Dangerous Hero

The first casualty of his leaving was one of the college’s pupils, Derrick Aarons, a fourteen-year-old weekend hiker and a participant in the Duke of Edinburgh Award. Aarons had completed all the requirements for the award’s Bronze Medal, and had been assured by Corbyn that the necessary forms had been sent to London, and that in January 1969 he would receive his medal from Jamaica’s governor general. The excited boy frequently asked Corbyn if he had received a reply yet from London. The answer was always no. In January Aarons returned from his holidays, and was told that Corbyn had decamped back to Britain. The medal never materialised. ‘I was,’ recalled Aarons, ‘a very disappointed teenager.’ Had Corbyn even submitted the forms? During a recent trip to London, Aarons, today a prominent Caribbean doctor, contacted Corbyn’s office to arrange a reunion. ‘I was convinced,’ he said, ‘that he would remember me as the keenest of his hikers, but I never received any acknowledgement.’

The more important casualties of Corbyn’s decision to quit early were the pupils in his four geography classes. No replacement could be found. ‘I always thought how curious to leave part of the way through the school year,’ observed Paul Wimpory. ‘It was not very professional.’ Corbyn left Jamaica, Dawn Tapper recalled, just days after her wedding on 14 December. ‘Jeremy told us that he was returning to Britain,’ she said. ‘I gave him a piece of my wedding cake to eat on his journey.’

Corbyn has always concealed what he did after leaving Kingston. ‘I spent my youth in Jamaica,’ he told Channel 4 News in 2015, but did not elaborate. According to his account, he left Jamaica in July 1969, having fulfilled his two-year contract. Not only is that untrue, but he has never honestly revealed what happened during the missing seven months. His description of the journey from Jamaica is vague: ‘I took a sailing boat around the Caribbean, and then a fishing boat to Guyana.’ The only local passenger ship leaving Kingston and going as far as Trinidad was a small island-hopping freighter. That left 430 miles along the coast to Georgetown, Guyana’s capital – hardly the route for a ‘fishing boat’.

Corbyn says that he ‘spent some time in Guyana’, a pertinent revelation. The former British colony was then Walter Rodney’s home. Until 1964, Cheddi Jagan, a Marxist, had been the country’s leader, but with the connivance of the British and the CIA he had been replaced by a pro-Western prime minister. Nevertheless, in 1968 the strong Cuban presence in Guyana, Castro’s base for guerrilla warfare in South America, remained undiminished, and with Rodney’s help Corbyn could have flown to Cuba via Mexico. He has never said when he first visited Cuba, and the extent of his Marxist education in Guyana remains unknown. Like so much of his account of his life until he left Guyana, it is partly romanticised, and possibly an invention.

According to Corbyn’s version, he travelled from Guyana to Brazil, and on to Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, back to Buenos Aires, and then sailed to France in 1970. He has said that during the year he spent travelling he had been impressed by the culture of South America’s indigenous tribes, the history of the European settlers’ revolts against the colonial powers, and the countries’ battles during the 1950s against rapacious American corporations and CIA subversion. The journey confirmed his socialist ideals. Here was a cause that suited his ‘loser’ personality – he would fight for the downtrodden against their oppressors.

More recently, Corbyn has claimed that he was influenced by Open Veins of Latin America, by the Uruguayan journalist, writer and poet Eduardo Galeano, a critique of the exploitation of the continent’s Indians by monarchs, the Catholic Church and multinational American corporations. That is doubtful. The book was first published in 1971, a year after Corbyn returned to Britain, and he could not read Spanish. Pertinently, shortly before his death in 2015 Galeano repudiated the book as a distortion of the continent’s economic history, and confessed that he was embarrassed by his youthful prejudice in favour of South America’s left-wing dictators. In his enthusiasm for the book, Corbyn ignored Galeano’s disclaimer. He was enchanted, he said, by the indigenous customs and languages of South American civilisations – Incas, Quechua and Aymara – all smothered by Spanish colonialism.

