Corbyn

by Richard Seymour

  This was linked to two developments, one in the scale of repression, and one in the tenor of popular culture. First, to enforce the new disciplinary order, police numbers, as well as the rate of imprisonment in the UK, both soared under New Labour. Thatcher increased police numbers from just shy of 110,000 to approximately 125,000. Under Major, police numbers remained relatively flat. Under New Labour, police numbers increased from 125,051 in March 1997 to 141,631 in March 2010.31 The prison population almost doubled from 44,386 in June 1993 to 86,048 in June 2012.32 One notable result of all this was a surge in prison overcrowding and a dramatic increase in prison riots and hostage-taking in jails.33 Second, under New Labour the consensus on welfare and redistribution shifted sharply to the right.34 The demonisation of the poor, the rise of stereotypes about council estate dwellers, single mothers, ‘feral’ teens and ‘chavs’ was the logical terminus to which New Labour’s ideological thrust moved Britain – and on such terrain, neither the Tories nor UKIP have had much difficulty making gains.

  Logically enough, Blair’s particular emphasis on the institution of the family also segued into a racial authoritarianism, as in his final days in office he decided to leave his mark by identifying ‘black culture’ as the cause of a series of knife and gun murders in the capital: ‘we won’t stop this by pretending it isn’t young black kids doing it’. In particular, New Labour was concerned that the breakdown of black family life had given rise to a generation of children without appropriate parental discipline. Here, the government once again pushed the boundaries of debate to the right, helped along by some in the race relations industry, such as the New Labour-friendly Commission for Racial Equality, who backed Blair’s speech.35 There had developed, since the 1980s, a consensus on multiculturalism and anti-racism which for all its flaws had constrained previous Conservative administrations. In an effort to render race a politically manageable problem, the discourse of multiculturalism sought to create a well-defined representational space for each ‘culture’, wherein selected representatives of each supposedly discrete entity would be given access to funding and influence in exchange for their role in securing political quiescence.

  Though New Labour had no intention of rowing back from the practice, the cultural consensus it produced posed certain problems for a government seeking to outflank the Tories on the issue of immigration, and subsequently to discipline British Asians following the 2001 northern riots. Jack Straw, as Home Secretary, cheerfully vilified Roma gypsies as troublemakers who ‘think that it’s perfectly OK for them to cause mayhem in an area, to go burgling, thieving, breaking into vehicles, causing all kinds of other trouble including defecating in the doorways of firms and so on’.36 Notably, the invocation of misplaced excrement as a symptom of multicultural disorder had previously found its way into Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.

  Later, in setting up a network of detention centres for asylum seekers and replacing cash benefits with stigmatising vouchers, Straw went further than the previous Home Secretary Michael Howard had dared. Those detention centres have notoriously become routine sites of human rights abuses. David Blunkett demanded that British Asians should speak English in their own homes, proposed a ‘Britishness test’ for immigrants, and signalled that ‘multiculturalism’ was over. New Labour-friendly intellectuals, such as David Goodhart and Trevor Phillips, gave this ideological shift a neo-Powellite gloss, drawing on the culturalist racism of the New Right. Phillips declared multiculturalism over, demanding of minorities ‘integration’ to shared values which were always just on the brink of being discovered. Goodhart argued that the existence of wide varieties of people culturally too dissimilar undermined the basis for the welfare state, since few would willingly pay into the pot to help people who were different: ‘most of us prefer our own kind’.37 In place of many cultures, there was to be ‘Britishness’ and a demand that all ‘cultures’ assimilate to this core of national being. In place of challenging racism and the disadvantages it brought to minorities, there was to be victim-blaming, and unfounded claims that British Asians were ‘self-segregating’.38 As all of this took place, unsurprisingly, so did a renewed surge in racist violence and harassment. Between 1996 and 1997 and 2003 and 2004, racial incidents more than quadrupled in England and Wales from 13,151 in 1996–97 to 52,694.39

