Corbyn

by Richard Seymour

  What is more, the flag-waving and tub-thumping about Brexit was to be complemented by a relentlessly negative campaign targeting Jeremy Corbyn and his allies as anti-British oddballs with a soft spot for the nation’s enemies. The themes of ‘terror’ and ‘security’ were to dominate, and this made perfect sense. Security had always been a red line in British politics, and voters were arguably feeling more jittery, more insecure, more precarious in their everyday existence, and perhaps more terrified of the future, than for decades. May, with her autocratic pretensions, was positioning herself as the nation’s protector. This was, moreover, the kind of thing that Tory strategist Lynton Crosby specialised in: ‘wedge issues’ to divide the party form its base, and ‘dog-whistling’ to motivate hardcore racist voters without offending others. And, surely, May’s personal failings aside, in any other context, if the machinery was working as usual, an anti-war socialist with Corbyn’s past would have been easy to demonise.

  The Tories had prepared the terrain by relentlessly attacking Corbyn for his Hamas ‘links’, and statements on war and terror, positioning him as a threat to British families. The tabloids had depicted Corbyn as an anti-British oddball unable to display correct decorum at the Cenotaph. The Sun ran a notorious story falsely claiming that Corbyn danced a jig before the country’s Remembrance Sunday ceremony.43 And once the snap election was called, the Tories began to tax Corbyn for IRA ‘links’ dug up by Andrew Gilligan of the Telegraph, and repeatedly raked over by broadcasters like Andrew Neil of the BBC. These promised to be particularly potent given that there had been a jihadist attack weeks before the election was called, which was followed by two further such attacks in the course of the campaign.

  The substance of the allegations looked a little threadbare to anyone who paid close attention. After all, Corbyn had been elected to his seat as a ‘Troops Out’ socialist, with a lot of support from Irish constituents. It was no surprise that he would attend republican events; sit in on Diplock hearings (jury-less courts used by the British in Northern Ireland); meet with Sinn Fein leaders; campaign for political prisoners like the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four; campaign against strip-searching, plastic bullets, and CS gas; and otherwise condemn the British campaign in the six counties. Nor was there anything dishonourable about this. In retrospect, there is even more damning material on the British counterinsurgency available today than there was before, particularly as it relates to the relations between the government and Loyalist death squads. Almost twenty years after the Good Friday agreement, moreover, the idea of talking to Sinn Fein representatives, some of whom have had beaming encounters with the British monarch, looks a lot less controversial.

  However, the headline usually counts for more than the content, and the headline insinuation of the coverage was that there was more to it than just ideological socialist republicanism. Corbyn, it was claimed, was on the side not just of the terrorists, but of the terror. As Andrew Neil put it to him, ‘Isn’t the truth that you’ve basically supported the armed struggle for a united Ireland, but now you want to be prime minister you have to distance yourself from it?’44 This line of prosecution was predictably drawn from the right-wing press, with Neil picking his preferred insinuations from an old piece by Andrew Gilligan for the Telegraph. Gilligan explained, with pearl-clutching hyperventilation, the details of Corbyn’s circulation through the republican scene in the 1980s: he had even attended events run by the Wolfe Tone Society which promoted ‘the policies and publications of Sinn Fein’. The same paper worked up a similar surplus of spittle lather over Corbyn’s ‘three decades of blocking terror legislation’. The paper persisted with an ‘exclusive’ story showing that MI5 had opened a file on Jeremy Corbyn ‘amid concerns over his IRA links’. The piece never explained in simple, precise terms what these ‘links’ were, nor did it address the natural concern that readers would have about intelligence services using their resources to spy on elected politicians. But it did show that MI5 had opened files on many left-wing politicians and ‘infiltrated anti-racist groups’. On the day of the election, the Telegraph ran a front-page story by former MI6 boss Richard Dearlove, harrumphing that ‘Corbyn would not be allowed into security services, so he’s not fit for No 10’.45 Again, the idea that democracy might take precedence over the desiderata of the spooks seemed not to have occurred to him.

