It’d be easy to get all bent out of shape over Jeremy
Corbyn’s election to the Labour leadership (
above). Plenty of people have (
Dan Hodges, we’re looking at you). So much emotion and blood and guts has been shed over
this apparently cataclysmic (or salvific) turn of events that you’d think that
the moon had just wrenched itself out of the earth’s orbit, or some
enterprising astronomer had just spotted a massive asteroid steaming in on a
collision course with the doomed earth. Well, no. Not really. A relatively unpopular
Western European political party has just elected a really hardcore Leftist as
its leader. No-one died. No-one even got badly injured, actually. Small
earthquake: no-one hurt.
Except. Except. Be in doubt that this might be an epochal
moment in British political history, insofar as that matters much in the world
any more – the moment that the Labour Party was transformed into something
radically new and different. Or the moment that it chose to dive off the
precipice that
most of its ex-leaders have been warning about for months. The
day it committed itself to a political kamikaze mission that can only end in
its extinction as a serious national force. It might, of course, just be the
juncture at which it chose to muddle on downwards, arguing with itself, bickering,
shoving with elbows, glaring around at the increasingly-inclement political
weather. But that seems less likely right now. We probably are at a real
crossroads.
So it’s our duty here, as a blog dedicated to rational
policy evaluation, data and – above all – to analysis based on long-term
trends, to look coldly and clearly at the Corbynite platform. Now we strongly
disapprove of a project that seems as doomed to failure as it is
self-indulgent, but it’s not enough to shout. Corbynism must be unpackaged and
examined as a political movement and argument, not just abused. The first thing
that usually involves is picking our categories, and it seems uncontroversial
to pick three areas in which we would judge any leadership: electoral strategy;
economic policy; and foreign policy. Let’s have a quick reconnaissance across
each of these, shall we?
Electoral strategy
Labour has now lost two consecutive General Elections,
that of 2015 quite badly. Any effective leadership must address and turn around
whatever failings led to that slow-motion rout, and we therefore make no
apology for turning to psephology first. Here the Corbynites make three central
claims. The first is that
they might attract non-voters to Labour’s colours, raising the party's vote
from outside the traditional electorate.
The second is that they will unite radical non-Conservatives under a single
banner, bringing in ex-Green and
Scottish National Party voters to serve
Labour’s cause. The third is that Mr. Corbyn might appeal to Britons who’ve
deserted Labour for the United Kingdom Independence Party. Let’s test these
using the tools of the reality-based community, shall we?
No blowing of trumpets, but we’ve got a bit of form here.
Public Policy and the Past correctly predicted that
the Ed Miliband experiment would end in electoral disaster – and (by the way) exactly why. This was for
three reasons: Labour had no economic credibility; Labour had a leader who the
voters struggled to take seriously; and the party seemed to have lost contact
with the social and moral values, both small-‘c’ conservative and more
solidaristic, that many ordinary people held. In short, it’d stopped listening,
and then stopped talking with a voice that most citizens could recognize or
even understand. So we’d ask for a bit of a hearing for the following
statement: the Corbynite’s psephological case is a total and utter load of
nonsense.
First, non-voters. The thing to remember about non-voters
is that they almost always remain that way. Labour tried mightily to raise the
turnout in the last Parliament, and managed an increase of one per cent (1.2
per cent in target seats). The Obama campaign of 2008 managed a two per cent
increase in the size of the electorate, with one of the best and most inspiring
candidates the western world has ever produced. There is not going to be a
massive surge of new voters to the polls. It will not happen. Indeed,
Individual Voter Registration, so cleverly brought in by the Conservatives in
the last Parliament, probably means that the numbers of voters is going to go
down, because indigent younger people,
in particular, are just not going to appear on the electoral rolls. Headline:
reality is tough. Get used to it. The second thing you should know about
non-voters is that they are
not necessarily sympathetic to Labour’s cause. Only
one third of them sympathized with that party in 2015. Even less would lean
over to Labour were the party to move decisively to the Left. Indeed,
their preferences look much more like UKIP’s than Labour’s, and hostility to
immigration and social and cultural change is much more ingrained among them than
any sort of radicalism. Labour might seek a one or two per cent rise in voter
numbers at the next election, if it stiffens every sinew to become a
campaigning crusade for registration and engagement: that might, and only
might, lift the party’s vote
in extremis by between a third and two-thirds of a
single percentage point.
A teeny, tiny uplift likely to be concentrated in heartland areas, where younger and poorer Britons
are likely to live, and where the party retains something of an emotional appeal to gut
rather than mind, rather than swing seats.
Big deal.
Next wake-up call: only very limited seat gains can be
expected from attracting Green voters, and
almost none from the SNP. Here
electoral geography limits gains from the Greens, whose vote is
disproportionately concentrated in liberal urban areas that Labour carried
anyway.
