Is Corbyn Allowing Yesterday’s Enemies To Win Again?

The Ghost Of Futures Passed: Does Jeremy Corbyn have the political ability to rise above his preoccupation with Labour’s past? Can he recast himself as the progressive champion of the UK’s European future? That would require him to align himself unequivocally with the Remainers by forcefully demanding a second referendum. It’s a big ask. But, surely, he understands that those who hesitate to climb on board History’s bus when it pulls up at their stop invariably get left behind.

JEREMY CORBYN’S fatal political error has been to look over his shoulder rather than over the horizon. As is so often the case with politicians who have had their party’s agenda wrenched from their hands by ideological rivals pursuing radically different goals, the temptation to start again from where they were forced to leave off is very strong. The 1980s Labour Party of Michael Foot and Tony Benn – the lodestars of Corbynism – was taken over and completely reshaped by Tony Blair in the 1990s. Rolling back Blairism and resuming Labour’s march towards democratic socialism has always been Corbyn’s mission. It was not, however, the mission imposed upon Labour by the relentless march of events. That, it turns out, is Brexit.

Corbyn has always been deeply conflicted by the evolution of the European project. Originally conceived as a means of preventing the powerful nations of Western Europe from ever again going to war with one another, the European Economic Community (EEC) had much to commend it. Its transformation, from the EEC into the European Union (EU), changed perceptions considerably. What began as an essentially social-democratic dream has morphed into what more and more leftists have come to regard as a neoliberal nightmare.

This trajectory (from social-democracy to neoliberalism) was, of course, mirrored in the domestic histories of practically all of the EU’s member states. Corbyn’s assessment, that a rejection of neoliberalism in the UK would be next-to-impossible if it remained an EU member, made him a very tepid advocate of his party’s official policy of encouraging Labour supporters to vote “Remain” in the 2016 Referendum. That so many of Labour’s heartland constituencies favoured the “Leave” option didn’t make things any easier.

Theresa May’s doomed attempt to increase the Conservative Party’s majority in the House of Commons by calling a snap-election in 2017, poured almost as much acid on the Leader of the Opposition as it did on the Prime Minister. Labour’s astonishing electoral performance was partly fuelled by its immensely popular “For the Many, Not the Few” manifesto, which, like Bernie Sander’s “democratic socialist” platform of the previous year, inspired and enthused tens-of-thousands of young, well-educated, but economically marginalised, voters. Mostly, however, Labour’s success was built on these younger voters’ conviction that Labour represented a forward-thinking alternative to the Tories’ reactionary “Little Englander” Brexiteers.

In the minds of the only voters that truly mattered – the ones who would spend most, if not all, of their lives in the Twenty-First Century – Labour stood for an open-hearted, multicultural and European future. If Labour wanted to endure as a viable political force (rather than a declining legacy party of Britain’s industrial past) then it had no choice but to make those young voters’ perceptions reality. Tragically, Corbyn was too mired in the politics of the Twentieth Century to rise to the challenge. Rather than lead the debate against Brexit; rather than mobilise his young supporters behind the call for a second referendum; Corbyn equivocated – and thereby surrendered the initiative.

What is currently unfolding in the UK is the direct consequence of Corbyn’s error.

Any politician who can count has worked out that for the Prime Minister to secure her “Brexit Deal” all she has to do is run down the clock to the point where the Labour Party – absolutely opposed to the UK “crashing-out” of the EU with no deal – is left with no alternative except to give May what she wants.

If Labour swings-in behind May’s deal, the Tory Brexiteers’ leverage instantly disappears. Would the humiliation of being outmanoeuvred by May and Corbyn cause the Brexit hardliners in the European Research Group to split the Tories? Of course! But the sheer intractability of the Brexit crisis has for some time indicated that some sort of break-up of the Conservative Party is unavoidable. It seems pretty clear that May accepts this. Willing to settle for the historical legacy of being the PM who fulfilled her “sacred duty” to take the UK out of the EU, May seems ready to ‘retire hurt’: limping, but with her head held high.

With the Conservative Government hopelessly divided, and May’s parliamentary majority in tatters, a new election becomes inevitable. Nothing could better please Jeremy Corbyn and his followers. With the Tories torn and bleeding, Labour would be swept to victory. Safely removed from the EU’s clutches, the battle against British neoliberalism could then begin in earnest.

