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Corbyn Lacks Credibility? Yeah Right

What exactly makes a credible leader? The consensus amongst the overwhelming majority of MPs, paid political commentators and their well-followed amateur counterparts is that, whatever it may be, Jeremy Corbyn does not possess it.

Criticising the paucity of debate on Twitter is an exercise in tautology, and yet the rank application of glib, divisive rhetoric by those gainfully employed to make comment still has the power to shock.

Aggravation appears on either side, yes; Corbyn’s followers have been guilty of appalling behaviour, and due to these outbursts can be framed as basic and crude, an explosive barrel of conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and economic naivety, armed with some clips from RT and a handful of Canary articles.

Forget that support for Corbyn remains high among Labour members old and new. Forget that this support has poured out from the only nucleation point on the edifice of the mainstream British left. Forget that this has happened after decades of disillusionment and decline. Forget this because Corbyn lacks credibility.

For the consensus makers, the bon mot sneezing liberals of news and social media, credibility (somehow) still takes the shape of the status quo. As representational democracies across the West convulse in a period of radical vicissitude, the cry goes out for more of same; respond to institutional failings with more of the failing institutions.

We are talking about writers and politicians who yearn for the recent years of maximised political apathy. Labour membership has surged past the half million mark, and this unprecedented broadening of political consciousness is treated with both suspicion and derision. Engagement is something to be mocked and feared. The mob has arrived to wrest away control of your local CLP.

Credibility has come to be equated with eschewing nuance for a clear message. Fundamental to any good leadership is the capacity to successfully communicate ideas, to utilise mass media, and on this Corbyn has been beyond woeful. But it is no coincidence that, as the forum for debate contracts to 140 characters, commentators tend to respect the leader who can boil down complexity to a ten word answer. This is not the liberating praxis of sloganeering, it is the confinement found in perpetual evasion.

Credibility, it is implied, means winning back your heartlands bycompromising fundamental ideals, regardless of the fact that it was through such compromises that the heartlands were lost in the first place. The PLP believe they must move rightwards on immigration and risk losing the metropolitan vote in order to woo back a working class they continue to blindly racialise as white and xenophobic. The soft-left clamour for a return to a 3rd-way market socialism that has been and gone and is never coming back — if only we could get the right leader, if only we could win back the white working class vote, then finally we could re-elect The Late 1990s. Still the centrists of the Labour party talk as if they know what is best for their economically disadvantaged neighbours.

But mostly credibility means electability. Electability is, under this formulation, deeply mercurial, given that Corbyn’s repeated electoral successes offer no evidence of its existence. As Frankie Boyle put it, “the idea is that Corbyn is unelectable, and it’s just one of life’s sad ironies that none of the people who believe this will be able to beat him in an election.” In just two years there have been three massive electoral events, in Scotland, in last years general election, and most recently in the EU referendum. In each, a huge protest vote was cast — not always successfully — to reject current political norms. This is something that must be captured, not shied away from. At this moment of all moments, a retreat to the centre ground could not be less anaemic, less appropriate, when the far right is once again on the march.

What is required is bold leadership. For your sketch writers and your CiF contributors, strong leadership still looks like David Cameron, or Theresa May, or Hillary Benn. Leadership, in this context, lies in the capacity to look and act the part — a part shaped by and intrinsic to the declining political culture apparently in need of saving. Leadership is something that can be put to Kinnock’s supermarket test. Leadership is something that comes in a suit and tie befitting a high office of state.

Corbyn has offered leadership, just not of a kind registered by the majority of MPs and media outlets. After the fivefold increase in racist attacks that followed the EU referendum, Corbyn travelled to the Polish Embassy in London to express solidarity with Polish citizens living in the UK. After the publication of the Chilcot Report, Corbyn apologised on behalf of his party for the role it had played in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. This is an MP who from the outset has led his party on a platform explicitly opposing austerity, an argument now won with little fanfare. (If it seems too much to give Corbyn credit for this, remember that it was only just over a year ago that Harriet Harman whipped Labour MPs to abstain on cuts to ESA.)

Not in my lifetime has there been a greater need or desire for a new constitutional and economic settlement. Credibility in that context means something altogether different from the capacity to conform within this faltering political system. Current modes of assessment are in as dire a need of recalibration as the institutions they emanate from. It is a horribly frightening world, one that seems to grow in uncertainty with every passing day. Whether Corbyn has credible answers to the old order entirely misses the point. Whether he has them for the new is the question that needs to be asked.

Michael Marshall

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