Only sixteen seats are winnable if every single Green voter in the country switches to Labour. Just sixteen, again on the totally unrealistic
basis that all those Green voters think and feel on the same axis as the
Corbynites: an old-fashioned battle between Left and Right, rather than one
rooted in environmental concerns, local activism and lived ‘sustainable’
eco-identities. Turning to Scotland, it is extremely unlikely indeed that
Labour will make any gains at all. Corbynites’ mistake here is to imagine that
the SNP is indeed the Left-wing party that it claims to be, rather than a
centrist
party of ‘the nation’ with radical trappings (and the occasional
Left-wing policy). British Election Study data makes eminently clear that the
reason for the SNP landslide is rooted in just that sense of
competence mixed with patriotism: the constitutional issue, coupled with a sense that Scots
would just be ‘better off’ under an effective and impressive leader in the
shape of Nicola Sturgeon, gave the SNP its conclusive victory. If Mr Corbyn enthuses
the Left, Ms Sturgeon will simply tack to the centre –
as she has already. The
SNP’s victory will probably abide for decades, and will not be disturbed
by playing to the Left-wing gallery. What thin evidence we have shows that
Scots (and especially Scots in poorer areas) declare themselves
less, and not more, inclined to vote Labour if Mr Corbyn is its leader. And insofar as there
might be some appeal or resonance in a far Left platform, in Greater Glasgow
(say), the SNP majorities are so huge that increasing the Labour vote will win
no seats, while losing votes in more conservative Edinburgh, where the SNP
surge has been rather less all-pervasive. Take a look at
Glasgow South, where
Labour will need a twelve point swing against a first-time sitting incumbent.
While the SNP, in the form of the Scottish government, hold all the cards and initiative. Is that going to happen? Very, very unlikely.
The point about UKIP is
rather more convincing. Here
there is
quite a lot more evidence behind the idea that Mr Corbyn’s populist
anti-politics will tempt back some ex-Labour voters. Even though they disagree
with him about almost every view he’s ever espoused, at least he’s ‘authentic’,
UKIP sympathizers might well say. At least he ‘believes what he says’, and
speaks like a normal person, they’ll muse – perceptions that are not without
foundation when you listen to the Islington MP’s speeches. But here again there
is the problem of geography. Most UKIP votes in 2015 piled up in Labour seats,
seats that Labour still holds (for instance) in the Midlands and the North of
England. Some returnees may hand them just a few seats in Southern England and
in Wales, perhaps, but almost certainly not enough to make a decisive
difference in the electoral balance.
And all the while, the seven per cent or so of Liberal
Democrat defectors that Ed Miliband was able to attract in 2015, and those
Labour voters who flirted with the Conservatives but stayed on board given the
main governing party’s poor image and lack of sympathetic warmth,
could be defecting in their droves to the Conservatives – as many Liberal Democrats in
fact did in the last election, handing David Cameron the majority that was the
cherry on the cake of his victory. We would guesstimate, on the basis of all
the quantitative data that’s out there, that Labour might now be able to boost
its vote by half a percentage point from ‘expanding the electorate’, one or two
points from the Greens, almost nothing from the SNP, and two or three
percentage points from UKIP. That’s a not-so-stupendous gain of 4.5-5.5 per
cent, placing Labour at a relatively healthy 36 per cent in the best possible
imaginable scenario. Take off seven or eight percentage points for those
middle-of-the-road voters fleeing the Left-wing takeover, though, and you get
to 28 per cent – pretty much what Labour got to while standing on a similar
platform in 1983. Bear in mind also that we think that this is the best Labour
can possibly hope to do in 2020 if Mr Corbyn is allowed the luxury of actual
contact with the electorate, and you can see the scale of the utter rout and
humiliation Labour now faces in that contest. Print this projection out and
stick it to your fridge: if Jeremy Corbyn is allowed to lead Labour into a
General Election, the party’s vote will be between 24 and 28 per cent, and the
swing to the Conservatives will be between three and five per cent. There will
be a massive Conservative landslide. No other conclusion can be drawn.
Mr Corbyn and his supporters are probably right to expect
something of a short-term boost in the polls, perhaps of some magnitude. He’s a
novelty. No-one knows much about him. He enthuses young people and (some)
non-voters: many will tell survey companies that they’re going to back him,
before failing to make it to an actual ballot box. He speaks using real words,
rather than careful-but-robotic soundbites favoured by most of his opponents. He
has ‘cut through’. Footballers talk about him. He’s mentioned in the pub. He’s
interesting. He really is. Some of what he calls for (rail renationalization,
for instance) is quite popular. And next spring’s electoral tests, for the
Welsh Assembly, the Scottish Parliament and the Bristol and London Mayoralties,
will be fought on some of his territory. If he can attract UKIP voters back to
Labour, they might cling on to one-party government in Cardiff (though some
form of arrangement with Plaid Cymru is more likely); they might at least stem
losses to the SNP by standing on a full-blooded socialist prospectus in
Scotland (especially because it’s a list election, and it matters rather less where
you win your votes). Liberal and cosmopolitan cities such as Bristol and
London might have been designed as test-beds for defections from the Greens and
from among more left-leaning Liberal Democrats.
