Catastrophe Corbyn

A party that only shouts about inequality is guaranteed to fail

 

According to some observers Jeremy Corbyn has a more than outside chance of becoming the next Labour eader. Endorsed by UNITE and other, smaller, trade unions, Corbyn certainly enjoys more support than many predicted at the outset of the campaign.

Corbyn’s unexpected prominence provoked The World Tonight to run a piece on the Labour left, one to which I made a rather sceptical contribution). For, that which passes for the Labour left today is, despite appearances, at its lowest ever ebb. Long gone are the days when the Tribune Group enjoyed a membership of nearly 100 MPs and had decent representation in Labour Cabinets.

The left enjoyed its greatest influence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time that saw founding Tribune member Michael Foot become leader and in 1983 present to the country possibly Labour’s most radical manifesto. It was no accident that the left’s greatest influence came at the same time as one of Labour’s deepest electoral nadirs. For, if some see the left as the party’s ‘conscience’, electorally speaking you can have too many principles. 

Jeremy Corbyn was elected in 1983. He joined not Tribune but the Campaign Group of MPs. The left had split over Tony Benn’s decision to stand for the Deputy Leadership in 1981, one many Tribune members opposed. In fact we can trace the decline of the Parliamentary left to Benn’s ill-judged campaign, one that saw his supporters leave Tribune to form the Campaign Group.

The Bennite ‘hard’ left believed socialism would come by persuading voters of the merits of socialism: this would be achieved by ‘campaigning’, in effect supporting trade unionists in any disputes they had with their employers. They argued that Labour’s Front Bench had always been afraid to make the case for socialism. Once the right sorts of leaders were in place, and arguing for socialism clearly and consistently, then the voters would fall into line.

The advent of Thatcherism persuaded the Tribunite ‘soft’ left that the party needed to make some accommodation with what the electorate thought. Electoral math stipulated that if it was to win power Labour needed the votes of more than committed trade unionists, public sector workers, radical feminists, and ethnic or sexual minorities – the groups to whom Benn spoke. That at least was the logic of Foot’s successor, the Tribune MP Neil Kinnock.

His attempt to appeal to those who had abandoned the party was inevitably condemned by the hard left. For their analysis remained as ever it was: Labour’s job was to shape how such voters thought. Indeed, Benn famously saw the terrible 1983 defeat as a victory for socialism, something to build on.

There is now no Tribune Group: Kinnock’s strategy of accommodation meant it lost its distinctive identity to such an extent Tony Blair was comfortable being a member. The Campaign Group is however still with us, just about, with not many more than 10 MPs on its books. Corbyn’s pitch for the leadership reveals how closely he and his colleagues remain wedded to the hard left analysis of the 1980s. For according to Corbyn, Labour should, first, be rebuilt around the unions and, secondly, become a campaigning organization: finally, Labour should oppose austerity with greater vigour than under Ed Miliband.

This would, however, be a catastrophic course for Labour, just as it was in 1983.

If basing itself around the unions in the early 1980s did not prevent the party from electoral oblivion then the result today will be even more disastrous. In 1979 there were 13 million union members: today there are 6.5 million, just one-quarter of the employed, two-thirds of them in the public sector. Many of these people already vote Labour: the party’s basic problem is appealing to those who are not in trade unions.

Calling for the party to become an outward-facing ‘campaigning’ organization is Labour’s version of Motherhood and Apple Pie. Most recently Ed Miliband brought Arnie Graf over from the United States to help him achieve that very end. But while there were some modest signs of progress, they had no measurable impact on the 2015 result. In any case, the idea that the ‘grassroots’ can by themselves alter the perceptions of enough voters in the right kinds of places to win Labour power by 2020, or even beyond that, is fanciful: it flies in the face of a desultory experience that stretches back to the 1930s.

Corbyn’s belief that Labour should campaign more vigorously against austerity is similarly whimsical. The main reason Labour lost in 2015 was that many voters considered Miliband’s programme lacked economic credibility. This belief was the result of numerous misconceptions about the causes of the fiscal crisis, confusions created and sustained by a right-wing press that exploited most people’s basic economic ignorance. Miliband obviously struggled to address this problem.

However, the notion that the party can win back office by simply telling voters they are wrong – even if they actually are – misunderstands the complexity of the dilemma currently faced by Labour.

