The shadow foreign secretary showed yesterday what an effective, coherent opposition should look like
I have been a member of the Labour Party for fifteen years and never have I witnessed anything like yesterday.
MPs had a grave decision to make – to support military action against ISIL in Syria or not.
The debate started on a poor note. The prime minister failed to give a clear explanation of his figure that 70,000 moderate Syrians were ready to provide the boots on the ground needed to back up air strikes.
His decision not to apologise for his remarks that those opposed to military action were somehow ‘terrorist sympathisers’ was also an error of judgement that diminished the standing of the office that David Cameron holds.
Then came Jeremy Corbyn – head down in his notes, he simply faced a barrage of noise from the Conservative MPs, failing to answer head on his views about the air strikes currently taking place in Iraq against ISIL, strikes undertaken at the invitation of the Iraqi government itself.
The new, honest politics obviously did not extend to answering a straight question with a straight answer. The sight of deputy leader Tom Watson with his head in his hands said it all.
But then came Hilary Benn. Since agreeing to serve under Jeremy Corbyn Benn has been placed in a difficult, if not impossible position. He was forced to clear up the mess created by Corbyn’s failure to provide leadership on the UK’s place in the EU, and over Syria he has been propelled to play the statesman role that the leader of the official opposition is incapable of doing.
Benn’s speech last night was well and truly electrifying. The passion, the energy and the clarity that he brought to the argument was the kind of speech that neither Cameron nor Corbyn could deliver. It was a speech of a prime minister in waiting.
Jeremy Corbyn sat stony faced throughout, not even able to muster a ‘well done’ on the delivery of a great speech to his shadow foreign secretary.
The Labour Party now faces a crunch moment that it has to confront head on. Yes, Labour members voted overwhelming for Jeremy Corbyn to lead the party but sometimes reality has to hit us.
Jeremy Corbyn is not a prime minister in waiting. His poll ratings are tanking further (if that were possible) among those voters who ultimately decide who governs the country.
His inability to present a united front on crucial security issues would pose severe difficulties of the UK’s position in the world if he were, by some fluke, ever to make it to Downing Street.
But worst of all has been his attitude to his parliamentary colleagues. Yes, he called for an atmosphere of tolerance as MP after MP has faced abuse for supporting military intervention in Syria, but it was he that sent Labour MPs to face the wolves last weekend, leaving them to stew. It was shameful.
Members of the parliamentary Labour Party and the country as a whole know the truth. For all his admirable qualities and principles, Jeremy Corbyn cannot and will not win a General Election. Hilary Benn showed yesterday what an effective, coherent opposition should look like.
Air strikes over Syria are now being undertaken in defence of democracy. In the UK our democracy is in peril thanks to the absence of a credible opposition to hold the government to account.
The Labour Party cannot go on like this. Something, and more specifically someone, needs to change and change now.
Ed Jacobs is a contributing editor at Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
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127 Responses to “Comment: Hilary Benn showed us what Labour is missing”
Steve Cheney
So, would you concede that when the Labour MPs who support airstrikes mostly consist of MPs who have been attacking Corbyn for the past few months, it looks a bit fishy?
I mean, if you want to keep politics clean and non-partisan, that has to apply WITHIN Labour as well, right?
Do you believe that all those people who didn’t like Corbyn anyway just so happened to vote with their consciences exactly the same way?
Because to most of us, it just looks like the political class using a Commons vote to throw a tantrum at not getting their own way. Which would be pretty pathetic if the vote in question WASN’T a matter of life or death to anyone.
Steve Cheney
The problem with that argument, of course, is that many of those “newcomers” are actually RETURNING Labour voters, who quit in disgust at Blair’s war.
I think that, if anything, some in the political class would prefer to see them driven away all over again, because they are inconvenient to their power base.
Steve Cheney
You are wrong, Neil. The government have been forced into several major U-turns since Corbyn became the leader. The media refuses to acknowledge it, but this is a direct result of his leadership.
After so many years where “Opposition” meant Blairites telling us that they’d do Tory policies WAY better than the Tories do (which, in their defence, they did, under Blair and Brown), we have a leadership who actually opposes the policies themselves, not merely their execution.
Frankly, I find it hard to imagine the past few weeks with anyone else at the helm. The other candidates would have begged the Tories to cut them a deal to maybe only mercilessly beast people 23 hours a day instead of 24. And then the Tories would have reneged on it.
I don’t know, do you people think that the media ridiculed and lambasted Ed Miliband because he was a bad leader?
Ringstone
The thing is they don’t just represent the sad individuals in the local association, they are honour bound to represent the voters, all of them, even the “evil Tories”™.
Steve Cheney
So your response to this if for Labour to abandon the voters that they stand the most chance of winning over and compete for right-wing voters with the Tories and UKIP?
Have you never heard of market saturation? Because it applies here. Labour would be at best third, probably fourth or lower, on any right-wing voters list of Parties Who Actually Mean It When They Say Right-Wing Stuff. So they’d have to have rejected the Tories, UKIP, and probably the Lib Dems as well, before they’d think that Labour were the best party for them to vote for.
Combined with the amount of effort and time and resources that it would take to convince people that Labour are right-wing at all, that’s a pretty weak return on a pretty huge investment.
And, let’s not forget, while they’re doing that, their traditional support will be leaving them IN DROVES, because they feel taken for granted, and because it’s clear that Labour is hell bent on becoming nothing like the party they love. So they’ll leave, and I guarantee, they’ll leave in far greater numbers than you can make up with Tory votes.
One Nationism was ultimately a joke, because while it talked as though all votes were equally valuable and equally accessible to Labour, in practice, this resulted in Tory votes being treated like the Golden Snitch – i.e. as though it’s worth sacrificing huge numbers of opportunities for more accessible votes to catch just one of the special hard-to-catch ones.
Labour’s move to the left makes sense in marketing terms, because, quite simply, they have virtually no competition for the left-wing vote right now. The Lib Dems revealed themselves to no longer be Charles Kennedy’s cuddly wuddly party anymore (and about time), and the Greens, bless ’em, showed that all they could really do outside of Brighton is cost Labour seats.
What enrages the PLP about Corbyn is that, while they talked about how Labour needs to change and proves that it’s listening to the concerns of people who claim they quit Labour for the likes of UKIP… Corbyn just turns up and says what he thinks like a normal person, and people flock to him and his party. It’s got to be incredibly embarrassing to have wasted so much money and time and energy on sculpting yourself into a slick, banal product, only to find that some hoary old park gent can do everything you hoped to do without even appear to try – and indeed, precisely BECAUSE he didn’t appear to be trying so hard.
What Corbyn had, and still has, is trust, and word of mouth. And those are the best forms of advertising, because a) you can’t buy them, and b) people KNOW you can’t buy them. When the people you know and trust say they support someone, you believe them, in a way that no expensive billboard campaign can make you believe.
Wandering off topic a bit, so, in summary:
Pursuing the right-wing vote is pointless for Labour because right-wing voters are completely spoilt for choice and Labour will never be their first choice even if they CAN convince them that they’re right wing. Whereas all Labour has to do to convince left-wing voters to vote for them is to actually BE left-wing, because who else are we going to vote for?