A Labour party preaching anti-austerity might find self-satisfaction in being right, but it is naive to imagine that this will lead to victory
With Jeremy Corbyn currently ahead of his rivals in terms of CLP nominations, the Labour leadership contest has taken an unexpected turn.
Corbyn’s uncompromising ‘anti-austerity’ stance has certainly tapped into some Labour members’ discomfort with the direction taken by their party in recent years. If these misgivings predated the 2008 fiscal crisis, the resulting austerity effectively brought to a head criticisms many had of New Labour.
Indeed, one reason Ed Miliband won the leadership in 2010 was his promise to move the party on from the Blair-Brown years. Yet Miliband’s course disappointed many on the left who believe that by 2015, the man the right-wing press dubbed ‘Red Ed’ merely offered the country ‘austerity-lite’.
A Corbyn-led party seems to be popular with a significant number of Labour members, or at least with that minority who attend CLP nomination meetings; but how likely is it that it will resonate with enough voters to deliver victory in 2020?
Corbynites have a ready answer: if we say it they will come. According to them, a resolute anti-austerity position will draw back to Labour those who voted Green, SNP, UKIP, and perhaps even Conservative in 2015.
They also point to the large number of non-voters: apparently many of them told pollsters they would support Labour but somehow got lost on the way to the polling booth. Corbyn, so this argument goes, will give such people a positive reason to vote Labour.
This at least has the merit of being a coherent strategy. It is also an approach that has a long lineage on the left. In the 1970s it inspired those who wanted to wrest control of the party from parliamentary leaders they believed were mired in reformism, who cut government spending and allowed unemployment to rise in the seemingly futile attempt to make a flawed capitalist system work.
Why did Labour keep losing elections, they asked? Why was Thatcher riding high? It was because the party did not offer voters a decisive alternative. Corbyn was at that point a keen supporter of Tony Benn who argued that Labour needed to base itself in trade unions and community groups so as to inspire a rainbow coalition of the oppressed.
In 1981 Benn wrote that, due to influence the left exerted in the party by then,
“Election campaigns have become platforms from which democratic socialism can once again be preached, reinjecting into the consciousness of the people some of the values on upon which any society claiming to be socialist must depend.”
Corbyn in 2015 (like Benn in 1981) proposes what political scientists call a ‘preference shaping’ strategy. Instead of ‘preference accommodation’ – that is, finding out what voters want and trying to convince them Labour is best qualified to deliver it – the left wants to change what voters want, to persuade them that an anti-austerity party is in their best interests.
But how will a Corbyn-led party do this? Is an approach based on messianically ‘preaching’ the message and mechanistically ‘injecting’ the right values into people’s minds going to work in 2015?
Benn spoke at a time when half of those employed were members of a trade union, when talk of establishing workplace party branches seemed almost realistic. And still, Benn failed to generate much of a popular response.
But this is the same approach Corbyn appears to embrace, despite the fact that only a small minority attend meetings and demonstrations, most of whom will already be convinced of the need to oppose austerity.
Standing on a platform and shouting so that those at the back can hear might be part of an honourable tradition but it rarely works. Corbyn needs to do much more than this.
That the austerity message has become embedded is revealed by survey after survey. To take just one example: according to research commissioned by the TUC, 42 per cent of those who considered voting Labour in 2015 but who in the end supported the Conservatives did so because they thought Miliband’s party would spend too much money and could not be trusted to run the economy.
Individual elements of Labour’s 2015 programme were popular, policies a Corbyn party might well embrace, such as ending non-dom tax exemptions, imposing an energy price freeze, levying a mansion tax, introducing a real Living Wage and reducing university tuition fees. But in 2015 this wasn’t enough, because voters did not consider them to have a credible position on austerity.
If Labour come up hard against such views there will likely be only one outcome for them in 2020, and it won’t be pretty. ‘Shaping’ strategies rarely work on their own: it took the small matter of a world war to get Attlee into office in 1945. Yet the fiscal crisis of 2008, widely touted by the left as the moment when the people would finally abandon neo-liberalism, saw the majority move further to the right.
