Corbyn
Corbyn
The Strange Rebirth
of Radical Politics
Second Edition
Richard Seymour
This updated edition published by Verso 2017
First published by Verso 2016
© Richard Seymour 2016, 2017
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-299-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-532-1 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-533-8 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress Has Cataloged the First Edition as Follows:
Names: Seymour, Richard, 1977– author.
Title: Corbyn : the crisis of British politics / Richard Seymour.
Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016019162| ISBN 9781784785314 (paperback) | ISBN
9781784785321 (ebook : U.K.) | ISBN 9781784785338 (ebook : U.S.)
Subjects: LCSH: Corbyn, Jeremy. | Labour Party (Great Britain) – Biography. |
Politicians – Great Britain – Biography. | Legislators – Great
Britain – Biography. | Great Britain. Parliament. House of
Commons – Biography. | Labour Party (Great Britain) – History. |
Radicalism – Great Britain – History. | Democracy – Great Britain – History. |
Great Britain – Politics and government – 1997–2007. | Great
Britain – Politics and government – 2007– | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE /
Political Process / General. | HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain.
Classification: LCC JN1129.L32 S443 2016 | DDC 328.41092 [B] – dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019162
Typeset in Fournier by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays Ltd
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface to the Second Edition: The Absolute Boy
Introduction: Against All Odds
1.How ‘Project Fear’ Failed
2.The Crisis of British Politics
3.Labour Isn’t Working: Whatever Happened to Social Democracy?
4.New Labour and Corbyn’s Route to Power
5.Two Years Before the Mast: Corbyn’s Subaltern Leadership
6.Prospects: Can Corbyn Win?
Notes
Acknowledgements
This book was proposed, researched and written in a flush of enthusiasm after Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour Party – a most unexpected occasion for a book. It couldn’t have been completed to my satisfaction without the input, encouragement and several friends, colleagues and many Labour members.
Marsha-Jane Thompson, Ben Sellers, Liam Young, Margaret Corvid, Phil Burton-Cartledge and Simon Hewitt were among those who gave up their free time and thoughts, often on numerous occasions, and I gained a lot from their experience and knowledge. I also am very grateful to Matt Zarb-Cousins for his insight and help. Tom Mills spent a long time giving me extremely thoughtful and incisive background on the BBC. Robin Archer at the London School of Economics gave me the benefit of his considerable expertise and thoughtful analyses. Jeremy Gilbert of Compass was also, as always, incredibly insightful.
In addition, there were many individuals, Labour activists, and others who, though too modest to be named, were happy to help fill in the blanks, and explained Labour politics in a way that the mainstream press generally can’t. They did this despite knowing they may not agree with my analysis. Huge thanks to them.
My editor, Rosie Warren, has been amazingly efficient, tolerant and helpful throughout, and I’m immensely appreciative of everything she has done.
Finally, thanks to my agent, Susie Nicklin, for her advice, support, insight and hard work in helping this book to come about.
Preface to the Second Edition:
The Absolute Boy
Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.
– Alasdair Gray
I
Rupert Murdoch, face heavy with thunder, got up and walked out of the election night party. Theresa May was reduced to tears. A Tory staff member was physically sick. Jeremy Corbyn, as his jubilant supporters crowned him the “Absolute Boy,” quietly celebrated with a halloumi kebab and apple juice.
The Conservatives had won the most votes and the most seats of any party in the election. And yet for them, and especially for their leader, Theresa May, the result was comprehensively a disaster: the blues had bombed. It was not just that they’d failed to win the parliamentary supermajority which polls early in the campaign had said they were likely to get. It was not just that for once most polls had severely underestimated Labour’s support. It was not just that Theresa May lost a parliamentary majority which she had called the election to fortify. The outcome was far more significant than that.
The exit poll had shown Labour gaining 40 per cent of the vote, and forcing a hung parliament. But worse than that, all over the country, it was making gains of the sort that it would only normally make if it was winning the election. Bellwether constituencies like Enfield Southgate, Warwick and Leamington, Reading East, Ipswich and Peterborough, went Labour. Mountainous SNP majorities fell. Supposed London marginals such as Ealing Central, Tooting, and Hampstead and Kilburn became safe seats. Canterbury, having been Conservative since the Great War, was won by Labour. Kensington, including the richest residents in the country, was swallowed in a vengeful blood-red wave across London as its forgotten working-class constituents took revenge on an atrocious Tory MP. The Labour candidate, an anti-gentrification activist, would later demonstrate why she was elected with her angry, passionate response to the horrific Grenfell fire, which consumed dozens of working-class residents. Portsmouth, a Tory–Liberal marginal, went Labour, as the party showed surprising strength across the South and South West. Labour had its biggest surge in vote share since 1945, with Corbyn racking up just short of 13 million votes, after coming from twenty points behind.
