A response from the Rosa Luxemburg wing of the Labour Party
According to Stephen Mills on Nine to Noon yesterday, Jeremy Corbyn’s resignation as Labour leader will only be mourned by “the microscopic Rosa Luxemburg-worshipping far left sect in New Zealand.” His outburst was deliberate, gratuitous and way over the top.
His vehemence reminded me of other friends in UK Labour who could barely constrain their apoplexy when Corbyn’s name was mentioned. Mills talked of Labour “coming to its senses” where the Englanders spoke of “the adults in the room.”
Interestingly also yesterday the 858-page report of the investigation into anti-semitism in the UK Labour Party arrived in my inbox. It describes in some detail how senior officials in the party actively worked against Corbyn in the 2017 election to the point of hoping he would lose. Treachery took the place of solidarity.
According to Mills, the main reason why Corbyn achieved one of Labour’s best-ever election gains in 2017 was because of the ineptitude of May’s campaign. Nothing could be further from the truth. Corbyn was tireless, and drew huge crowds to his rallies the length and breadth of the country. The Manifesto “For the Many not the Few’ was one of the rare ones that was a widely-read, much-cited vote-winner.
The 2019 campaign was different. The determinant was always going to be whether it would be fought over austerity or Brexit. Labour was caught in two minds over Brexit and compromised; the LibDems wanted a midwinter snap election, thinking Jo Swinson would be Prime Minister, and winter put an end to any chance of rallies. “Get Brexit Done” was a runaway winner.
Corbyn did make mistakes no question, partly because he was too nice a bloke. Anti-semitism was a smear, and there he compromised where he could have condemned. He was also not ruthless enough in dealing with those who briefed against him for so many years.
But he did bring the Labour party membership to heights not seen for many decades, and the manifesto policies will still be core to Labour’s future. The irony is likely to be the accident of Covid-19, that will turn Johnson’s party into true one-nation Tories, stealing all Labour’s clothes. With over four more years to go before an election this could be another long time between drinks for UK Labour. Time to dust off John O’Farrell’s “Things Can Only Get Better.”
But back to Mills and the “Rosa Luxemburg-worshipping far left sect.” I had to look her up – she was shot as a revolutionary socialist by the SPD Freikorps. I’m not a revolutionary and nor was Corbyn, but we would probably both agree on her best-known aphorism “Freiheit ist immer nur Freiheit des anders Denkenden” – “Freedom is always and only the freedom of those who think differently.”
The vehemence of those who opposed Corbyn has always puzzled me – he is so reasonable and mild, albeit stubborn, that it couldn’t be anything personal. The 2017 result showed that it wasn’t about electability. So it has to be about policy ideas.
My anti-Corbyn friends are people who are involved in policy development, or policy-making. “For the Many nor the Few” wasn’t particularly radical, it just wasn’t conventional.
Stephen Mills does speak frequently about convention; in the interview he mentions “the conventional view that National is better at economic policy.” It’s never been true, but it has become a mantra, and when I look back over the years one I have heard repeated in Labour circles more times than I care to think about. It has become self-imposed Labour’s manacle.
In the post-Covid times perhaps the best response from the “Rosa Luxemburg-loving sect” in the Labour Party is to say that it is definitely time for us to think differently about economic policy.
It has been thirty-six years since I found a typewritten draft of the Treasury’s neo-liberal manifesto “Economic Management” on the Labour Party office photocopier the Monday after the election win.
It’s now way over time for a Kiwi version of “For the Many not the Few.”
40 comments on “A response from the Rosa Luxemburg wing of the Labour Party”
This reply to Wayne was not published due to Incognito banning me for a week...
Based on electoral results, it seems Mills was way more accurate than yourself.
Based on electoral results a year after Mills' first cowardly denigration of Corbyn on RNZ National, Mills was wrong. The Labour Party went close to a stunning upset in 2017, massively reversing the losses incurred under Miliband's "leadership."
Back in 2016, Mills of course could not have predicted the absurd, destructive, fantastical jihad launched against Corbyn by the unholy alliance between the Blairite rump and the Labour Friends of Israel. Nobody could have predicted it, because there was no basis for it; of course, the truly anti-Semitic, deeply racist parties in Britain were the ones led by Farage and May/Johnson.
I appreciate you are continuing fan of Corbyn
???? I have criticised Corbyn many times over many issues, including in this very thread. I was disgusted by his failure to speak out forcefully against the imprisonment of the journalist Julian Assange. I was astonished that he did not move to discipline the brazenly treacherous Hillary Benn after that chickenhawk bellowed in parliament for the bombing of Syria. I was appalled by the way he failed to stand up to liars and slanderers like Dame Margaret Hodge, Tom Watson, John Mann and Wes Streeting. I was appalled to see him, under pressure from those liars and slanderers, throw his supporters like Chris Williamson, Tony Greenstein and Ken Livingstone to the wolves.
So, no, I am not a "continuing fan of Corbyn". But for all his failings, he has many positive qualities, and his policies were popular with the majority of the country. It was just the established political class that couldn't stand him, and were desperate to destroy him.
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“It laid the foundations for a highly valuable asset which is providing 1100 jobs into Northland, it’s more than seven percent of Northland’s economy and it gives New Zealand a security of supply which is important in turbulent times.”
Zealand said importing crude oil and refining it here gives us more flexibility and less vulnerability.
And if at first glance it seems an oil refinery would to more harm than good to our country’s ambition to be carbon-neutral by 2050, Zealand said they’re looking at that, too”.
It had been left there by Simon Walker, Labour's Comms director for the 1984 campaign. He tried for Pencarrow in 1987 but was beaten by Sonja Davies and went on to a distinguished career in the UK. He was close to Douglas and the Treasury team. I had started working for the Party a week before Muldoon called the snap election. I took a copy and gave it to others but we were always on the back foot – it was a coup.