Paul Mason in writing about that the Corbyn years (htpps://paulmason) has highlighted some lessons we need to learn. The first is that Corbynism wasn’t an accident. And he’s right, there was a dramatic dearth of socialism or even radical social democratic enthusiasm among the candidate to replace the hapless Ed Miliband.
Had Ed lost manfully to his more able brother and gone off in 2010 to concentrate on the climate emergency and left it to David to bash Cameron, instead of winning and then believing the flawed policy that suggested sitting still while the coalition destroyed itself perhaps we would have a very different political landscape. Scotland might have received greater attention resulting in Labour not being annihilated north of the border. But in 2015 the Labour Party was feeling crushed and the old men, still smarting from the kicking Neil Kinnock and then Tony Blair had given them in the 80s and 90s saw a hope – albeit a slim one – of at last taking revenge for the defeat of the Militant revolution and grasping control first of the party then of the country.
For the ageing revolutionaries like McDonnell, McCluskey and Livingstone this was a last throw of the dice and then there was Corbyn, sincere and dull, scruffy and with a back catalogue of bad decisions that made him a figure of derision among most political observers.
And yet in 2015 with a demoralised party still deeply scarred by Blair’s disastrous Iraq policy and bruised by five years of Ed’s vacuousness, the mood of society was different. There was a ground swell of socialism. Syriza had won in Greece and there was a new generation who found the idea of a moral and decent socialism to be attractive.
Oh, and by the way to vote in the Labour Leadership election you paid £3 and had an equal say.
It is of course true that among the Labour MPs were those for whom socialism was a very dirty word. These were people seduced into being part of the Labour family by the hope of being part of a Miliband’s centrist government for ever. There are always needed to be an exit room for them.
Mason goes on to say that the change in the Labour Party was real and that those who had been lost to active political involvement by being part of the left but with no home in Blair and Brown’s New Labour have become an important part of the newly revived Labour Party. My greatly missed friend Paul Flynn always told me that he was “True Labour” not “New Labour” and he never got offered the opportunity in government his talent deserved. Many like Paul found under the Corbyn a home they thought they had lost forever. The legacy of the Corbyn revolution is that there are great many people who have become engaged in political discourse who would have simply evolved themselves into activism without seeking specifically political activism. By this I mean involvement in issues such as Palestinian support, anti-capitalist events and climate concern, in short green politics. So the Corbyn years did make the party very different and, while the Leader’s team had all the levers of control in their hands they made some significant changes. I don’t believe that a Labour Manifesto of the future will ever offer Thatcherism Lite, which is rather the route into which Gordon Brown had pushed himself by 2010. And Ed Balls who had been the brains behind the Treasury in the last part of Brown’s control was the star of Milibandism.
During Corbyn’s time Socialist intellectuals with real alternative strategies began to flourish and their influence grow. The Labour Party now is a much more democratic socialist entity than a social democratic one and Mason is right, this alternative thinking must not be lost in the desire to regain power by the route of looking like the Tories only being a bit more competent and a bit nicer.
He is also right when he says that there has been a significant growth in left thinking intellectual platforms. Even without the finance behind the right-wing economically libertarian organisations that have been the outriders in the swerve away from the last remnants of the post-war settlement within the Conservative party, there has been a growth of organisations like Common Wealth and Labour for a Green New Deal. As he argues it is actually true that one third of the electorate voted in 2019 for a seriously socialist platform.
Margaret Thatcher destroyed the trade unions as a political force and Blair absorbed the new reality as if it were an eternal orthodoxy. Only in very recent times with the Corbynista Revolution have we seen unions beginning to stiffen their resolve. Sadly in Unite the result was to punish the enemies within the party rather than win power for the rank-and-file of the working people. Len McCluskey whose political outlook was shaped in the 1970s, played, in the Corbyn era, a role which failed to harness the slowly growing politicisation of the workers. The post-pandemic world will be a very different place and there may well be an equivalent movement that floated in the Atlee/Gaitskell/Wilson era which sees the Butler/Macmillan Tory equivalent of having similar goals but with different strategies. The Johnson administration has started with distinctly Buskilite tendencies. Worker power, the destruction of the Gig economy and false self-employment has properly been called out and identified in the Corbyn era. It is for Starmer to maintain the drive and not slip into Brown like timidity.
