What is all the fuss about the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn?

Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is a British politician who was elected as the Leader of the Labour Party on 12 September 2015, with an overwhelming vote of 59.5% in the first round of the ballot. In May 2016, 72 per cent of Labour members thought he was doing well as leader and 27 per cent badly. However at the beginning of July only 51 percent think he is doing well and 48 per cent said badly. Why the big drop?

Astoundingly, during just one week at the end of June, 60,000 people joined the Labour party! Last week, more than 183,000 new supporters of Labour registered in just 48 hours, motivated by wanting to be eligible to vote in this summer";s leadership contest between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith. They surprisingly rushed to pay the one-off fee, at a rate of one per second, despite the decision by Labour";s national executive committee to increase the price from £3 to £25- a move seemingly designed to minimise the number of people voting to support Corbyn. People were apparently joining both to vote for and against Mr Corbyn in any leadership challenge contest. The party, by the second week of July, had more than 500,000 members, the most in modern history. So- why has Jeremy Corbyn";s leadership suddenly become such a hot issue?!

The first answer seems to be that he supported the Remain in the EU campaign and, by only about 2%, the Brexit campaign won the vote. In a knee jerk reaction to this very close vote, Mr Corbyn faced calls to resign at a stormy meeting in the House of Commons during which more than 20 members of his shadow cabinet and a similar number of junior ministers walked out. They later conducted a non-binding vote of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Leader, and the result was a 172-40 vote against him. Mr Corbyn said the ballot had 'no constitutional legitimacy” and that he would not 'betray” the members who voted for him by resigning. Thirteen of his Shadow cabinet members and several Shadow Ministers even resigned in protest at his leadership. What could possibly cause such strong feeling?

The reason seems to be that they questioned his performance (ability to persuade the electorate) during the EU referendum and his ability to lead the party into what they believe could be a snap election after the successful Brexit vote. Dave Sparks, a Labour councillor in Dudley and a former chair of the Local Government Association, warned that if Mr Corbyn stayed, the party was looking at its support disappearing in England as it had melted away already in Scotland.

This seems to be blatantly contradicted by the amount of obvious support he is still receiving from the British people. At the end of June the general secretaries of 10 of Britain";s largest trade unions signed a joint statement giving their continued support to Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Over 240 Labour councillors have signed an open letter giving their continued backing to Jeremy Corbyn";s leadership and slammed the moves against him as 'indulgent” and 'self-defeating. A large rally took place outside the Parliament at the end of June, and a Newsnight survey of 50 Constituency Labour Party (CLP) chairs found 90 per cent were still behind him. According to the New Statesman magazine, ‘";Local parties — who are responsible for vetting new members in the first instance — report that the bulk of joiners who have responded to welcome emails or messages from MPs are strongly opposed to any attempt to remove Corbyn.” The number of party members is heading for 600 000 — the largest in half a century!

Why the belief in Corbyn? As Jo Hall, a lifelong active member of the Labour party, previous Local Councillor and member of local government put it, ‘Corbyn was a breath of fresh air and honesty after the corrupt years of right-wing rule in the Labour party. He is showing that he has the backbone to defend the left, and socialist principles, and is a great leader for the left";. Another Labour party member Chris, 55, from Bournemouth, says he joined 'because I was inspired by Jeremy Corbyn and the hope of a new politics that is not in the pockets of the elite bankers and big business.”

According to one of the MPs who has just left the competition to be voted new leader of the Labour party, Angela Eagle, the need for a new leader is to unite the party and ensure it becomes electable: ‘We need to have a strong and united Labour Party so we can be a good opposition, take the fight to the Conservative Government and heal our country."; Then one may ask why divide it in the first place by challenging the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn?

I find it surprising that his MPs would suddenly lose confidence in him just because the Labour leader backed the Remain campaign in a manner that was not clear and whole hearted enough. Jeremy Corbyn supported the Remain campaign with the proviso, in keeping with many of the British people";s sentiments, that the EU needed some reforming. The British people showed themselves to be equally ambivalent about the EU, belonging to which seems to have a few benefits for Britain, as well as a few disadvantages.

Jeremy Corbyn is probably still the most popular of all the MPs in politics today, so why were those in power so willing to risk losing the popularity of the Labour Party by substituting him as leader? As the Labour Councillors said, ‘";It would be utterly self-defeating for the people we represent if now, less than a year after Jeremy was elected on the single biggest mandate of any previous leader, he was to be forced from office";"; (60% of the Labour membership voted for him), and 'We will risk losing all those new members and enthusiastic campaigners who joined us because Jeremy offered a vision of hope for the future.”

I am mystified still as to why Jeremy Corbyn is even facing a challenge to his leadership. What other reasons could be behind this level of dissension in the shadow cabinet and amongst Labour MPs? Could it be that Corbyn, awarded for his work as an international human rights campaigner, is just too morally principled, too interested in social justice, too anti-war and anti-unregulated free market capitalism, and therefore he would be unpopular with the banks, and multinational corporations, now heavily influencing policy in the UK and America?

Also, could this political vendetta against him be because he supports Palestinian rights, and supports law-abiding Muslims against the Islamophobia and war mongering that a few among Conservative politicians in addition to the Murdoch owned media have been trying to spread? John Harris, an author and journalist regularly writing for the Guardian on politics confirmed as much by saying, ";They (the Parliamentary Labour Party) are now using false and ridiculous claims of antisemitism and misogynist and homophobic bullying in an attempt to undermine his constituency and trade union support…";.

Despite the attempted ‘coup"; against Corbyn, people-power is winning in the UK, as it has in Turkey. In a recent online poll by the Opinium/ Observer to gauge opinion among those who say they back Labour, an overwhelming 54% were found to support Corbyn, against just 22% who would prefer Owen Smith, the only remaining challenger, now Angela Eagle has dropped out of the leadership contest, due to be voted upon on September 24th this year. So Jeremy Corbyn is likely to remain the Labour leader for some time to come, thanks to the renewed political interest and activism of the British people rallying around him, wise enough to know who is really on their side.

The writer is an English Muslim, with a Masters in Urban Regeneration. She can be contacted at