There is only one alternative to Prime Minister Boris Johnson

Corbyn may not be a great or even a particularly good leader, but it seems few in the media recognise he is the only viable opposition to the far right we have.

While I have been critical of the Labour leadership’s Brexit stance for some time, and still do not think Corbyn has gone far enough to maximise Labour's chances of General Election victory, he has done enough to ensure one thing: his survival. While his Brexit stance, together with continuing problems with antisemitism, will have lost some members and made others luke warm, there is little appetite to replace him amongst most members. This view will only strengthen as the likelihood of a General Election increases. It is Labour party members who choose the party’s leader.

But what about antisemitism? Could this issue be the downfall of the Labour leadership? The answer is almost certainly no. As the poll discussed here shows, while 66% of Labour members think antisemtism within the party is a genuine problem, 77% think the problem is deliberately exaggerated to damage Labour and Corbyn himself. On the basis of current evidence, and that includes any rebuke from the EHRC investigation, Corbyn’s position among members on this issue is secure.

The only other factor that might raise questions among the membership about their leader is very bad poll ratings. But two factors mean this is not a risk factor for Corbyn’s leadership. First, the new Brexit policy will win some voters back. As Rob Ford notes here, there are signs that the electorate’s flirtation with four party politics is coming to an end, as both Labour and the Conservatives move their own Brexit position. Second, Labour under Corbyn have been there and done that in 2017, such that there will always be the hope of a pre-election surge for Labour.

Could Labour’s continuing antisemitism crisis create another serious split between MPs and the leadership, along the lines of the vote of no confidence in 2016 after the Brexit vote? A split of this kind would only make sense if Labour MPs believed that they had a chance of defeating Corbyn in a ballot of members, and as I have already suggested they would be delusional. MPs may demand this and that in terms of how disciplinary procedures are handled within Labour, but any attempt to unseat Corbyn, or mass defections by Labour Mps, seems unlikely.

The security of the Labour leadership’s position within the party is one of two key factors in which to evaluate the impact of continuing criticism of Labour within the mainstream media and elsewhere. The second is the threat we face from what has become the most far right and dangerous government the UK has experienced for decades if not centuries.

The Conservative party is looking increasingly like the US Republican party, and its likely leader increasingly looks like a UK version of Donald Trump. However the Conservative party has got itself into a far more dangerous position than the Republican’s have ever faced. The Tories have Nigel Farage and a right wing press pushing them to implement a No Deal Brexit that goes way beyond anything Trump might be contemplating with tariffs. Furthermore opposition within the Tory party towards Johnson’s leadership ideas and No Deal looks vanishingly small.

Two recent events have underlined how far the UK government has descended into far right territory. The first was of course Johnson’s failure to stand up for one of our own ambassadors in the Darroch affair. A corrolorary of No Deal is that a trade deal with the US becomes politically essential, and that in turn means that Trump’s not so polite requests become the UK’s actions. This is a President who tells non-white Congresswomen born in the USA to go back to “the crime infested places from which they came”. In practice a US trade deal that UK politicians desperately want will be disastrous for UK agriculture, UK consumers and many more, people already hit hard by the UK leaving the EU with no deal.

The second recent event was Amber Rudd preferring a job in any future Johnson government to her previous opposition to No Deal. It has been an object lesson to those who thought Conservative MPs would always stand up for business and the Union to see how quickly all but a few have chosen political expediency instead. Again parallels with the Republican party in the US are instructive. Just as the right wing media in the US was able to use the Tea Party movement to shift the Republicans to the right, so the right wing press have used Farage to shift the Conservative party in a similar way.

The net result will be the normalisation of a No Deal Brexit over the next few months. Leaving without a deal was not what all of the 52% of Leave voters in 2016 voted for, but virtually no one in the broadcast media will be brave enough to push this point. The lie that the 2016 vote provides a mandate for No Deal will go unchallenged. Broadcasters will balance the nonsense that the impact of No Deal on the UK will be, to quote Johnson, “infinitesimally small” against the truth that it is the biggest act of political and economic self-harm ever inflicted on the UK.

