Put on your tin hats – we must stand with Corbyn against media attacks

Every day seems to bring a new media-generated hoo-ha about what Jeremy Corbyn may or may not have said. As Owen Jones warns, we’d better get used to it. The vast armoury of the Tory press is trained on Jeremy.  Years of remorseless battering of Ed Milliband left many of us in Labour exhausted by the impossibility of getting a serious political message across in a media that thrives on division and ridicule.

We better hang onto our tin hats – the right wing media has only just warmed up. Better than that, we need to stand together.

Last week, while the media was obsessing about women-only rail carriages – for the record, Jeremy announced a consultation, an opportunity to listen to women themselves, not a policy – the Tory party went about its everyday business, largely without serious scrutiny. The prime minister produced a list of Lords that challenged any remaining notion that the revising chamber could have a respectful place in our democracy, swelling to a gargantuan size, replete with those enjoying the favour of the government, while the elected chamber will lose many seats (in mainly Labour areas). The Regulatory Policy Committee – independent advisors to government – unanimously declared the Trade Union Bill `not fit for purpose’, a savage indictment of the first major piece of legislation of the first full-Tory government in nineteen years yet barely rippling the media pond.

And in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, it was confirmed that thousands of people with disabilities had died while being hounded into work by Iain Duncan Smith. Such is the concern about this revolting state of affairs, international human rights lawyers will investigate.

This country needs this Government to be held to account. They came to power without fully revealing their malicious intent, opportunistically using the collapse of western banking on 2008 to slash and burn the state they abhor yet has been the greatest force for equality the people have seen. And, despite some benign recent economic conditions, they have increased the debt!

Jeremy Corbyn, should he be revealed as party leader on September 12, and as a supporter I hope he is, is very well aware that the people need Labour.

People like my neighbours on Merseyside who are in work but earn so little they have to rely on tax credits (now being removed) to subsidise the low wages from their employers.

Or the young people who feel utterly let down by short-termist politics which gambles away their futures for the votes of the better off, and hopeless about a nation that cannot offer them an education, a decent job or the hope of a home. The parents desperate for the school holidays to end so that their kids can get a decent meal at midday, for whom talk of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ is a joke when crap jobs, low wages and foodbank dependency make life more akin to the ‘Northern Workhouse’.

I am one of the lucky ones.  I have been able to work and contribute through my adult life.  I have been able to afford somewhere to live, I can put food on the table. I can enjoy a holiday, and when I retire it will not be into poverty. I believe in  the benefits of the state for all in our society and I am proud to pay my way.

But to be honest, many of those I work alongside or share a community with had given up on politics, especially the young.  It all happened over there, in the ‘Westminster bubble’.  It never spoke to them, and it certainly did not seem to do them any favours. They were at best forgotten about, at worst cruelly experimented upon in the name of austerity.  Politicians were `all the same’.

Then along came Jeremy and blew the dust off political life gone stale.  It has been remarkable and joyful to behold prompting even Mr Blair, who has confessed that he’s struggling to get his head around the phenomenon of packed-out halls and the movement of young and old that has united behind Jeremy, to promise to at least try to understand what is going on.

Others in the parliamentary Labour party should take the hint. Don’t rail against the voters or their candidate – understand why they back him, reflect upon the opportunity before our party to reconnect with those communities that looked at Labour and saw nothing for them. And, please, stop being on the end of the phone whenever the Tory press wants to stick the knife in the Labour Party.

Standing up to this Government – this must be our party’s first priority, and our way back to power.  The voters need to know that this is a government that is hell-bent on recasting our society away from one where we move forward together into one where it is everyone for themselves.  It’s gunning its way through our public services, irresponsibly shifting debt from the state to the individual creating horrendous insecurity, and is gerrymandering the Commons by reducing the opposition’s chances of forming a government.  Now they are coming for one of the significant remaining voices of protest and challenge, our trade unions.  The voters need to understand this and be confident in the alternative we offer.

Those people who need Labour in power in 2020 also need the party now in 2015.  Those who were returned as Labour MPs in May have a duty to ensure that taking on this government is what they are doing, morning and night, providing vigorous, unified and creative opposition to Cameron. Taking the fight to the Tories won’t just need the leader’s personal courage, however, but the full strength of our movement and its talents alongside him.

John Storey is a Unite EC member who works in the chemicals industry. He writes in a personal capacity.