Corbyn

by Richard Seymour

  Blair, who had thus far survived the unprecedented opposition to his decision to invade Iraq, was spared embarrassment at conference over the matter, and suffered no serious parliamentary moves against him through the ensuing years of chaos. Robin Cook, the only anti-war MP with sufficient clout to have a chance of competing for the leadership, died in the summer of 2005. So it was that when conditions finally ripened for Blair’s departure, the avowed causes of his ousting were as depoliticised as could be. In 2006, a letter sent by some of the 2001 intake of Labour MPs to Blair suggested that he had been ‘an exceptional Labour Prime Minister’, but that without a change in the leadership it was ‘less likely that we will win the next election’. Tom Watson’s resignation letter affirmed the same idea: ‘Your leadership has been visionary and remarkable. The party and nation owes you an incalculable debt.’ But for the sake of Labour being ‘re-elected at the next general election’, it was time for him to stand down.57

  Not a single policy or decision of the old regime was criticised by the coup plotters – which was just as well since the man behind the coup, Gordon Brown, was as up to his neck in it as Blair. The turf war between the Blair and Brown factions of New Labour, notwithstanding the vain attempts by pundits and politicians to find an issue of principle between them, seems to have been chiefly about who should lead the project. Brown’s oscillation between Hamlet-like procrastination and furious private rages directed at New Labour’s co-founder, was a drama without the slightest wider resonance: Brown simply thought that he should inherit the project without debate and without any challenger. And, having worked out a compromise with Blair on the timing of his exit, he was duly inaugurated without any election process, as Labour MPs prevented possible rivals, such as John McDonnell, from even getting on the ballot. Brown’s leadership was welcomed with a deep sigh of relief by some ministers, but the relief barely lasted a year. The disillusionment of New Labour apparatchiks with Brown was once more not over any matter of political substance, but had to do with a combination of personal loyalties, ambitions and Brown’s apparent strategic blunders. In particular, having failed to call a snap election in 2007, he had seen Labour’s poll ratings decline and walked into a major global economic crisis for which Labour had to take responsibility and over which it had limited time to manage. Straw, who had rallied for Brown, later declared that he would have been a better prime minister.58

  The looming problems with the global economy had not been totally invisible. As early as September 2007, Northern Rock – one of the UK’s subprime mortgage lenders – began to appeal to the Bank of England for liquidity support. The sectoral imbalances in the British economy, the weakness of its manufacturing base, pitiful levels of research & development, the ongoing slump in productivity only made up for by long working hours and an expanded workforce, and the housing bubble, had all been apparent for some considerable time before then.59 All of this, above all the centrality of debt and speculation to the British economic model, made the UK particularly susceptible to the credit crunch when it struck. While the Conservatives are opportunistic in claiming that the economic mess was one made by Labour, their mendacity should not be allowed to obscure the extent to which New Labour created a British haven for banks and speculators.60 As the crisis struck, Brown’s position was suddenly elevated and dignified, whereas it had been increasingly frustrated and diminished beforehand. Having developed his relationships with Washington and Wall Street power-brokers since those hesternal days of the early 1990s, and taken a leading role in negotiating Britain’s integration into the Washington Consensus, he was well-placed to take part in the globally orchestrated interventions to prevent a banking collapse and sustain economic demand – a role for which he gained considerable political credit with the electorate. The net effect of these interventions was to heighten the power of the banks: in effect, it was not so much that failing banks were nationalised, as that the Treasury was semi-privatised and put at the disposal of the City.61 They were to be followed by years of bracing austerity to cover the costs of bailing out the banks, while the underlying financial infrastructure was left more or less intact.62 Brown at least signalled a mild shift from the New Labour era by raising the top rate of tax for the first time, and declaring the era of fully free markets over. But the phrase ‘too little, too late’ was rarely more apt: Labour crashed in the 2010 general election, with 29 per cent of the vote, the lowest share it had received since 1918.

  As the New Labour project teetered on the brink of collapse, there was one group of people on whom it had made a great impression: the Tory modernisers. Times columnist and later Tory minister Michael Gove was one such, who expostulated, ‘I can’t hold it back any more – I love Tony.’ The Cameron wing of the Conservative party into which Gove was inducted became enraptured by Blair, with George Osborne declaring him ‘the master’.63 This Tory faction, having taken the leadership of their party from a recalcitrantly right-wing base, had begun to slowly assimilate Blair’s presentational and political lessons. In particular, Cameron had begun to triangulate New Labour on key issues, and even to outflank them to the left on some issues and some local campaigns – for example over Post Office closures or immigration. Initially, he refused to contest Labour on public spending totals, and instead focused on priorities.64 The volte-face following the banking bailout was a mark of skilled political opportunism but, even as the Tories attacked Labour spending and began to lay the narrative demand for austerity, they were preparing to implement cuts with a ‘progressive’ facade.

