Corbyn challenge is desperation from centrists who need Labour more than the party needs them Today, one of the most bizarre and underhand plots in British political history failed. The Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) […]

Today, one of the most bizarre and underhand plots in British political history failed. The Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) voted, narrowly, against an attempt by a number of members on its right wing to interpret the party’s Rule Book in such a way that Jeremy Corbyn – a sitting leader with an enormous mandate from the membership – would not automatically be a candidate.

This was an attempt by a handful of clever operators to use a committee of 33 people to abolish the most significant social and political movement of recent years. Had they succeeded, the leadership challenge would have become a transparent coup – and the Labour Party would have faced an internal democratic crisis that would have made the 1980s look like an extended cuddle.

If this experience should teach us anything, it is that the fight being waged by some Labour moderates is a raw battle for power.

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But for those of us who support the politics that Jeremy Corbyn put forward when he first ran to be leader – and among Labour members, we are in an overwhelming majority – there is no time to dwell on the machinations of the Labour Right.

Corbyn may be on the ballot, but we cannot assume that overwhelming support for his ideas will automatically translate into votes, either in the party or the country.

Chaos and hopelessness

A fog of chaos and hopelessness has been carefully cultivated by elements within Labour, including, not trivially, almost its entire parliamentary wing and the party machine itself. Everything has been tainted: a respectable performance in the local elections became a calamity; winning unprecedented votes in Mayoral contests got a passing mention; and a referendum lost by an out of touch political elite became the fault of a man, and a movement, who represent the best hope for a progressive anti-establishment politics.

The total and self-conscious detachment of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the party machine from the will of members is the primary cause of Labour’s current crisis.

We should be under no illusions about what this leadership contest represents. It is a desperate move by a set of centrist forces inside the Labour Party whose social and political space has evaporated, and whose only chance of survival other than on the margins on British politics is to cling to the Labour Party for material sustenance and voter base.

Tensions to the fore

They know that the longer Corbyn remains leader, the more remote their hopes for political relevance become and the more their bastions in the party machine and the parliamentary party are eroded. This is why some of them were they are so desperate to prevent him from winning, at all costs.

But the leadership election also presents an opportunity to grow and renew the Labour movement and the left more broadly. Tensions that previously bubbled below the surface in Labour have been brought to the fore, and hundreds of thousands of people have joined the Party – the vast majority of them probably to support Corbyn and the ideas he represents.

Those new members cannot be left as passive voters: over the next few weeks, and then beyond, everyone must become an activist – not just to recruit members and win the leadership election, but to become an engine of social change in communities and workplaces.

The struggle of ordinary people

We should not be surprised about the kind of behaviour. Just as the achievements of the labour movement were founded on the struggle of ordinary people, not hand-outs from above, so too the idea of internal democracy has had to be fought for by generations of activists against the will of generations of Iain McNicols and Peter Mandelsons.

Until the 1980s, only MPs got a vote on the party leader. Then as now, it was the party’s left wing – a force lambasted by the press and witch- hunted by the party machine – that led the campaign for internal democracy.

A general election could be called at any moment – and Labour must be ready to elevate the radical, popular message that Corbyn espouses above all the noise. The attempted coup has been disruptive, but it has exposed the supposedly responsible Labour establishment in the most spectacular way.

It is they who have attempted to wilfully vandalise the party. It is now down to the wild, dangerous membership – the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, inspired by a politics of hope – to do the responsible thing: win Labour and transform society.