Corbyn

by Richard Seymour

  53This is reported, albeit grudgingly, in the Independent. Matt Dathan, ‘Jeremy Corbyn comes out fighting amid sexism row and insists shadow Cabinet positions he has given to women are the real “top jobs”’, Independent, 14 September 2015.

  54John Elledge, ‘Labour chooses white man as leader’, New Statesman, 12 September 2015.

  55Andrew Grice and Oliver Wright, ‘A third of Labour voters less likely to vote for the party with Jeremy Corbyn in charge, with critics already plotting to oust him’, Independent, 18 September 2015.

  56Allister Heath, ‘One Thing Is Clear – Jeremy Corbyn Has No Understanding of the British People’, Telegraph, 30 September 2015.

  57Rafael Behr, ‘In Oldham, Jeremy Corbyn is just another face of “poncified” Labour’, Guardian, 2 December 2015.

  58Roy Greenslade, ‘The Times counts the cost of spinning against Labour in Oldham’, Guardian, 4 December 2015.

  59John Harris, John Domokos and Dan Susman, ‘Oldham byelection: Corbynmania collides with reality – video’, Guardian, 2 December.

  60Asa Bennett, ‘Oldham by-election: did Muslims worried about war in Syria save Jeremy Corbyn from doom?’, Telegraph, 4 December 2015.

  61Kate McCann and Rosa Silverman, ‘Revealed: Jeremy Corbyn had a second relationship with a Labour politician’, Telegraph, 18 September 2015.

  62Janet Daley, ‘I’ve lived under Jeremy Corbyn’s rule – it turned me into a Tory’, Telegraph, 25 July 2015.

  63Anne Perkins, ‘The National Anthem May Stick in Corbyn’s Craw, but It Is His Job to Sing It’, Guardian, 16 September 2015.

  64Aubrey Allegretti, ‘The Sun’s Front Page Smear Story On “Hypocrite” Jeremy Corbyn Revealed As False’, Huffington Post, 15 September 2015.

  65Liam Young, ‘Why is the Sun so determined to destroy Jeremy Corbyn? Because he could be prime minister’, New Statesman, 9 December 2015.

  66Roy Greenslade, ‘Rightwing press mounts assault over Jeremy Corbyn’s Cenotaph nod’, Guardian, 9 November 2015.

  67Rowena Mason, ‘Corbyn urged to disband Momentum after Labour MPs report bullying and abuse’, Guardian, 3 December 2015; Charlie Cooper, ‘Syria air strikes: Pro-war MPs bullied by extremists, say Labour figures’, Independent, 2 December 2015; Cathy Newman, ‘Showing Corbyn how it’s done: The war Britain’s bullied female MPs are determined to win’, Telegraph, 3 December 2015; Roy Greenslade, ‘Stella Creasy crushes story about protest outside her house’, Guardian, 4 December 2015.

  68Rowena Mason, ‘Corbyn urged to disband Momentum after Labour MPs report bullying and abuse’, Guardian, 3 December 2015.

  69Tom Tugenhat MP, ‘Jeremy Corbyn is no pacifist – he wants to see Britain defeated’, Telegraph, 18 January 2016.

  70Caroline Mortimer, ‘British Army “could stage mutiny under Corbyn”, says senior serving general’, Independent, 20 September 2015.

  71Rowena Mason and Patrick Wintour, ‘Trident: military chief will not be disciplined over Corbyn remarks’, Guardian, 9 November 2015; Andrew Sparrow, ‘Corbyn to complain to MoD about army chief’s “political interference”’, Guardian, 9 November 2015.

  72Philip Collins, ‘Am I angry at vain, arrogant Ed? Hell, yes’, Times, 15 May 2015.

  73Tim Stanley, ‘Labour didn’t lose because it was too Left-wing. But it will lose again if it becomes too Right-wing’, Telegraph, 15 May 2015.

  74Tony Blair, ‘In conversation with … Tony Blair: opening remarks’, Progress, 22 July 2015.

  75Dan Hodges, ‘Sadiq Khan Winning in London Will Be Bad News for the Labour Party’, Telegraph, 19 January 2016.

  76Peter Hyman, ‘This Is an Existential Moment in Labour’s History. It May Not Survive. And It May Never Win Again’, Guardian, 20 December 2015.

  77Polly Toynbee, ‘Dear Labour, split the party and you’ll regret it. Love from an sdp candidate’, Guardian, 26 January 2016.

  78Jon Rentoul, ‘Daily catch-up: Will the Labour Party split? Will there be an SDP Mark II?’, Independent, 14 December 2015.

  79Mark Mardell, ‘Is “King Jeremy the Accidental” on the up?’, BBC News, 21 January 2016.

