Jeremy Corbyn Just Can’t Win

And his losing streak isn’t limited to elections.

Out of the political wilderness he came, to front up Her Majesty’s Opposition for a few brief years, before heading off to obscurity once again.

I feel a little sorry for Mr Corbyn (despite not having voted for him recently).

I was one of many who took out a supporter subscription to the Labour Party a few years ago, simply in order to vote for Jeremy to be its leader. He seemed to represent a principled old-school socialism a million miles away from the jaded realpolitik of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell.

Anti-Nuclear Marches? Check. Anti Falklands War? You bet. Anti Middle-East adventuring? Absolutely.

Corbyn was my guy, but the credentials that made him an effective firebrand agitator were an almost automatic disqualifier for high office, which requires a level of disingenuous obfuscation he has always found impossible to master.

Nothing was clearer than his long-held antipathy to the European Union as a project. It had always epitomised the capture of government by vested interests and powerful lobbies, which was anathema to him. However, in order to effectively stand in opposition to the Conservative Party, he had to mask his true colours and act as though nothing would please him more than to continue down the path of ever-closer European integration.

His heart wasn’t in it, and his lacklustre campaigning for the Remain vote before the 2016 EU Referendum was painfully obvious to friends and foes alike.

In the latest election, even when focus groups, media and Labour insiders screamed at him that sitting on the fence was killing Labour’s hopes of victory, the best he could come up with was deliberate impartiality — to let the country decide (again) and stay even more neutral in the forthcoming debate.

But, even more than his confusing position on Brexit, the previous occasions when he has come down on one side of an argument were his undoing.

Jeremy is of an age when he can remember Northern Ireland prior to The Troubles, and in particular their origin in a human rights issue affecting the minority Catholic community there. He stood with that minority while gunmen took up their cause, and always insisted on a dialogue between the loyalist and nationalist communities as the only way to resolve the conflict.

He was correct. History bore him out. But because he came off the fence early and definitively, it is much easier to find old photos of him cosying up to the IRA than with protestant loyalists. This doesn’t play well in 2019, in a nation which looks back on those times in black and white terms of terrorists versus the innocent public.

He suffered a similar, perhaps worse, fate in respect of anti-semitism. He has spent much of the past two years looking bemused as to how a lifetime of fighting against racism and discrimination in all of its forms has had the rug pulled from under it so comprehensively.

Again, a little historical perspective is in order. Corbyn’s views on the Middle East were undoubtedly influenced by events that occurred decades ago, such as the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps. It is hard to come down firmly on the side of the Palestinians, then or now, without coming down equally against the State of Israel.

Again, photos of Corbyn with known Palestinian sympathisers, laying a wreath on the graves of other activists, are not hard to find. But what has wounded his reputation irreparably is that he has always been assumed, by dint of being seen as an enemy of the Israeli State, to be an enemy of Judaism in its entirety.

This was an accusation without any possibility of a truthful response, given his ambitions to lead the country. I am sure that if he were to level with his interviewers about his true thoughts on Israel and its supporters abroad, he would find himself digging an even deeper political grave.

So, he has had to guard his tongue, while repeating the mantra that he is opposed to discrimination and racism in all its forms. Even under pressure, he cannot filter out the desire to include the people he believes to have been really oppressed.

If he has been slow to address anti-semitism in the Labour party it is because at heart he doesn’t feel that the Jewish community is an oppressed minority requiring or deserving of special protections. In his defence of the mural below, he initially saw only the oppression of the slaves holding up the monopoly board, and didn’t take offence at the caricatured Jewish bankers playing the game.

So — if he was completely open about his thoughts and feelings on any of the above, he would alienate a vast swathe of the electorate. Conversely, when trying unsuccessfully to keep it all under wraps and sit on the fence he looked uncomfortable, shifty and unworthy of the electorate’s trust.

I call it Corbyn’s Choice and, for this reason, I feel some pinch of grudging sympathy for the man.

Note from the editor: The views expressed by any Thought’s writer on political issues are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the editor.