Corbynism

Matt Bolton, Frederick Harry Pitts

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781787543713
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From the moment Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader, Corbynism has been dismissed, derided or romanticised, but rarely taken seriously as a set of ideas on its own terms. This book critically outlines the shared understanding of capitalism and its alternatives that unites the component parts of the Corbyn movement. It decodes the central tenets of the Corbynist worldview, showing their coherence with contemporary political-economic shifts and conspiratorial understandings of global capitalism as a 'rigged system' common to populist nativism in an age of Trump and Brexit.

1

EXPLAINING 2017: THE RISE AND FALL OF AUSTERITY POPULISM

In the days following the 2017 General Election, British politics was awash with mea culpas. Self-flagellating apologies poured out of every paper, news programme and political website. Channel 4 newsreader Jon Snow epitomised the general masochistic tone the day following the result: ‘I know nothing. We, the media, the pundit, the experts, know nothing. We simply didn’t spot it.’¹ And he had a point. Ever since Jeremy Corbyn’s shock victory in 2015 Labour leadership contest, there was barely a pundit, psephologist or policy wonk who had not predicted electoral catastrophe. Yet it had not come to pass. On the contrary – Corbyn’s Labour had gained 30 seats, deprived a once imperious Theresa May of her majority, and, perhaps most startling of all, had won 40 per cent of the popular vote. At a stroke a whole plethora of political truisms disintegrated: Corbynism was a ‘movement’ more clicktivist than canvasser, Corbyn himself was electorally toxic, Labour faced a 1931-style demolition and the total collapse of its Parliamentary presence. Notwithstanding that Labour did not win, and will likely need an even bigger push to win next time, all had proven to be categorically wrong – even the clicktivism proved moderately successful.² Once the ritual humiliation was over, and the MPs who had opposed Corbyn from the start had swallowed their pride, some sheepishly joining in with the chants of ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’, the experts and analysts began to collect the shards of their shattered worldview and rearrange them in the light of this new situation. How was this result possible? What had we all missed?

It was not as if historical precedent had not backed up the catastrophist thesis. There was 1983 of course, the last time the programme of the so-called Labour ‘hard left’ had been put to the test in an election. Electoral carnage and seventeen years of opposition had followed. But there were more recent warning signs too. In 2015, Ed Miliband had risked a slight shift to the left, banking on an upswell of support amongst a ‘squeezed middle’ after five years of Conservative–Liberal Democrat public sector cuts. It seemed like a plausible move – which was why the election result, when it arrived, was such a body blow. Cameron and Osborne had sold the need for cuts off the back of the government deficit and debt run up in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. Their explanation for the crash and subsequent debt was that it was the direct result of Labour’s ‘overspending.’ The only solution to such wasteful extravagance, they argued, was thus a severe bout of ‘austerity’, in which spending on public services would be progressively cut back until the government bank balance was back in the black. So successful was this narrative that Miliband had not been able to say a word during the 2015 campaign without the question of ‘the deficit’ being thrown at him. In order to try to fend off such attacks and carve out the space to be heard on his own terms, the very first page of his manifesto declared that not a single Labour pledge required a penny of extra borrowing. But even this display of neurosis was not enough. When polling day arrived, the Tories won their first majority for a quarter of a century.

Come 2017, and Labour’s prospects seemed even worse. The vote to leave the European Union (EU) set alight the inferno of nationalism, imperial nostalgia and anti-migrant revanchism that UKIP leader Nigel Farage had long been stoking, bringing down the Cameron government with it. The new Prime Minister was Theresa May, whose stint as Home Secretary was best known for her desire to create a ‘hostile environment’ for migrants, including ordering a fleet of vans emblazoned with the injunction to ‘go home’ to drive around ethnically diverse areas of London. In the weeks following her ascension to power, May had attempted to capitalise on the nativist spring unleashed by Brexit – railing against cosmopolitan ‘citizens of nowhere’ whose loyalty was to the international flows of capital, commodities and labour rather than to the ‘ordinary working class people’ rooted in local communities.³ She had interpreted the narrow 52–48% Leave victory in the most extreme way possible, promising Brexit voters that she would leave the Single Market in order to end the freedom of Europeans to live and work in Britain and restore a supposedly lost ‘sovereignty’ – whatever the cost. Her hopes of bringing the substantial UKIP vote into the Tory fold and gain a foothold in Leave-voting Labour seats seemed to have paid off by the time she called a ‘snap’ election in April 2017. May had built up a formidable lead in the polls. She had the vociferous and unanimous support of the rightwing press who, aroused at the prospect of ‘hard Brexit’, called for her to ‘crush the saboteurs’ and enact ‘blue murder’ on any opposition.⁴

