Thanks to the
last-minute entry into the Labour leadership race of Jeremy Corbyn, what began as
a tedious political sideshow by the party
that lost the election now has the potential to become an overdue debate about
the kind of country we want to live in.
If the first big
lie of the 21st century was Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, a
yarn spun by the US aided and abetted by New Labour and the second was that too
much public spending by a Labour government caused the financial crash, a lie which
the three establishment candidates refuse to refute, the third is surely that
Labour lost the 2015 general election because it was too anti-business and
frightened away the middle class.
That first lie is
why politicians have lost the trust of the people, and remains a burden borne
by even those Labour politicians who did not support the war, the second lie
provided the Tories with the pretext to finish off Thatcher’s attack on the
public sector and the welfare state. The third lie, easily disproved by the
data, available to those who wish to find it, and by the experiences of Labour
activists who were trying to get the vote out, was repeated ad nauseam by the initial candidates to
replace Ed Miliband. Taking their cue from the New Labour figures that sniped
at and undermined Ed Miliband right up to Election Day, they ruthlessly
established the narrative that what caused Labour’s defeat was Miliband’s
partial, flawed, but real attempt to distance Labour from the Blair-Brown years
and to tackle inequality. Attempts to be more like the Tories presented a
surreal spectacle to those voters, particularly Labour voters, who had not
turned out, or as protest, voted for UKIP, because they thought Labour and the
Tories were too much the same.
Liz Kendall
represents the distilled essence of Blairism: the abandonment of any
social-democratic project and the capturing of the political process by the
interests of business. Her
pronouncements of the need to ‘balance the books’ are indistinguishable from
the economically illiterate prescriptions of Osborne. There’s precious little
of the political tightrope walking, known in polite circles as triangulation; her
campaign is not that complicated! Who needs trade union backing when you’ve got
the Sun? It’s missing the point,
however, to label her as a Tory, as some do. In a way, she’s worse than that. She
genuinely believes that what she advocates is what a Labour government should
be doing. In that sense her campaign is a product of the political degeneration
and the hollowing out of the Labour party since the 1990s, although no doubt
she’d prefer to be called the ‘modernising ‘candidate
Cooper and
Burnham, on the contrary, are busy triangulating themselves into a frenzy. Both are incapable of uttering a sentence
which does not contain ‘aspirational’, code for ‘rich’ and not, it appears, the millions of peoples’
aspirations to have a home they can afford, a route into a secure employment
and good public services. Tacking right and then ‘left’, both admit that all is
not well with the world, while frantically back-pedalling from their former
leader’s modest attempts to do something about it. Both have been booed at hustings when they
have refused to commit themselves to opposition of the benefit cap, a policy so
open to challenge (large benefit payments are made to buy-to let-landlords and to
top up the earnings of those on poverty pay) that failure to oppose it is an
admission of political cowardice; no wonder Frankie Boyle referred to
candidates talking like hostages!
Corbyn’s entry has
changed the dynamics of the contest. Having an opponent who says what he
believes is an obvious challenge to the ‘triangulators’. Burnham, in
particular, must be tying himself in knots. On the one hand it relieves him of the burden of being ‘Red Andy’, but on the other, it limits his chance
to use his undoubted communication
skills to hone his well-used ‘northern man of the people’ routine, to convince
socialist in the party, with an nod and a wink, that he’s really one of them.
More fundamentally
Corbyn’s entry means that that the discussion ceases to the one about the
details of ‘austerity lite’. Corbyn is opposed to austerity, he supports
council housing, public services a living wage, rights at work and trade
unions; he is for the defence of the environment and he has a longstanding
opposition to nuclear weapons and the Iraq war. Add into the mix the fact that
non-members can pay £3 to become supporters and we could have less a leadership
campaign than a movement.
The ‘Overton
Window’ is a term sometimes used to describe the range of ideas which, in a
democracy, are regarded as electorally acceptable. The window may be pushed one
way or the other according to circumstance. In the UK, the Overton Window has
over the past 35 years been pushed to the right by the Tories, their outriders
and sections of the media, notably News International. When in power New Labour
did nothing to move it back to the left. By 2015 the three main Westminster
parties had converged on political terrain which 40 years ago would have been
the property of free market zealots and cranks: the privatisation of water and
fuel, the assumption that a roof over your head meant getting onto the ‘housing
ladder’ and a lifetime of debt, zero hours contracts, academy schools run by
big business, and so on. None of it really works, of course, except for those
who get rich as a result. The opprobrium heaped on Ed Miliband was the result
of his modest attempt to take on this tyranny of what Tariq Ali has called the “extreme
centre”. The same will no doubt be visited on Jeremy Corbyn, if he has any chance of winning.
The media, which
generally inhabits the same Overton Window as the politicians, is already
having difficulties in dealing with Corbyn’s campaign, as shown by the inane
question on Channel 4 News: ‘Was he to
the left of Karl Marx?’ It’s not that
the journalists are thick, or, necessarily, even consciously biased, it’s just
that many of those who entered the
profession in the last 20 years lack the
personal or professional hinterland to be able to understand properly what Corbyn’s campaign is all about.
Most of the
population doesn’t share the elite’s Overton Window. It is consistently to the
left of what were until May 7th the major parties on issues such as council
house building and the renationalisation of rail, energy and water. It is true
that those same people have concerns about immigration and many of them ,
apparently, support the benefit cap, because no Labour politician has had the
guts to take on the right on the those issues. Corbyn is doing that.
Can he win? He’s
been regarded by the media and the New Labour establishment as a quirky addition to the contest, albeit a
quaint throwback to our recent past, but
when people actually start listening to him, his life could be made very
difficult indeed. Others, New Labour-loving
media grandees such as John Rentoul. Martin Kettle and the increasingly
poisonous Dan Hodges are queuing up to make it clear that he cannot, or must
not win. Some Labour activists are saying they like him but he won’t win an election. Should their choice
be dictated by ‘head or heart’?
It’s a false dichotomy.
A party standing on an anti-austerity ticket did rather well in Scotland on
May, 7th and only by opposing austerity and outflanking the SNP from the left
can Labour win again in Scotland. As for the rest of the UK, campaigning on the
basis of ‘austerity lite’ ‘or ‘cutting too far too fast’ wasn’t exactly a sure-fire election winner,
was it?
If he does win, it
won’t be ‘business as usual’ in the Labour party – or anywhere else, for that
matter – and, even if he doesn’t, we may have another Scotland on our hands: a movement
out of the control of the professional politicians and the uncomprehending
media. Let’s hope so.