He would also claim to have been influenced by Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 1972, which described the Caribbean search for identity after the end of colonialism. Rodney’s and Galeano’s ideas, picked up after his year in Jamaica, thereafter became the foundation of Corbyn’s principles and way of looking at the world. He loathed imperialism – Spanish, American or British. He never sought to understand how Greek, Roman and successive European empires were the foundation of Western civilisation, but stuck resolutely to his belief in the unalleviated evil of white colonial oppression. In 2015 he demanded that the then prime minister David Cameron apologise to Jamaica for Britain’s ‘brutal’ involvement in the slave trade. ‘It’s a history of the most gross exploitation of people,’ he said. He would never condemn Russian, Chinese or Arab oppression in similar terms. Nor, as a self-proclaimed pacifist, could he explain how the victims of imperialism – either the local Indians in Latin America or Europeans as the prey of the French, Soviet and German empires – could have regained their liberty without fighting.

In 1970, three years after leaving Britain, Corbyn returned to his family’s Shropshire home. He had not once spoken with his parents during his time away. On the single occasion he telephoned his home, there was no reply.

He returned to a seemingly empty future. Not only did he have no prospects, but he had missed the best of the swinging sixties. Although he would later claim to have joined his brother Piers on an anti-Vietnam war demonstration in London, that famous clash between the children of the counter-culture and the police had erupted during his absence, back in 1968. He also missed the big anti-apartheid marches of the 1960s, only joining their mini-successors two decades later, such as the Trotskyist ‘Non-Stop Picket’ breakaway group championing illegal protests in London, during which he was arrested. In speeches or interviews he never mentioned the outbreak of urban terrorism – Baader Meinhof in Germany, the Red Brigade in Italy, the Red Army in Japan, the Weathermen in America, the Quebec separatists in Canada, the Angry Brigade in Britain. Unlike every other leftist, he did not march with CND from Aldermaston to London every Easter. The politics of the sixties philosophers who had so influenced young undergraduates had no relevance to someone filled with Walter Rodney’s protests against colonial oppression. Perhaps a particular loss, he had missed the election in November 1970 of Salvador Allende, Chile’s Marxist president. His only contemporaneous eyewitness experience was the resurgence of the IRA’s war against colonialism.

On his return to Britain, now twenty years old, he had good reason to be apprehensive. Minimally educated, unqualified and unable to engage in hard work, he was isolated in Shropshire, forced to take a series of local jobs. In May 1972, after rejoining the Wrekin Labour Party, he arrived at the Young Socialists’ annual congress in Skegness with Andrea Davies, a nurse from Telford, his first British girlfriend. Although ostensibly a Labour Party function, the camp for five hundred members was run by Liverpool’s Militant Tendency, a group of revolutionary socialists formed in Liverpool in 1955 with the express purpose after the mid-1960s of infiltrating Labour to make the theories of Trotsky, Marx, Lenin and Engels official party policy.

Among those Corbyn met at the camp were Keith and Val Veness, two activists from Islington, then a rundown area of north London. Keith, a salt-of-the-earth, self-educated employee of NUPE (a trade union for public sector workers), was on the verge of joining the Workers Revolutionary Party, another group of Trotskyites, more intellectual but less well organised than Militant. ‘I was on the right wing of the delegates,’ he recalled. He regarded Clement Attlee’s post-war government as ‘social democrats, not the real Labour Party’.

Over the weekend, the four bonded. ‘I’m from Telford New Town,’ said Corbyn, suggesting that he lived in a working-class area. Keith Veness found his new companion’s intense commitment instantly charismatic. He told him that Labour membership had been much reduced during Harold Wilson’s government. ‘We’re an empty shell in London,’ he said, explaining that Labour’s branches were open to far leftists like himself. He urged Corbyn to join the cause, and as an introduction ‘to read the classics – Marx, Trotsky and other philosophers’. Corbyn nodded enthusiastically. To get him started, Veness handed him a copy of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, which he had just won at the camp’s raffle. Six months later Corbyn returned the book, still in its wrapping. ‘He wasn’t interested in reading anything,’ Veness concluded. ‘Not even Lenin on imperialism. It was a waste of time talking to him about books.’ Veness could not decide whether Corbyn was unintellectual or just lazy. There was no disagreement about politics, however. Over that weekend Corbyn immersed himself in a group dedicated to highlighting class conflict. By raising people’s consciousness about the horrors of capitalism, his instructors explained, the masses would be mobilised for revolution. To achieve equality and justice, capitalist wealth would be confiscated and aggressively redistributed to the poor.