Allowing Johnson to become leader shows that the Conservative party has completely lost its moral compass. All of Johnson’s misdeeds in his past mean nothing, just as Trump’s behaviour means nothing to his supporters and the Republican party. Both individuals lie all the time, but it doesn’t matter to his own side. Johnson encourages a friend to beat up a journalist, but it doesn’t matter. Johnson uses racist language on many occasions, most recently comparing Muslim women wearing the niqab and burqa to letterboxes, but this was deemed acceptable by his party. Johnson gets advice from Steve (“Let them call you racist. Wear it as a badge of honour”) Bannon, and even the BBC does not think Johnson lying about these contacts matters.

And so, as the Conservative party loses its moral compass, the chances are that large sections of the country’s elite will do so as well, and our standing overseas will plummet even further. Although Tory party members may find Johnson’s insults acceptable, don’t expect other countries to take a UK run by Johnson as more than a bad joke. Don’t expect other countries to do business with a UK that proposes to destroy its trade relationship with the EU and many other countries at a stroke. An elite that treats threats to prorogue parliament as acceptable will not be respected by countries that value democracy, although some others will welcome the development.

Yet those who say not in my name need to ask themselves whether they are prepared to make the choice required to stop this happening. There is only one realistic opposition to a Johnson led government. Believing the Liberal Democrats could ever play that role was unrealistic, because Labour has enough loyal voters to ensure that the anti-government vote would be split. Farage along with the LibDems might also take away votes from the government, but it would be foolish to rely on an English vote split four ways just happening to go against a Conservative government.

The awkward truth for those who for whatever reason dislike Corbyn’s Labour party is that Labour is the only party that can defeat this government, and its leader in the next election will be Corbyn. Voting is always a choice between the lesser of two evils. Supporting smaller parties when that lets the Conservatives win, or supporting none, may make those who dislike Corbyn’s Labour feel better, but it is in effect a statement that Corbyn’s Labour party would be just as bad for the country as a whole as out current government, and that is simply not a credible belief. Corbyn is not going to leave the EU with no deal, and in practice will be unable to leave the EU in any way. Corbyn is not threatening to prorogue parliament, is not desperate to do a trade deal with Donald Trump, does not lie all the time, does not get friends to beat up opponents, and does not have a history of using racist language. Whereas Johnson promises tax cuts for the rich, a Corbyn led government would help the many, not the few.

Yet there are few in the mainstream media who seem prepared to recognise the choice we face for what it is. Even wise and perceptive commentators like Martin Wolf, who lament the situation the Conservative government has led us to, often feel it necessary to balance their piece with a derogatory remark about the Labour leadership. Those remarks may or may not be accurate, but a plague on all your houses just allows this Tory government to stay in place.

Worse still are those in the centre or centre-left who refuse to give up hope of getting ‘their party’ back and will do anything that in their view helps that cause. In the first year after Corbyn was elected many MPs and journalists waged a constant war against the left in the media. I said at the time it was utterly futile and self-destructive, and I was right. It led to an attempt to unseat Corbyn that everyone on the left calls a coup, and a clear majority of members saw it the same way. Polls suggest the same is true today. Those in the centre and centre-left need to realise that for all Corbyn’s faults and mistakes he will be Labour’s leader going into the next election, and if they repeatedly attack him they are helping Boris Johnson do terrible damage to our country.

Of course the right wing press will do anything to discredit Labour: that is what their owners pay them to do. But often their task is made easier by the non-partisan media who think they are making choices using simple journalistic criteria, such as going with the story. What we are in danger of seeing with 24/7 criticism of Corbyn is a repetition of what happened to Hilary Clinton in the US elections. As I showed here, the mainstream media spent much more time talking about her email server than any of the sins of Donald Trump, or indeed all those sins combined. In that sense the US media chose Trump over Clinton. It was of course not a thought-through or considered choice, but just the outcome of lots of individual decisions that seemed to make sense in journalistic terms, but were disastrous in political terms.

Of course the constant tunes the media play matter. One of the incredible poll findings of that US election was that more people trusted the serial liar Donald Trump more than Hillary Clinton. That makes no sense unless you note the constant stream of media stories suggesting Clinton had something to hide. No one is suggesting Labour’s failures over antisemitism should not be exposed, just as no one was suggesting that Clinton should not have been criticised for using her own email for government business. What is missing in both cases is a sense of perspective, as here for example, or here. Without that perspective constant attacks on Corbyn will have an impact. The impact will be to keep a destructive far right government in power.