But make no mistake: on every single day of the
Parliament to come, Labour support in (say)
Nuneaton, Lincoln, Kidderminster,
Plymouth, Harlow, Carlisle and Crawley – all seats that Labour just has to win
– will be ebbing away. The voters have now told Labour twice that it wants the
party to get a more astringent economic plan; that it wants it to appoint a
more credible leader; and that it wants to be spoken to as if its views matter
(even when they might be wrong). Choosing Mr Corbyn as its leader amounts to turning round and urinating on this electorate. Doubt what we say?
Watch this focus group, drawn from voters living in Nuneaton and Crawley, and then
come back and argue with us. No? Didn’t think so.
Summing up under this heading, all we can say is that
Labour under Corbyn will be lucky to drag its boats off the electoral beaches
in a Dunkirk-style electoral disaster. Mainly by picking
their least popular potential leader. The party might win about 180 to 200
seats in a 600-seat House of Commons shrunk by planned boundary reforms, if it
makes no gains and suffers no losses at all from 2015; we would expect a
Corbyn-led Party to hold no more than 150. There is some possibility, at one
end of the probabilistic bell curve, of a General Election campaign becoming
gruesomely and negatively dynamic, with the Conservatives bringing out of the
closet, every single day, something controversial and unpopular that Mr Corbyn
has said in the past (on which, more below). At the limits of very real
possibility, Labour under its new leader faces the danger that it might
experience a wipeout like that of the Liberal Democrats in 2015, ending up with
no more than 130-140 or so seats clustered in its urban heartlands. That’s
still unlikely: but it has now become possible, for the first time since the
Parliament of 1931-35.
Economic policy
Here
we should distinguish between the Corbyn camp’s
relatively uncontroversial ideas, mainly
in the sphere of macroeconomic strategy, and its more far-fetched concepts.
Economists can fairly easily be asked to sign up to a programme of less
austerity, as the 41 experts who wrote to
The Guardian in just this vein proved
without much effort. There is no doubt – and this blog has pushed the case
again and again – that there is absolutely no need to cut public expenditure at
either the speed, or to the extent, which Chancellor George Osborne, now plans.
It’s just vandalism, intended as an ideological check to the idea that the
state can help people at all, rather than properly-worked-out economic
strategy. One of Mr Corbyn’s strongest cards is that he has always unequivocally
opposed austerity in the strongest and starkest of terms – just as Labour
activists and members have always yearned to, in their heart of hearts. He’s
right about that. There is absolutely no need to cut public spending at the
rate Mr Osborne proposes, and there never was. Some increase in Labour’s
definition and full-throated opposition on this issue would be welcome.
There is, however, a grave tactical and presentational
danger here: although austerity has had, and is having, a deleterious effect on
growth, Mr Osborne has shown on more than one occasion before that he is quite
capable of junking it when the need arises. His great 2013 U-turn, when he
stopped cutting on his accelerated timetable and went back to Labour’s plans, has now
been matched by his second 2015 Budget, which announced a much slower and
smoother path for spending reductions. And you know what? By 2019-20 he’ll
probably have plenty of money to spend. He’ll splurge it everywhere, posing as a
latter-day centrist Harold Macmillan. New train lines? New hospitals? New
schools? How many would you like? And Labour will have
absolutely no answer whatsoever, if all it has focused on is austerity.
Some individual Corbyn policies can also be welcomed – at least
in theory, and on the basis that they are unlikely to do positive harm. Rail
nationalization would likely produce some savings given the crazy franchising
system under which the UK labours right now, a treasure trove of work for
lawyers and train owners (who usually franchise their units to the actual Train Operating Companies). A more efficient railway
probably would emerge once
the shift to a reorganized, slimmed-down public sector provider was complete. Network Rail
is in this respect far superior to Railtrack. But there most of the efficiency
gains end. Anyone who thinks that water and energy, for instance, would be
better off in the state sector should remember the key lessons of the 1960s and
1970s. The first of these is that the Treasury, obsessed with short-term
budgeting, is unlikely to pay itself for the infrastructure upgrades that those
sectors constantly need. The second is that, in attempting to reorganise such
industries on a ‘big bang’ and technocratic basis, the key flaw of most
centralizing management initiatives (including the free-market arms-length
initiatives we’ve so failed to enjoy since the 1980s) will impose itself:
namely that nothing so complex as these entire industries can be run as one
organization. Britain’s water and sewerage system was in a terrible state by
the 1980s; its railway system was doing rather better, but it was hardly a
model of either modernity or efficiency. Since then, Britain’s beaches and
rivers have been cleaned up, while we live in what is really a golden age of
passenger numbers and investment on the railways. None of this is to say that
new models of citizen participation and control, for instance via election to boards
and the like, cannot be experimented with. Such ideas would be more than
welcome. But it is to say that the banner of ‘nationalization’, so alluring and
so simple, is a very questionable one indeed.