  The Sun, publishing its hit piece mere hours after a bombing in Manchester in which a jihadist suicide attacker targeted young people and children leaving an Ariana Grande concert, claimed that Corbyn had ‘Blood On His Hands’. Its front-page headline was based on an ‘exclusive’ piece written by a ‘former IRA man’ who claimed that Corbyn ‘might not have planted a bomb, but he made it easier for those who did’. The Sun didn’t explain that the ‘former IRA man’ in question, Sean O’Callaghan, was by his own account an Irish Special Branch operative who had been working in the IRA as an informant. Nor did it mention his past record on factual accuracy, such as his attempt to depict the murdered Catholic lawyer Pat Finucane as an IRA man, which was discredited by the House of Commons inquiry into the killing. Nonetheless, any scrupulous reader would have looked in vain in the piece for any specific new information: its sole argument was that by being pro-republican, Corbyn ‘boosted the morale’ of the IRA.46 By the same rationale, presumably, those who were pro-Union ‘boosted the morale’ of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster Defence Association, and similar Loyalist death squads. The Sun had form in this, having previously run a thirty-year-old discredited story about Corbyn funding an ‘IRA bomber’.47

  In another moment of the unfolding media spectacle, a broadcaster criticised Corbyn for refusing to single out the IRA for special condemnation, instead insisting on condemning all the killing. This was an extraordinary criticism: his refusal to apply double standards proved that he must be an enemy of the people. By insinuation, if you haven’t shown a consistent bias toward the British state, the Union, and the Loyalist paramilitaries defending it, you’re as good as one of them. That, naturally, segued neatly into the Conservative campaign claiming that Corbyn had, in the words of Security Minister Ben Wallace, ‘spent a lifetime siding with Britain’s enemies’. Or, as Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson put it, that Corbyn had ‘taken the side of just about every adversary this country has had in my lifetime’. The Tories went further in their attack ads, editing pieces of Corbyn’s speeches to make it appear as if he refused to condemn IRA violence at all.48

  The chorus was in synch, the choreography perfectly timed. From the Tory tabloids to Tory ministers to broadcasters who took their lead from both, there was a consensus that this was a crucial issue. And beyond: many Labour MPs had already taken the view that Corbyn’s fitness, or otherwise, to lead hung on his ability to convincingly answer these loaded questions. During the attempted coup against Corbyn, Owen Smith’s supporters in the parliamentary party had urged him to attack Corbyn over the IRA. Labour’s MP for Stoke, Gareth Snell, had previously condemned Corbyn as an ‘IRA-supporting friend of Hamas’.49

  And yet, all of this had already been aired over and over. The leadership team had thought carefully about the kinds of attack they would be exposed to, and concluded that there was no new angle for the media, so the attack dogs have to just go harder on the same lines that they had already used. This meant that Labour, for the most part, had its answers worked out. An example of this was when Sophy Ridge of Sky News confronted Corbyn with one of the nebulous ‘links’ allegations. This time, the claim was that he was general secretary of the editorial board of Labour Briefing at a time when it ran an inflammatory story about the IRA campaign. Corbyn’s withers were unwrung, as he calmly debunked Ridge’s claim, and the source for it. But since none of these attacks had proved effective against Corbyn before, what made journalists, or the Tories, think they would avail now? As a senior advisor put it,

  They just attacked, attacked, attacked. When there was a coup attempt against Corbyn, we thought it was going to go very badly. But
within nine hours, a rally had been organised outside parliament with ten thousand people in attendance. Every attack strengthened Corbyn by motivating people. For every MP who attacked him, fifty people outside supported him. So what they did was strengthen Corbyn. And the Tories thought, ‘we’ll do the same thing; that’s how we’re going to run our campaign’. No one learns. Journalists keep thinking this stuff will work. The Sun is still running with the IRA smears. Why do they think it’s suddenly going to stick?

  It didn’t stick. As election day loomed it was broadly agreed that Corbyn was mopping the floor with Theresa May on the issue of defence and national security. How on earth did that happen? In the first instance, Corbyn weathered the attacks with the same placid good humour that he had displayed during the Labour leadership coup in 2016. Though occasionally hesitant or slightly stumbling in his speech, he proved impossible to bait into losing his temper. More importantly, he took the initiative in combating the narrative of Theresa May, making a well-poised speech critiquing the role of British wars in generating support for apocalyptic jihadist outfits.