Why the reassuring stories about Donald Trump are quickly falling apart

When May visited Trump, the UK media were full of comparisons with Thatcher and Reagan. The US free press paid little attention to the visit, because they were fully preoccupied by the enormity of what was happening to their country. They were not seeing the first few tentative steps of another Republican president, they were seeing the confident strides of the equivalent in the UK not of Nigel Farage, but the leader of the BNP or the EDL. If you think this is going over the top, read on.

There were three kinds of story about Trump that encouraged people to think things wouldn’t be so bad. The first, which we now know is untrue, is that he would surround himself with more experienced and wiser counsel. Instead probably the most powerful man in Trump’s White House is Steve Bannon. He is executive chairman of Breitbart News, essentially a far right, or what is called in the US alt-right, news and opinion outlet that promotes white supremacist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic ideas. One of Trump’s latest actions is to oust the director of intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from always attending the Principals Committee of the National Security Council and replacing them with Bannon. John McCain said the appointment of Mr. Bannon is a radical departure from any National Security Council in history.

The second story was that everything said on the campaign trail was to win the presidency, and that once that was achieved more ‘serious’ (aka traditional Republican) measures would be introduced. (US financial markets might have bought into that idea, and are now beginning to realise their error.) Once again the first few days, and particularly this travel ban, have proved that wrong. Trump is enacting the headline measures that were both highly controversial and also effective on the campaign trail, and doing that fast. This is smart politics. His strength was never in the Republican party or in the business community, but in those who watch propaganda networks like Fox News and who helped him into the White House.

The final story, which continues on both the left and right, is that Trump and his team are inexperienced buffoons who will quickly make fools of themselves, and will be brought to heel by the checks and balances of the US constitutional system. Its too early to tell, but the signs so far do not look good. Take the holocaust statement. According to this story, leaving out any mention of Jews or anti-Semitism from the Holocaust Day statement was perhaps an oversight that would get corrected later. But it was not, but instead intentional and purposeful.

A far more plausible explanation of what is going on is that it is part of a strategy, not only to firm up Trump’s base but also to test those checks and balances. Telling border agency staff to ignore court orders is not confusion but deliberate, to see how far they can go. Initial reports that the top state department officials had resigned were perhaps deliberate misinformation: they were all fired by the White House, with no replacements in sight. What this looks like is a concentration of power at the very centre. The lack of consultation about the immigration order was not inexperienced oversight but the shape of things to come.

The trouble with checks and balances are that they are designed to work on the margin, stopping small acts of overreach by different parts of a normal government. Whether they can cope with a determined and fast moving small team in the White House we have yet to see. These checks and balances are often slow. For example Trump has become president with his business affairs hardly altered. The travel ban excluded the four countries in the area in which Trump has business interests. “This isn’t the way the presidency has worked since Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act in 1978,” said the director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, but what is anyone going to do about it?

Given all this, for Prime Minister May to celebrate a “new era of American renewal” after meeting Trump represents either craven grovelling or a complete misreading of what is going on, or both. As Simon Schama tweets:

“Nothing is being renewed in USA except hatred. Nothing is being renewed in USA except ignorance and the dissolving of distinction between lies and truth. Nothing is being renewed in USA but much is being destroyed: equity under law, the climate, civil decency, public education, public health.”

If you think that quote, and this post more generally, are overreactions of the type often found in the worst kind of left-wing hyperbole, here is Charles Koch, scourge of the American Left: “We have a tremendous danger because we can go the authoritarian route ….”.

All this is going to have huge consequences for the people of the US and the world. But I make no apology for ending on a more parochial point, because it is critical and happening right now. Brexit is like a train with no way of stopping before its destination, full of people who think they are going to paradise, but their paradise has just been taken over by someone who is turning it into hell. Does our leader say we must get off the train before it starts, fit it with more brakes or even that we must pause before we leave? No, she says she sees and hears nothing, and even the normally rebellious guard says we must follow the will of the people. As Trump goes about putting his campaign pledges into action within days of taking office, Boris Johnson in the Commons yesterday actually said that it was clear that “Trump’s bark is considerably worse than his bite”. Keynes may not have said “When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”, but it is the right question to ask right now..