Nationalization would also cost money, unless the UK
government proposes just to steal foreign governments’ and investors’ property
(totally against European Union rules in any case). It’s true that investing in
an asset shouldn’t be seen as current spending, but the transport and
especially the energy sectors’ income and balance sheets are very uncertain.
They certainly do not represent going concerns, free of subsidy already - so
they can't just be discounted as a free hit. They might well be ‘investments’. That
doesn’t mean they’re good investments. And this at a time when, whatever the
arguments about the relative need for budgetary restraint right now, there is no doubt
that some spending reductions, especially in real terms and as a share of
national income, will be required in the years to come. The United Kingdom is
about to dive into an era of structural deficits created by its rapidly-ageing
population and pitiful labour productivity, without much of a natural resources
buffer (such as oil and gas) to soften the blow. Continuing to run deficits as
we are now, without any reduction at all, is just deferring the pain until it
will be much more difficult to cope with, and much more damaging to those young
people who for the moment flock to Mr Corbyn’s red banner. Put simply, the
Exchequer does need more money, and only spending cuts and tax rises can make
that change.
It is here that the Corbyn campaign engages in a rather
nifty sleight of hand, for it contends that a mix of apparently painless tax
rises (such as a reversal of the Government’s planned Corporation Tax cut), a
crackdown on tax avoidance and ‘corporate welfare’, and a plan known as
People’s Quantitative Easing can bridge this gap. Well, we’re sorry, but it
can’t. The Corporation Tax change would raise relatively little cash, quickly
absorbed by Mr Corbyn’s voluminous public spending pledges, from the arts to
nationalization to his proposed ‘National Education Service’ and the abolition
of university student fees. The £120bn that his advisers at first seemed to
herald from reducing tax evasion and avoidance quickly shrank to £20bn, a
figure
strongly, consistently and convincingly called into question both by the
most eminent independent experts (some of them on the Left themselves) and Her
Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’ actual figures. Yes,
there is more than £30bn in the big gap between what the Revenue should
theoretically bring in, and what it actually does. But that doesn't mean that you can actually get at it. It's been squeezed by tax-starved Chancellors for years. You can get some more out of that pot, if you squeeze hard enough. £120bn? Laughable. £20bn? No. Maybe a few billions more - not enough to fill the Corbynite spending hole. The ‘corporate welfare’ we hear
so much about is also often made up of tax breaks for investment or exports, neither of which
we suppose that the corporatist Mr Corbyn would really wish to see cut. And so
on. Labour activists like to say ‘if only big companies would pay their taxes, everything
would be all right’.
They wouldn’t. It’s a fantasy.
As for People’s Quantitative Easing, this basically
involves the Bank of England printing more money (as it has to support economic
growth via the banks since 2008) via loans to the Government for infrastructure
projects. The concept is rooted in
Modern Monetary Theory, a set of ideas that
posits that this is unlikely to be an
overall
increase in debt because lending money in this way might dry up some of the
demand for increased lending in the private sector (ballooning, almost out of
control, as Mr Osborne always intended it would to take up the slack of
government retrenchment). Well, we’re not convinced, and neither should you be.
The whole thing reeks of an academic bookkeeping exercise rather than a really
coherent plan. For one thing, QE was initially a plan for a downturn, during
which it would support demand; to push it further in a strongly upward growth
phase, which we might be in for during this Parliament,
makes no sense at all.
Next, the idea
threatens the independence of the Bank of England – something that
we shouldn’t really have an absolute fetish about, but
should preserve if we can as
one capstone of a still-fragile banking system struggling for credibility. If the Government can just order the Bank (or a new State Investment Bank, inevitably just its proxy) to do as it pleases
for specific reasons and on particular
projects, what’s the point of a central bank at all?
Far better just to borrow the money in the normal manner, especially while interest rates are so
low.
Mr Corbyn knows this himself, in his heart of hearts. He
admitted that PQE was just ‘one option’ during one of Labour’s
seemingly-endless leadership hustings. And he said that he’d just consider
raising the money via increased borrowing, which – given his spending pledges – is a bit more of a realistic plan that abandons much of what is new about
‘Corbynomics’ in the first place. All while apparently increasing funding for
council areas bearing the increased strain of immigration that his policies
will undoubtedly involve, and boosting the state pension –
further assisting the very group who have done the best, financially, out of the past thirty years.