Corbyn and the Venesses came together at a decisive moment in British politics. The Tories under Ted Heath were in turmoil. The unexpected defeat of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in the 1970 election and the Conservatives’ victory had followed a decade of industrial strife. Trade union shop stewards continually called for strikes. Repeated walkouts by seamen, dockers, railway workers and employees of all the country’s major industries – shipbuilding, car manufacturing and engineering – had crippled the economy. Continental Europe was thriving while Britain tottered on amid shortages of food and fuel. Exports drained away, and foreign competitors grabbed Britain’s traditional markets. After devaluing the pound in 1967, the Labour government was accused of creating ‘the British disease’ – a growing trade deficit, low productivity, high unemployment, a ballooning national debt, an exodus of talented professionals and, above all, industrial anarchy. Under Wilson, eleven million working days were lost to strikes in 1970 (compared to 900,000 in 2017). Once Wilson abandoned his attempts to control trade union militancy, the electorate had turned to Heath to prevent left-wing union leaders from destroying the country.

Heath, however, fudged his party’s manifesto pledge to unravel the socialist economy imposed by Labour governments since 1945. Airlines, the telephone network, road haulage, the steel industry, utilities, coalmines and the railways were all state-owned. Whitehall’s civil servants not only managed the economy but also, through joint committees with trade unionists and employers, industrial production, the regulation of incomes and prices in shops. Privatisation would eventually show that the public-owned industries were largely run for the benefit of their employees. Nationalised industries were 40 per cent overmanned, and costs were inflated by about 20 per cent; but after two years in government Heath lacked the conviction and the courage to destroy the consensus accepted by both Tories and Labour since the war. Besieged by strikes, Heath faced in particular Arthur Scargill, a Marxist miners’ trade union leader who had called out his members to strike for a 40 per cent pay rise. ‘We took the view we were in a class war,’ said Scargill. ‘We were out to defeat Heath.’ Thousands of miners confronted and outnumbered police. ‘This conflict,’ wrote Heath, ‘was the most vivid, direct and terrifying challenge to the rule of law that I could ever remember.’ Knowing that the miners held the country to ransom because its electricity supplies depended on coal, Heath panicked. In his search for a way to escape, he appointed Lord Wilberforce, a senior judge, to review the miners’ pay. Wilberforce decided in just three days that the 16.5 per cent pay rise they had been offered was insufficient, and that they should receive 20 per cent. Heath instantly capitulated, despite knowing full well that every other union would demand similar pay rises. In 1972, twenty-three million working days were lost to strikes.

Corbyn and his new friends rejoiced in Heath’s surrender. It was a tumultuous moment in the Labour Party. Britain’s trade union leaders, some of them on Russia’s payroll, were sabotaging the economy in order to topple the government. The outrage among the Tories only increased the pleasure among the Young Socialists gathered at Skegness.

The infiltration of Labour had been advocated by Lenin. ‘Support the Labour Party as the rope supports the hanged man,’ he had told Sylvia Pankhurst, who had hosted the first meeting of the British Communist Party. Lenin taught that the far left should gain political power in Britain by taking control of the Labour Party. Once the communists commanded the party, and then became elected to government, they could destroy capitalism. Thus battle was joined. In the early days, democratic socialists expelled communists and Trotskyites from Labour, but during the 1960s Harold Wilson inexplicably relaxed the controls, and ‘entryists’, as they were known, were allowed to join the party. Constituency parties were infiltrated by Trotskyites, who then deselected any social democrats. Effectively, a separate hostile party was flourishing within Labour, and more and more communists were elected as Labour MPs. Their object was to use the democratic machinery of Labour to undermine democracy. The result was toxic. In February 1973, in the wake of Heath’s surrender to the miners, Wilson succumbed to left-wing pressure to sign a ‘compact’ for the party’s next election manifesto. To win workers’ support, Labour pledged to extend nationalisation, prevent Britons taking money abroad, impose a rent freeze, enforce price controls on private business, finance widespread food subsidies, and push through a ‘large-scale redistribution of Britain’s income and wealth’ – precisely the programme that Corbyn and the Venesses saw as the first step towards their Marxist ideal.