  This was subject to the usual barrage of wounded retorts in the British media. The Telegraph claimed it was ‘blaming the victim’, while one of its columnists declared that Corbyn had ‘long hated Britain’. The Spectator seethed that he had ‘always blamed Britain first’. The Sun predicted that Corbyn’s intervention would provoke ‘outrage’. And the Independent, while agreeing with the substance of his speech, pathetically claimed that it was an ‘error of judgment’ to raise it so soon. The leader column was even illustrated with a bizarre political cartoon, depicting the election as a tortoise-and-hare story in which May had recently slipped on the banana peel of her social care plan, while Corbyn was about to scupper his own catching up by slipping on the banana peel of his terrorism speech. But within days, the polling showed that Corbyn had won the argument with the general public, and that he was giving voice to what had long been an unspoken common sense.50

  Corbyn did not exclusively swing against May from the Left on this issue. In the aftermath of yet another jihadist outrage, this time involving multiple stabbings in the London Bridge area, Corbyn made it clear that he supported the police decision to use lethal force in that situation, and ran hard on Labour’s policy of increasing police numbers. The idea that increasing police numbers would make the slightest difference to terrorism seems far-fetched, particularly when there is no conclusive evidence that it even affects the burglary rate. Nonetheless, representing the police cuts since 2010 as another aspect of the Tories’ sadistic austerity project, Corbyn used the issue to trash May on what most had assumed was her home turf, thus controlling the news cycle for a couple of days in which the attacks were foremost in the coverage. May, having been quite efficiently ruthless in taking on the Police Federation and the Association of Chief Police Officers, forcing through both cuts and reforms to the police after years in which uncritical backing for the thin blue line had been bipartisan, was disarmed.

  Manifesto

  Thus was the proverbial spanner thrown into the works of the Lynton Crosby spin machine. The centrepiece of Corbyn’s aggressive campaign, however, was the Labour manifesto. Almost universally panned in the media, it turned out to be wildly popular. Voters ‘overwhelmingly’ backed its key policies, including investment in house building; renationalising the rail, mail, and energy; free education; and raising taxes on the richest 5 per cent.51 This was entirely predictable to those who paid attention to anything other than the very narrow media consensus. Polling and social-attitudes surveys had, for years, shown strong support for policies of just these kinds.52 The difficulty had been getting any major party to offer them. Nonetheless, the public debate continued as if nothing had really changed, and Corbyn was about to be caught short. The response of the media could be divided roughly into the stereotyped right-wing response, which was that Labour’s policies were part of a radical attack on middle-class property rights, and the liberal–realist response, which was that the manifesto was an expensive shopping list of policies, laudable in principle but utterly impracticable.

  In the liberal–realist category was the Guardian, which lamented that while Labour had made certain ideas thinkable, it had done ‘too little to make the thinkable seem realistic and practical’. The Observer took a similar stance, complaining that the manifesto gave ‘no sense of the trade-offs a government would need to make, simply hinting at an unlimited pot of cash’. Andrew Grice of the Independent scoffed that it was a ‘long shopping list’ of policies from ‘a party that knows it has no hope of power’. Nick Robinson of the BBC agreed, describing Corbyn’s manifesto as ‘long on passion’ and ‘short on details. Story of his life.’

  This critique, for all that it spoke of feasibility, was not about the technicalities of costing and implementation. Labour had no doubt drafted some of its manifesto in haste, yet it was costed and the Conservative manifesto wasn’t. And the sums added up. Moreover, the specific costing mechanisms weren’t from Mars – raising taxes on corporations to a level last seen in 2010 surely wasn’t breaking the mould. This was a matter of what the journalist class thought was possible in politics. Expectations had been shaped for so long by the bipartisan consensus that the main task in politics, to which every other goal was subordinate, was to streamline government, cut costs, and reduce debts, as though the state was a small business. From this perspective, even the Theresa May–Nigel Farage fantasy of Britain as a ‘global trader’ – the Del Boy Trotter school of statecraft – looks somehow more realistic than expanding public investment.