The idea that a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn – in the eyes of his critics inside and outside the party metropolitan, tax-and-spend, pro-immigration – could avoid electoral wipeout in such unpropitious circumstances seemed implausible even to some of his biggest supporters. Indeed, Len McCluskey, the head of the Unite union who had long been one of Corbyn’s most steadfast backers, claimed a month before election day that keeping Labour’s losses down to 30 seats would constitute ‘success.’⁵ To make matters worse, Corbyn could not even claim to straightforwardly represent the 48% who had voted Remain, overwhelmingly concentrated in cities and younger demographics – his core constituency. Corbyn, like his mentor Tony Benn, had opposed British membership of the EU for his entire career. From the Bennite perspective, the EU was a ‘bosses club’ imposing neoliberal strictures upon the British nation-state, particularly through the political and economic infrastructure of the Single Market.⁶ Corbyn’s internal critics suspected that his lukewarm campaigning during the referendum had its roots in this historic antipathy, which set him at odds with much of his own base, particularly younger voters, as well as the party’s own democratically-decided policy.

This contradiction had been exacerbated by the post-referendum support shown by both Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell for May’s hardline position of leaving the Single Market and the Customs Union – neither of which had been mooted during the Referendum campaign. Corbyn thus seemed to have adopted what journalist Stephen Bush described as a ‘0% strategy’.⁷ His continued support for immigration and free movement alienated the 52% who had voted Leave, while his insistence on leaving the Single Market angered the 48%, both in terms of the economic consequences of such a drastic move, but also because many viewed EU membership as an expression of an open-minded, internationalist outlook. The combination of the deficit, immigration, and the nationalist energies unleashed by the Leave vote seemed insurmountable. Even as the Labour election campaign seemed to be gaining momentum and the Tory effort very publicly falling apart, the conditions for Labour gains seemed so remote that they blinded everyone to what was happening on the ground.

Nearly everyone, at least. For the left’s true believers, there was nothing surprising about the 2017 result when it came. It was what they had predicted for decades, if only someone had listened. Throughout the dark days of the Kinnock and New Labour eras, the so-called ‘hard left’ of the party had insisted that what the electorate was really craving was a no-holds-barred socialist party who would break with the neoliberal consensus and offer a real choice. When Labour lost elections as in 2015, this subterranean consensus suggested, it was not because they had moved too far to the left. It was because they were not left enough. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Miliband’s problem was not that he failed to convince voters he took the issue of the deficit seriously. Nor was the bout of English nativism which Cameron had engendered (somewhat portentously, given what was to come) by raising the spectre of a Labour coalition with the Scottish National Party to blame. Rather Miliband’s defeat could be explained by his failure to sufficiently differentiate Labour’s platform from that of the Conservatives, falling back on what Corbyn himself described as an ‘austerity-lite’ manifesto.⁸ This belief helped fuel Corbyn’s victory in the leadership campaign following Miliband’s resignation. More than anything else, Corbyn’s rise was driven by Labour members’ sheer frustration at Miliband’s failure to forcibly challenge the Conservative’s narrative around austerity and the deficit, and exasperation that none of the other candidates for Labour leader – all tarnished by association with the Blair-Brown years and lacking credibility in their claims to authenticity and charisma – seemed to recognise the urgency of doing so. If nothing else, so the theory went, at least Corbyn could be trusted to deliver an unadulterated anti-austerity message.