This was not supposed to happen. Jeremy Corbyn was the traduced laughing-stock leader of a broken and divided opposition, scolded by the liberal press, hounded by the right-wing press, condescended to by the broadcasters. Brexit had transformed the political terrain, and great swathes of the country were about to turn Tory. In traditional Labour heartlands, from the West Midlands to Wales to the rustbelts of the North, early polling suggested that the rush of former UKIP voters back into the Tory fold was likely to turn a number of Labour seats into Tory strongholds. Scotland was forever lost to Labour after a disastrous independence referendum campaign, in which the party, led by figures from the Blairite Right such as Jim Murphy, failed to distinguish itself from the Conservatives. Labour was twenty points behind in national opinion polls, seemingly adrift since Brexit, its leader scoring high negatives. May herself was glorified at the beginning of the campaign by Tory pundits such as A. N. Wilson and Matthew D’Ancona who claimed that her great secret was her matriarchal ‘sex appeal’. Tory activists called her ‘mummy’. The Daily Mail, a traditionalist Tory newspaper, salivated that May would ‘Crush the Saboteurs’.
And yet as the campaign went on, May’s weakness was exposed. Her wariness of debates, and unscripted interactions with the public, far from conferring on her the queen-like inaccessibility that she apparently sought, began to erode her au
ra of autocratic power. Her rare public appearances varied between competently boring and cringe-inducing. In fairness, most politicians would struggle with, for example, a question about the naughtiest thing they did as a child. May’s answer, that she used to run through fields of wheat, upsetting local farmers, might in other circumstances have come across as a charming evocation of bucolic childhood innocence. But having made the election into a ranking of personalities, inviting the electorate to choose between a ‘tough’ Theresa May leadership and a ‘weak’ Jeremy Corbyn leadership, May had set herself up for critical scrutiny of her personality, her presentation, and her competence. And she failed her own test.
The Conservative Party’s slowness in launching a manifesto was all the more damning when the actual document was produced. It included deeply unpopular attacks on core Tory supporters, above all pensioners. These included the promise to make social care users pay for it with the value of their homes. The Tories would also scrap the ‘triple lock’ guaranteeing increases in the value of pensions at either the rate of inflation, average earnings, or a minimum of 2.5 per cent (whichever was higher). And they would means-test winter fuel payments for the elderly. On top of that, the party proudly announced policies designed only to preach to the converted and annoy everyone else, such as the pledge to legalise fox hunting.
Meanwhile, Labour’s campaign was far better than anyone had expected, and Corbyn in particular proved a star turn in debates and public appearances. Labour’s manifesto – above all its core commitments to renationalising rail, mail, energy, and water; expanded public investment; abolishing tuition fees; building council houses; raising the minimum wage; and rolling out a new menu of workers’ rights – was extremely popular. It was a promise of modernisation, a social upgrade, which addressed the needs of the working class in an age of austerity and stagnant capitalism. Corbyn’s appearance at a Libertines concert and his interview with Grime star JME might for any other politician have come over as a patronising, baffled effort at panhandling for votes. For Corbyn, it was politics as usual: campaigning to mobilise the alienated and excluded was what he had built his leadership on. He took his audience seriously, as a political agency with aspirations, and so they took him seriously. One extraordinary result of this was that his name became a meme, a slogan, a sort of joyous battle cry chanted by the young at music concerts and football stadiums and outside pubs – to the tune of ‘Seven Nation Army’ by the White Stripes.
What Diane Abbott referred to in her election-night speech, celebrating a stupendous majority of 35,000, as ‘the politics of personal destruction’ – a politics designed to demoralise – had been dealt a lethal blow. The smear machine run by Tory PR men like Lynton Crosby, and their faithful tabloid amanuenses, had broken down. Weeks and weeks of acres and acres of febrile nonsense about Corbyn, his supposed ‘links’ to the IRA taking pre-eminence in an election campaign punctuated by two shocking terrorist attacks, had failed. Not that it had failed to convince Tory voters, and a layer of rightward-moving Labour voters, that Corbyn was a menace to Britain. There was at least anecdotal evidence of older, white Labour voters defecting. Rather, it failed to sap the extraordinary energy, confidence, and aggression from Labour’s campaign, or the buoyant pugnacity of its supporters. If anything, the attacks added to the sense that the political establishment was ganging up on an honest, principled outsider. The editors and press barons, the pundits and establishment politicians, still have their power. But increasingly they look like yesterday’s men.
The result was a sharp increase in turnout in certain demographics, especially among the young and poor, who went heavily for Labour. The party won among the working-age population, only losing badly among retirees who went heavily for the Conservatives. Labour’s increased turnout of its support more or less drowned the expected ‘UKIP effect’, which in part would have been a result of a long-term decline in the Labour turnout in core seats. A fifth of UKIP voters – made an offer addressing their immediate interests rather than pandering on immigration – defected to Labour. The party even held onto West Midlands marginals like Birmingham Edgbaston, and expected northern converts like Bury North, with dramatically increased majorities. Adding dozens of seats in an election in which it had been expected to lose dozens, Labour had what journalist Stephen Bush termed a ‘glorious defeat’. Enough Tory seats were turned into potential swing constituencies, with tiny majorities – including Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s constituency – that it would in principle only require a small further swing to Labour for Corbyn to be prime minister.