  Conclusion: The Miliband Interregnum

  For the Blairites who had been plotting to get rid of Brown as soon as he took the leadership, the 2010 Labour leadership election campaign ought to have been their moment of delicious revenge. With a youthful and, by their standards, charismatic candidate in David Miliband, they were confident of victory. But instead, the leadership was taken by the younger, more neurotic Ed Miliband, who gained the support of trade unionists by cautiously letting it be known that he was slightly to the left of his brother, and would be more receptive to the concerns of trade unionists if he won. ‘Red Ed’ was always a tabloid conceit, but Miliband was at least someone who recognised the need to decisively close the New Labour era, recover lost working-class votes, and ever-so-slightly push at the boundaries of acceptable neoliberal discourse. What is more, he seemed to begin to attract new members, cautiously optimistic about the possibility of pushing Labour moderately to the left.

  Why, then, was the period of Ed Miliband’s leadership one of general fug and confusion for Labour? In part, the answer is organisational. While Miliband’s major allies were on the soft-Left of the party, he was beset on all sides by powerfully positioned Blairites who were outraged that their candidate had been pipped to the post. Miliband was desperate to keep this faction onboard due in part to their entrenched power and their potential to wreak havoc for him. Another part of the answer is societal. The immediate response of British society to the credit crunch and ensuing recession was to freeze, as though caught in the headlights. It was not until late 2010 that the first glimmer of any kind of organised revolt against austerity began to make itself visible in the form of the students’ rebellion. And that movement, while culturally very significant and probably laying some groundwork for a general turn to the left among the young, was as short-lived as subsequent public sector pensions campaigns, and the UK’s miserably diminished version of the Occupy movement. As such, there was no continuous or generalised shift to the left, and in fact much of the movement after 2011 was to the racist and authoritarian Right. But the most important answer was political. It was an integral part of Ed Miliband’s strategy for reviving and rebranding Labour that it should seek a new synthesis of left and right, rather than be seen to move to the left. This was arguably another reason that Miliband needed the Blairites, to counter pressure from trade unionists and constituency activists to move further left than he wished to go.

  The ‘Blue Labour�
� shenanigans of the Miliband era can be interpreted in part as an attempt to anchor the response to Labour’s problems to the right, with a series of appeals based on ‘faith, flag and family’. In essence, while the Blairites wanted to woo middle-class Tory voters, Blue Labour wanted to flatter working-class voters drifting to the nationalist Right. To achieve this, they argued, Labour had to fashion a patriotism that would attract such voters,65 one that reversed the Left’s supposed softness on crime, its indifference to the ‘culture of entitlement’ on welfare, and its failure to understand anger about immigration. As Blue Labour doyen Maurice Glasman put it, he wanted Labour to be somewhere that members of the far Right rabble, the English Defence League, might feel at home.66 This was quite at odds with the view of Blairite insider Dan Hodges, who described how the party leadership had attempted to ‘ape the language of the BNP’ only to succeed in ‘boosting the BNP’67 by driving their obsessions up the political agenda. It also gave Cameron, who was not averse to using a ‘muscular’ rhetoric on immigration when it suited him, the opportunity to deride Labour’s ‘Alf Garnett’ race politics.68 Miliband nonetheless cleaved hard to this strategy throughout his reign.

  The rightward tilt was not just a question of Labour seeking to co-opt anti-immigrant rhetoric for the centre-Left. Soon, while Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls relinquished his brief flirtation with anti-austerity economics, Miliband was adopting a more rigorously punitive version of welfare policy than his New Labour predecessors had managed, at least at the level of policy. In addition to a welfare cap, Miliband proposed that those who had not worked in the previous five years should have their benefits cut, retirement ages should rise and parents should be forced into work-related training as soon as their child hit the age of three.69 This was all laid out by Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Liam Byrne, someone on the Right of the New Labour project with a flair for pugnacious populism – his election campaign, managed by seasoned right-winger Tom Watson, had pledged to ‘smash teen gangs’ and stop benefits for ‘failed asylum seekers’. And indeed, as pernicious as the policy was the rhetoric, which was culpably aligned with that of the populist Right – just as Labour sought to (gently) bash the bankers and call for ‘responsible capitalism’, so it sought to (harshly) incriminate the poorest as yet another usurping pressure on the ‘squeezed middle’.70

  The British nationalism that Miliband sought to mobilise had another purpose, however. One of the reasons that New Labour had so fanatically pursued its ‘Britishness’ agenda was to ward off the menace of Scottish independence. The devolved institutions that New Labour had itself created, the better to forestall such questions, had become a terrain in which the SNP consistently outmanoeuvred and out-classed their Labour rivals. By 2011, the SNP, having simply demonstrated a better ability than Labour to defend basic social-democratic rights such as free higher education, had swept the elections at Holyrood with a landslide. By the following year, they had gained an agreement with Cameron that there would be a referendum on independence come 2014. Since the Tories had little in the way of a base or party machine to fight the campaign in Scotland, they left it to the Scottish Labour Party, the bastion of the Labour Right, to take the lead. It was, of course, not compulsory for Labour to wage this fight and, having decided to do so, it did not have to form an open alliance with the Tories. In so doing, Labour merely underlined the extent to which there was a policy consensus at Westminster on essential matters from Trident to spending cuts. While the pro-independence campaign highlighted that Scotland need never again have a Conservative Government like the one which at that moment was privatising the NHS, Labour showed that within the Union, there would be a Tory Government whoever was in office. This not only fatally alienated much of its core vote – with the ‘No’ vote being concentrated in working-class heartlands like Glasgow – it also set itself up for perverse attacks from the Conservatives for supposed ‘softness’ on the SNP.

