Populism as an intra-party phenomenon: The British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn
| Author | Jake Watts,Tim Bale |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118806115 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
research-article2018
Original Article
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
Populism as an intra-party
2019, Vol. 21(1) 99 –115
© The Author(s) 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118806115
DOI: 10.1177/1369148118806115
Labour Party under Jeremy
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Corbyn
Jake Watts1 and Tim Bale2
Abstract
This article seeks to demonstrate that the concept of populism can help us to understand the
dynamics of intra-party politics. This argument is made via a case study of the British Labour
Party under Jeremy Corbyn, who was elected as its leader in late 2015. Corbynism as a (highly
personalistic) political phenomenon has relied, in its resistance to opposition from more moderate
MPs to Labour’s leftward turn, upon the idea that the party’s members are ‘the people’. This idea
links to notions of the ‘heartland’ members occupy, the elite conspiracy against them and the
democratic resolution made possible by the leader. Analysing how the rise of populist politics
affects politics within parties, as well as between them, may, the article argues, help account for the
populist transformation of established parties. This transformation, in turn, is one way in which
populist discourse may infuse a country’s politics, permanently or otherwise.
Keywords
Britain, intra-party democracy, Labour, party factionalism, populism
In 2004, Cas Mudde (2004) set out to redefine populism as a concept in the face of what
he described as the ‘populist Zeitgeist’. While it was possible to distinguish populist par-
ties making gains in the politics of various countries at that time, it is arguably only in the
past five years or so that populism truly has become the spirit of the age, at least in Europe
and the United States (Rovira Kaltwasser et al., 2017). Populist forces on the right are
now firmly entrenched in a range of Western party systems, in some cases making it into
government (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2015). Marine le Pen of the Front National
made it to the second round of the French presidential election. The FPÖ in Austria put in
strong showings in both the 2016 presidential election and the 2017 legislative election.
The M5S in Italy, with its more idiosyncratic combination of anti-establishment politics,
anti-immigration stance and calls for direct democracy, won a third of the votes in the
1Department of Politics, School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
2Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
Corresponding author:
Jake Watts, Department of Politics, School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex, Freeman
Building, Brighton BN1 9RH, UK.
Email: j.t.watts@sussex.ac.uk
100
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 21(1)
2018 general election in Italy and may govern alongside the populist radical right party,
La Lega. Moreover, their mainstream opponents feel obliged to adopt, or at least adapt,
their rhetoric and their policies, particularly on immigration, with the governing VVD in
the Netherlands perhaps the most obvious contemporary example (see Rutte, 2017). Left-
wing populism is also a phenomenon, most obviously in Spain, where Podemos has eaten
into support for PSOE and in Greece, where Syriza find themselves in office. Meanwhile,
in Central and Eastern Europe, populist nationalist parties seem to be moving Hungary
and Poland towards ‘illiberal democracy’. Lastly, Donald Trump is President of the
United States – in no small part because he appealed to the same sentiments as populist
radical right politicians in other polities (Donovan and Redlawsk, 2018).
Given these developments, it is entirely understandable that the emphasis of academic
engagement with populism is almost always on its external inter-party face. Populism
may be a contested concept (see, for example, Müller, 2016), but whether it is taken to be
a style, a strategy, a (‘thin-centred’) ideology or a combination of all three, it has been
regularly relied upon to describe and explain the politics of entire parties or party families
(see Kriesi and Pappas, 2016; March, 2017; Moffitt and Tormey, 2014; Mudde, 2004; Van
Kessel, 2015; Weyland, 2001). However, the concept of populism has rarely, if ever, been
used in an academic context to explicitly explain or analyse intra-party dynamics. In this
article, we argue that it can and should be. We make that argument via a case study of the
British Labour Party between the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2015 and the
2017 general election.
At the time of his election as leader, Corbyn was a veteran left-winger with no front-
bench experience and very little support in his own parliamentary party. He was elevated
to the leadership by members and supporters in the wake of a second successive defeat at
the general election of 2015 – a decision they repeated when he was challenged for the
leadership a year later in the summer of 2016 (Nunns, 2018; see also Poletti, 2016).
Between his first election as Labour leader and the 2017 general election, there was seri-
ous disquiet among Labour MPs over his ability and legitimacy. These concerns were
compounded by an even deeper struggle for both ‘the soul’ and the levers of power of the
party as Labour found itself searching for a consensus on how to deal with the awkward
legacies of the New Labour years (see Goes, 2016). In and among these struggles, the
populism that Cas Mudde sought to identify and define found a home. This home was a
party devastated by two consecutive electoral defeats under leaders (Gordon Brown and
Ed Miliband) who had clearly been desperate to find a compromise between the respon-
siveness demanded by members and the responsibility demanded by the electorate (Mair,
2009). This dilemma is often one that engenders a populist response (see Mudde and
Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017: 100).
In arguing that Corbynism is an example of intra-party populism, we root ourselves
firmly within existing ‘ideational’ approaches that consider populism as an ideology and
seek to clarify its contents and proponents in primarily empirical terms. We acknowledge,
of course, that, as the ‘discursive’ approach taken by Laclau (2005) ably demonstrates,
such approaches are far from the only way to analyse populism more generally and do
have their limitations (see Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). Within that ideational
tradition, we have focused on what we see as being the key features of populism that are
evident in the case of Corbynism and Labour’s internal politics – most obviously, perhaps,
the pitting of a virtuous and homogeneous ‘people’ against a corrupt and collusive ‘elite’
(Mudde, 2004) that allows populists to claim they are supremely democratic in their con-
nection to and treatment of this ‘authentic’ people (Canovan, 1999; Shills, 1956). We then
Watts and Bale
101
draw on the arguments that Corbyn and his supporters have made in relation to Labour’s
internal (rather than outward facing) politics as our source material. Note that we do not
suggest here that Corbyn and those around him are, as some media coverage often assumes,
populist in an all-encompassing sense (see, for example, Martin, 2017 and Bloom, 2017).
Instead, we argue that the populism of Corbynism is, as it were, local rather than global –
situated inside the party itself. Correspondingly, we suggest that Corbynism has found
strength, utility and coherence by drawing on populist ideas during the period of intra-
party turmoil the Labour leader faced since his first election. In short, we aim to demon-
strate the contemporary currency of populist ideas in the intra- as opposed to the inter-party
politics of a long-established political party of the centre-left that has struggled to maintain
cohesion in the midst of a crisis for British and, indeed, European social democracy (see
Cramme et al., 2013).
Within this methodological and conceptual frame, this article charts the use in Labour’s
intra-party politics of four key features of populist ideas by Corbyn and his closest sup-
porters, following the leadership election of 2015 and during the leadership challenge he
successfully faced down the following year. First, we outline the Corbynistas’ construc-
tion of Labour’s membership as a virtuous ‘people’. Second, we trace how this people
was located in a populist heartland that emphasised the need for a return to a historicised
notion of Labour’s movement politics in order for Labour’s grassroots members to flour-
ish. Third, we consider the way that Labour’s people was pitted against the apparently
perfidious elite of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) as MPs sought (unsuccessfully)
to remove Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Finally, we outline how the language of democracy
provided Corbyn and his allies with a tool to both delegitimise this elite and articulate a
remedy to the supposed subjugation of Labour’s membership.
Within the Labour context, these elements show how populist ideas have come to
constitute an important feature of its intra-party battles in recent years. Going forward, the
galvanising effects of such ideas inside a party like Labour should lead us to consider the
relationship between populism and intra-party politics more extensively. As such, we
conclude by considering how an...
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