Corbyn

by Richard Seymour

  What is reasonably clear is that, while activists will always have to prioritise between party-building and movement-building, between electioneering and agitating, they are still wanting a form of organisation that enables them to do this rather than bogging them down in internecine power struggles or sucking them into minutiae. They have, thanks to the unexpected electoral windfall, a unique opportunity to make gains across the Labour Party, and then make choices about how to use that power to make the party more enabling to activists. Whether that means supporting policies like the McDonnell amendment making it easier for Left candidates to stand for party leader, or mandatory reselections for Labour MPs, or changes to the make-up of the NEC so that it is more directly elected, there is a limited period of time in which the party’s left-wing has all the political capital it needs to achieve and institutionalise such transformations.

  All of this becomes even more urgent if, as now seems to be the case, Labour has a chance of forming a government and trying to implement its agenda. Government imposes pressures and limits on all political parties, but most of all on parties trying to achieve radical change. The only counter-pressure, as Corbyn knows very well, is well-mobilised and empowered grass roots.

  Electability: One More Push?

  Even in what is increasingly a post-democracy, elections matter. And in a normal political situation, Jeremy Corbyn shouldn’t be electable. The ‘common sense’ of the media and political class should prevail. Too bad for normality. Too bad for common sense. The credibility crunch has destroyed tons of political capital.

  At first, it seemed that normality, or what the late Mark Fisher called ‘Capitalist Realism’, would prevail. Corbyn was polling poorly, unable to expand Labour’s base beyond the approximately 30 per cent support that it had had since the 2015 election.29 He was confronting a centre-seeking Conservative Party, detoxified by the Liberals, and subtle enough to steal Labour’s ideas while trashing Labour: whether on the ‘living wage’ or claiming to represent workers. He had taken over a party widely blamed for the 2008 financial crisis, a theme repeated ad nauseum by the coalition government in preparing the ground for austerity. As a radical socialist, his personal views were those of a sizeable minority of the public, but even with the compromises he made, it wasn’t clear that he could summon an electoral plurality. As an anti-war Leftist in a country that seemed not to have got over the loss of empire, he was vilified as a threat to ‘national security’, something the Tories and their press outriders immediately got to work on once he was elected. His efforts to rebuild in Scotland by outflanking the SNP from the Left were falling on fallow ground. With Scottish Labour stretching every sinew to prove that it, at least, wasn’t giving in to Corbynism, most voters saw the party as being ‘indistinguishable from the Tories’.30 Corbyn was surrounded on his own benches by those ranging from sceptics to saboteurs.

  In the first edition of this book, however, I invited readers to try a different proposition. Supposing this wasn’t a normal political situation, that Corbyn’s leadership victory wasn’t a fluke, and that the old metrics of success didn’t hold? What happened if we put all of the reasons why Corbyn is not electable a slightly different way? Labour was polling poorly under Corbyn, but no worse than before he was elected. Part of the reason for its current poor polling was the post-election adjustment made by polling companies, who reacted by weighting heavily against younger and poorer voters. Yet part of Corbyn’s brief was to get those voters to turn out en masse. He was confronting a centre-seeking party at a time when the centre was not necessarily as broad as it had been, when living standards continued to decline and parts of the middle class that were dependent on the public sector were declining. As leader, he was far less inculpated by past Labour performance than any of his rivals would have been – above all by the credit crunch, which most voters blamed Labour for, and which was decisive in losing Labour two elections in a row.31 As a socialist, he was elected to win over and lead people who were not socialists – but it is the task of virtually every political leader, left, right and centre, to assemble coalitions. Blair did not win office because most of his voters agreed with his politics, but because he persuaded most of them that he was the best deal they were going to get. It was surely not beyond Corbyn to make a more tempting offer than that.