  Disillusionment and Demoralisation

  As Labour approached the 2001 general election, Blair was in a characteristically strident mood. Everywhere, opinion polls told him that his major policy of public sector reform, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), was deeply unpopular. Analyses suggested that such policies were costly boondoggles giving favoured private enterprises access to grotesque amounts of public money for new hospitals and schools or renovations that were far more cheaply done in the public sector. Worse, they resulted in poorer services, as PFI hospitals tended to have fewer staff and fewer beds. In every conceivable respect, the policy was a disaster.40 Labour was no longer just running against itself and its own social-democratic instincts. It was also running against the British public, to the extent that they shared those instincts. Blair decided that PFIs were not just another policy, but were the flagship policy for this election, and dared the electorate to oppose him. Of course, given that PFI was originally a Conservative policy, there was little to choose between the big two parties on this issue. Only in one constituency, the marginal Kidderminster seat of Wyre Forest, was a candidate for the makeshift party Health Concern able to capitalise on opposition to PFI and take the seat from Labour. But elsewhere, much of the electorate simply abstained. Turnout plunged to below 60 per cent for the first time since 1918. The biggest drop was in the Labour vote, which fell by just short of 3 million, while the Tory vote dropped by just over a million.

  The disillusionment even spread into the quarters of the old Labour Right. Former deputy-leader Roy Hattersley, who can be credited with laying some of the groundwork for New Labour, declared that under Blair the party had not only moved further and ever faster to the right, but had embraced ‘an alien ideology’. By replacing the discourse of equality with that of ‘meritocracy’, it had in effect signed up to ‘shifting patterns of inequality’.41 Urging party members to ‘rise up against the coup d’état’ against social democracy, he committed himself to an unavailing fight against the Blairites – apparently oblivious of the fact that the battle against the Left, in which he had energetically participated, had also helped decimate the ranks of almost all currents to the left of New Labour within the party. If he now found that old Rightists like him were marginalised, how much more so were the soft Left who had once formed common cause with him? In initiating the reforms of the party structure which centralised more power in the hands of party managers in order to sideline constituency activists, they empowered the clique whose ascension they had done so much to bring about. And in driving out or demoralising some of the most confident and capable militants in the interests of electability, and by forcing through the party’s adaptation to Thatcherism, they had compounded the traumas which made the grass roots so susceptible to the Blairite takeover. Unsurprisingly then, none of the grumblings of discontent amounted to a serious challenge to the leadership.

  It is quite possible that developments in the trade unions might have led to a rupture in other circumstances. On 11 September 2001, Blair was due to give a speech to delegates at the TUC conference, at which it was expected that he would be given a rough ride over his unseemly determination to force through private sector involvement in public services. There had been, alongside a growing discontent among trade unionists, the beginnings of an ideological radicalisation among a layer of young people, manifest in the anti-capitalist movements. Public opinion, after a series of disasters in the rail network, was overwhelmingly calling for renationalisation.42 New Labour had failed to secure victory for its London mayoral candidate against the left-of-centre challenger, Ken Livingstone, who was pledged to oppose the Public Private Partnership (PPP) on the Undergroun
d.43 Small chinks in the armour of neoliberal rule were beginning to open up. Whatever may have happened, however, the attacks on the World Trade Center suddenly shifted the conversation to other matters, and secured a quiet welcome for Blair.44 While the government remained determined to press ahead with policies that would leave transport, health and education services paying off huge dividends to corporations for decades into the future, the emphasis shifted to the prime minister’s allegiance with President Bush, and the wars that were to come.