There’s nothing
necessarily wrong with any of those initiatives, taken in and of
themselves, but the impression that he is just turning on the money hoses cannot
be avoided – at one and the same time as he ignores most of the really new
ideas, around micro-finance, localism and productivity, that should actually
get us excited. If he cancels the Trident nuclear missile system, that might
save the UK £10bn over the next Parliament: nothing like the funding he’d need
to meet all these raw spending pledges. Voters will and should draw the correct
conclusion: that Labour believes, even more than it did in 2010 and 2015, in a
magical money tree. They will act accordingly. They will vote for parties that
speak to them in a language that they understand.
Foreign policy
Now let’s conclude our three-pronged analysis by looking
at the next vital area of any party's or candidate’s work: foreign policy. Here’s
where the arguments around Mr Corbyn have actually burned fiercest, unusually
in the increasingly-insular UK, a fact that’s most often due to his
multifarious contacts with extremist groups. Now it’s important to take some of
the energy out of these debates. Some of the more heated attacks
on Mr Corbyn have been misguided or overblown. He has been called
an anti-semite, or at
least a fellow-traveller. This seems overdone. He might or might not have given
money to an anti-semitic organization, but perhaps before its true nature was
clear. He spoke up for conspiracy theorist Stephen Sizer, notorious for
‘encouraging debate’ about the view that Israel was behind 9/11, but
not over his absurd conspiracy theories. He has indeed described Hezbollah as his ‘friends’, though
that seems in its context to have been rather more in the way of a diplomatic
formality than an expression of warm and close relations. He has raised the
case of two terrorists who plotted to bomb the Israeli embassy back in the
1990s – but experts in miscarriages of justice, including the campaigning QC
Michael Mansfield, thought that the law might have gone wrong in that case as
well. Mr Corbyn did indeed invite to Parliament a Lebanese political activist,
Dyab Abou Jahjah, who once argued that ‘every death of an American, British or
Dutch soldier as a victory’. That sounds pretty bad. But
Abou Jahjah has subsequently become a respected political commentator in his adopted home
country of Belgium: his ideas have evolved in a much more secular and
democratic direction that some of the comments attributed to him suggest on the
surface. And so on.
So the most serious allegations against Mr Corbyn are,
individually, not necessarily as bad as they can be made to look. But the
pattern is pretty scary – a continuous association with a grisly fringe of the
disreputable, the dishonest and the downright nasty. A
reluctance to really examine and question their views. And the singular
reasonableness of those cases taken one-by-one doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t
be concerned about his view of the world. For Labour’s new leader has a long
history of sympathizing (and meeting) with anyone who opposes the interests of
what he must see as American and British Imperialism. His worldview might be
described as Chomskian, after the American political campaigner and theorist
Noam Chomsky. It basically involves a deep suspicion of ‘western’ economic,
diplomatic and military power, a deeply appealing view across much of the Left
in the wake of the disastrous Second Gulf War. But that view of the deleterious
effect of the American Imperium, its power to smash local equilibria and
oppress peoples who stand against its clients (particularly Israel) can be a
snare and a delusion if you push it too far. It can get you into some very,
very questionable positions when you start to talk to America’s enemies. Hence
the talks with Hezbollah and Hamas; hence the sympathetic hearing granted to
Islamic extremists. Hence, also, Mr Corbyn’s
deep-seated distrust of the European Union, to Labour's new leader a capitalist club and free trade bloc against the
policies of which he has voted many, many times in the House of Commons, and
out of which he would probably like to lead Britain – if he was allowed.
Mr Corbyn’s camp excuse all this as ‘dialogue’, ‘a search
for peace’ and a series of ‘engagements’ with perhaps some distasteful
contacts. But this won’t quite wash. Mr Corbyn’s thought is deeply penetrated
with a nasty old dose of obeisance before power, always one of the Far Left’s
most unattractive attributes. In his search for counterweights to the
Americans, Mr Corbyn has signed an Early Day Motion
on behalf of Slobodan Milosovic; played down Serb forces’ behavior in Kosovo;
recommended Russia Today, that mouthpiece of Vladimir Putin; mused aloud that Russia only moved in
on the Ukraine because NATO forced them to it; drawn parallels between the
crimes of 9/11 and the killing of Osama bin Laden (
read the actual text if
you’ve heard that this is a slur); and reflected that 9/11 might not have
happened at all if it were not for western military intervention in the Middle
East. Well – how shall we put this? – that’s quite a list. We’ve gone over the
electoral implications of Corbynism, and we don’t want to go back over his
likely deep unpopularity: but these philosophical and theoretical dispositions,
quite apart from all the unpleasant meetings that Mr Corbyn seems to put
himself through, are inimical to leading a major Western European political
party.
