Remember those few days in June when Labour MPs couldn’t stop resigning? That long Sunday after the country had voted for Brexit, when every time you turned on the radio another shadow cabinet minister had stood down, calling for Jeremy Corbyn to do likewise? Or the next day, when the only thing you wanted to quit was the non-stop news, just for a few hours, but there was Angela Eagle in tears at her own resignation? Before June, the mass resignation of 44 frontbench politicians in as many hours, all citing a loss of confidence in their leader, would have led to said leader being turfed out of office. But we didn’t count on Corbyn.
Since Corbyn’s second victory in September, Labour has suffered a trio of miserable byelection results, including a lost deposit in Richmond. The party lags behind the Tories by 17 points, according to a recent YouGov poll. Yet the Labour rebels have been very quiet about Corbyn’s leadership. This is all part of a concerted plan to do nothing, allowing Corbyn to fail on his own. Just don’t call it a plot …
The coup’s ringleader was Hilary Benn, sacked after midnight before he could be the first to resign. After a powerful intervention as shadow foreign secretary in a debate on Syria months earlier, Benn had won many admirers and his call for Corbyn to step down was seen by MPs as characteristically brave. While the coup ultimately failed, Benn’s elevated profile led to him winning the chairmanship of the Brexit select committee, scrutinising Theresa May’s woeful policy of “Brexit means Brexit”. And he can make jokes: “When Moses came down from the mountain bearing the tablets, they did not contain the Ten Hints,” Benn told the Commons this month.
As the coup unfolded, Angela Eagle was tipped as a leadership contender. Yet the day after launching her bid, a brick was thrown through the window of her constituency office and she received death threats. Within a week she had withdrawn, leaving Owen Smith alone to run against Corbyn. Along with Benn, she has been at the forefront of Labour’s shadow cabinet in exile on the backbenches, challenging the government on Brexit.
Our negotiations to leave the EU are fertile ground for the former rebels: Heidi Alexander, the first shadow cabinet minister to resign during the coup, made an impassioned defence of immigration during the Commons debate on Brexit earlier this month, saying: “I am a 41-year-old woman without children. Babies grow up to become taxpayers. Who will be contributing to my pension and my care? The answer is migrants and their children.”
The post-Brexit landscape presents a different challenge to Gloria De Piero, whose Ashfield constituency is among those northern seats targeted by new Ukip leader Paul Nuttall. Ukip came a close third in Ashfield in 2015 and at the referendum, 70% voted leave, meaning De Piero will have to fight off Nuttall’s party at the next election as he attempts to rebrand Ukip as an alternative to Labour in the north.
As deputy leader, Tom Watson was unable to fully join the coup, but his failure to back Corbyn was supposed to help ease the leader out of office. What was extraordinary was that the architect of the 2006 plot to unseat Tony Blair used his 2016 Labour conference speech to urge the party to stop “trashing the record” of the former prime minister. Watson was later given the extra job of shadow culture secretary by Corbyn. Now he is taking on an old foe even more immovable than the Labour leader: Rupert Murdoch, and his attempted takeover of Sky.
Although he had no frontbench job to quit, Wes Streeting was one of Corbyn’s most prominent critics during and after the coup, including condemning the peerage for Shami Chakrabarti just weeks after she had conducted an inquiry clearing Labour of antisemitism. Streeting’s stance has led to Momentum activists – so far unsuccessfully – targeting his local party in Ilford North.
Luciana Berger quit as shadow minister for mental health during the coup, but from the backbenches she has continued to fight for parity of esteem in the NHS, as well as better social care provision. Earlier this month, she gave evidence at the Old Bailey about the antisemitic abuse she received from rightwing troll Joshua Bonehill-Paine, who was sentenced to two years in jail.
If the point of the coup was to get rid of a leader who was pushing Labour too far to the left, then no one told Owen Smith: his leadership pitch was to argue for the same leftwing policies, only without the cultish, idiosyncratic appeal of Corbyn. Funnily enough, this didn’t work. Since his defeat, Smith has pressed Labour’s case for the “just about managing”, as well as getting into a bizarre row on Twitter with BuzzFeed over fake news.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 21 December 2016