  80Robin De Peyer, ‘Noel Gallagher launches scathing attack on Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership’, Evening Standard, 10 January 2016.

  81Peter Hyman, ‘This is an existential moment in Labour’s history. It may not survive. And it may never win again’, Guardian, 20 December 2015.

  82Interview with Jeremy Gilbert, 14 January 2016.

  83Peter Mandelson, ‘Peter Mandelson’s memo on how Labour’s modernisers lost their way – and where they go next’, New Statesman, 25 September 2010.

  84This is not to deny that New Labour generated a degree of positive support among some voters – especially among ex-Conservative voters on economic issues. However, Labour’s biggest asset was the ‘new equilibrium’ reached by Tories in the polls after the ERM crisis. Peter Kellner, ‘Why the Tories Were Trounced’, Parliamentary Affairs, vol. 50, no. 4, 1997.

  85Rowena Mason, ‘Jeremy Corbyn is most popular among voters from all parties, poll suggests’, Guardian, 15 August 2015; Joe Murphy, ‘Left-winger Jeremy Corbyn is “first choice for Londoners”’, Evening Standard, 14 August 2015.

  86Roy Hattersley, ‘Labour’s moderates have a duty to serve in the shadow cabinet’, Guardian, 13 September 2015.

  87John McDonnell, ‘How Labour will secure the high-wage, hi-tech economy of the future’, Guardian, 19 November 2015.

  88Even Paul Kenny of the GMB, who is otherwise sceptical of Corbyn, insists that the Blairites should accept Corbyn’s victory or quit the party. Jon Craig, ‘Union Leaders Say “Accept Corbyn Or Quit”’, Sky News, 12 September 2015.

  89When New Labour first promoted the replacement of Trident, an overwhelming majority of the public opposed renewing it. See ‘Nuclear Deterrent’, Populus, 21–22 February 2007. In subsequent polls, a majority of the public favoured getting rid of Trident to save money. See: ‘Published Voting Intention Figures’, ComRes, 4–6 September 2009; Glen Owen, ‘Here’s £37bn of cuts to get you started, voters tell PM’, Mail on Sunday, 13 June 2010. More recent polling suggests that opinion is at least an even split on Trident. Andrew Grice, ‘Trident: Majority of Britons back keeping nuclear weapons programme, poll shows’, Independent, 24 January 2016. Meanwhile, a number of leading ex-generals have publicly called for the scrapping of Trident. ‘Generals in “scrap Trident” call’, BBC News, 16 January 2009; Helen Pidd, ‘Trident nuclear missiles are £20bn waste of money, say generals’, Guardian, 16 January 2009; Kate Hudson, ‘Trident’s an outdated waste. Even the military say so’, New Statesman, 24 June 2015.

  2. The Crisis of British Politics

  1Oliver Milne, ‘Momentum sweeps board at Labour party youth elections’, Guardian, 19 February 2016

  2I am grateful to Simon Hewitt for these points. Interview with the author, 13 January 2016.

  3Quoted in Ian Dunt, ‘Ed Miliband: We need our working class vote back’, Politics.co.uk, 16 August 2010. Although, in fact, this argument was slightly over-simplified. Millions of those who had voted Labour in 1997 would have died by 2010. The question is why those voters weren’t replaced. The biggest reason is that voters who might tend to support Labour – largely poor and largely young – stopped turning out. For a more conventionally Blairite take on the numbers, see Peter Kellner, ‘Labour’s lost votes’, Prospect, 17 October 2012.

  4Jon Trickett reaffirmed this argument after the 2015 election defeat. ‘It was the working class, not the middle class that sunk Labour’, New Statesman, 13 May 2015.

  5Toby Helm, ‘Labour’s lost voters may never return again, study finds’, Guardian, 18 July 2015.

  6Ross Hawkins, ‘Ed Miliband did not lose election because he was too left wing – study’, BBC News, 17 September 2015; Rowena Mason, ‘Beckett report: Labour lost election over economy, immigration and benefits’, Guardian, 14 January 2016.

  7Alberto Nardelli, ‘Party membership in the UK is tiny’, Guardian, 29 September 2014; Hugh
Pemberton and Mark Wickham-Jones, ‘Labour’s lost grassroots: the rise and fall of party membership’, British Politics, vol. 8, 2013.

  8John Moylan, ‘Union membership has halved since 1980’, BBC News, 7 September 2012; Brian Groom, ‘UK trade union membership holds steady’, Financial Times, 20 May 2014; Michael J Morely, Patrick Gunnigle, David G Collings, Global Industrial Relations, Routledge, Abingdon, 2006, p. 226; also Robert J Flanagan, Globalization and Labor Conditions: Working Conditions and Worker Rights in a Global Economy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006.

