Corbyn

by Richard Seymour

  When the Right and centre can no longer seriously claim to offer ‘opportunity’ to underemployed and precarious workers, Labour offered workers’ rights, a cradle-to-grave free education service, and investment to create jobs. When ‘aspiration’ is no longer plausibly championed by the Tories; when home ownership is increasingly out of the question even for professionals like teachers, nurses, and junior doctors; when landlords drive up rents for ever dingier properties with impunity and oligarchs drive gentrification, Labour offered to build council homes, control rents, bring back housing benefits for the young, and impose new minimum habitation standards. In this, Labour was addressing the problems of twenty-first-century Britain, something that was already clear in Corbyn’s 2015 leadership bid, but was largely ignored by his oblocutors.

  In the 1980s, modernising meant moving to the right, accepting ‘free markets’, marginalising the left-wing ‘dinosaurs’ (such as Corbyn), and imposing an obsessive, managerial, focus-grouped control in messaging in order to win support across classes. Today, modernisation is a left-wing goal, the Blairites are the dinosaurs, and obsessive message control has been abandoned, with the result of rebuilding Labour’s support faster than anyone expected. The boisterous celebrations among Corbyn’s social media prize-fighters are entirely justified. They woke up on 9 June in a country they didn’t know existed: that, arguably, wouldn’t have existed had it not been for Labour’s breakthrough campaign. So, to an extent, are the outbursts of angry triumphalism from those who have been belittled, patronised, and vilified for so long. Many an erring pundit has been christened a ‘melt’ and invited to ‘eat your tweet’ or, better still, ‘delete your account’. At some point, however, this has to give way to a more sober appraisal of the dilemmas facing Labour.

  The problem is not just that Labour must now find a way to turn its advantage into electoral victory, which raises a question about where to find the necessary voters in a first-past-the-post system, and how. Even if a fresh election is called soon and Labour does win, it will be in the position of having to try to implement a radical programme in an economy where there is very little investment. It will have to persuade corporations to invest, in spite of the higher taxes, regulations, and workers’ rights they will face. It will have to convince the City and businesses that paying toward an upgraded infrastructure is better for them than hoarding capital in the form of low-risk securities or in offshore tax havens.

  Most difficult of all, it will now have to manage the giant task of Brexit, an economic and political minefield. The issue of whether to leave the European Union was settled by the referendum, but the issues of single-market membership and free movement were not. And while pundits may have overestimated just how much people care about Europe per se, the issue of migration cuts to the heart of a cultural and generational divide in Britain today. Not only that, but if the EU isn’t forthcoming with a viable deal, if it decides to punish the UK for Brexit, then Labour would need to immediately win support for an emergency economic programme, far more radical than anything that is currently being contemplated.

  Moreover, the divisions within the Labour Party are far from over. The Labour Right is divided, defanged, and demoralised, but there are fresh lines of attack opening up already. Nor is its power completely gone. Most Labour MPs are still well to the right of the leadership and the membership, as indeed are most trade union leaders. Their influence is demonstrated in Labour’s manifesto commitments on NATO, Trident, and policing, as well as, arguably, Labour’s ambiguous position on migration. Nor are the strategic and organisational problems for the Left resolved. Labour has had a rocky two years under Corbyn, in no small part thanks to open sabotage, and the Left has had to think on its feet. If the overall effect of this turbulence has been to weaken and discredit the Labour Right even further, it has also exposed weaknesses on the Left. Momentum, the left-wing Labour activist group, has experienced crises. More broadly, there is evidence that most of Corbyn’s membership base, while it will rally to defend the leadership, abstains from local party activism. This raises the question whether they’re abstaining because there are other forms of activism they would prefer to be engaged in, because they just haven’t been approached properly, or because they’re waiting for the leader to act on their behalf.

  Above all, this raises a fundamental strategic question. What is the ultimate goal? In the traditional Labourist view, the goal is a Labour government, plain and simple. It is to elect ‘our’ government and defend it as it, hopefully, achieves some incremental gains. There was never any reason to reflect too much on the structural limitations imposed on any government’s ability to act as long as Labour wasn’t trying to do anything too radical. But Labour’s leadership is, perhaps for the first time, systematically trying to pull British politics to the left, something it will no doubt also try to do in office. And it will be that much harder if it confronts a situation in which the balance of power in British society still overwhelmingly favours the owners of the country, and in which workers and communities are so poorly organised. Corbyn’s own experience and perspective foreground the necessity of extra-parliamentary, grass-roots organisation: ‘people-powered politics’, as his campaign put it. Corbyn won the leadership in part because the idea that change simply, or adequately, follows from winning elections is no longer persuasive. It is no use being in office without power, as Tony Benn once put it. But Corbyn can’t build movements by decree, even if it was in his style to lead in that way, so finding the right way to organise is a crucial problem for his supporters.

