote to back the deterrent when the government calls a vote expected next year ahead of a conference vote next autumn.
Across the whole range of policy, the Corbyn team hopes to resolve the tensions between MPs’ opinion and Jeremy Corbyn’s opinion (backed by the mass of members) by giving the members a greater say, but they need time to do that.
The NEC was told yesterday they’ll get Mr Corbyn’s draft reforms for consultation at the November meeting. One party source said those rule changes were in the “embryonic” form at the moment but, as I mentioned last Friday, the idea of membership plebiscites and those are still being talked about in senior Corbyn circles.
One senior union figure I spoke to said his union wouldn’t have a problem in principle with the approach as their 50 per cent share of conference votes has frequently provided meaningless triumphs and a vote of a more left-wing membership base might be a better way to entrench the shift to the left.
As he left Brighton Jeremy Corbyn bumped into chefs from his conference hotel kitchen and thanked them for the vegetarian options they’d provided. Yesterday one of his aides waved his arms across the delegates saying that half of them wouldn’t be there next year. Corbynites, he suggested, would make sure next year’s delegates would be closer to the leader’s ideology. Will Jeremy Corbyn get to meet them?
On some levels he looks stronger than he did two weeks ago. Expectations were low and cleared presentationally. Until today’s spat over Trident, he’d managed to avoid provoking outbursts from his shadow cabinet, though some were clearly uncomfortable with talk yesterday of a massive personal mandate on Trident.
The Corbynites are not nearly as organised as the Bennites in the 1980s, when supporters were home-grown in the party, politically groomed. Much of the new membership appears to be less doctrinaire. But the Corbynites understand the importance of organisation and have their tails up while the centre right of the party seems winded, still dazed or, as one constituency delegate put it “smashed”. One Brownite former minister said the left now “own the means of production” in the party.
One footnote on presentational skills: I hear that John McDonnell had mastered autocue for his speech on Monday only to see the autocue plates fail to rise up in front of him when he got to the platform. He had to read off a hard copy text instead. The problem was that when former MP Candy Atherton’s wheelchair got stuck under the lectern and leader and shadow chancellor tried to dislodge her, the autocue machine was accidentally detached in the process.
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