“I do not know if the people would vote for superior men if they ran for office,” Tocqueville once noted, “but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.” How easily those words spring to mind this summer in Britain. Here the opposition Labour party is voting for a new leader to replace Ed Miliband following its worst general election result since 1983. From a dire field, Jeremy Corbyn, the hard left candidate, is the runner with momentum. By common consent, his victory would condemn Labour to another general election defeat in 2020, with the potential for oblivion thereafter.
For Labour, this situation is a self-inflicted wound. Corbyn was supposed to be a joke candidate–the proto-Marxist sacrificial victim put up by the hard left at every Labour leadership election. Unable even to gather the 35 nominations from Labour MPs required to make it onto the ballot, a number of MPs, including former foreign secretary Margaret Beckett, signed his papers in order to give the party a full debate. “They should be ashamed of themselves,” says John McTernan, a former adviser to Tony Blair. “They’re morons.”
Those parliamentary “morons” failed to understand that the Labour Party in the country has shifted dramatically to the left. Moreover, given that you only have to pay £3 to register for a vote as a party “supporter,” entryism by extreme left groups such as Militant (not to mention a few mischievous Conservatives) has clearly been going on. Half of those eligible to vote have signed up in the last three months.
Even without the fringe element, most party supporters have rejected the center-ground politics of Tony Blair that won three successive elections for Labour between 1997 and 2010. Blairites are now seen as a “virus” in need of eradication. Liz Kendall, the neo-Blairite candidate, is regularly booed at hustings and condemned as a closet Tory. Many look instead to the success of the anti-austerity message of the Scottish National Party (SNP) at home, and Greece’s Syriza and Spain’s Podemos abroad, as a populist way to return Labour to power.
That argument might have validity if it didn’t fly in the face of facts. A Labour postmortem into the recent defeat shows that the existing anti-austerity message helped cost the party the general election. “The first hard truth is that the Tories didn’t win despite austerity,” says the report’s author, MP Jon Cruddas, “they won because of it.”
Corbyn’s policies, including higher taxes, more public spending, re-nationalization of utilities, scrapping Britain’s nuclear deterrent and a soft line on terrorist organizations, are unlikely to appeal to those middle-ground voters who rejected the party at the last election. Blairite-ultra David Aaronovitch provides a searing summary in The Times of Corbynite policies as a form of “state socialism…a deadening, bureaucratic nightmare, held together only by an antipathy towards America.”
And let’s be clear: Jeremy Corbyn loathes the United States and Western “imperialism.” Russia’s incursion into Ukraine? “It is the U.S. drive to expand eastwards which lies at the root of the crisis in the former Soviet republic.” The rise of ISIS? A result of Western military intervention in the region. The UK, he says, would be much better off “not being part of U.S. foreign policy at every step.” Corbyn and his followers profess an admiration for the landmark Labour government of 1945–51, but, as Clement Attlee’s biographer, John Bew, makes clear, their foreign policy is as far removed from Atlanticist tradition of Attlee and Ernest Bevan that constructed the NATO alliance as it is possible to get.
If Corbyn is unlikely to be Prime Minister, perhaps his foreign policy stance hardly matters. But with the Conservative government holding such a slender majority in the House of Commons, and every UK military campaign requiring assent from the House, Corbyn, as leader of the opposition, could have a seriously disruptive impact on Britain’s role as a member of the Atlantic alliance.
So how has a man who symbolizes the “loony left” and has voted against his own party in Parliament more than 500 times since 1997 now become a genuine contender to be its next leader?
Writing in the introduction to the recent Fabian Society report, “Never Again: Lessons from Labour’s Key Seats”, Andrew Adonis, a key figure from the social democratic wing of the party, notes that Labour’s recent general election result was “a defeat in the broad realm of ideas and positioning, not individual policies or leadership and campaign failures.”
And here perhaps we get to one reason why Jeremy Corbyn has momentum in the race to be leader. For Corbyn does have ideas, however delusional they may be. Watch the candidates in action at the hustings and you can see his real connection with the faithful.
And while Corbyn has a vision for what Britain should look like, his two main rivals, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper, hem and haw, offering not much more than bland platitudes. Liz Kendall, meanwhile, who does have ideas and vision, is doomed as the Jon Huntsman of the campaign; everyone admires her except those with a vote.
Politics is a war of ideas, and on this occasion a bad idea is on course to trump the “no idea” of the other viable candidates. But the real protagonist in the conflict lies elsewhere. For the rise of Jeremy Corbyn has less to do with the success of the hard left than the intellectual triumph of David Cameron and his strategist-in-chief: Finance Minister George Osborne.
Osborne is known throughout Westminster as an ardent student of history, who revels in the high politics of the Victorians. To use the terms deployed by the conservative scholar Maurice Cowling to analyze that era, Osborne has skillfully used both “maneuver” and “rhetoric” to construct the national political debate in the Conservative party’s favor, fighting and winning the last election on the dangerous terrain of austerity, sound finance, and debt reduction. He won the war of words that saw the previous Labour government defined as profligate and incompetent. And by making the UK the best-performing economy among the G7 nations, he has the figures to back up his rhetoric.
For Labour that has left two choices: embrace Osborne’s language of austerity as its own, giving it a social democratic twist; or reject it outright. Kendall says do the former; Corbyn the latter. The fact that Kendall looks set to come last tells us where most Labour supporters stand on that debate.
All of which is likely to mean that come the next general election, the British people will say “thank you, comrade” and vote for Tocqueville’s “superior men” on the other side. If Corbyn is declared leader on September 12, Labour may be out of power for a generation or more. Worse for Labour supporters, that may even still be the case if either Burnham or Cooper stumbles over the line courtesy of second preferences, so divided does the party look set to become. The winning alliance put together by Tony Blair has self-destructed.
Can Labour then pull itself back from the brink? When the movement emerged onto the political stage at the beginning of the 20th century, it did so as the party of the workers in a mass industrial society. Now in our postindustrial age, Labour has been destroyed in Scotland by the SNP, is under attack in its northern heartland from UKIP’s appeal to working class nationalism and the Conservative’s aggressive “northern powerhouse” strategy, and in southern England has apparently given up on those aspirations that Tony Blair understood so well. The party that Labour replaced a century ago, the Liberals, had until that time, in one form or another, been a dominant force since 1688; by 1923 they had been decimated at the polls and were destined thereafter for a minor role in British politics.
Political parties, historically speaking, do become irrelevant. Labour members might reflect on that fact when postal voting begins on August 14th.