This is the terrifying prospect that caused first the Labour Right, and then the Tory Left, to step forward as the vanguard of a new electoral force conceived to achieve two, brutally simple, strategic objectives. The first: To prevent, by any means necessary, Corbyn’s democratic-socialist Labour Party from taking power. The second: To secure, with all possible speed, the UK’s membership of, or re-admission to, the EU.

What the world is currently witnessing in the UK, is the “pre-emptive split” that simply has to happen if the looming, uncontrolled, disintegration of the British Right, and the left-wing victory such an unmediated break-up will permit, is to be circumvented.

As always, to save the Right, the Left has first to be rendered electorally harmless. Look, then, for the rise of a British version of Emanuel Macron’s “Le Republique En Marche” – a media-driven, City of London-funded, manifestation of the so-called “radical centre”.

It’s not as if such a re-alignment has never happened before. To get the UK through the Great Depression of the 1930s, without capitulating to the far-Right or the far-Left, required the formation of a “National Government” – led initially by the renegade Labour Leader, Ramsay MacDonald, but held up by the votes of the shires. The Labour Party proper was reduced to an impotent parliamentary rump. It required the massive social and economic upheavals of the Second World War to restore Labour to electoral competitiveness.

Clearly, there is still a great deal to do before this unfolding political re-alignment can be brought to a satisfactory conclusion. What its organisers need most is time.

And time, strangely enough, is precisely what the EU leader, Donald Tusk, appears to be offering Theresa May. The last thing the EU’s German and French masters want to see is a securely entrenched democratic-socialist government unsettling the people of Europe from the other side of the English Channel. The EU looks set to give the UK’s political class all the time it needs to prevent such a dangerous development.

Does Corbyn have the political ability to rise above his preoccupation with Labour’s past? Can he recast himself as the progressive champion of the UK’s European future? That would require him to align himself unequivocally with the Remainers by forcefully demanding a second referendum. It’s a big ask. But, surely, he understands that those who hesitate to climb on board History’s bus when it pulls up at their stop invariably get left behind.

In the end, Corbyn’s obsession with fighting yesterday’s battles may only make it easier for yesterday’s enemies to win again.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Sunday, 24 February 2019.

"A Benn - Not A Bennite" - Finally, The Blairites Have Someone To Replace Jeremy Corbyn.

Cometh The Hour ... Hilary Benn's speech in favour of bombing the Islamic State brought the House of Commons to its feet. Finally, the Blairites have someone to replace Jeremy Corbyn.

 

IT HAS BEEN HAILED as one of the best speeches delivered to the House of Commons in 50 years. Having urged his fellow MPs to support the Prime Minister’s motion in favour of bombing Syria, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Hilary Benn, resumed his seat to resounding cheers from both sides of the aisle. The Labour Leader, Jeremy Corbyn, his face a picture of both puzzlement and exasperation, did not join in the applause. No one from the Labour Party, himself included, had managed to deliver so passionate a speech on behalf of peace.

 

The emotion missing from Corbyn’s countenance was fear. It speaks well of the man that Benn’s noisy standing ovation did not frighten him. Someone more steeped in the realities of politics would have heard, behind the cheering of the Commons, the dull rattle of the tumbril. He should have known that his opponents weren’t just applauding the impassioned speech of a bellicose social imperialist, they were applauding the fact that, at last, they had found the person to replace the despised Member for Islington North.

 

It’s been the biggest problem of the Blairites all along that among their ranks there was no one who could hold a candle to Corbyn. When set against the sincerity and plain-spokenness of the front-runner, the bland contributions of the other three leadership contenders came across as utterly unconvincing. Liz Kendall, the candidate most closely associated with the Blairite rump, attracted just 5 percent support from the party membership. What’s more, in the aftermath of the membership’s resounding endorsement of Corbyn, the Labour Right’s petulant refusal to accept that Blairism had been rejected only added to the new leader’s lustre.

 

Yes, Labour’s parliamentarians had the advantage of a sympathetic press. United in their disdain for Corbyn the journalists and columnists of the allegedly “left-wing” newspapers – The Guardian, The Observer, and The New Statesman – never missed a chance to tell their readers that Labour could not hope to win with Corbyn at the helm. But, increasingly, the left-wing media’s hostility was being written off by the Labour rank-and-file as yet further proof that the whole “mainstream” political establishment was rotten to the core.