In that era, the distinction between Marxists and Trotskyites was important. Refashioned as the ‘new left’ to separate themselves from Stalin’s crimes, the Marxists viewed history through the lens of the class struggle. Britain’s evolution into a truly socialist society, they believed, would start with a communist state under the dictatorship of the proletariat. British Marxists like Keith Veness spoke about a ‘revolution’ to assert the proletariat’s control, but without the bloodshed that had marked events in Russia in 1917.

Trotskyites were more aggressive. Leon Trotsky had led the Red Army after 1917 to defeat the counter-revolutionary tsarist White Army supported by Winston Churchill and the British government. Thereafter, ignoring the mass starvation caused by the Bolsheviks’ forced collectivisation of agriculture, he campaigned to spread the communist revolution across Europe and then the whole world. His militarist internationalism and belief in fostering a permanent international revolution were opposed by Stalin, who wanted first to consolidate his takeover of power in Russia. In turn, Trotsky accused Stalin of obstructing the proper course towards global communism by refusing to encourage the working class to agitate and cause unrest in every country. In 1929 Trotsky, fearing for his life, fled Russia. He settled in Mexico, from where he urged his followers to engage in a permanent struggle. Unwilling to be threatened by an ideological foe, Stalin arranged for Trotsky’s assassination in August 1940. His death galvanised his disciples to recruit members, organise meetings, constantly debate, and to secure power wherever and however possible. Organisation, Corbyn was told by Veness, was paramount. Salvador Allende’s election in Chile was a crucial lesson for Marxists: it showed that they could win elections even in capitalist democracies. The vital ingredient was to have an effective political machine.

Soon after that weekend, Corbyn prepared to move to London. At his mother’s suggestion he had enrolled at the Polytechnic of North London in Holloway to study trade unionism. He barely entered the building before he abandoned the course. ‘I was utterly bored,’ he would say later, but he knew that academic work was beyond his abilities. To conceal his failure, he and his brother Piers would in later years craft a story of defiance: how he had walked out of the polytechnic after an argument with a lecturer about his course. Others knew the truth. Val Veness was working at the left-wing newspaper Tribune when Corbyn appeared in her office along with a friend, John Pickering. He had just arrived in London, he said, and having rented a bedsit in Islington was looking for work. ‘He never mentioned the poly,’ she recalled.

2

The First Rung

In his search for employment, Corbyn aimed low. An advertisement placed by the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers for an assistant in its research department attracted just one reply – Corbyn’s – and he got the job. Based first at the union’s headquarters in Kensington, then at Hoxton in the East End, he worked directly for Alec Smith, who was the national officer for the union from 1959 until he became its general secretary in 1974. In 1973 Smith was negotiating with employers at the Retail Bespoke Tailoring Wages Council, at a time when the industry in Britain was declining as production moved to Asia. Out of 112,901 union members, just 7,220 lived in London, the majority of them women. Working under Smith was Mick Mindel, a Jewish communist and the union’s representative at the World Jewish Congress. Mindel articulated his members’ passionate support for Israel, reflecting the fact that most of their employers were also left-wing Jews. Like Mindel, they looked to communism to abolish injustice and prejudice, including anti-Semitism. Mindel and many of the union’s members became Corbyn’s first encounter with Jews.

In Corbyn’s version, although only an assistant in the research department, he personally challenged the employers to recover members’ unpaid wages after their bosses ‘had mysteriously gone bankrupt just before Christmas, owing their workers a lot of wages and not paying National Insurance and all this kind of thing. Scumbags, actually. Crooks. My job was to try and chase these people through Companies House and so on.’ According to Corbyn, he forensically examined the companies’ accounts in order to verify phoney bankruptcies. That notion is contradicted by Alec Smith, and also by the trade union’s well-catalogued records, which do not reveal any issues about ‘unscrupulous employers’, or refer to any member complaining about being unpaid, especially after Christmas. On the contrary, Jack MacGougan, the union’s general secretary, who recruited Corbyn, proudly announced in his annual report for 1972 that the union had won a trailblazing four weeks’ paid holidays for its members, and had established a forty-hour week. Smith is certain that Corbyn ‘never had any contact with our members. He just sat in at meetings passing me information.’ Further, added Smith, ‘He was OK, but he didn’t have the chance to shine.’ Smith also recalled: ‘The clothing industry is a tough business. If an employer went broke it was because of trading conditions – not to fiddle their employees.’ Corbyn, not for the first time reshaping the truth to improve his self-image, conjured a tale of a brave personal fight against exploitative Jewish employers of sweatshop labour. Parochialism and fantasy fed the original source of his anti-Semitism – namely, as he saw it, the malign collective power of Jews.