  9Richard Hyman, ‘Strikes in the UK: withering away?’, EurWork: European Observatory of Working Life, 27 July 1999.

  10James Doran, ‘5 Things You Need to Know About “Pasokification”’, Novara Media, 5 January 2015.

  11The loss of ethnic minority voters was apparent well before Corbyn took the leadership. See Tim Wigmore, ‘Is Labour losing the ethnic minority vote?’, New Statesman, 5 January 2015. The evidence of polling, however, suggests that Corbyn’s leadership is less popular among these groups than Labour is as a whole. Aaron Bastani, ‘Corbyn’s declining popularity?’, LRB blog, 3 December 2015.

  12Colin Crouch, Coping with Post-Democracy, Fabian Society, 2000; Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy, London: Polity, 2004; Colin Crouch, The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism, London: Polity, 2011.

  13Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing Out of Western Democracy, London: Verso, 2013, Kindle Loc. 367.

  14Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing Out of Western Democracy, London: Verso, 2013, Kindle Loc. 437–67.

  15Armin Schäfer and Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Introduction: Politics in the Age of Austerity’, in Armin Schäfer and Wolfgang Streeck, eds., Politics in the Age of Austerity, Cambridge: Polity, p. 16.

  16Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing Out of Western Democracy, London: Verso, 2013, Kindle Loc. 665.

  17Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing Out of Western Democracy, London: Verso, 2013, Kindle Loc. 623.

  18Pippa Norris, ‘Apathetic Landslide’, Parliamentary Affairs, 54, 2001, pp. 565–89.

  19Pippa Norris, ‘Apathetic Landslide’, Parliamentary Affairs, 54, 2001, pp. 565–89; Ron Johnson and Charles Pattie, Putting Voters in Their Place: geography and elections in Great Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 246.

  20David Garner, ‘Why do so few people vote in UK elections now?’, Department of Politics, University of York, 20 June 2005.

  21Emma Ailes, ‘Election 2015: Who are the non-voters?’, BBC News, 6 May 2015.

  22Roger Mortimore and Kully Kaur-Ballagan, ‘Ethnic Minority Voters and Non-Voters at the 2005 British General Election’, Ipsos-Mori, Paper for EPOP Conference, University of Nottingham, September 2006; ‘General Election 2015 explained: Turnout’, Independent, 4 May 2015.

  23On these origins, see Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson, ‘Why Did the West Extend the Franchise? Democracy, Inequality and Growth in Historical Perspective’, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, web.mit. edu.

  24Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, London: Verso, 2014, pp. 77–9.

  25On the relationship between neoliberals, democracy and the far right, see: William E. Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt: The End of Law, Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999; Renato Christi, Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism: Strong State, Free Economy, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1998; Perry Anderson, ‘The Intransigent Right’ in Spectrum: from right to left in the world of ideas, Verso, 2005, pp. 15–16; and Renée Sallas, ‘Friedrich von Hayek, Leader and Master of Liberalism’, El Mercurio, 12 April 1981. On the role of neoliberals in the Pinochet dictatorship, see David Harvey, Neoliberalism: A Short History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 7–9; Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007, pp. 77–87; Greg Grandin, ‘The Road from Serfdom: Milton Friedman and the Economics of Empire’, Counterpunch, 17 November 2006. And on the underlying assumptions of neoliberal thought with regard to state and economy, see: Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso, 2013; Philip Mirowski, ‘On the Origins (at Chicago) of some Species of Neoliberal Evolutionary Economics’, in Robert van Horn, Philip Mirowski and Thomas A Stapleford, eds., Building Chicago Economics: New Perspectives on the History of America’s Most Powerful Economics Program, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

  26James M. Buchanan, Public Finance in Democratic Process: Fiscal Institutions and Individual Choice, Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1967; William A. Niskanen, Jr., Bureaucracy and Representative Government, AldineTransaction, 2007; William A. Niskanen Jr., Bureaucracy and Public Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 1996.

  27Rarely a year goes by when some scandal does not befall Serco, by far one of the most useless corporations in the world, and also the government’s favourite. Richard Whitell and Emily Dugan, ‘Services provider established by outsourcing giant Serco overcharged NHS by millions’, Independent, 27 August 2014; ‘Prisons privatisation cancelled amid Serco probe’, BBC News, 22 November 2013. Competition in the NHS was found to have driven up overheads to 15 per cent of total costs by 2007. See Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein, ‘Competition in a publicly funded healthcare system’, British Medical Journal, 335, 2007.

  28Colin Crouch, Coping with Post-Democracy, Fabian Society, 2000.

  29Mark Mills, ‘British Businesses Are Hoarding Billions That Could Be Invested in SMEs’, Huffington Post, 3 January 2014; Adam Davidson, ‘Why are Corporations Hoarding Trillions?’, New York Times, 20 January 2016.