For consider the other ideas that Labour’s new leader
wants you to agree with. He’s against renewing Britain’s Trident nuclear
weapons system, and
he wants to ‘recast’ British forces’ role within NATO
(having previously been in favour of leaving altogether). Now the former
position is a perfectly respectable one, and one with which we here at Public
Policy and the Past have some sympathy. Trident is expensive; a bit of a white
elephant in a world where most threats will come from non-state actors unlikely
to be deterred by the thought of nuclear deterrence; and a distraction from
making sure that the UK has the carrier and rapid reaction forces that it needs
to win and secure the peace. One can always think about the way every country
commits its forces: France left NATO’s military structures in the 1960s for its
own reasons, and the heavens did not fall. So – once again – we can’t just say
‘Corbynism is mad’, an impoverished and not-very-reflective position into which
his rivals have fatally, to and to their own ultimate harm, fallen.
But speaking out of both sides of the mouth about Russia,
saying that you can’t imagine any circumstances in which you’d use British
troops at all, and comparing Islamic State to the Americans’ occupation of
Iraq? That just disqualifies any of these policies getting a hearing at all:
for they amount to saying that you might as well not have influence, you might as
well not bother paying for any force projection of any kind, you might as well
not fight for anything – even for the Kurdish, Syrian and Yazidi peoples that (just
for instance) might desperately need our help. Okay, western military
intervention isn’t always the answer. But sometimes it might be. It was in
Kosovo. It was in Sierra Leone – both campaigns of which Labour should be
rightly proud. Right now, Mr Corbyn is moving in and trashing the last elements
of Tony Blair’s legacy that Labour’s previous leader, Ed Miliband, left intact.
And who can ever be expected to respect or support a party, or a governing
philosophy, that will not even speak up for some of its most conspicuous
successes?
Northern Ireland provides another good case study of Mr
Corbyn’s various searches for ‘peace’ – not entirely a foreign policy question, of course, but certainly one with a lot of foreign policy aspects. And a
live matter of deep concern as the Stormont Assembly in Belfast struggles to
survive under the burden of increasing suspicion and political division. Here
the record is against very revealing. Mr Corbyn met with Sinn Fein
representatives just weeks after the 1984 Brighton Bombing had seen the IRA try
to murder the British Cabinet. He stood for a minute’s silence honouring the
IRA’s ‘active service brigades’ while the latter were still committed to
murdering social democrats and liberals within the UK’s borders – and beyond.
He still believes in Irish unity without broad consent,
just as he always did, refuses to
condemn the IRA's actions, and apparently in the
rise of an ‘Irish identity’ that we can only identify as Catholic, Nationalist
and Republican – not the ‘Irishness’ to which many of the people of Northern
Ireland, and increasingly many in the South, would aspire.
Just as in the case of Israel’s enemies, one is entitled
to ask: on whose authority did Mr Corbyn do all this chatting? In whose name?
Who appointed him? To whom did he report? Exactly what was being ‘negotiated’?
Precisely what was being said that forwarded the cause of peace? And did Mr
Corbyn also meet with Northern Ireland’s Loyalists, or right-wing Israeli
settlers? Well, no. He poses as a visionary who reached out to supposedly
irreconcilable enemies before it was fashionable to do so: but, and this is
crucial, he did so before there was the slightest indication that his contacts
were willing to compromise or even temper their hard-line hatred of many
(Northern Ireland’s Social Democratic and Labour Party, for instance) with whom
he should have been standing and fighting – for peace. Most of this just has
the flavor of a free-floating backbencher’s intellectual curiosity and hatred
for settled orthodoxy, which is fair enough. But the signal it sends, not just
to those who seek peace but who actively wish the UK and its allies ill, is
unmistakable: UK Labour is making sure that it is crystal clear that there is a
deep weakness, and a willingness to talk on almost any grounds, at the heart of
the British state. In a very unstable world, that is a very dangerous place to stand.
The standout conclusion is this: it’s not the meetings
that are the problem. It’s the ideas. If you think that NATO should stand up to
Putin over Swedish NATO membership, the Baltic states’ independence, Ukraine’s
national integrity, or oil and gas security, Labour’s leadership election just
dealt your liberal and democratic views a huge blow. If you believe in the
European Union’s historical mission to spread peace and security across the
European continent, Britain is now more likely to turn its back on you. If you
think that the search for peace in Northern Ireland involves the creation of a
new sort of mixed and flexible ‘Irish’ identity, you can’t look to Labour any
more for any assistance. If you think that liberal internationalism will
sometimes, necessarily, involve military action, you just lost a whole
movement. It’s a doleful picture, and a potentially epochal betrayal of
Labour’s historic mission so stand up – in any way it can – for national
self-determination and European security.
