If you haven’t yet seen the Public Sector Pay Gap Momentum video, watch it. It’s an enlightening 72 seconds. The content, unsurprisingly, is economically questionable, half-baked Corbynite drivel – but that’s not the point. It’s beautifully filmed, powerfully performed, and neatly packaged on Twitter as a juicy bite of shareable content, shot through with dark humour. It’s already been liked over 8000 times on Twitter, and re-tweeted a further 8500 times. As a piece of propaganda, which is exactly what it is intended to be, it would turn the world’s best advertising agencies green with envy.
Compare it to most of the Conservatives’ pathetic attempts at social media engagement and cringe. While Momentum’s social media contributions glisten with the enthusiasm of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dedicated, young, techie volunteers, the Conservatives official Twitter page appears to be run by a bloke at CCHQ who hasn’t quite grasped the concept of a hashtag. Incredibly, three and a half months after “Strong and Stable” horribly backfired to cost weak and wobbly Theresa May her Commons majority, her Brexit mandate and her personal confidence, the slogan is still emblazoned all over it.
That Momentum outshines the Conservative Party when it comes to social media engagement is hardly ground-breaking news. To anyone who has been following British politics for the past two years, that truth is self-evident.
But this latest short film is worth taking seriously for a more fundamental reason: it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jeremy Corbyn has got what he wanted back in 2015 – his “new kind of politics” has arrived, and the Conservatives still haven’t grasped the full implications of what that means.
During his campaign to become leader, Jeremy Corbyn repeated time and time again that he wanted to change the way politics worked. Under his leadership, the party would be “grassroots focussed”, and wouldn’t be constrained by the stuffy eccentricities of the House of Commons. He would bring the people who got him elected (those infamous £3 members) into the fold of elite politics, and, with their help, he would iron out the fold altogether.
He was as upfront as he possibly could have been about his aims, but it’s taken two full years for the rest of us to realise that he was serious: he really doesn’t give a damn about the House of Commons.
Once you’ve understood this fundamental fact about Jeremy Corbyn, everything else starts to slot into place. Shrill accusations that he is turning Labour into a “protest party” miss the point because a protest party is exactly what he’s after. He doesn’t want to engage in the boring nuances of political debate in stale old Parliament, he wants the people on the street and on internet forums to yell at and troll the Government until it is forced to capitulate.
And his methods are working: following pressure, the government’s pay cap policy has collapsed. Theresa May and Philip Hammond, are drawing up plans to end the seven-year cap on public sector pay for some state employees, including nurses and newly qualified teachers, and it seems likely that more U-turns will follow. The Prime Minister may have been more coherent and convincing in PMQs, but in the new kind of politics, PMQs is an irrelevant side-show.
This lack of interest in party politics also explains the approach to campaigning which Corbyn took his summer. Confused and hurt Scottish Nationalists have been at a loss to understand why the man they thought of as a socialist messiah has betrayed them by trying to take seats from vulnerable SNP MPs. The answer is that Jeremy Corbyn has no interest in tribal politics in the traditional sense, and he’s not interested in doing the ground-work required for a future socialist coalition. The purpose of his particular brand of campaigning (which involves a lot of megaphones and banners) it is to whip up the sort of feverish support normally reserved for the Taylor Swifts of the world. While other politicians look for supporters for a cause, Jeremy Corbyn is after fans.
His many detractors within the Labour Party were hoping that this would be his fatal flaw. It takes a lot to shift a person’s fundamental political mindset, but it doesn’t take much to turn them against a celebrity. Last week, there was a certain amount of excitement surrounding a YouGov poll which indicated that Corbynmania may be wearing off.
Unfortunately for mainstream politics, that excitement was misplaced. In a six-hour meeting of party chiefs yesterday, Jeremy Corbyn moved to strengthen his grip over the Labour Party today with a series of reforms which will give the Labour leader’s army of grassroots supporters a bigger say over the running of the party as well as policies and future leadership elections. The reforms include four new places on the National Executive Committee, the party’s rule-making body, which will be reserved for grassroots member, and a reduction in the threshold required for candidates to stand for the leadership to 10 per cent of MPs and peers, down from 15 per cent.
The Labour Leader is aware that his popularity may be as ephemeral as a snap on Snapchat, and he is now going about fixing the roof while the sun is shining. He’s making sure that the new kind of democracy he’s introduced doesn’t die with his celebrity status.
Ever since he was first elected as an MP in 1983, Jeremy Corbyn has shown complete contempt for the standard approach to the House of Commons. I don’t mean that as an insult; it’s simply the truth. During the Blair/Brown era he rebelled no fewer than 428 times, and, as recently as last month, his friend and ally Chris Williamson scathingly announced that he (read they) sees the Parliamentary Labour Party as “just a tiny part of the wider movement”.
What’s interesting about Corbyn’s radicalism is that he has never made any attempt to hide it. In fact, he’s been completely brazen about his desire to make the Houses of Parliament obsolete. The problem is that the Conservatives didn’t take the warning signs seriously. Week after week, they laughed at Corbyn’s poor performance on PMQs, not realising that he was useless only because he had no interest in what he perceived to be an anachronistic and meaningless ritual. He’d lined up his troops to fight on an entirely different front outside Parliament.
Momentum’s bizarre insistence that Jeremy Corbyn won the election starts to make sense when you realise that while the Conservatives have been in a permanent state of fluster since the referendum last year, Momentum has been systematically breaking down and rebuilding the machinery of British politics. The primary purpose of Momentum was never to gain parliamentary seats, it was to reform politics so that seats no longer mattered. In Momentum’s version of politics, the people control the Government through pressure campaigns – and if the latest video is any indication, Momentum’s version of politics is what we’ve got.