  Public opposition to the first such war, in Afghanistan, was seemingly muted – but already, unexpectedly large public protests signalled what was to come.45 By the late summer of 2002, as Blair prepared to lead his party to war in Iraq, up to 400,000 people had demonstrated in London.46 Significantly for New Labour, the build-up to war divided the traditionally pro-Labour press, as the Mirror came out against the prime minister while the Observer remained fiercely loyalist47 – even to the point of suppressing explosive stories developed by its leading journalists, such as the news that the CIA considered Bush’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ line to be a pack of lies, or that the United States had been spying on the UN Security Council. By early February 2003, Blair was faced with the largest popular opposition he had yet faced, with overwhelming opposition to the looming Iraq War signalled by the presence of approximately a million anti-war demonstrators in London.48 This anti-war movement was remarkable for the fact that, despite the prominence of seasoned Labour left-wingers such as Tony Benn, George Galloway and, of course, Jeremy Corbyn, its massed ranks drew as much from the affluent and professional suburbanites as from the metropolitan Left. Blair drew upon his immense reserves of contumely for public error to issue a counterblast as imperious as it was self-serving. It was, he remarked, wonderful that people could protest in a democracy, much as they could not in Iraq. But in addition to rooting out weapons of mass destruction which Saddam had allegedly concealed in a series of wily desert escapades, the war would bring liberation to an oppressed people. He did not ‘seek unpopularity as a badge of honour. But sometimes it is the price of leadership. And the cost of conviction’.49 As is often the case when political leaders scorn popular will, he evinced a matchless heroism about his purpose, as if true courage was to defend a cause with no more powerful allies than the Ministry of Defence, the major press and broadcasters, the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House.

  The presidentialism of Blair’s leadership style was exacerbated by his foreign policy belligerence. The role of the prime minister in prosecuting wars is inevitably far greater than in the execution of domestic policy, and Blair did not hesitate to take advantage of this. He was inordinately fond of being seen on the international stage, with world leaders, or among military men, with white shirt-sleeves rolled up, as if he was about to throttle an enemy combatant himself. This Blair, who had proved even more belligerent than a centrist US president in waging Operation Desert Fox in Iraq, and the Kosovo War, who aligned with a hard-Right US president in the invasion of Iraq, and whose astonishing zeal in battling Labour’s own supporters now took the form of facing down a mass social movement which went from the inner city estates to the heart of cherished ‘Middle England’, was the Blair whom much of the commentariat fell in love with.

  If there had been any expectation that the dominance of New Labour would suddenly prove depthless, that the grass roots would rebel, or even that there would be a left-wing split on the model of Continental equivalents – where the senior defections led to the formation of new radical-Left parties – it was disappointed. While Labour Party activists partook fully in the peak of anti-war activity in 2002 and 2003, and Labour banners were even occasionally visible on protests, the party as a whole remained strikingly cohesive. Despite resignations of senior ministers such as Robin Cook, and despite deep unhappiness on the backbenches about the case for war, only one Labour MP would find himself on the outside of the party after the war began. This was George Galloway, who did not choose to leave but was driven out over comments urging Iraqis to fight the invaders and calling on troops to defy orders. Galloway’s exit enabled a short-lived alliance of the far Left and Muslim groups to form on an anti-war, left-wing platform, and the political party they formed, Respect, was able to embarrass Labour with a stunning swing in a core East End constituency, while taking sizeable numbers of votes in Birmingham and Leicester. Yet such a ramshackle, federal alliance, overly dominated by certain well-placed egos, was never likely to seriously challenge Labour’s heartland dominion on a broader basis, even as its working-class vote eroded.

  Meanwhile, the Labour Party conference in 2003 was remarkable for one thing – the absence of Iraq from the discussion, and the torrents of standing ovations for one right-wing speech after another. John Reid was cheered to the rafters for a speech promising to model the NHS on private health provision. David Blunkett roused conference with a speech attacking the Liberal Democrats from the populist Right on crime: ‘they know just where they stand. Four square behind the human rights of the perpetrator’.50 And to cap it all, Tony Blair won seven minutes of applause for a classical strident performance culminating in the line, ‘I’ve not got a reverse gear’. All of this was manna for the constituency activists, who didn’t have to be hectored into such extraordinary displays of loyalty. Their fervour was reflected in their votes. As Nick Cohen wrote in the Observer: ‘Activists from constituency Labour parties usually backed Blair by a majority of three-to-one. The majority never fell below two-to-one, however contentious the issue. From now on when the whips confront a rebellious Labour backbencher, they will be able to tell him he isn’t standing up for his local party workers but flying in the face of their express wishes.’51