Seven degrees of wrongness
So the data, the evidence and the weight of history tell
us this: Mr Corbyn’s electoral strategy is, quite simply, in error; his
economic policy is factually incorrect; his foreign policy is the most worrying
element of the whole picture, at best very naïve and at worst vaguely sinister.
How to thread it all together? How can we even get a purchase on this level of
misguidedness? Well, there are in fact at least seven analytical categories
which we can and should use to summarise the overall failings of Corbynism. The
first of these is just how disingenuous it all is. Mr Corbyn is the man of
principle who was against NATO before he said we should stay in; who has
campaigned against the European Union, but now says that a Special Conference
could be held to ‘advise’ him about it; who said he would keep Shadow Cabinet
elections
until he said he wouldn’t; and who thought he might stand for yearly
re-election until it looked as if he would win. It’s not much of a record of
principle. All from a populist non-politician, anti-metropolitan insurgent who,
well, went to a public school and who has been the MP for a North London seat
for 32 years.
Shorter descriptions will have to do for our other six
headings, but you’re probably beginning to get the picture. Corbynism is,
secondly,
deeply nostalgic: for nationalization, to be sure, but also for a
world of street-organised machine politics that defined
British Leftism in the 1970s and 1980s. The current uprising in Labour’s ranks is a variant of crowdsourced
clicktivism: but the bursting-at-the-seams church hall meetings and the
overspilling masses outside addressed by loudhailer are deeply evocative of an
older Britain that will soon come into conflict with the newer (
and very sophisticated) techniques at the disposal of the Conservatives.
Thirdly, the
new leadership is deeply naïve. Meeting with extremists, without making clear
exactly where you stand, or that you’re going to lay down some red lines at some
point, is the very acme of such a failing; but Mr Corbyn’s announcement that he
wanted to ‘consult’ on all-women train coaches is another example. Rule one of
announcing consultations: that means that you own them, and you’re probably 90
per cent in favour of the policy you’re consulting about. Not to realise that
means you went to sleep in… well, 1979 actually.
Fourthly, Corbynism involves
thinking in binary terms alone. That’s what’s behind the blank anti-Americanism, as if the USA is behind
all the world’s problems; but it is also shown off by the Corbynites’ refusal,
under any circumstances, to talk about attracting citizens who voted
Conservative in 2015. ‘Horrible Tories, horrible Tories’, goes the mantra; the
far Left’s opponents are constantly labelled ‘Red Tories’. Never mind that
Labour can never, ever return to power if it does not attract such people;
never mind that they are usually unassuming workaday citizens who the Labour Party should be
standing up for and helping. No. They’re Tories, and that’s it. Quiet
patriotism? Charity? Self-help? Volunteering? The little battalions that Mr
Cameron summoned up, at his best, as the long-forgotten ‘Big Society’? Suburban
voters’ fear of economic profligacy and waste? They’re all just fantasies,
Labour’s new masters say – the product of false consciousness and media lies.
Well, they’re welcome to come out on the doorsteps and discuss that theory with
actual voters. They’d soon find that their
fifth failing, the simplicity of
their concepts, is one of their reasons that their views are so at variance
with grassroots reality. Every social problem can be solved by just spending
more money, they often seem to say; every industrial problem by common
ownership; every social problem by ‘consultation’. Here’s another example:
Tony Blair might be put on trial for ‘war crimes’. What crimes, under which law, and
in which court, we are never told – and nor do Corbynites ever face the
inevitable consequence, the criminalization of every single British officer and
soldier who was involved in the Second Iraq War. Well, complicated, messy,
difficult public life and step-by-step policymaking isn’t actually like that:
it demands complex tradeoffs, shades of grey, pushing two steps forward only to
go one backwards, identifying precisely what you’re going to do and how you’re
going to do it. Anyone who always tells you that they have the solution to
every problem – and that it’s usually the same sort of controls and spending
that they’d apply to every other difficulty – is someone who it’s best to
ignore.
Six and seven are easier.
Sixth on our list is this: Mr Corbyn thinks in mechanical
ways, similar to
the Lego theory that we often criticized when wheeled out by
Mr Miliband, his immediate predecessor. Mr Miliband thought that he only had to
attract ‘left-leaning’ Liberal Democrats to win a General Election – a similar
thesis, though far less ambitious, to the idea that gluing together SNP, Green
and non-voters will carry Mr Corbyn to victory at the next election (stop
laughing at the back there). But he thinks in terms of Left and Right on
everything, from international relations to class and through to his deeply
inadequate approach to a Scottish nationalism he cannot help but see as deeply
contradictory (because he cannot understand the
national element). The result? The major ways in which people
really think – viscerally, in terms of attachment, viscerality, credibility,
likeability and loyalty – are almost entirely ignored.