  Miliband had always been so terrified of being thought of as in any sense left-wing. He capped his first year as leader by assuring the Sun that ‘Red Ed Is Dead’,71 while posing with a copy of said paper. Later, when Emily Thornberry posted an apparently disobliging photograph of a St George’s Cross-strewn house in Rochester, Miliband forced her resignation so that no one would think he lacked ‘respect’ for such patriotism.72 Whenever the shade of ‘Red Ed’ seemed on the brink of resurfacing, Miliband took pains to ward it off by clumsily veering to the right. The Conservatives duly took this as a sign of weakness on Miliband’s part and, despite Labour’s self-destructive leadership of the ‘Better Together’ campaign, they embarked on a campaign to preempt any potential Labour–SNP coalition after the election by depicting Miliband as Alex Salmond’s puppet. Miliband took fright, and used every available platform to attack the SNP, particularly on the two policies on which it had strongest support: Trident, and austerity.73 It was both tactically preposterous, since Labour had no idea what sort of quid pro quos it may have to engage in after an election, and unconvincing, since the demonstrative attacks were plainly bluster under fire.

  Labour went into the 2015 general election faced with the defeat it had been preparing for through the last five years. The hallmarks of its campaign were the farcical ‘pink bus’ campaign seeking to mobilise female voters – because, apparently, women won’t communicate in any other colour – and the ‘Edstone’ listing Labour’s pledges, a fittingly terminal punctuation for a campaign that was dead on arrival. The share of the vote received by both Labour and the Conservatives barely altered: only the distribution of seats changed, as a freshly detoxified Conservative Party took advantage of the Liberal collapse to mop up their seats. This was not, pace the Blairites, because Miliband was too much the left-wing firebrand, or because, as Blair predictably claimed, New Labour had been ditched.74 The Beckett review into the party’s electoral failure noted that the left-wing policies were in fact among the popular things about Miliband’s Labour.75 What hamstrung Miliband was that he was invested in the worst legacies of New Labour. These included not just the ill-fated attempt to triangulate the hard Right on race and immigration, the pandering to anti-welfare resentment and the defensive British nationalism, but also Miliband’s own control-freakery, his excessively presidential manner of running the party, and his determination to bring US-style campaigning methods into Britain.76 As a party, Labour seemed to have no coherent purpose: were they out to tame capitalism, as Miliband sometimes claimed, or out to tame welfare? Were they for or against austerity? They had many populist policies which were not difficult to sell by themselves, but these often cut against the grain of the overall policy framework. As an opposition, Labour could barely bring itself to oppose – to the extent that Ed Balls openly declared before the general election that he wouldn’t reverse anything from Osborne’s latest budget.77 As tacticians, they couldn’t bring themselves to act intelligently, because their strategy was too invested in a way of doing politics that was bringing about Labour’s destruction. This was not anti-Blairite Leftism. It was a timorous attempt to reformulate Blairism for a post-credit crunch terrain. New Labour was not dead; it was undead.

  5

  Two Years Before the Mast:

  Corbyn’s Subaltern Leadership

  Day One: Project Despair

  If Corbyn won, it would be back to the SDP and 1980s splits. Back to the 1970s. Back to the USSR. Sputnik would triumph again if Corbyn won. Wall to wall, from populist Right to centre-Left, the news was of a coalition of simple-minded, palaeolithic tribalists, Militant thugs, over-emotional hysterics and sun-stroked hippies converging to take over the Labour Party.

  Labour MPs were determined not to let it happen. If Harriet Harman didn’t stop the plot by cancelling the election, the coup would strike on ‘day one’ of any Corbyn leadership. He had been warned. Simon Danczuk told LBC radio that Labour MPs would not put up with any ‘crazy, left-wing policies’. The coup would come ‘as soon as the result comes out’, ‘if not before’. Talks among La
bour MPs, other reports suggested, were taking place as to how soon a no-confidence vote and a leadership challenge could be mustered.1 Others were more equivocal about the precise timing, with a Labour MP anonymously briefing the Telegraph, ‘We will have to decide whether he should be removed immediately, or whether it would be better to give him a year or two of being a disaster and get rid of him by 2018.’2 A great deal depended on the size of Corbyn’s margin of victory; a smaller mandate would permit an earlier challenge. Once Corbyn’s victory was secured with an overwhelming mandate, placing him 40 per cent ahead of his nearest rival, the arch-Blairite apparatchik Peter Mandelson cautioned against anything too importunate. ‘It would be wrong to try to force this issue from within,’ he said, ‘before the public have moved to a clear verdict.’3 This caution prevailed, to an extent, but it didn’t prevent restless backbenchers from sabotaging, or members of the shadow cabinet from briefing against, Corbyn. After all, it was important that the public move to the correct verdict, one way or another.