"When the candidates were announced, we were all feeling a bit flat. We dubbed it ‘fifty shades of bland’."
Naomi Fearon
Ryan was unimpressed. “That completely switched me off,” she says. “That was just it for me.”
She took to the internet to share her concerns about Burnham’s interview with like-minded Labour supporters. On a Facebook page called Labour Refocused, she asked her online friends what they thought, and suggested they start a petition calling for a Left-leaning, anti-austerity candidate to take on Burnham in the leadership race. One user, Rebecca Barnes, responded saying she would like to help.
Barnes had joined Labour as a teenager but let her membership lapse during the Blair era, when the first of her four children was born. She was, however, an active trade unionist, having been a railway ticket collector for more than 20 years. Despite re-joining the party at the start of 2015, the 40-year-old had not been an active campaigner at the general election; living in the safe Tory seat of Orpington, she had seen little point.
Instead, like Michelle Ryan, she was active online. Before she read Ryan’s post, Barnes too had been planning to vote for Burnham. “He was the best of a bad bunch and he looked quite nice,” she jokes. “But I wasn’t happy. There was a feeling it was time for real change.”
The two women – who to this day have never met or even spoken on the telephone, and have only ever communicated via the internet – agreed to draw up the petition that would lead directly to Corbyn’s decision to stand.
Written by Barnes, the petition offered to support a candidate who could bring “much-needed anti-austerity ideas to the forefront of the [leadership] campaign”. It was signed in the names of “Beck Barnes and Chelley Ryan”.
Keen for the petition to get as wide an airing as possible, Barnes and Ryan contacted Red Labour, an organisation founded in 2011 with the aim of promoting socialism within the Labour Party, via its Facebook page. Their plea was spotted by one of the site’s administrators, Naomi Fearon, a 32-year-old teacher from Fleetwood in Lancashire.
She too had been disappointed by the way the leadership contest was unfolding. “When the candidates were announced, we were all feeling a bit flat,” Fearon says. “We dubbed it ‘fifty shades of bland’.
“I said, what about doing some sort of statement encouraging people that would like to see some different policies or candidate? Anti-austerity had to be on the agenda. We started to draft something, then Beck got in contact via the Red Labour page. She said: ‘We’ve done this letter…’ Saved me a job.”
Fearon decided to give the petition as prominent a display as possible, by posting it to 38 Degrees, a not-for-profit campaigning website that which supports “progressive politics” and has around 2 million members. It went live on 20 May 2015. At this stage, Ryan, Barnes and Fearon were unclear who might respond to their plea to run as a candidate of the Left.
They set their sights on finding a suitable MP to represent their views. “It wasn’t Jeremy,” Fearon says.
“He’d never expressed an interest in the leadership. We all knew Jeremy, he’d been quite a key figure on the Left, and his interest was always foreign policy. We talked about possibly Ian Lavery [Labour MP for Wansbeck and a former union official], he’s normally seen as quite a Left MP, but then he came out and supported Burnham and ruled himself out.”
Ryan, meanwhile, wondered if Clive Lewis, the newly elected MP for Norwich South, might be persuaded to stand, having been impressed by an interview she saw on YouTube in which he unapologetically described himself as a socialist.
“I just wanted somebody who represented our view, and there was nobody. It was just really horrible to be unrepresented in the Labour leadership election,” she says. Barnes thought John McDonnell, who had twice run for the party leadership – following Tony Blair’s resignation in 2007, and again in 2010, after Gordon Brown’s – might put himself forward, and even wondered if the octogenarian Dennis Skinner could be persuaded.
The petition took off in a modest way, eventually attracting nearly 5,000 online signatures. As pressure for a Left-wing candidate built, Ryan, Barnes and their online friends began a round-the-clock campaign to promote the petition, directly tweeting MPs urging them to heed the call to enter the race.
But was anyone listening? It is now clear that Corbyn was. He was one of the first to retweet one of Ryan’s messages, soon followed by McDonnell.
Corbyn later credited Ryan and Barnes with inspiring his decision to run, writing, appropriately enough, on his own Facebook page: “One of our biggest supporters, Chelley Ryan, who along with Beck Barnes instigated the original petition demanding an anti-austerity candidate in the Labour leadership election[,] essentially sparked this whole thing…”
Comrade Corbyn by Rosa Prince is published by Biteback, priced £20. To order your copy for £16.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
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