From this perspective, Corbyn’s performance in the 2017 election had shown this analysis to be right all along. For his fans, a properly socialist leader had put forward a properly socialist manifesto, in the teeth of ferocious opposition both internal and external – and the result had been anything but calamitous. Labour had run an energetic, positive, smart campaign. Labour thrived off a cleverly leaked manifesto, a series of simple policies that set the pace on radio news bulletins, Corbyn’s unflappable debate performances and regional television coverage of a constant series of city-specific rallies.⁹ The quick-witted air war was backed up online and through unprecedented numbers of volunteers taking to the streets to engage potential Labour voters and getting them to turn out on polling day.¹⁰ Through the courage of the leadership and the commitment of those pacing the streets and flooding social media, Labour had overturned the austerity consensus. They had refused to kowtow on immigration numbers, bow to Brexit nativism or scapegoat those on benefits, so the story went. They had stood up against the forces of reaction which were on the rise across the globe. And they had had won the support of 40 per cent of the electorate in doing so, against all odds. This was vindication.

A romantic tale, no doubt – and not without an element of truth. Certainly the disintegration of Cameron and Osborne’s austerity narrative was the crucial factor in Corbyn’s success. Two years previously the deficit had strangled Miliband’s campaign at birth. It was the most powerful adversary in British politics, squeezing the life out of every other issue. And yet, astonishingly, in the 2017 campaign the words ‘debt’ and ‘deficit’ were barely mentioned.¹¹ It was fought instead on the basis of sentiment, emotion, culture and ‘values’.¹² There can surely have been no issue which has suffered such a dramatic change in political fortunes in such a short space of time. More than anything else – more than Momentum’s sterling electioneering, more than the meme-makers pumping out jpgs and gifs, more than the fabled manifesto – it is the strange death of the deficit which holds the key to explaining Labour’s remarkable performance in 2017.

AUSTERITY POPULISM

The collapse of the international banking sector in 2008, as credit markets seized up following the revelation of huge levels of toxic sub-prime debt throughout the system, overturned three decades of economic wisdom. Governments who had vowed to give the financial markets a free hand were now called upon to bail out the banks to the tune of billions. Electorates around the world demanded answers. How had this happened? Who was responsible? For those competing for political power in the wake of the crash, the overriding priority was to construct a narrative that was able to explain the crisis to the public, justify a particular policy response, and pin the blame for economic disaster elsewhere. And no political narrative succeeded on all three counts to such an extent as that constructed by David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg, the leading figures in the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government which came to power in 2010.

Austerity is often taken to have caused the contemporary rise of populism.¹³ In retrospect, however, it is abundantly clear that austerity itself was a populist project – both in Chantal Mouffe’s sense of the creation of a political frontier between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and Jan-Werner Müller’s notion of the hyper-moralisation of political discourse. How else to explain the singularly odd way that Britain responded to the financial crisis? The Cameron government was far from the only one to react to the crash and their ballooning deficits by insisting on the need for a programme of austerity. But in no other country did the public don hairshirts with such gusto. As Owen Hatherley has noted, Britain was convulsed by a fit of ‘austerity nostalgia’ in the wake of the crisis – unleashing dark political energies Tom Whyman captured well in the coinage ‘cupcake fascism’.¹⁴ This mood was epitomised by the ubiquitous ‘Keep Calm and Carry on’ poster, which seemed to pine for ‘an actual or imaginary English patrician attitude of stoicism and muddling through’, the reprise of an age marked by make-do-and-mend thrift and ‘hardiness in the face of adversity.’¹⁵ It was as if the public actively welcomed the collapse of the economy, regarding it as an event which finally gave some meaning to a life waylaid by the cheap thrills of credit-fuelled consumerism and reality TV, a form of existence that suddenly felt as toxic as the junk bonds clogging up the balance sheets of banks around the world.

The austerity narrative was founded on an opposition between a national community of ‘hardworking people’ and a feckless underclass who had brought Britain to its knees – namely the ‘scroungers’, the benefit cheats, those too lazy to work and choosing to live off the largesse of the state.¹⁶ In this telling, the financial crisis itself was essentially caused by the Labour government’s reckless decision to rack up monstrous debts in order to fund the lavish lifestyles of their shiftless clientele. In contrast to this rotten coalition of bloated state, corrupt liberal-left political elite, and workshy scroungers, the Tories would instead take the side of the ‘hardworkers’, those willing to take responsibility for their own lives and roll up their sleeves to ‘sort out Labour’s mess’.¹⁷ ‘We’re all in it together’ was the cry, deliberately evoking the Churchillian spirit of wartime. The ‘deficit’ – and those responsible for it – was turned into a national enemy whose defeat, as in the Blitz, depended upon a heroic act of collective endurance, a momentous sacrifice of abstention in order to save the country, and indeed future generations, from financial ruin.