  These are difficult enough problems, but they happen to be the problems of success. And it would be a fool who would bet the farm on failure at this point. Corbyn began, we can hardly forget, as a 200–1 outsider to win the Labour leadership. At the outset of the snap general election, he cheerfully reminded critics of this fact before confounding their expectations yet again. Everything Corbyn, his allies, and his supporters have achieved has been against the odds – against all odds.

  August 2017

  Introduction:

  Against All Odds

  There’s Something about Jeremy

  Early 2016, and Tony Blair is ‘baffled’. What with Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, and Bernie Sanders in the United States, he sighs: ‘I’m not sure I fully understand politics right now.’1

  His confusion is to be expected. He had warned Labour, to no avail: ‘if your heart is with Jeremy, get a transplant’. His former confederate Peter Mandelson joined in, telling that bastion of Labour values the Financial Times that: ‘The Labour Party is in mortal danger.’ And his old ally and sparring partner Gordon Brown exhorted Labour not to become a ‘party of permanent protest’.2 What more could they have done?

  But since Blair left office, the world has been changing, one regime at a time, and he is no longer at ease. Sarkozy has gone, Bush has gone, Aznar has gone, Mubarak has gone, Qadhafi has gone. Soon, his last ally in office will be the Kazakhstani dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev, for whom he provided invaluable service in managing his image after a notorious regime massacre.3

  As abroad, so it is at home. Where once the Blairites seemed unshakeable in their power, their ruthless sodality has finally bitten the dust in Labour’s leadership elections of 2015, when they received 4.5 per cent of the vote. Officially, the burial was executed by an unassuming anti-war socialist named Jeremy Corbyn, who won with a landslide 59.5 per cent of the vote in the first round.

  It would be underselling this to call it the most unlikely political comeback in history. It is true that there was a time when socialists operated openly in the Labour Party, unashamed and relatively vocal. Yet rumours of their former power have always been exaggerated. And this is the first time in Labour’s history that it has a radical socialist for a leader.

  It does the novelty of the situation no justice at all to compare Corbyn to Michael Foot, as some commentators prematurely did. Foot was of the soft Left, and his political roots belonged in a form of radic
alised liberalism. Despite a certain amnesia on this point, moreover, he was far more dependent upon the party’s right-wing than its hard Left – it was the former which ran the ill-fated 1983 election campaign. His long record of peace campaigning didn’t prevent him from supporting Mrs Thatcher in the Falklands, in a way that it is difficult to conceive of Corbyn doing. A closer historical comparison might possibly be made with George Lansbury, a left-wing pacifist with an activist past, who was elected Labour leader in 1931 after Ramsay MacDonald’s defection to join a Conservative-led National Government. That one has to look back this far for comparison is a register of precisely how unprecedented the current position of the Labour Party is, and even here it only goes so far: Lansbury had been a popular local mayor and a cabinet member by the time he was elected, whereas Corbyn has held no executive office. That this rebounded to his advantage in this campaign tells something of how unpopular the governing strata has become.

  Jeremy Corbyn is one of the last standing Bennites in the Labour Party. Those whose memory of Tony Benn is chiefly of a gentle elder radical in the anti-war movement and incomparable diarist, rather than as a threat to the British establishment hounded by spooks and monstered on the front pages, may not immediately grasp the significance of this. For Benn had been an upper-class rebel, a noble by birth who rejected his title, and a former cabinet minister who had seen inside the vaults of power and concluded that it called for something rather more wide-reaching than mere tinkering. He could, by all accounts, have led Labour himself had he not veered so hard to the left having experienced office. But the experience of ‘office without power’, as he described it, radicalised him.4 Labour’s problem, he argued, had been that it attempted to manage capitalism rather than do anything to undermine the serious inequities of wealth and power that existed at the time. As a result, it was presiding over a system that was losing legitimacy, generating major discontent, and as a result was in danger of being reversed by the Right.

  To remedy this perceived failure, Benn had called for Labour to implement a round of sweeping reforms, akin in its depth and ambition to the achievements of the 1945 Labour Government. This meant redistributing wealth, reforming unelected state apparatuses, and nationalising key industries in order to place them under workers’ control. One of his major criticisms of the post-war settlement had been that nationalised industries were still not democratic, but run on the same top-down basis as private industry – often by the same people. Within the framework of democratic socialism, he argued, it should be possible for parliament to pass laws giving workers the right to manage and to elect their managers.5 The very idea that Labour should ever aspire to such drastic reforms was precisely what New Labour existed to destroy.

