In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill finds the humour in the staggering collapse of the Corbynist wing of the British Labour Party, from being tantalizingly close to forming a government to today’s political knife-fight for a single seat in North London:
Jeremy Corbyn, then-leader of the Labour Party speaking at a rally in Hayfield, Peak District, in 2018.
Photo by Sophie Brown via Wikimedia Commons.
Schadenfreude is an unbecoming emotion, I know. But if you think I am not going to derive at least fleeting pleasure from the fact that the Corbynista movement went from being on the cusp of government to fighting tooth and nail to hold on to one poxy constituency in north London, then you are off your rocker. We must all find mirth wherever we can in this drabbest of elections. And I find mine in the staggering contraction of Corbynism, the almost total collapse of this cause that was once so beloved of every trustafarian Trot, Glasto wanker and they / them fruitloop.
It’s nearly too funny for words. Five years ago, Jeremy Corbyn and his crew were eyeing up Downing Street. They were in the running to run the country. Now they’re entirely concentrated in Islington North. Corbyn once commanded vast crowds of affluent youths at Glastonbury, basking in their posh chant of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!”. He had whole armies of time-rich tweeters who put their expensive education to good use by barking at us “gammon” about how “Jez” was “the absolute boy”. Now he can just about rustle up a few score political anoraks to go canvassing for him in a little bit of north London. It would require a heart of stone not to laugh.
Much has changed for “Jez” in the past five years. He was leader of the Labour Party back then. Now he isn’t even a member of the Labour Party. He was suspended in 2020 after he said the scale of Labour’s anti-Semitism problem under his leadership from 2015 to 2020 had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons“. Then he was officially expelled this year after he announced his intention to stand as an independent in Islington North, the constituency he represented for Labour since 1983. The man who wanted to be PM is now fighting for his life to remain an MP. We’ve gone from “socialism in one country” to “socialism in one constituency”.
Die-hard Corbynistas are flocking to Islington North as if it were the Paris Commune under attack from Versailles. They’re beating the streets to plead with constituents to return the absolute boy to parliament in order that socialism might yet live. The list of starry names Corbyn has dragooned to his door-knocking cause reads like a Sky News producer’s rolodex of wankers. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, anyone? Yes, I’m sure her post-truth bollocks about “all white people [having] white privilege” will go down a treat among the white working classes on the council estates of Archway.
There’s Grace Blakeley, too, a privately educated flapper-girl socialist who thinks flouncing out of a book festival is “collective action“. That’s how she described her decision to withdraw from the Hay Festival over its receipt of funds from the investment management firm, Baillie Gifford. Tweeting “I’ve decided not to go to Hay” is the well-heeled millennial’s Battle of Orgreave. Perhaps Ms Blakeley will compare her class-war wounds with those of some old Irish fella she meets in a pub in Holloway when she’s out electioneering for the boy.
