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”
Cole
He was elected as leader of the Labour Party – and Labour won 3 general elections under his leadership. Whatever you think of him that’s undeniable.
Of course the hard left are now trying to say he was an infiltrator or a Tory. Which is daft – but what you’d think if you were a Trot.
Cole
I have a ‘right wing tendency’ apparently – although I’ve been a non Blairite Labour member for years.
Saul Till
Agree with that. According to many of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters the labour MPs who voted to intervene in Syria did so solely because they thought it would ‘annoy’ Jeremy Corbyn. This is both staggeringly solipsistic and deeply crass, and it says something about the conspiratorial thinking that infects both extremes on the left and the right.
Your respondent implied that there was something “fishy” about all these known anti-Corbyn MPs…just happening…to vote for intervention – he seems oblivious to the existence of the following, rather obvious argument: ie. that these MPs are anti-Corbyn precisely because their political beliefs on things like foreign policy have always diverged from Corbyn’s.
Therefore it’s hardly a sodding surprise if they disagree with their party leader about Syria. In fact, it’d be a hell of a lot more “fishy” if they’d all suddenly decided to vote with Jeremy Corbyn against airstrikes.
The hard left seem to need reminding that the pro-intervention labour MPs aren’t all Single White Female-style JC-obsessives who are so transfixed by, and jealous of, the man’s explosive charisma and political credibility that they’re driven to say to themselves ‘well, my principles are one thing, but seeing Corbyn’s grumpy little face when I disagree with him on Syria…that’s much more important’.
The interventionists are average labour politicians not the fucking Sith, and as much as self-centred, illiberal left dogmatists would like to believe otherwise there’s no reason to believe these MPs took the ethics of military intervention any less seriously than the Corbynites(who occasionally seem rather ambivalent about Russian or Syrian government intervention). Frankly, considering the total dearth of positive propositions put forward by the anti-interventionists in the run up to the vote and afterwards, it seems more likely that it’s the latter who are guilty of dogmatic, thoughtless decision-making.
Saul Till
By ‘hold them to account’ you mean threaten them with being knifed?
Saul Till
And Corbyn was in favour of the IRA bombing right up until…oh wait, he’s still for it.
We can all play this game, and considering some of the quirkier positions people like Seumas Milne, Diane Abbott, StWC, Corbyn himself etc. have held viz a vis Hamas, Hezbollah, Putin’s Russia, the Iranian theocratic government, Stalin(!) and depressingly many more it’d probably serve JC and his supporters best to not get involved. Their cupboard’s fit-to-bursting with some very ugly skeletons.