  On the other side of the political fence, the reactionary press preferred to accuse Labour of taxing ‘ordinary working families’ (the Daily Star) and ‘middle-class homeowners’ (the Telegraph). This was an extraordinary claim given Labour’s express pledge, not matched by Conservatives, not to raise taxes for the bottom 95 per cent. The basis of it was the Tory interpretation of Labour’s plan to investigate replacing the poll tax with the land value tax. Taking their estimate of the revenue that would be raised by such a tax, they claimed that, averaged out across households, Labour’s idea would treble the amount of tax they were paying. But, of course, the point of the land value tax is that it is progressive – most households would pay less, while the wealthiest property barons would pay a lot more.53 By and large, given the popularity of Labour’s manifesto, the Tories and their press supporters preferred to avoid talking too much about it, and keep the fire aimed at Corbyn’s record in the 1980s.

  By contrast, the Tory manifesto, which turned out to be disastrous, was at first considered a masterful stroke by the press, combining classically Tory policies with some populist feints toward the working class. The Daily Mail and Daily Express saluted it on their front pages. ‘May’s plan for a fairer Britain,’ the Express offered. ‘At last, a PM not afraid to be honest with you,’ exulted the Mail, delighted that May had addressed the ‘needs of ordinary working families’ without making any big promises. For the Sun, it was a ‘no-brainer’, the manifesto showing a ‘grown-up Tory party’ which was willing to take ‘tough choices’ that would even ‘make traditional Tories poorer’, such as the policy of means-testing the winter fuel allowance, while standing up to ‘fatcat corporations’ (which in practice simply meant criticising the pensions rip-off artist Philip Green). The front page, headlined ‘Blue Labour’, lauded ‘May’s “red Tory” manifesto’ with its ‘Bold … bid to win over socialist voters’. Even the Guardian, while criticising May’s proposals, suggested that it betokened a potentially very popular ‘new Toryism’: ‘Like Tony Blair in 1997, Mrs May is where the majority of voters are: to the left on the economy and to the right on social issues.’54

  With the single exception of the tribal Mirror, there was a remarkable unanimity that May had redefined politics for the next generation. To an extent, this was a perfectly understandable calculation in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, and in a political culture used to the logic of triangul
ation. There is always a temptation to think that the surest route to popularity is to come up with a new hybrid of left-wing and right-wing ideologies – ‘Blue Labour’, ‘Red Tories’, ‘One Nation Labour’, and May advisor Nick Timothy’s ‘Erdington Conservatism’ are characteristic failed expressions of this basic strategic conception. And since long-standing polling trends show that most people tend to cleave to the right on social issues, and to the left on economic issues, May’s rhetoric about the ‘working class’ and nationalist, anti-immigration, securitarian rhetoric ought to have worked.

  And yet within days, the Tory manifesto was widely agreed to be a disaster. Attacking traditional Tory voters no longer looked so smart. The policy of means-testing winter fuel payments, and making the elderly pay for social care out of the value of their home, was regarded as spiteful rather than popular. It took very little time for it to become obvious that the social care policy – dubbed the ‘dementia tax’ by Labour – was not aimed at the rich elderly. To qualify, one only had to have, over one’s lifetime, accumulated assets worth over £100,000 in a country where the average house price was £215,847.55 What is more, the Tories bewilderingly insisted on policies that would please only a small number of already committed voters, such as repealing the ban on fox hunting. But perhaps more importantly, May’s class rhetoric was a direct response to the potential appeal of Corbynism. The explicit attack on Corbyn had always been he can’t win. The suppressed fear was he might actually win. And since the Corbyn campaign didn’t accede to the politics of demoralisation, of there being ‘no alternative’, and instead pressed ahead with a radical form of class politics, May’s rhetoric looked like very thin gruel indeed. Accordingly, the polls began shifting, and the Tory campaign went into meltdown.