 

What they needed was a challenger untainted by all the petulance and back-stabbing; someone who cleaved to his or her principles with the same sincerity and passion as Corbyn himself. Someone who had served time in the trade union movement. Someone unafraid to summon-up the ghosts of the men and women of the International Brigade who died fighting Franco’s fascists in Spain. Someone who was a teetotaller and a vegetarian. Someone who never fiddled his parliamentary expenses claims,. Someone whose father was, for more than 50 years, one of the towering figures of the Labour Left. Someone, in short, called Hilary Benn.

 

That Benn the Younger had made a point of telling his constituents that he was “a Benn – not a Bennite”, and had been an enthusiastic supporter of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” from Day One, serving in the Cabinets of both Blair and Gordon Brown, well, that only made it all the more delicious.

 

Not that the Blairites will be celebrating too loudly. The more intelligent among them understand that Corbyn has shoved “Overton’s Window” decisively to the left. Indeed, when History assesses the (now almost certainly brief) leadership of Corbyn, breaking the neoliberal stranglehold on the British Labour Party will be cited as his greatest achievement. If Benn wants to be Prime Minister he will have to run on a clear anti-austerity platform and to offer the voters policies that are recognisably social-democratic in tone, content and purpose.

 

But if Paris, as Henry of Navarre is said to have quipped “is worth a mass”, Number 10 Downing Street is worth the renationalisation of British railways and a sharply more progressive tax system. Hilary Benn has only to signal to Labour’s rank-and-file that Corbyn’s vision (minus the pacifism and all that baggage from the 1980s) is safe in his hands, and the incumbent’s already difficult position will become impossible.

 

As the Andrew Finney character (played by Ian McShane) says in the TV series Ray Donovan: “If you see a man getting ready to take on the world – bet on the world.” After weeks of relentless media and political assault (not least from his own side) even Corbyn’s staunchest supporters know, deep in their hearts, that the British Establishment is never going to allow their hero to become Prime Minister. One way or the other, Corbyn is going to be driven from the Labour Leadership.

 

But the United Kingdom is an old and devious state, and both its public and not-so-public protectors know that if they are seen to have taken out one Labour Leader, then it is not in their interest to be seen putting too many restrictions on his replacement. In return for Trident, the “Special Relationship” with the USA, and a light hand when it comes to reforming the financial system (i.e. The City of London), the Left will be given their moment in the sun. The protectors of Britain’s Deep State understand that the Westminster System requires two parties of more-or-less equal strength if it’s to go on working. Allow that myth to fail, and who knows what the long-suffering British people might replace it with?

 

The King is dead (or soon will be). Long live the King!

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road on Saturday, 5 December 2015.

The Contagion Of Hope: Musings On The Jeremy Corbyn Campaign.

Oh Come All Ye Faithful: How can Jeremy Corbyn possibly be in the lead? After all, the man is an open and unashamed socialist – an affliction which should have ruled him out of serious contention immediately. Even worse, Corbyn’s clothes look like they were bought at a jumble sale – and he has a beard!

 

POLITICS CAN BE HARD on friendships. Radically diverging views on the nature and worth of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Greece’s Syriza-led government recently ended a relationship of more than 20 years. What student politics and the Labour-Alliance split could not break, was destroyed by my friend’s extraordinary, and, from a distance of 18,000 kilometres, utterly inexplicable, animosity towards any left-wing iteration more exciting that Gordon Brown’s watered-down Blairism. Ending the friendship was made easier, I suppose, by the fact that he has, for many years, lived in Scotland, while I’ve been here in New Zealand. Had I been there, or he here, I suspect things would have come to a head a lot sooner – and it would have been a lot nastier.

 

My own personal setback has, however, made it a lot easier to understand the rapidly rising level of aggro afflicting the British Labour Party’s leadership election.

 

The rise and rise of Jeremy Corbyn is threatening to split the party asunder. The Blairite Right, like my former pal, simply cannot understand the 60-year-old backbench MP for the London suburb of Islington North’s burgeoning popularity. After all, the man is openly and unashamedly left-wing – an affliction which should have ruled him out of serious contention immediately. Even worse, Corbyn’s clothes look like they were bought at a jumble sale – and he has a beard! So why have upwards of 20,000 people joined the Labour Party on the strength of his candidacy? Why have his younger followers taken to chanting “Jez we can!”? And why, oh why, do people insist on abbreviating his name to “JC”?