  Corbyn’s views on war and Trident tended to be closer to the balance of public opinion than his rivals like to pretend, while ‘national security’ panics were no longer as effectual as they might have been in a Cold War world. Scotland would not return to Labour, but Scotland has rarely in electoral history been key to Labour winning office (ironically, it may have been a Tory surge in Scotland which kept May in office in 2017). And if a coalition with the SNP should prove necessary, Corbyn’s stance on Trident and austerity would be an asset. Finally, there were those in Labour waiting to sabotage the leadership, endlessly extolled by the media, but on the most contentious recent issue that Corbyn had faced in the parliamentary party at that point – the vote on bombing Syria – he had carried most of his MPs and even a majority of the shadow cabinet. He had won the very vocal support of Labour big hitters, such as John Prescott and Len McCluskey. The minority who were ceaselessly agitating for a party coup were likely, through their bombast, deluded air of righteous victimhood, and smug sense of entitlement, to powerfully alienate those whom they would need as supporters and allies. (We didn’t know the half of it.) On the other hand, with the overwhelming support of the party grass roots, Corbyn could begin to lead a process of democratic reform in the Labour Party, which would put manners on the party’s fixers.

  All of this was more true than I knew. However, the caveats are worth revisiting too. The Labour Right, though unimaginative and timid even in terms of achieving their own limited objectives, were correct to identify the problem that the existing vote for socialism of the Corbyn variety was not enough to win an election. The metropolitan Left, based in large urban centres and university towns, may be a sufficient source of activists to drive a movement for change. The educated precariat, politicised and with spare time and resources, could take a leading role, insofar as there was a movement for them to lead. And surrounding them were some social groups who never particularly cared for neoliberalism, but were previously silenced because they lacked representation. But beyond that, there were more provincial areas where the concerns of the urban working class were not as visible, where the difficulties with home ownership and renting were not as acute, where a sense of neglect and distance from Westminster wasn’t expressed in progressive attitudes. Among these constituencies, it was even quite possible that having a leadership represent a politically correct metropolitan constituency would be just as alienating as a leadership representing economic liberalism.

  The results of elections held at that point were not sufficient to make a judgement about how well Corbyn could bridge the gap. Polling had not been good. Labour’s poll ratings in the first eight months since the 2015 general election were on average eight points behind those of the Conservatives – the worst performance by Labour after a general election since the Second World War.32 Corbyn had not impeded the reconstruction of Labour’s core vote, but it had been on the mend since the 2010 defeat. The increased vote for Labour in Oldham West under Corbyn was not as big as the improvements Labour experienced in previous by-elections during the Miliband interregnum. Elsewhere, the polls indicate a generally poor Labour vote.33 Meanwhile in London, the heartland of the metropolitan Left, where Corbyn’s support was strongest, he was denied the chance to take the share of credit he was due for Labour’s victory in London, due to Sadiq Khan’s energetic distancing of himself from the leadership. If one followed the pattern and stopped the analysis before the snap election, one would have concluded that Corbyn’s leadership, whether through his fault or that of saboteurs, was failing on electoral terms.

  Nonetheless, there was a generational shift taking place in the UK which, elsewhere, had led to left-wing surges, from
Ecuador to Greece. It was difficult to say when these tendencies would mature (much sooner than I thought), or whether millennial voters would be geographically concentrated in the right places (they seem to be). But what should make Corbyn’s opponents pause was the decay of the representative link discussed in the introduction. Everywhere, there were shocks, sudden surges, and reversals, unpredictable and unpredicted by pundits – who had not discernibly become more humble in their prognoses as a result. The old regime was sufficiently lacking in legitimacy and the political situation in industrial democracies was sufficiently fissile that, should there be further recessions, eurozone calamities, or stock market crashes, there was no surety against another ‘government of the Left’.