A Corbyn win will therefore turn Labour’s predicament into a crisis. We do not need to imagine how the media will respond: look at what they did to ‘Red Ed’, someone who Corbyn believes was insufficiently radical.

This has proved to be a very dull leadership election – three of the four candidates basically agree what went wrong in 2015 and there is a broad consensus about what needs to be done. Corbyn offers a contrast, and is a useful reminder that a more ‘pro-business’ Labour party needs also to attend to inequality.

Yet, Labour will only win office if it convinces enough in the electorate it can competently manage the economy, and that means engaging with popular views about the need for austerity. This involves difficult choices and a nuanced strategy – and even then there is no promise of success. But a party that only shouts about inequality – Corbyn’s main issue, despite only 15 per cent of voters thinking it important – is guaranteed to fail.

Steven Fielding is Professor of Political History and director of the Centre for British Politics at the University of Nottingham.

Image credit: Garry Knight (CC)/Flickr. This blog is also published on Ballots & Bullets – a University of Nottingham blog

60 Responses to “Catastrophe Corbyn”

  1. Robert Jones

    I’m not going to vote for Jeremy for several reasons, which I shall waste no one’s time by sharing here. But this article will only do him good, much as Harman’s extremely foolish decision not to oppose the Tory budget, and Kendall’s endorsement of it, will drive people in Corbyn’s direction. For one thing, this is a highly biased analysis, playing fast and loose with the historical narrative, and for another it is repellently cynical: even if the electorate was wrong, we shouldn’t tell them so, eh? So, if we think they were wrong – and that’s a whole new argument in itself – we should artfully pretend we think they were right in order to seduce them into voting for us? This is witless – from a professor of politics, it’s worse than witless, it’s disgraceful.

  2. Lamia

    Thanks for the steer, but I don’t think it’s very strong evidence. Corbyn only talks in terms of certain kinds of industry on the one hand, and (tax-evading) big business on the other.

    “I would want to see an incoming Labour government with public participation in developing industries, recognising that the needs of the world are efficiency and sustainable energy sources

    That is well and good but it ignores most business.

    Meanwhile:

    A commitment to social justice is not incompatible with a commitment to
    business. But we expect all businesses to pay their taxes. At the moment
    we have over £50bn a year not collected because of tax evasion and tax
    avoidance, either through offshore accounts, tax havens or simple fraud
    of the HMRC.

    i.e. his view of business is limited to encouraging green industry (which I absolutely agree with) and stopping tax-evasion by big business (which I also absolutely agree with). But is a lot more to enterprise in this country than those.

    I don’t see any great knowledge or interest about the breadth of business in the UK and what can be done to help it in the article cited.

  3. Labouring Life

    He is doing something right with labour activists, he is speaking to the core beliefs of many and I personally like a lot of what he is saying, but the leader is not the party nor the electorate.
    If he wins as has been said elsewhere there would be a coup of immense proportions to rid the party of paid workers not with his agenda. Out of the 200 or so MPs we have 10 are on the same page as him. Much of the present party activists relied on at elections ( I do not mean the activists that regularly attend meetings) are more left of centre that left wing, we may find ourselves in 2020 in the same place the lib dems found themselves at the 2015 elections with no one willing to come out and help. Then there is the electorate, a straw poll recently amongst non political people I know tell me Harriet Harman gets their vote and they had no idea who the rest were. The with the electorate there is the question of persuading people who voted one way last time to vote Labour this. Recents stats and polling analysis tells us that the reason polls were so far out is that people who promise to vote labour are least likely to actually go and vote. They say they will but they don’t. Why they don’t is something we need to discover. Corbyn might say it is because we are not left wing enough, but I believe people are generally disenchanted and apathetic about what politics can do for them, Greece will not have helped: ask the people, ignore the people, crush the people.

  4. JoeDM

    Common sense on LFF. How strange !!!

  5. JonB

    This article is further evidence of the “weather vane” mentality in British politics, particular within the Labour Party. No ideology whatsoever, no sense of what might be the right course of action, just driven by a desire for popularity. Tragic. Note the author’s use of the phrase “electoral math”. The word is mathematics, and in this country we shorten it to “maths”. The Labour Party has for too long looked to the USA as a source of inspiration, and here we even see the effect on an apparently well educated man’s use of his own language. Depressing!

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