A Labour party preaching anti-austerity in such circumstances might find self-satisfaction in being right, but given what we know about public opinion it is naive to the point of irresponsibility to imagine this will lead to victory.
Most successful parties combine preference accommodation with shaping: they seemingly appease in order to ultimately change opinion. When he first became Conservative leader, David Cameron went out of his way to demonstrate he was in touch with the public: remember ‘progressive’ Conservatism? Since being in power, however, the Conservatives have assiduously shaped opinion.
Look at what Osborne has done with the Living Wage: he has taken a popular idea then used it against those who should have benefited in order to serve his wider neo-liberal agenda. Corbynites will hate to hear this, but New Labour did the exact same thing from a different political direction.
Blair was elected in 1997 promising to keep to Conservative spending limits, but won reelection in 2001 having convinced a once-sceptical public that a massive increase in government spending on schools and hospitals was actually ‘investment’.
Accommodate-to-shape is a difficult trick to pull off – and New Labour benefited from a discredited and divided Conservative government – but it is the only one that has any hope of working. With Corbyn’s three rivals offering variations on this strategy, he needs to indicate how – beyond speeches to already convinced audiences – he will engage with those who currently imagine some dose of austerity is necessary for their hopes of prosperity.
Steven Fielding is Professor of Political History and director of the Centre for British Politics at the University of Nottingham.
47 Responses to “The problem with the Corbyn strategy”
Graham Coupe
While I am no expert on political or social history, didn’t Labour spend on schools and hospitals because they are in such a poor state through the tories lack of investment ?
Graham Coupe
It is a real shame is that the contenders are such a wishy washy, insipid bunch that they cannot help but make Corbyn look good. Forget the election, Labour needs to sort itself out and the likes of Liz Kendall are not the way. They are far to distant from the grass roots.
stevep
Yes, Keynes was the foremost economist of the 20th century.
if the USA had followed his recommendations at Bretton Woods instead of nicking his ideas and bending them to suit the dollar, we would be in a better position now. Even the Chinese are carefully re-scrutinising hi BW proposals.
Ken Bell
The problem with this argument is that it is predicated on the notion that people in Northern England, say, will continue to vote Labour even though the policies offer them little or nothing. The idea is that they have nowhere else to go, so will continue taking whatever scraps Labour offers them as part of its drive to give a good feast to Nuneaton.
This wheeze will work until people wake up as they have in Scotland. You can forget Scotland from now on as it is an SNP fiefdom. They offer people hope for the future and benefits whilst they are waiting for that future. Sooner or later Northern England will create a similar party and then where will Labour be?
stevep
The Title of the party should give people a clue. Labour. The party set up by and to represent working people. That includes retired working people.
This means that notionally, Labour should be the party to represent the vast majority of us, for we all have to work to “earn” a living, unless we were born into wealth and land.
Labour lost touch when they panicked after the 1983 election. They seemed to believe the propaganda directed against them: “The longest suicide note in history”- Labour 1983 manifesto.
“Militants running the party”.
“Nuclear disarmament would leave our country open to soviet invasion”
Etc. Etc.
The 1983 manifesto was carefully considered and democratically voted through. The militants as they were tarred, were committed party activists. Nuclear disarmament was more relevant in 1983 than it`s ever been in history.
With the Kinnockite purges of party activists, Labour lost impetus and started it`s long drift to the right to appease focus groups and commentators who argued that “the Left” belonged in the 1970`s and they shouldn`t argue the point. moving on was deemed more important – does that argument sound familiar? Tony Benn was one of the few who argued otherwise.
After 1992`s defeat Labour had another panic and moved further to the right and unnecessarily ditched core values.
We have a Labour party today that is afraid to argue or stand up for anything in case it upsets someone.
Meanwhile, the Tories, unafraid to be radical, are laying waste to our country.
Labour needs to wake up and realise voters don`t mind radical policies. People want a clear alternative to current politics, not just Tories or Tory lite parties and manifestos.
I know there are people who will argue the point differently, but unless Labour distances itself from Capitalism, the party will wither on the vine and die.
Then the vast majority of the people in the UK will have very little representation.