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.
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47 Responses to “The problem with the Corbyn strategy”
Darren Cahil
I think it is an expression of demoralisation more than anything. My point against Fielding’s logic is that I still think it is correct to win over people to the principle of democratic socialism, to transform the Labour party into a partisan of the working class. The option put forward by Fielding is that of a lesser evilism of a right-wing Labour party counter posed to a right-wing Tory party does not help us, it leads to demoralisation of the working class to put winning elections, above that of winning over less class conscious workers, better to stay as a principled opposition, rather than win power and then implement policies of another class, just ask Greece how that’s working out?
Because in 2015, the Blarite formula of ‘promising to keep to Conservative spending limits, but’ winning ‘reelection in 2001 having convinced a once-sceptical public that a massive increase in government spending on schools and hospitals was actually ‘investment’’, will not work in a post ‘Great recession’ of 2008. After the China stock market wobble, the world capitalist system is looking more unstable. The fact is Osborne and co showed their weakened confidence in the global economy when they talked about “red flags” in the global economy in the pre-election 2015 period.
Nick
I don’t see why not ? whats the point of living in a country that goes out of it’s way to make the lives of the sick and disabled kill themselves or to die through DWP negligence?
just because the uk government dislikes like many other countries the sick and disabled it does not mean to say that all of the people do because they don’t
half the people may say yes to their demise but Corbyn needs to fight their cause if he were to become leader on behalf of those that do support the sick and disabled
otherwise this group of people will be wiped out over the long term along with other groups of people so the country will need someone like Corbyn to fight their corner because no one else is that’s for sure
If it means labour staying in opposition and Corbyn keeps some sick and disabled people alive to my mind that will be worth it because the elderly are living longer and that will be the next tory cut to come along and that’s to get rid of this large group of people
Perry525
If you repeat something, over and over eventually, people come to beleive it.
The Torys repeat the same lies over and over, why is there no challenge from Labour.
What is wrong, with correcting these lies, instead of letting them go unchallenged?
Many think Labour didn’t want to be elected in 2010 and 2015 – because they didn’t try hard enough.
Asteri
New Labour and the Blairism that this website loves was invented purely for people who are basically right-wingers but think they are too cool and “edgy” for the Tories.
JAMES MCGIBBON
If the Labour Party think moving to the left will get them elected then they should honour the Stasi.
Britain is a wealthy country. MILLIONS OF WORKING CLASS have moved on and into the middle and upper middle class bracket. They hold the key during elections. People move on and forget about the struggles their granny went through. Labour cannot just claim to represent a minority but must appeal to everyone or end up in total oblivion. Look what has happened in Scotland we now have the Tartan Tories anti trade unions in charge. The SNP will vote against Westminster anti trade union reform because they can and it will not affect them. They will blame the Tories although silently agreeing with them.