Seventh, and last, the
Corbynista's preconceptions are just so evidentially at variance with the scene outside Britain’s
large radical conurbations. They make but little sense outside of the meeting
room, the agenda, the motion and the long-winded speech. We’ve seen this, again, in
terms of their psephology: but consider, too, their view of the overall crisis
of late or post-capitalism that we are experiencing. They think that the
European Left is riding the wave of a chaotic, but dynamic, revolt against
capitalism itself – while Podemos, their mirror image in Spain,
falls away in the polls, while the Right and far Right in France get stronger all the time,
and while the radical Leftists of Syriza
begin to split and fall out after performing an absolutely vast austerity U-turn in Greece. Well, let’s just put it like this: just as their
domestic analysis seems wildly astray, it seems unlikely that they are right
when they look abroad for inspiration.
Conclusions: false hope is worse than despair
It is an awesome cluster of misconceptions, a tsunami of
inaccuracy and misguided enthusiasm, a wrongness that you could probably see
from space. And it seems likely to land Mr Corbyn, in person a decent and moral
man, in an absolutely agonizing position. He will have to lead Parliamentary
colleagues many of whom have never even met him, and among whom many frankly
loathe him; he will have to face a triumphant and braying Conservative Party,
delighted at his elevation to Labour’s leadership. No wonder he looked so
crushed when he first faced Mr Cameron across the floor of the House of Commons
as leadership frontrunner; no wonder he slipped quietly out of the subsequent
meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party; no wonder his
appointment of the Shadow Cabinet turned into
a farce and a joke. He must feel, in his heart of
hearts, the deeply sickening, sinking feeling of someone who is now going to
have to bear burdens they are deeply unsuited to; of a man who is about to be
vilified and humiliated beyond limits most of us can be imagine; and who is
going to be
transformed into a figure of hate and derision by both the
Conservative media
and his own colleagues. Let’s face it: once the
Conservatives are done with him, he will resemble an empty plastic bag floating
in an abandoned canal. It is a
deeply tragic and perhaps even darkly comic turn of events, for
Mr Corbyn most of all.
But we are going to have to watch it all. Mr Corbyn is
going to be left without any refuge. He is, in the jargon, going to have every
last scrap of bark stripped from him. Last week’s Panorama is only the beginning. Think you’ve seen political hatchet
jobs? Oh, get ready. You haven’t seen anything yet. It was hard to watch the
miners and the printworkers go into battle in the mid-1980s, to almost
inevitable defeat, fulfilling just that role that the Conservatives had long
planned and set for them. To watch the people you stood with and agreed with
fall into just about every trap the far Right and the far Left could tempt them
into. You know what? This is going to be a replay. This is going to be nearly
as bad.
Because it’s a great thing, the evocation and the experience of hope. We’ve
seen and commented on hope in all sorts of places.
The rebuilding of NewZealand’s Christchurch after its disastrous earthquake; the election (
and re-election) of Barack
Obama, the United States’ first African-American President; Northern Ireland’s
troubled, but ongoing, peace process; Britons’ very human reaction, in recent
days, to the plight of Syrian refugees. All full of hope. All inspiring. And
Mr Corbyn’s young supporters feel similar hope – embodied in a new, participatory,
straight-talking politics of equality and respect. Building hope is always a
good thing. But there is a difference between inspiration and the peddling of
false hope. Because what will happen when Mr Corbyn is either ousted by his
Parliamentary colleagues, or – even worse for Labour – is actually allowed to collide
with the electorate, like a piece of space debris burning up as it smashes into
the atmosphere? The eye-popping but fake sugar rush of this microwaved Tony
Benn’s elevation having passed, the subsequent crash will be terrible. There
will be the blankest, darkest, most painful despair you can imagine, followed
by blame – of Blairites, the media, the public themselves – who were not clever
or far-sighted enough to accede to the Corbyn relevation.
Then the Corbynites will move on to join the Greens, or
drop altogether out of organized politics, cursing the Labour Part as they
leave. Free to indulge the fantasy that the world can be lived in and engaged
with as if it is exactly as they imagine it, rather than as it is – a world
that never has been, never will be, and never can be. In which you never have
to fight to defend yourself, or your allies, or the powerless. You never have
to choose between spending your money on one thing or another. You never have
to appeal to voters you don’t agree with – or talk tough with terrorists and
their fellow-travelers. And the Labour Party? After that trauma and exodus,
that once-great movement will have been stripped of much of the little
credibility and loyalty it can still command. The only – the only – vehicle for
forwarding and fighting for working people’s lives that we still have will have
been crippled.
And then what? Then what? The answer, you know in your
hearts, is this: decades of unbroken Conservative dominance. And a Britain that
becomes less fair, less equal, less open, less liberal, less European – and less respected – with every passing day.