  The possibility of a government of the Left has become a probability. The Tories are in a worse crisis than they have been for years, and the Labour leader looks, even to his most determined opponents, such as deputy leader Tom Watson, like a prime-minister-in-waiting. Long-standing critics, including Chuka Umunna and Stephen Kinnock, both of whom had previously urged Corbyn to resign, and styled themselves possible future leaders, let it be known that they were now willing to serve in the shadow cabinet. His opponent in the 2015 leadership election, Yvette Cooper – who had prepared a press conference for the week after the election, only to be forced to cancel it – also volunteered for a job on the front benches. The Telegraph complained, with some justice, that they were ‘crawling back to Corbyn’ after ‘benefiting from Jeremy Corbyn’s popularity’.34

  Even Tony Blair eventually emerged to begrudgingly acknowledge that Corbyn had ‘tapped into something real and powerful’ and pay tribute to his ‘temperament during the campaign’, as well as to ‘the campaign’s mobilisation of younger voters and to the enthusiasm it generated’. Ultimately, of course, Blair was not particularly happy about Labour’s breakthrough on a left-wing programme: ‘it doesn’t alter the judgement about the risks of an unchanged Corbyn programme, if he became Prime Minister and tried to implement it at the same time as Brexit.’ But this was merely Blair being true to his long-held position that even if he felt victory was possible by a Leftist route, he would not take it.35

  But the question now is what it will take for Labour to make the jump from a powerful, energised opposition to a government with a powerful mandate. On this question, figures from the right of the party have begun to promote the idea that, having excited young voters, Corbyn needs to make a determined shift back to the centre in order to pick up another decisive group of voters. And the key issue for them, and the means for a new attack on the leadership, is Brexit. There has been a split between those who want to attack Corbyn for allegedly betraying the hopeful youth vote with ‘hard Brexit’, and those who want to attack him for abandoning the working-class vote with his pandering to middle-class students. However, both tendencies seemed to agree that, as the Mirror claimed, Labour’s young voters were ‘furious over Brexit’. Robert Ford, the political scientist who had claimed that UKIP’s support derived from the ‘white working class’ who were ‘left behind’ by globalisation, agreed that the result demonstrated the ‘revenge of the Remainers’ on the ground that there was a correlation between Labour’s gains and the seats with the highest number of Remain voters. The Telegraph, in typical fashion, mourned the ‘revenge of the liberal metropolitan elite’.

  This argument is simply untenable. Brexit mattered a great deal to Conservative voters, but far less to Labour voters, only 8 per cent of whom said it was their main issue. For as long as it was the dominant issue in the snap election, Labour was far behind. But as the campaign went on, and Labour’s campaign started to dominate, Brexit became far less important. Had Labour attempted to run a defensive, triangulating campaign focused on that issue – trying to appease anti-immigrant voters on the one hand, and anti-Brexit voters on the other – it would have found it hard to convince anyone, or excite voters. Had Labour run the sort of campaign that the likes of Tony Blair and Alan Johnson wanted him to run, the election result would in all likelihood have been similar to that in recent by-elections, or indeed in the West Midlands mayoral contest, with Labour perceived as weak, and turnout for the party desperately low.

  Watson, nonetheless, has argued that Labour, in a future election, must run a ‘slightly different’ campaign to give ‘greater reassurances’ to ‘traditional working-class voters, some of whom left us on issues like policing and security’.36 As someone of the traditional Labour Right, he has form on this kind of campaigning. He ran Liam Byrne’s successful campaign in Birmingham Hodge Hill in 2005, largely by tacking to the populist Right, with appeals to patriotism and a promise to ‘Smash Teen Gangs’, and by attacking the Liberals from the right on immigration. Labour’s slogan, ‘On Your Side’, identified an antagonism, but against whom? Criminals and immigrants. He was also closely involved with Siôn Simon’s disastrous, failed campaign for mayor of the West Midlands, which used the Brexit slogan ‘Take Back Control’ and promised to ‘fly the flag for English patriotism’.

  Phil Wilson has gone so far as to claim that ‘working people’ ‘favoured the Tories’ in the election. He went on to add that Labour had become a ‘middle-class pastime’, wasting money on ‘subsidising middle-class kids’ (abolishing tuition fees), and winning big largely in university towns and cities.37 Presumably, what he meant by this was that constituencies which had the largest share of working-class constituents (using those outmoded NRS social grades) had the biggest Tory swing – even though they usually remained Labour. But quite why he thought this was significant is unclear. First of all, constituency-level analysis risked unsafe generalisations: the so-called ‘ecological fallacy’. The fact that a swing took place in a largely working-class constituency did not mean that the swing had taken place exclusively among workers. Insofar as there was a working-class swing, this largely reflected working-class conservatives returning to the Tory fold. The story of the election in that respect was that this swing didn’t produce a blue tide due to a sharply increased Labour turnout. For all the dog-whistling, it was the Brexit dog that didn’t bark.