  One of the main reasons the war did not enter the formal debate that year was because the unions played their traditional role in protecting the party leadership on its most exposed flank, using their block votes to prevent a motion on the war from being debated. This is not to say that the unions were happy with the government. The union leaderships acted to spare the government’s blushes, because they saw it as ‘their’ government. However, New Labour ministers seemed to take glee in attacking them and inciting their outrage. Health Minister John Reid was particularly combative in his speech supporting ‘foundation hospitals’, a matter on which he knew the unions would vote against him. It didn’t matter, since conference had long since lost any serious policymaking authority, and Reid could declare that even if he lost the vote to the unions, he had ‘won the argument’. But, while handing the government empty defeats on public sector reform, any motion on war was kept off the agenda, so that Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon could deliver a pro-war sermon to polite applause.52

  Discontent with New Labour among union leaders therefore bubbled away, with occasional empty threats to withdraw funding or seek out a new political partner, leading to short-lived confrontations which usually fizzled out before a major breach. One such confrontation came to a head in the year after the Iraq War began, over Blair’s determination to persist with Private Finance Initiatives and market-based public sector ‘reform’. But any chance of this becoming an organised breach between the union leadership and the party leadership was neutralised by the decision of the National Policy Forum in Warwick to offer the unions a series of incentives to remain in the fold. The offer was modest, comprising some employment rights such as restrictions on firing striking workers, and a promised review on the gender pay gap.53 But this was the classic quid pro quo for the unions – squeezing for reforms in exchange for loyalty within the overarching policy framework.

  With this agreement under its belt, the anti-war movement still powerful but receding, and the Tories still stuck with an unpopular Thatcher-era relic as their leader, New Labour could go into the next general election with a war treasury supplied by the unions. Despite the localised threats posed by Respect and various anti-war campaigns, the major beneficiaries of Labour’s losses, with almost a further million votes gone,
were the Liberal Democrats, whose personable and highly regarded leader had taken a wanly anti-war stance for as long as it was convenient.

  Brown Fudge

  Notwithstanding Blairite obduracy, greatly inflamed in the aftermath of the attacks on London on 7 July 2005 – upon which, Blair gravely informed us, the rules of the game had changed – the beginning of the end of New Labour was becoming gradually visible. There was, for a start, an increasingly broad constituency of left-wingers, liberals, middle-of-the-road Conservatives, and those of a libertarian persuasion, for whom New Labour’s statist authoritarianism seemed to be out of control. The extremely broad uses to which anti-terrorist legislation was put, preempting the way in which different groups of protesters under Conservative rule were stigmatised as ‘terrorist’ and ‘extremists’,54 was the softer end of a continuum of authoritarian policies that extended through CCTV on Muslim council estates to extraordinary rendition.55 Twinned with this was a rising arc of Islamophobic provocation from the government and friendly intellectuals. Jack Straw’s gratuitously public refusal to speak to Muslim constituents in Blackburn who wore the full veil merely punctuated an increasingly febrile climate that led Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland to opine: ‘If this onslaught was about Jews, I would be looking for my passport.’56 In addition, Blair’s growing emotional and political affiliation with the hard Right could be seen not just in his friendships with Bush, Aznar, Berlusconi and Sarkozy, but also in his decision to give wholesale, uncritical support for Israel in its 2006 invasion of Lebanon – a war that was opposed by the majority of Britons. Labour’s poll ratings fell to the low thirties for the first time since 1992, while the Conservatives under Cameron had seemingly rebuilt their base to gain the support of about 36 per cent of the voting public.