As part of this newly burgeoning intellectualism Mason sees Communism in the post Corbyn era is having a proper place in the Labour Party thinking, sourced from Gramsci and others but which recognises the destructive and negative influence of Stalinism in the failed experiment that was Leninism in the Soviet Union. Mason considers the changes in the working class dynamic and refers specifically to Claire Ainsley’s “The New Working Class.” This new working class he rightly concludes has no intrinsic loyalty to the Labour Party, which explains for example why Scotland was able to totally abandon the Labour Party when its people saw the SNP represent their aspirations, it also explains why Greens and Lib Dems took significant quantities of votes from the Labour Party in December 2019. The challenge for the post-Corbyn Labour Party is to provide an intellectual and spiritual home for these members of the new working class. But Labour lost votes, in very significant amounts and in key areas to the Conservatives. Some of this movement can be put down to the media assault on Corbyn and McDonnell and also to the complicity in attacking Corbynism from the right wing of the Party. But the party-the hands of Corbynites became ever narrower and exclusive in its outlook, if you are not fully signed up to believe there is no place for you at the table. This has in some cases led to people with very limited outlooks reaching Parliament and giving opponent easy targets for future attacks.
To regain the trust of the lost non-metropolitan working class who left to support Boris and who gave the Tory seats that are part of the heartland of the Labour movement, the Labour Party must move away from the hard left Socialist Worker/Militant movement which has been in control and become the guardian of the aspirations of those people who abandoned the party of posh boy Trotskyites for the safe haven of the Tory toffs.
The left and becoming more inclusive needs not to follow the line that helped sink Hillary Clinton in the states by condemning people as deplorable, a tendency that dominated much of the anti-Brexit rhetoric. Mason is also right when he says that while the party can’t be a social movement but that the party must learn from the methods of the social movements of the left who have prospered in recent times even though long-term success eludes them.
Mason’s analysis then turns to the quality of the leader and his leadership team. That he was not capable of being an effective leader is without question. He is, always was and always will be an inadequate person and politician. The early period of his leadership was marked by the sniping of the vast majority of the parliamentary party and the party workers, but even when he gain control of all the levers of power, his leadership was distinguished by its incompetence.
I do not believe that he is an anti-semite or an evil terrorist supporter. I believe he is a sincere Marxist believer who has demonstrated a lack of discrimination when choosing which causes to support. He took the road of surrounding himself with advisers who made him look inwards. The leader of the opposition built a wall around himself and his office.
Then the anti-Semitism. Personally I have problems with the Israeli state – not it’s right to exist and provide a home for all Jewish people from wherever they come. All Jewish people have a right to have a home where they feel safe. My issue is with how this just entity has treated the Arab peoples, Christian as well as Muslim, who were the citizens of the land out of which Israel was formed. Nothing justifies the use of violence and the pursuit of justice by individuals or groups. So the violence of Hamas and Hezbollah is wrong but so too the violence of settlers forcibly removing families who have lived on and farmed land for centuries. But to criticise the excesses and misbehaviour of Mr Netanyahu and his supporters is not to give legitimacy to Holocaust deniers and their fellow travellers. We have a good sense in Britain that religious belief and diversity is a given and making it safe and comfortable for Jewish people in the Labour Party is something that Mr Starmer must achieve and he needs to act ruthlessly and rapidly to make it clear that everyone whatever their race or religious affiliation is welcome within the party.
The end of the Corbyn experiment has coincided with the Covid-19 crisis there are two strands to the crisis, health and wealth. In one form or another the crisis will drag on in health terms until an effective vaccine is developed. This means that there may be some restrictions around until 2021. We, and the developed countries of Europe and North America are now in recession. The wealth crisis will worsen unless there is coordinated action to ensure the recession though it may be deep and painful does not become a long-lasting slump or depression. And I find much to support in the view that we need a strategy of smart re-industrialisation – increased ownership of national assets by the National community as represented by the state – a degree of societal planning albeit tempered by the understanding that market economics can inform though never command – that following a crisis that has hit people without regard to economic status, health and social policies must be based on the well-being of the whole community – and finally the climate crisis needs us to act together now and work for solutions dictated by the needs of future generations. It is more obvious than ever that, just as in 1945 we cannot go back to business as usual.
For Britain post Coronavirus to avoid a return to business as usual the new dynamic will require a different post Brexit settlement than that which had been planned by the neo liberal ideologues. When a crisis that is worldwide struck we needed mechanisms to work in a united worldwide response. We don’t yet know the effect on Africa of Coronavirus. But we do know the extraordinary disparity between the healthcare facilities in Western Europe and sub- Saharan Africa. If we, as we master this crisis do not share our capacity with the less economic the advanced societies we will all suffer.
Corbynism and the political experiment it represented was a failure but the rebalancing of the Labour Party has the possibility of providing a realistic alternative government when the next election comes. 2024 probably, but who five years ago would have seen…
Peter Landers April 8, 2020
Peter Landers: My Opinion and my Travel 