Corbyn was immersed in an unfamiliar world. The union was dealing with struggling, overworked, self-employed Jews. Tailoring was a fragmented, insecure industry, and bad luck could turn an employer into an employee overnight. In that alien culture, Corbyn had no time for those seeking self-improvement – to fulfil the dream of moving from East End slums to north London’s suburbs. Thirty years later he boasted that at the end of one Wages Council meeting, a Jewish tailor had offered to make him a suit if he provided the cloth. Corbyn had spurned the offer. ‘Imagine trying to bribe a union official,’ he laughed about the generous gesture.

Since he disdained materialism, culture and anything spiritual, Corbyn was an empty vessel, uneasy with a race complicated by its history of survival over two thousand years of persecution. While Jamaica was black against white, and South America’s indigenous Indians fought against the Spanish, Jews in London were the victims of discrimination by all classes of Europeans, including the working class. That truth did not quite fit the Marxist theory of history that Corbyn had imbibed in Jamaica and Skegness: workers exploited by employers, who needed his protection as the first stage before eventually seizing power to govern the country.

Those nuances eluded him even as he found his metier. Here was a cause that secured him both an office and status, so that his sense of inferiority was partially alleviated. With a regular income, he could afford a better home: he left Islington and rented a flat in neighbouring Hornsey. There he joined the local Labour Party, a moribund group split between the extreme left – communists, Marxists and Trotskyites – and conventional social democrats. At meetings held in a dilapidated headquarters on Middle Lane in Crouch End, Corbyn deftly gave the appearance of not belonging to any faction. But Barbara Simon, the branch’s long-serving secretary, was not fooled. ‘He was a natural Marxist,’ she noted, seeing him as a sly, diligent agitator seeking political advantage at every turn to secure control of his small domain.

Corbyn was transformed, and politics became his life. Soon he was appointed chairman of the branch’s Young Socialists, and he would regularly cycle around the constituency, chatting to potential voters in every public venue and council estate, and offering application forms to join the party. His energy transformed Labour’s status in Hornsey. Through jumble sales and collections, he also helped to raise enough money to repair the local party headquarters. Toby Harris, a member of the branch from the age of sixteen, was struck when in the summer of 1972 he returned from Cambridge University and saw the newcomer tirelessly undertaking the thankless chores hated by everyone else.

The one odd note was Corbyn’s parsimony. Ever since he had witnessed the treatment of farm animals in Shropshire, he had been a vegetarian. In addition, he rarely drank, and did not smoke, go to the cinema, watch any sport or enjoy any social activity, so he had little in common with most members. His one concession to frivolity was to sing Irish protest songs in an Irish pub. Commitment to the reunification of Ireland was not wholly outlandish at the time. In March 1971 Harold Wilson had flown to Dublin to speak to the IRA’s leaders about peace and a planned transition to a united Ireland, and he later welcomed them to his home in Buckinghamshire. The former prime minister, however, received no credit for that initiative from Corbyn, who shared his fellow members’ anger at what he saw as Wilson’s betrayal of socialism during his last government. Unlike Corbyn, Wilson was not dedicated to hastening the imminent collapse of capitalism. Rather, as ‘the principal apostle of cynicism’, he was blamed for ‘too great a number of tawdry compromises [which] pollutes the atmosphere of politics’.

Like others on the left, Corbyn was not taken in by Wilson’s compact with the trade unions, and in 1973 he joined the new Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, an organisation that reflected his own commitment to establish a communist society. Thereafter his ideals never changed. To secure victory in the class war, he embraced the mantra of Tony Benn, at that time the rising star of Labour’s parliamentary radicals, to encourage direct action by workers on the streets and in workplaces to establish what the left called ‘industrial democracy’. Benn had just read The Communist Manifesto, and had become passionate about the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a Utopian, classless society, a mystical world. In this vision, the economy would be nationalised without compensation. That would include all the major industries, banks and property corporations. To turn Labour into the agent of that revolution, Corbyn adopted Benn’s rallying cry: ‘There are no enemies on the left.’ Their only adversaries were capitalists.