By Rab Bruce’s Spider

Many on the political Left in Scotland welcomed Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader. On the face of it, he was a potential ally in the fight against the Tory Government. As we have learned since, much of that optimism was misplaced but I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the similarities between Corbynmania and the Yes movement and also to examine some of the differences.

First, the similarities. Corbyn stood for election on an anti-Austerity, anti-Trident, pro-nationalisation ticket and was voted in as leader by a significant number of Labour members. In all of these things, he was following the SNP lead rather than creating something new even though it was new to the majority of English voters. He also faced a very similar backlash from the Right Wing media. The Yes campaign in Scotland saw the full fury of Project Fear and recognised exactly the same scare tactics being used against Corbyn. Those tactics will continue as long as he remains Labour leader and he faces a very tough challenge if he is to overcome the media portrayal of him.

I must admit that I like his style of PMQ’s and I admire his professed desire for more straight-talking politics. He is not the sort of politician we have seen for the past few decades and he makes a refreshing change.

In theory, he should present a problem for the SNP but, for a variety of reasons, it looks as if he is going to blow his chances of bringing about Labour’s recovery in Scotland and, worse, looks unlikely to succeed in England either.

To begin with, Corbyn is a London MP with no prior knowledge of, nor interest in, Scottish politics. He has clearly taken advice from Scottish Labour and his TV appearances in which he blatantly lied about the SNP, did him no favours at all. We should not forget that Corbyn has been at Westminster for around thirty years and is steeped in its traditions and beliefs. He is a Unionist at heart and this necessarily means he is an opponent of the SNP. The speech at Labour’s conference by his Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, confirmed that Corbyn’s Labour want nothing to do with the SNP.

Despite this, it must be in the SNP’s interests to make common cause with Labour at Westminster but they need Labour to be united and this is where Corbyn has his greatest problem. He may have begun something but this is where the similarities between Corbynmania and Yes diverge.

During the IndieRef, the SNP may have started the ball rolling but the wider Yes movement picked it up and carried it much further than anyone could have expected. Any member of the public who wanted information and went online could find plenty of pro-Indie websites and bloggers who would provide information and arguments to counter the newspaper and TV reports, often in a more direct and blunt manner than the SNP could. Some of these arguments may not have been presented in a politically correct manner but they got the message across. And I’m not talking about abusive CyberNat trolls here, but about people who were not constrained by Party politics and could therefore create a new media forum which the Better Together campaign never really succeeded in mastering. And the message was spread by thousands of ordinary people on Twitter, disseminating information among an ever-growing band of converts to Yes.

But when it comes to Corbyn’s vision of Labour, there does not yet seem to have been that groundswell of support that the Yes movement created. There is plenty of support on Twitter and even a handful of bloggers but the movement does not seem to have taken off. It’s as if people are waiting for somebody else to take the first steps. They are relying on Corbyn and, so far, he has not been able to galvanise them. Why is this? One reason could be that the Yes campaign had the backing of a Parliamentary Political Party who provided a constant and consistent message. This official backing for a Yes vote was the rock on which the rest of the Yes campaign was founded. And that is precisely the rock that Corbyn does not have.

Many in the Labour Party oppose Corbyn. The Red Tories have fundamental disagreements with him which could yet see the break-up of the Party. Worse, even people Corbyn has appointed to his Shadow Cabinet have fundamental disagreements with him on a number of key policy areas. As a result, he has already been forced to U-turn on such things as Trident, student tuition fees and nationalisation of the energy companies. These climbdowns make it much more difficult for his supporters to justify his stance as a leader to be followed. He is not leading, he is being pushed around. This is because the people who elected him are not the people he must deal with on a day to day basis, a problem which presents him with a quandary. He says he wants his Labour Party to be democratic but the only way he can gain support for his measures is if he insists on a vote of al Labour members on every issue of policy. If decisions are to be left to the Parliamentary Labour Party, he faces many battles and probably many defeats.

It is early days yet and, despite the difficulties facing him, Jeremy Corbyn may yet turn Labour around. It seems unlikely because he does not yet have a wider support movement to mirror the Yes campaign, his Parliamentary Party is split and he has a hostile media to contend with. As Yes showed us, the media can be challenged effectively but only if you have the other two pillars of support in place. The first might yet come, although Corbyn’s U-turns make supporting him more difficult by the day, but the second, gaining the wholehearted backing of his Parliamentary Party, looks to be well out of his reach.

In short, the Westminster machine will crush him unless he can pull off a major turnaround. From what we’ve seen so far, that doesn’t look likely.