Building Something To Last

Originally published at People’s Republic of Teesside, 11th January 2016

 

It’s a funny thing when all the obscure, arcane, sectarian polemical squabbles you’ve been embroiled in for years on the fringes of political discourse are suddenly catapulted to the forefront of national political debate.  But that is what has happened with the ascendancy of the Corbyinstas in the Labour Party in the last nine months, and it is extraordinary to see all the mutual bitterness and division I know so well from my involvement with the revolutionary left now playing out on a national stage.  We live in strange times.

I voted for Corbyn and don’t regret it.  I always thought the Party establishment he took on and defeated was tired, muddled and ideologically moribund, and his rivals in the leadership contest last summer appeared like a human embodiment of the kind of pre-2007 politics that no longer appealed to the party or the country — a parade of identitkit careerists, reared inside a managerialist New Labour “spadocracy” which reigned supreme in the long years of the last financial boom.

As the former Blair advisor Geoff Mulgan recently observed, “parties need periodic upheavals to remember what they are for.”  With its incredible transformation of Labour into a mass membership political party, and its tearing up of cosy shibboleths that have held sway in the party for decades (much as New Labour once did itself), I still think Corbynism is an upheaval that will benefit Labour in the long run, even if immediate electoral prospects look very bleak indeed.  (And I’m not convinced that his rivals would fare much better in the current context.)

And yet, much of what has happened in the first four months of Corbyn’s leadership has been shambolic.  Why?  For my money, there are three main reasons.

First and foremost, the lack of support for his politics among colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party — an organisation which has changed beyond recognition after 25 years of aggressive centre-right domination — makes his position almost impossible, and the fact that the PLP is almost entirely hostile means that Corbyn and his allies quite simply do not have the means to impose their will on the party in the way leaderships traditionally do (i.e. through appointments, briefings, party discipline, etc.).  Every attempt, by fair means or foul, to construct and then maintain a “party line” is met with howls of outrage and derision which simply add to the ongoing frenzy of opposition.  The fact that this puts the PLP at odds with the majority of the membership is a pickle to say the least.  Anthony Painter, himself no Corbynite, correctly argues:  “The calculation of a significant portion of the PLP seems to be that open public warfare is the means of swaying the members away from Corbyn. They may be right. I suspect it is making matters worse.”  

The extent to which many MPs are engaged in this open public warfare on Corbyn is of course embarrassing, but the other two factors contributing to the chaos are weaknesses inherent in Corbynism itself.   Firstly, the Corbynites belong to a beleaguered political faction (i.e. the Bennites) which is decades out of practice in the exercise of serious influence in mainstream Labour politics.  Unlike in its heydey back in the 1980s, this faction now lacks not just the numbers but also the expertise and infrastructure to steady the ship and conduct politics in the way people now expect.

This is reflected in the lack of professionalism which has been a hallmark of Corbyn’s leadership since the beginning, from the unnecessary blunder of McDonnell’s U-turn on the deficit to the dramatic shadow cabinet reshuffle last week which seemed to last forever.  Of course, other elements of this unprofessionalism have been more endearing — e.g. Corbyn’s unrehearsed media performances — and may even benefit the party given the anti-politics mood which is a defining feature of the era.  But the Corbynites’ lack of collective experience is needlessly rubbing people up the wrong way, and their enemies in the PLP need no invitation whatsoever to plunge the knife in and twist it.

The other problem inherent in Corbynism is the one that really brings back memories of those internecine far-left battles which (I’ve heard) continue to rage in the darker corners of the blogosphere.  The Tory researchers and journalists who spend hours trawling through the social media accounts and back catalogue publications of Labour MPs, candidates and organisers can tap into a veritable treasure trove of contentious quotes from Corbyn and his close allies on the vexed question of foreign policy.  Unfortunately, this is about more than just the twisting of words, because in so many respects the Corbynites’ politics in this area have been just genuinely bad, and do nothing to improve the image of a party which is already vulnerable on questions of national security.

The two most famous examples of this are Corbyn and McDonnell’s erstwhile support/praise for the IRA (detailed here in a Telegraph article which quotes extensively from old issues of London Labour Briefing), and Corbyn’s involvement in the Stop the War Coalition, an organisation which actively whitewashes some hideous regimes that are about as anti-socialist as you can get (see this classic example from 2007 in which a Stop the War speaker flatly deniesthat Ahmedinejad’s Iranian regime is undemocratic).  Such nonsense doesn’t come out of nowhere — it is part and parcel of the political milieu in which these groups and individuals belong.  Phil BC explains in more detail here how a particular strain of Leninist anti-imperialism and “revolutionary defeatism” can be seen to underpin much of Corbyn and Stop the War’s thinking in relation to international politics, which is hardly surprising given the dominance of groups such as the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of Britain in StWC’s organisational structures.  Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey provide further historical context here.  Their analysis of the latest developments in the Party has more than a ring of truth about it, though perhaps overplays the influence of “Leninism” as such (which is itself a bitterly contested idea):

It is certainly not a Leninist takeover of Labour.  Corbyn’s mindset is indebted to Leninism, but the Labour Party members and supporters who voted for him were and are people who wanted a change of tack on austerity and foreign military intervention. What they’ve  got isn’t what they wanted. Putting it crudely, a handful of Leninists past and present have been given key bureaucratic positions by a hard-left Leninist-fellow-travelling leadership. Or to frame it differently: in choosing his team, Corbyn took a leaf out of Livingstone’s book and co-opted Leninist organisational talent for reforming and social-democratic ends.    

Of course, the Tories, the Sun and the Daily Mail, as well as most MPs and members on the right of the Labour Party, have no moral ground whatsoever on which to criticise any of this — especially, in the case of the latter, given their curious lack of outrage over all manner of shenanigans during the Blair, Brown and Miliband years.  Sadly, though, that won’t stop them flinging mud at Corbyn when it suits them, and I worry about how a party communications strategy led by Seumus Milne will respond.

Nevertheless, if Corbyn and his team can survive, there is still much to celebrate and much to be done; it must only be appreciated that the type of change Corbyn is pursuing takes years to come to fruition (and for those who cry “we don’t have years!” – yes, we do actually). To hear the kinds of arguments Corbyn is espousing in the mainstream — workers’ rights, anti-racism, pro-migration, anti-austerity — is a major advance in British politics and I just hope that such ideas will seep back into the national consciousness if they can be honed and presented in a more coherent way.  Even if Corbyn sees no immediate benefit to his electoral prospects, I suspect future leaders might; and the fact that Jeremy Corbyn, a decent man in a dishonest business, is blazing a trail for socialist ideas in a more open, diverse and pluralistic national political culture, is why I still believe Corbynism is worthy of critical support.