How Jeremy Corbyn Found Himself Backing Up the Tories Over Brexit

A still from 'Jeremy Corbyn, the Outsider'

Who remembers July of 2015? Our enemy was a big pink ham-hock calling itself David Cameron, and Britain was a cruel and stupid island, but outright Nazism was mostly frowned upon. The future looked bad, but we knew what it would look like.

The Tories were trying to push through a welfare bill, a piece of classically sadistic legislation that put an arbitrary cap of £20,000 per family on all benefits, effectively rendering the entire south of England – and most cities in the north – entirely uninhabitable for thousands of people. They didn't have to do this – there was some guff at the time about balancing the budget, which seems like such a distant notion now – but they wanted to. They wanted people to suffer, they wanted to kill off the poor as quietly as possible, and they got everything they wanted. There was a Tory majority in Parliament for the first time in nearly two decades; Labour could oppose the bill all they wanted, and it wouldn't matter. But Labour did something strange: they didn't even bother to oppose it.

In the end, 184 Labour MPs abstained on the welfare bill. Harriet Harman, the interim leader, explained why: the Tories had won the last election, the majority of voters had supported them, and it was hardly the place of the Labour party to tell voters they were wrong. And it made a demented kind of sense. Toryism is the damp, measly essence of Britain; it's the force that changes the world, and anyone else can either raise a futile, empty "no" in opposition, or just get with the programme. Go along with it, and one day you too might be elected to carry out Tory policy from the other side.

So it's understandable how shocked and upset all the bobbling plasticine people of the Labour party were when their cowardice over the welfare bill suddenly became a fire at the arse-end of one Jeremy Corbyn, whooshing an unimposing bearded old socialist at high speed directly to the top of the leadership polls. Maybe they were wrong about the intrinsic Toryness of the electorate: this was a candidate who promised that, whatever else happened, he would never roll over and just let the government do whatever they wanted.

Well, look how that turned out.

Harriet Harman, for all her gutless idiocy, only asked her MPs to abstain on a destructive and dictatorial bill. By imposing a three-line whip on Article 50, Corbyn is asking them to support it.

The strangest thing about the three-line whip on Brexit is not how stupid an idea it is, but how easy it would have been to do right.

Large portions of the Labour base might have voted Leave, but they still don't like the Tories. The vote to leave the EU, Corbyn should have said, was not a vote the turn over all future decision-making to an unelected clique of rubbery monsters. Parliament is sovereign, and so Parliament must shape what comes next. Labour will vote to give authorisation to trigger Article 50, but only if the cabinet commits itself to not snatching the food from our mouths. A few Tories might even have joined him.

WATCH: 'Jeremy Corbyn – The Outsider'

Instead, Corbyn said from the start that his party would vote for the bill. Labour is trying to add amendments, but there's little point: the threat's not there, because they've agreed to vote for the bill; they're trying to get the government to fight a battle that's already been conceded. It's hard to imagine how they could have fucked this up more systematically.

The question is why. The narrative that the right has chosen to construct around Corbyn is one of incompetence: he's flailing and useless, shambling around in his scruffy linen suit, not really sure what's in front of him or where to go; his mind wanders during long parliamentary meetings to the simple joys of his little allotment; he never wanted this job, and it's far too big for him.

That doesn't really work here. Labour MPs tend solidly to a shiny liberal Remoaning; an incompetent leadership is one that would gulp and burp and witlessly go along with them. Imposing a three-line whip takes serious, directed, deliberate effort: it's not a slapstick failure to do something the right way, but a calculated attempt to do it wrong.

The Article 50 vote is informed by the same political mythology as the welfare bill abstention. People voted for Brexit, Corbyn reasons, so they have to be given what they want. The problem with Corbyn is not that he's too far to the left, or too indecisive, or too incompetent. It's that he is, first of all, a creature of the Labour party, and subject to the same dumb instincts that inform his enemies. The Harriet Harman wing of the party might be opposing him, but he's following the exact same pattern that they always have.

For decades, Labour gave in to ugly political narratives about migrants, benefits claimants, young people, Muslims and every other social outgroup that the right-wing press cared to identify – because they always assumed that it's the right wing that creates our shared social world, while the left hops happily along to catch up with it. Jeremy Corbyn's problem is that, like everyone else on his benches in that rotting old Victorian pile by the Thames, he doesn't really think the left has the power to change anything.

Corbyn is important for the left, but not because of what he is. What was crucial in Corbynism was never the fate of one old man's doomed attempt to lead a toxic political party that always hated him: Corbyn was a signifier, a name that brought together a political collectivity, and united it in struggle. He gave the left a space to assert itself openly in British politics, in surprising numbers, against the backsliding cowardice of the soft left and the manicured void of Blairism. He helped the left understand, however briefly, that we can actually win.

His moment might be passing now. If the Article 50 bill goes through without amendments, he may not be able to stay in the leadership for very long. The task for the collectivity that he helped form shouldn't be to defend him as a person – as a slightly wet social-democrat who could never break through the dumb dogmas of his party – but to defend itself, the force that really does have the potential to change things: to make sure that whatever happens, the Harriet Harmans of the world are never allowed to have their cringing, craven victories again.

@sam_kriss