  30An extended version of this argument can be found in Richard Seymour, Against Austerity: How We Can Fix the Crisis They Made, London: Pluto Press, 2014.

  31Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing Out of Western Democracy, London: Verso, 2013, Kindle Loc. 367 & 1327.

  32Frances Perraudin and Rowena Mason, ‘Include Lib Dems in coalition or face second election this year, says Clegg’, Guardian, 5 May 2015.

  33Emma Ailes, ‘Election 2015: Who are the non-voters?’, BBC News, 6 May 2015.

  34‘Building Public Engagement: Options for Developing Select Committee Outreach, First Special Report of Session 2015–16 (House of Commons Papers)’. House of Commons Liaison Committee. November 2005

  35Polly Toynbee, ‘Every vote counts – to waste yours would be near-criminal’, Guardian, 7 May 2015; Iain Sinclair, ‘Polly Toynbee, Jeremy Corbyn and the limits of acceptable politics’, Open Democracy, 29 June 2015.

  36In the Iowa primary, which was unexpectedly a near draw, Sanders defeated Clinton 6–1 among under thirties. See Aaron Bastani, ‘Young Americans’, LRB blog, 10 February 2016.

  37Gerassimos Moschonas, In the Name of Social Democracy: The Great Transformation 1945 to the Present, London: Verso, 2002, pp. 190–204. On the struggle throughout the 1980s to defend a non-neoliberal set of institutional commitments, see Göran Therborn, Why Some People Are More Unemployed Than Others: The Strange Paradox of Growth and Unemployment, London: Verso, 1986.

  38This analysis draws extensively from Paolo Chiocchetti’s as-yet-unpublished PhD thesis, ‘Filling the Vacuum?: The Development of the Partisan Radical Left in Germany, France and Italy, 1989–2013’, Department of European and International Studies, King’s College London, 14 November 2013. I am also grateful to the author for explaining his thesis in personal conversation. But see also: Dan Hough, Michael Koß and Jonathan Olsen, The Left Party in Contemporary German Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; Dan Hough, Michael Koß and Jonathan Olsen, Left Parties in National Governments, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; Kate Hudson, European Communism since 1989: Towards a New European Left?, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000; Kate Hudson, The New European Left: A Socialism for the Twenty-First Century?, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; Valeria Camia, ‘Social democrats, Europe and the radical party factor’, National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR), Challenges to Democracy in the Twenty-Fir
st Century, Working Paper No. 54, July 2012; Daniele Albertazzi, Clodagh Brook and Charlotte Ross, ‘Italy’s radical Left in the Age of Berlusconi’, Radical Politics Today, July 2009; Luke March and Cas Mudde, ‘What’s Left of the Radical Left? The European Radical Left After 1989: Decline and Mutation’, Comparative European Politics, 3, 2005; Luke March, Contemporary Far Left Parties in Europe, Berlin: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2008; Luke March, Radical Left Parties in Europe, London: Routledge, 2011.

  3. Labour Isn’t Working: Whatever Happened to Social Democracy?

  1Tony Blair, ‘In defence of Blairism, by Tony Blair’, Spectator, 9 December 2015.

  2On the role of religious ideas in the formation of Labour, see Mark Bevir, The Making of British Socialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.

  3Though not the disappearance of the Chartist idea. See Keith Flett, Chartism After 1848: The Working Class and the Politics of Radical Education, Pontypool: Merlin Press, 2006.

  4Quoted in John Saville, The Labour Movement in Britain: A Commentary, London: Faber & Faber, 1988, p. 9.

  5Maurice Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution: The Passing of the Second Reform Bill, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 48–52; Paul Foot, The Vote: How it Was Won and How it Was Undermined, Viking, 2005, pp. 125–9; John Ramden, An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party Since 1830, HarperCollins, 1998, p. 93.

  6Gordon Phillips, The Rise of the Labour Party: 1893–1931, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 7.

  7Gordon Phillips, The Rise of the Labour Party: 1893–1931, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 9.

  8Gregory Elliott, Labourism and the English Genius: The Strange Death of Labour England?, London: Verso, 1993, p. 27.

  9Ross McKibbin, Parties and People: England 1914–1951, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 3–5.

  10Paul Mason’s description of the syndicalist milieu, from 1899 to 1914, is apt: ‘All over the world, “labour of the humbler kind” was getting organised. If the Paris Commune had closed the door on the era of street revolutions, the dock strike had opened an era of workplace revolutions. The trade union itself could become a mini-commune: training and educating workers for self-government’. Paul Mason, Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global, London: Vintage Books, 2007, p. 117.