 

The simple answer is that the Corbyn Campaign is offering people hope. It’s what the SNP offered the Scots, and Syriza the Greeks: a sense that, actually, something can be done; a better tomorrow is possible. Significantly, hope was the attribute most conspicuous by its absence from Ed Miliband’s appeal to the British electorate. That’s because, if my ex-mate is anything to go by, the Labour Right treats hope as the political equivalent of nitro-glycerine – useful in small amounts, and in strictly-controlled settings, but potentially devastating if tossed about all over the place. Labour must be very careful not to raise people’s hopes too high. Why? Because then they’d have to fulfil them!

 

The so-called “left-wing” British commentariat are, for the most part, marching in lock-step with the Blairite Right. Their argument against Corbyn boils down to: He’s going to win, therefore he must not win.

 

That the MP for Islington North is filling halls from Manchester to Luton is, according to the pundits, the best reason for not voting for him. The people turning out for Corbyn, they insist, are nothing like the rest of Britain. The latter know nothing about him, and care even less. Apparently, the only sort of person who can lead Labour to victory, is the sort of person who knows how to woo these know-nothing/care-even-less voters.

 

That sort of leader will, of course, be given his lines by professional political consultants, who will, in turn, have plucked them out of focus groups – filled with, you guessed it, know-nothing/care-even-less voters. The idea that a candidate like Corbyn might, if elected, be able to generate the same sort of hope and enthusiasm among know-nothing/care-even-less voters as he is currently generating among Labour’s rank-and-file, is dismissed out of hand. And yet, all that really distinguishes the people who are turning out in the hundreds to hear Corbyn, from the know-nothing/care-even-less voters, is that somewhere along the line someone gave them enough knowledge to make them care.

 

It’s what lay at the heart of the falling-out between me and my old friend: how we viewed the electorate.

 

To him, the voting public are nothing more than an abstract electoral resource – something to be tapped. They cannot be entrusted with important decisions because they lack the knowledge and experience required to make them. Political power properly belongs to those with the best understanding of how the game is played. The rest of us are merely punters to be convinced.

 

To me, there is always much more that unites the voting public than divides them. This is because, when all is said and done, they are human-beings with human needs. Left-wing politics should be about uniting the electorate around these most basic needs, and then allowing the resulting political energy to change society in ways that allow them to be met.

 

Corbyn’s speeches are not examples of great oratory, but they are peppered with collective pronouns. He talks about “we”, and “us”, and the things that are “ours”. And in the surge of solidarity such language inevitably generates, his listeners catch a glimpse of an alternative future. In Luton, it brought them to their feet. The youngsters chanted “Jez we can!” And their parents reached for Labour Party membership forms.

 

Such is the contagion of hope.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 6 August 2015.

Re/Defining Neoliberalism

The March Of Neoliberalism: Not a coherent economic philosophy, but a fearsomely coherent political project. Its purpose: to use the coercive power of the state to thwart and/or reverse any and all attempts to empower the many at the expense of the few. Those who try to pass neoliberalism off as the crackpot economic "religion" of a handful of Act supporters, are simply attempting (like Tony Blair) to carve out a political space for themselves within the Neoliberal Settlement.

 

THE DEBATE which Matthew Hooton kicked off in earnest on Radio New Zealand this week is hotting-up. In dispute is that much-used, but imperfectly understood, political term: “Neoliberalism”.

 

Some, including economist, Brian Easton; former Finance Minister, Sir Michael Cullen; and Wellington blogger, Danyl McLauchlan; have claimed that John Key, and the government he leads, no longer fits the neoliberal description. They have not, however, moved as far down the revisionist road as Mr Hooton. His claim is that the Key Government has not only moved on from neoliberalism, but that it has also crossed the line into the full-blown leftism of that arch-socialist, Rob Muldoon.

 

Wellington-based academic, Jack Vowles, joined the fray a couple of days ago - posing the question: “Neoliberalism: Half-Full or Half-Empty?”

 

As Professor of Comparative Politics at Victoria, Jack’s purpose in entering this debate appears to be the rather dubious one of muddying the waters about what neoliberalism is – and is not. In its turn, this obfuscation seemed to be aimed at keeping open the political space currently occupied by what he calls “market pragmatists” – those particularly pusillanimous neoliberals known as Blairites.

 

Vowles’s case: that neoliberalism is a kind of economic religion, adhered to by a tiny number of extreme Hayekian economists, and only ever imperfectly applied in New Zealand, is, like most erroneous conclusions, based upon an erroneous premise.

