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An easy step-by-step guide for Jeremy Corbyn to become prime minister by Christmas

Labour is so conditioned to opposition and protest that it cannot see that the Conservative Party is limping around like a wounded gazelle, inviting predation

Sean O'Grady
Sunday 17 June 2018 21:03 BST
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Had Corbyn played his parliamentary hand a little differently, Theresa May would have been defeated on a key Europe vote
Had Corbyn played his parliamentary hand a little differently, Theresa May would have been defeated on a key Europe vote

At the Labour Live event in London, which you may know better as “JezFest”, being a cross between a Jeremy Corbyn rally and a music festival, there was a great deal of impatience about. People wanted justice – for the Windrush scandal, the Grenfell tragedy, for people with disabilities left destitute by sanctions from the Department for Work and Pensions.

They wanted to bring rail, mail and water into public ownership. They wanted employment rights for all from day one of work. They wanted a National Education Service and the right to a university education for all. They wanted to stop privatisation in the NHS and properly fund it. They wanted to repeal trade union legislation. They wanted a lot.

And when did they want it?

Now.

Which is fair enough. But you would also think that Labour was faced in parliament with an implacable and unified Conservative cabinet backed by ranks of loyal MPs, all luxuriating in a landslide majority. There seemed, in other words, little sense that the government could quite easily have fallen last week, and on a few other occasions since Theresa may lost her majority last year. Or, more accurately, that Labour could actively and easily bring them down.

Had Corbyn played his parliamentary hand a little differently, and ganged up with the Tory rebels, SNP, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid, Caroline Lucas and anyone else willing to join in, Theresa May would have been defeated on a key Europe vote.

Jeremy Corbyn attacks Theresa May over government's Brexit delays

When that happened the steps to what Boris Johnson recently called “the meltdown” would be clear. Indeed the opportunity is still there for when the next set of amendments on the Brexit bill comes back to the Commons from the Lords.

Corbyn, here’s how you get into Number 10:

1. Don’t put any official Labour amendments down, which Tories will simply not vote for.

2. Vote for some of the amendments that already have the backing of Tory rebels. Don’t fuss about it.

3. Put a three-line whip on, say, one of the provisions about the customs union or single market that is almost identical to Labour’s policy (especially seeing as none of the fudges, red or blue, make much sense anyhow). Maybe you’d take a more sympathetic view on a final referendum on the deal; or parliament’s right to vote to stay in the EU.

4. Send your MPs through the lobbies. A few Labour Brexiteers (Caroline Flint, John Mann, Frank Field, and Kate Hoey) will be swamped by the rest of Labour and the other opposition parties.

5. The Government is defeated. Meltdown achieved.

6. May calls a vote of no confidence in her own government, a device that has been used before, and quite extensively when John Major was in a similar predicament in the 1990s.

7. Wait and see. If the government wins, then fine, nothing has been lost and the UK stays in some kind of customs union or single market. The May administration is then left in a kind of limbo, unable to govern yet unwilling to leave office either. Sooner or later the zombie government will just collapse, and an election, with some constitutional delays, will follow.

8. If May loses her vote of confidence, then the Fixed-term Parliaments Act takes its course. There’s no immediate automatic general election; but, as in 2017, an early election is still possible, and probably growing inevitable.

9. A relatively lively and united Labour Party meets a Tory party in disarray at the polls. Labour stresses its genuinely popular policies – rail nationalisation, taxing the very rich, funding the NHS, a mildly more pro-European stance.

10. Chances are that Jeremy Corbyn could soon form a minority government, with the tacit support of the smaller parties, just as May does now with the DUP. Corbyn would be in Downing Street by the end of the year.

11. Having lost, the Tories then have the civil war they’ve been spoiling for for decades. Recriminations abound; mayhem results; Jacob Rees-Mogg vs Savid Javid rips them apart. They are effectively out of the political game for months, maybe years.

12. You, on your own terms, get on with serving the people you claim to want to rescue with a radical 100-days legislative programme rivalling the Attlee government for scope and ambition. (Or as much as Vince Cable will let you get away with.) Immediate emergency measures might include paying to house the victims of Grenfell and making all tower blocks safe; banning DWP sanctions; a crash programme for social housing; abolition of tuition fees; and taking every privatised rail line franchise into a new British Transport Service. At the end of your six months or year in office as a minority government, you present your record to the electorate. Proven in power, your frontbenchers at last able to show what they can do, and a more confident Corbyn administration can go to the country for the support it needs to carry on and, indeed, deliver a Brexit for jobs.

Just imagine! Or you could carry on messing around in parliament, putting down amendments you know the Tory rebels won’t touch, abandoning the poor and the vulnerable, and sit there and watch as Jeremy Hunt, Chris Grayling, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove continue to tear apart society and everything you care about.

Labour is so conditioned to opposition and protest that it cannot see that the Conservative Party is limping around like a wounded gazelle, inviting predation.

Corbyn could so easily go in for the kill I wonder whether he really wants power, or is happier to go on rallies and marches instead. Perhaps he is so hung up about “principle” he cannot see the damage he is allowing to happen, again on his own terms, to society, and who is actually paying the price for his pristine approach to politics. If record numbers of young men, especially, are committing suicide because of the mental health crisis, why does Corbyn want to hang around for the 2022 general election, which he’d probably lose, to try and change society?

Labour in the stately lobbies of the House of Commons – not on the streets or in strike action – has rarely had the opportunity it has now to seize power and, in its own terms, to rescue the country.

Kicking out the Conservatives: It’s an open goal, to borrow a current metaphor, in the political World Cup final. It’s much easier than England beating Germany on penalties, another example of a tragic failure of confidence.

Like the England team, does Labour really have to lose, again?

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