  It was even more unclear what Wilson proposed to do about the problem, since he offered no practical proposals other than, seemingly, abandoning the highly successful policy of abolishing tuition fees. It would also be difficult for Wilson to pin his colours too firmly to the mast of Brexit or immigration, since he is a fervent leading supporter of the Remainer group, Open Britain, although he did call for some largely symbolic ‘action on immigration’ within a single-market system – a particularly ineffectual way of patronising working-class voters. Was Wilson, then, proposing anything different from a Blair/Brown-era policy mix? Gloria de Piero and former chief whip Graham Jones argued that many Labour voters had abandoned the party. Jones added, ‘We have to talk about their concerns – counter-terrorism, nationalism, defence and community, the nuclear deterrent and patriotism.’38

  The thrust of this argument about the working class was clear. Workers could only be appealed to on a right-wing basis: guns and flags, with English rather than Ulster accents. Certainly, there were signs that a layer of older, white, and disproportionately male working-class voters had defected on the basis of Conservative campaigning about Corbyn’s nuclear position and IRA ‘links’. And although Labour had improved its share of the vote among those classified as ‘skilled working class’, the C2 vote in the old ‘social grades’ schema, they had still gone much more strongly for the Tories than for Labour. Even so, the Tories have usually done well among ‘skilled workers’, and much of their improvement in this stratum was down to the ‘UKIP effect’. The fact that it didn’t result in sweeping losses across the West Midlands, the North, and Wales is indicative that Labour succeeded in raising the turnout among ‘traditional Labour voters’ as well as new voters – exactly what Siôn Simon’s campaign for West Midlands mayor had failed to achieve.

  The weakness in certain working-class constituencies was, moreover, the culmination of long-te
rm trends for which the politics of triangulation bear some responsibility. This is the essence of the problem, and the reason why new Labour hold-outs are split over what direction to take over Brexit. People like Wilson, Umunna and Sadiq Khan want an anti-Brexit campaign, or at the very least a ‘soft Brexit’; people like Watson, Piero, and Jones seem to want a harder stance on immigration (as indeed do most on the Labour backbenches). This split is one that, as Chapter 4 suggests, is generic to the New Labour project, which had always embodied elements of both missionary cosmopolitan liberalism and melancholic conservative authoritarianism. The same party which abolished Section 28 also passed authoritarian legislation targeting non-EU migrants. In recent years, the latter tendency has been more in tune with the Weltanschauung winds, but the liberal wing hopes that Labour’s disproportionately younger, female, urban, multiracial, and socially liberal base will break with Corbyn over the question of hard versus soft Brexit.

  Those expecting a split in Corbynism are hubristic. Corbyn’s preference for leaving the single market and the customs union, and above all for ending the free movement that goes with it, has disappointed some of his supporters. In some ways, the answers that Corbyn and his allies give on this question sound uncharacteristically evasive. The problem is not that McDonnell wants to maintain maximum flexibility in negotiating (‘flexit’). That much makes perfect sense. Nor is it with the idea of a ‘jobs-first Brexit’, however necessarily vague that is. Putting jobs ahead of anti-immigrant prejudice and flag-waving is a good idea. But Corbynite MPs are beginning to offer formulations like, ‘with Brexit, freedom of movement will end’ and ‘leaving the EU means leaving the single market’. Neither statement is literally true. Both are performative in that they intend, by creating a narrative about the meaning of the Brexit vote, to bring about the reality they describe. And the reservation that many of Corbyn’s supporters express is that this is being done so that Labour can appease Brexit voters on immigration without accepting any responsibility for it.