  Corbyn, from a more humble background in rural Shropshire, where he worked on local farms, has never been considered a likely Labour leader. As he put it,

  The difference between Tony and me was that whereas he was one of those very unusual politicians who was actually very successful in a conventional career pattern, I have been monumentally unsuccessful in the conventional career pattern.6

  Yet in another way, his political background was more favourable to a course as a socialist agitator than Benn’s. The son of middle-class political activists who met while campaigning for the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, he grew up in a family steeped in radical ideas. And the evidence is that he genuinely obsessed about politics and little else. As a grammar school student, he foreswore study the better to spend time with his politics. As a Voluntary Service Overseas worker in Jamaica, he was radicalised by the ‘imperialist attitudes, social division, and economic exploitation’ he found there. As a trade union organiser, first in the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers, and then in the National Union of Public Employees, he tirelessly attended meetings, protests and picket lines. He seems to have found no time at all either for money or drink or for the hedonistic pleasures of counterculture, preferring instead to practise the teetotal strain of socialism for which Benn was famous. On the plus side, this meant that he was, as his former partner Jane Chapman recalled, ‘very principled, very honest … a genuinely nice guy’.7

  These characteristics are consistently evident throughout Corbyn’s career as constituency MP for Islington North, which he has represented since 1983. Even his most sceptical biographer, the Telegraph journalist Rosa Prince, acknowledges that he ‘is known as a “good constituency MP”, meaning he takes great pains over helping those who need him, and he is universally considered to do an exemplary job’.8 As a member of the Socialist Campaign Group, representing the Bennite wing of Labour, he has consistently opposed the government whichever party was in office. Ever the activist, never an operator, he was more likely to be found working for the Anti-Apartheid Movement or the Palestine Solidarity Campaign than wheeling and dealing for favour and influence. He was found, during the expenses scandal that befell British parliamentarians in 2009, to have claimed the smallest sum of expenses of any MP – £8.95 for a printer cartridge.9

  His activism is not just a moral calling, but also a matter of a conscious political strategy. ‘People are saying the job of the PLP is to go for the middle-class suburban vote,’ he explained during the Kinnock era,

  but the Campaign Group must be on the picket lines and at the workplace level. In inner-city areas where there are no major employers except local government and some public services, there just isn’t trade union experience, and school-leavers know nothing about the trade union or labour movement.10

  For Corbyn, the relative weakening of the Left and the labour movement was not a reason to move to the right, but to patiently rebuild. This is far more fundamental to his perspective for reviving the Labour Party than the necessary compromises and reassurances offered to parliamentary backbenchers. As he explained in one of his campaign speeches, the Conservatives were able to win because people were not mobilised and thus didn’t vote:

  Their parliamentary majority is based on a low turnout, it’s based on the support of 24% of the electorate as a whole … There is a fairly small political party membership in Britain, really. The Labour Party membership is 240,000. I’ve no idea what the Conservative Party membership figure is … Liberal Democrat membership I have no idea; I suspect it’s not very big. And so there isn’t a vast number of people in political parties in Britain, but that’s not to say we’re living in a totally depoliticised society. Look at the 250,000 that came on the anti-austerity march last weekend; look at the vast number of people who were on the Pride march in London yesterday, and the demonstration. People are involved in politics in a different way … I think we need to build a social movement.11

  This is not to claim that Corbyn’s campaign was the social movement, but it used the techniques of movement building in a way that conveyed what Corbyn wanted for the Labour Party. This way of doing politics, greatly underestimated by the media and political classes, was critical to Corbyn’s success. The exhausting sequence of packed public meetings in towns and cities across the country, for example, were a typical part of Corbyn’s calendar. As he explained, ‘I did over a hundred events during the leadership campaign and by the end of the year I will probably have done 400 to 500 public meetings.’12 This political style had been largely forgotten in the era of focus groups, marketised politics and the obsessive shaping of news cycles. Corbyn, far from evincing embarrassment at his militant record, plentiful images of which circulated on social media sites during his campaign, embraced it as a virtue. He was elected as a man of the movements, not of the markets.

  And through such means, he has assembled a surprising breadth of support. The ideas that he champions haven’t had a powerful mainstream voice for years, and the last time anyone remotely this left-wing got close to the Labour leadership was during Tony Benn’s run for deputy leader in 1981, which Corbyn played a leading role in organising. As Phil Burton-Cartledge, a Labour Party member in Stoke, astutely observed, Corbyn seems to have personified s
omething that people of various political hues feel is missing from politics. ‘Whether you’re a Green, self-described Old Labour, a recovering Trotskyist, or some other permutation’, there is ‘something attractive about Jeremy’s politics’.13

  This is what has taken the party establishment and its sympathisers in the media most by surprise. The ideas with which Corbyn won are ones that have largely been ignored, suppressed, or regarded with amused condescension since the Blairites took control. It was not just that Corbyn was prepared to oppose the government’s austerity programmes and support higher public spending, nationalisation and redistribution. This was all bread and butter for the social-democratic Left. And on these issues, there is some evidence that the British electorate is more left-wing than is conventionally assumed.14 Corbyn also defied what is supposed to be the common sense view on immigration, refusing to give an inch to the resentful UKIP-style nationalism that had permeated both of the dominant parties. This suggests that Corbyn is prepared to challenge more than the establishment; he aims to run against popular prejudice, and win. His first gesture as leader, utterly characteristic of him, was to attend a pro-refugees rally in central London, where he received what the Mirror called a ‘hero’s welcome’.15