 

Neoliberalism as never been, and is not, a coherent set of economic principles, the presence or absence of which in any given policy prescription determines the strength or weakness of its ideological credentials. Indeed, neoliberalism, far from being some sort of neo-classical economic crusade, is what it has always been: the fearsomely coherent political project of global capitalism’s ruling elites.

 

Its anti-state/free market propaganda notwithstanding, neoliberalism’s purpose has always been to use the coercive power of the state to thwart and/or reverse any and all attempts to empower the many at the expense of the few.

 

As Professor David Harvey notes in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism:

“Redistributive effects and increasing social inequality have in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalisation as to be regarded as structural to the whole project. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, after careful reconstruction of the data, have concluded that neoliberalisation was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power.”

 

It is no accident that neoliberalism’s origins, as a politically effective force, may be traced to the economic, social and political upheavals of the 1970s. This was, after all, the decade in which the power of the capitalist ruling classes came under maximum pressure: the decade in which both individual capitalists and the principal organs of capitalist power (especially in the USA and the UK) commenced their still-advancing counter-offensive against the unnerving encroachments of social-democratic redistribution and reform.

 

It also explains why, in practical terms, neoliberalism has always been a more-or-less constant set of political and economic objectives rather than a coherent philosophy. The whole point of neoliberalism is to have the coercive powers of the state deployed to the exclusive advantage of the elites. This may be seen not only in the largely successful campaigns to reduce the influence of organised labour, but also in the ongoing efforts of neoliberal regimes to decouple the regulatory and administrative powers of the state from those sectors of the economy that the forces of social-democracy had once been powerful enough to wrench from private hands.

 

Vowles’s plaintive cry, that not all of the defining features of a neoliberal regime are in and of themselves bad, misses the point entirely. Of course trade liberalisation can be seen “a good thing” – but not when it’s used to gut the domestic manufacturing sector and eliminate the social milieu out of which strong social-democratic values grow. Relieving the pressure on income tax to meet all of the state’s fiscal needs may, similarly, be a good thing, but not when a deeply regressive goods and services tax is imposed on the working-class to fill the fiscal hole created by easing the “burden” of progressive taxation on the wealthy.

 

Why is Vowles unable to see this? Primarily, because he is desperate to avoid acknowledging both the Neoliberal Revolution, and the Neoliberal Settlement which it enabled, as the central political (and, increasingly, cultural) realities of our time. Were he ever to accept that neoliberalism will manoeuvre swiftly and decisively (principally through its enablers in the news media) to thwart “the alternatives that do exist to promote [a] more inclusive and egalitarian society”, then all his talk of “responsible economic management” and of not taxing and spending “without any apparent constraints” would stand revealed for what it is: mealy-mouthed Blairite blather.

 

It is, however, in the midst of all his Third Way apologetics that Vowles let’s slip the very insight he’s trying so hard to pretend he has not had. It’s when he declares: “The implicit alternative to neoliberalism implied by many on the left is simply not feasible in the 21st century.”

 

This is the crucial admission, and the crucial explanation for why Vowles and his Blairite comrades are so keen to reduce neoliberalism to something only a handful of Act supporters take seriously. What Vowles is really saying is that the Left’s alternatives are not feasible while the Neoliberal Settlement endures. And if that is true, then the only possible programme for a genuine left-wing party is the one committed to challenging that settlement head-on and reclaiming the coercive powers of the state for the many, from the few. (The sort of coercive powers that John Key’s indisputably neoliberal National Party refuses to deploy even in the name of ensuring that working people are not seriously injured or killed on the job!)

 

I have followed Jack Volwes’s highly successful career in political science for more than quarter of a century. His scholarship in dissecting the crucial general elections of the 1990s – not to mention the arrival of MMP – always possessed the reassuring feel of work undertaken by a man comfortable in his own radical skin.

 

What happened, I wonder, to the Jack Vowles who seemed to see, in the epic struggle between Labour and the Alliance, the acting out of the urgent mission to make left-wing policies “feasible in the 21st century”? When did it become okay for the Professor to put down the opponents of neoliberalism as inhabitants of a political ghetto, communicators of despair, weakeners of their own cause?

 

Was it about the same time, Jack, that you decided that if neoliberalism could not be beaten, then it could, God forgive you, be joined?

 

This essay was posted simultaneously on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Saturday, 30 May 2015.