On election night, former chancellor George Osborne, whom May had sacked from the government, quipped that running through fields of wheat was no longer the worst thing she’d ever done. For now she had exposed the Tories to a brutal separation of wheat and chaff.
II
Good evening. I know nothing. We, the media, the pundits, the experts, know nothing. We simply didn’t spot it.
Jon Snow, Channel 4 News, 9 June 2017
Here was a credibility crunch of gigantic proportions. Media corporations, think tanks, academics, and pundits had been acting like the ratings agencies, conferring credibility on politicians for years, determining who was electable and who wasn’t. Corbyn, by common consent, simply wasn’t electable. He was a good man, pundits might patronisingly concede, an honest man: but a disaster. He was toxic stock. Though hardly the first Labour leader to suffer from toxic stock syndrome, he was considered the worst by near-unanimous consent among commentators. And yet in recent years, media-conferred credibility had been losing its prestige. They had endorsed as blue-chippers those who turned out to be toxic stock, and vice versa. It was not simply that they hadn’t seen Corbyn coming, either in the leadership election or the general election. They hadn’t foreseen Brexit or Trump’s victory either.
One could be charitable to the media, the pundits, and the experts, and argue that very few did ‘spot it’. And why should they? Any knowledge economy is governed by scarcity; there are never enough facts around. The shortfall always has to be made up with a combination of theory, guesswork, ideology, and experience. Psephologists, communications specialists, and political strategists have to make working assumptions about how electoral systems operate, and their assumptions – however ideological, however much they are doctrine mistaken for fact – are usually grounded in some degree of experience. To spot the Corbyn surge, arguably, required breaking with truisms which had held for years.
But had they? When there is a shock to the system, when the old ways of knowing break down, it is only reasonable to ask whether the old assumptions ever really explained what they seemed to. What holds in the physical sciences must surely hold here. The experiments from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century using microscopes, which disproved Newtonian mechanics, wouldn’t have been much use if people had excused the old laws of motion by saying, ‘Well, no one could have predicted black body radiation.’ It required years of painful rethinking and a fundamentally new view of the universe, replacing deterministic laws with probabilistic laws of motion, to account for the new data. Likewise, recent crises call for a paradigm shift, a fundamental rethinking of how politics works.
This should really have been initiated after the credit crunch. Not only did economists fail to predict the cataclysmic event, the worst crisis for capitalism since the 1930s; also, their theories denied it could happen. Elaborate mathematical models, based on the assumption of efficient, self-regulating markets, were developed to guide academic theory and policy. They ignored obvious, common sense facts, such as that house prices could not indefinitely rise above the value of incomes without producing a crash. Instead of recognising the full severity of this outstanding failure of orthodoxy, economists tended to blame either exogenous shocks or herd irrationality for the crisis. This was convenient for financial corporations who wanted to avoid any political backlash from the crash, and the same orthodoxy was invoked to justify austerity policies transferring
the costs of the crisis to public service users, welfare recipients, and employees.
The credibility crunch, while long in the works, in part owes itself to the effects of austerity. In the first edition of Corbyn, I argued that Corbyn’s leadership was made possible by a deep crisis in politics and representation. The secession of large parts of the electorate from the political system was evident in plummeting party membership and identification, and voter turnout. On the other side, politicians increasingly withdrew into the state, becoming less and less interested in the electorate except as a diminishing pool of participants to manipulate with good messaging. These were long-term processes, but the polarising effects of economic crisis and its austerian remedy accelerated them and produced a degree of hitherto unseen political instability.
Within the Labour Party, this produced an electoral crisis, the loss of Scotland – long a bastion of the Labour Right – and compounded an ideological crisis for the conservative old guard. It was in this context that Corbyn, addressing this profound political alienation, built his leadership campaign on an anti-austerity, anti-establishment prospectus. He was able, as a 200–1 rank outsider, to mobilise a radicalised minority in British society, a coalition that included politically polyamorous young people, trade unionists, and left-wing supporters of ‘Old Labour’. With his opponents struggling to offer coherent answers to the party’s crisis, and to the problems of austerity, he defied the pundits and experts and swept to the leadership with a landslide.
The question was always whether he could repeat the same feat within the country, and if so how long it would take to achieve this. His critics, who insisted he could not win the Labour leadership, now insisted that he could not change the country: only a moderate leadership could win an election and have any chance of stopping the Tories. Now that Corbyn has, by depriving the Conservatives of their majority and setting Labour up for a future win, proved the critics wrong, what needs to be rethought?
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