This was classic ‘productivist’ discourse. The economically active (the ‘hardworking families’, the inhabitants of ‘alarm clock Britain’) were presented as morally superior to the non-productive (the unemployed at the bottom, the state itself at the top), who are portrayed as a parasitic drain on the resources of the former. Britain’s economic woes were the result of the non-productive being allowed to gain political and economic dominance over the productive, an imbalance that was both economically disastrous and morally reprehensible. ‘Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?’ George Osborne asked in his 2012 conference speech. ‘When we say we’re all in this together, we speak for that worker.’¹⁸ The only solution to such a dire situation was to either force the non-productive minority to become productive themselves, through a ramped-up programme of ‘workfare’, or cut them off from any state subsidy whatsoever via savage benefit cuts and sanctions, consequences be damned. The implication was that public spending on services for the productive might once again be possible as soon as this parasitic excrescence was no longer allowed to deplete the vitality from society. Austerity was thus both economically necessary and morally right, an act of national rebirth in which the dregs of the old society would be cast off and the new rebuilt around the righteous desires of the productive.

It is doubtful whether Cameron and Osborne actually believed their claims of a causal relation between Labour welfare spending, the crash and the deficit. Indeed, in an interview in 2017, after he had left Parliament, Osborne admitted he did not.¹⁹ The demonization of ‘scroungers’ and pinning the blame for the crash on the previous Labour government was a political manoeuvre designed to legitimate a broader strategy to cut public expenditure and fundamentally change the relation of state to society. It set the template for what was probably the most brazen lie in British political history a few years later – the promise that leaving the EU would mean £350m a week extra for the NHS, a pledge that was immediately recanted the morning after the vote to Leave.²⁰

The difference between the two was that the austerity narrative retained its connection to matters of prosperity in the last instance, even if that prosperity was by no means distributed evenly across society – whereas the Leave campaign’s claim was used to force through a policy which virtually every economist agreed would reduce Britain’s economic well-being. Thus in 2013, once his austerity policies looked like they were seriously threatening to thrust the economy back into recession, Osborne changed tack. He ‘paused’ austerity by pushing plans for further cuts back into the next Parliament, stimulating a period of economic growth in the run-up to the 2015 election.²¹ The ‘belt-tightening’ rhetoric did not change, but the policy did – which is not to say that the ‘pause’ provided any real relief for those still reeling from the effects of the cuts already implemented, or reduced the impact of those still to come. The point is merely that when it came to the crunch, economic realism trumped the ideological narrative. While Cameron and Osborne were happy to utilise populist tropes as a tool when necessary, their government retained a core of general economic rationalism. The way in which they went about managing the economy is up for dispute – but their attachment to principle of economic interest itself is not.

The extent of Cameron and Osborne’s bad faith matters less than the extraordinary power generated by the concept of austerity. It seemed to tap into a force that was far greater than the trivialities of day-to-day politics. It drilled down into deep-lying reserves of national sentiment and cultural memory, conjuring up image after idealised image of a past that had never actually existed, but whose retrieval was nevertheless held to unlock the door to an authentic life. The energy and intensity of this torrent of false nostalgia inevitably overwhelmed valiant technocratic arguments about the historically low cost of state borrowing, relative bond yields or interest rates. Charged with such cultural significance, the political and media debate around ‘the deficit’ could never have been one based on reasonable consideration of the various approaches to a post-crisis economy.

For all the criticism hurled at Ed Miliband and Ed Balls by Corbyn supporters for their supposed ‘austerity-lite’ programme, there was in truth no shortage of attempts to put forward alternative proposals to the Conservative–Liberal ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1. Explaining 2017: The Rise and Fall of Austerity Populism
• 2. The Preconditions of Corbynism: On Two-Campism
• 3. On The Right Side of History: The Moral Mythology of Corbynism
• 4. Taking Back Control: Corbynism In One Country
• 5. ‘Things Can and they Will Change’: Class, Postcapitalism and Left Populism
• 6. The Rigged System: Corbynism and Conspiracy Theory
• Conclusion: A Politics of Pessimism
• Endnotes
• Index