Corbyn

by Richard Seymour

  III

  The world, for a start. In the past few decades, it has been taken for granted among the majority of journalists and politicians that something miraculous was taking place: globalisation.

  The world was converging, under the relatively benign tutelage of Washington, toward a liberal world order. With the vast global expansion of trade availed by the global rollback of capital controls and tariffs, a series of institutions of global governance sprang up, as well as a patchwork of regional trading alliances rolling out property rights, and rolling back barriers to trade such as public ownership, and environmental or labour protections. It was, to coin a phrase, capitalism en marche: investor rights sans frontières. A post-democratic world system in which the US trade representative would potentially have more power than any national monarch or president.

  This situation was taken for granted. It was the way of the world. There was no alternative. The liberal journalist George Packer argued that ‘rejecting globalisation was like rejecting the sunrise’.1 And besides, it was benevolent: a rising tide would lift all boats, while judicious exertions of military force would iron out any wrinkles in an increasingly flat earth. But there are growing signs since the global financial crash that we have reached, as one of John McDonnell’s advisors, economist James Meadway, put it, ‘peak globalisation’. World trade is still growing, but far less rapidly than before the credit crunch, and more slowly than global GDP. According to the World Trade Organization, the ratio of trade growth to GDP growth fell to 0.6:1 in 2016. Financial internationalism, wherein banks extend their reach increasingly globally, is slowing down. Protectionism is on the rise across the G20, and various governments – notably the Chinese – have imposed capital controls.2

  This is a crisis of globalisation, and, with that, a crisis of all the taken-for-granted wisdom about globalisation. Economists have been changing their minds, and so have voters. The crisis has exposed layers of people who never particularly cared for ‘globalisation’, but who were submerged in the rising tide. In the backwash, the economy is being politicised once more. Many of the most prominent expressions of this are on the Right. President Trump’s repudiation of the Trans Pacific Partnership has cost hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue for US corporations. His threat to renegotiate NAFTA could have been even more costly if seen through. At the G20 summit in Hamburg, US negotiators actively opposed global liberalism on trade and climate change, to the dismay of Angela Merkel, recently dubbed the new ‘leader of the free world’ by an impressively broad array of journalists and columnists.

  These moves were based on extraordinary political fantasies: that, for example, world trade had enriched a rising Asian middle class at the expense of white American workers, that America was being cheated by Mexicans at every turn, and that global warming was an expensive Chinese-perpetrated swindle. And all of this, of course, the Trump campaign blamed on cosmopolitan elites, ‘globalists’ who may have been born American, but lack national belonging. These fantasies are a kind of racist dreamwork, part of the same outlook which says that African Americans caused the global crisis and a Kenyan stole the presidency. But they have found fertile ground beyond their usual redoubts because they give coded expression to elements of experience. They work on the relative decline and economic isolation of those parts of America which did not benefit from the expansion of finance and communications technologies, where major corporations, lobbies, and parties did not have headquarters, and where the ‘old economy’ was still ‘the economy’.

  In Europe, an energised far Right has found a similar set of fantasies, wherein out-of-touch metropolitan elites are accused of collaborating with a Brussels despotism to ship national law-making powers to an incipient European superstate – a new Soviet empire, an ‘EUSSR’, with its own rouble. They charge the European Union with having allowed Eastern Europeans to cheat and undercut the workforces of North West Europe and usurp national public resources, and with preparing a fresh influx of Turks to really kill off living standards. They charge that these politically correct, out-of-touch elites have made a nefarious alliance with the enemy, jihadists. In the United Kingdom, the Brexit campaign was suffused with this sort of racist paranoia.

  But it wasn’t just the Right that began to politicise the economy. The Left has also had its say, from Syriza to Podemos to La France Insoumise. The victory for Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership, and even the tentative gains for the Left in the leaderships of the French and Spanish Socialists are part of the same process. This points to a crucial mistake which pundits and psephologists made about Brexit. They had assumed that, in Britain at least, the politicisation of the economy would only effectively benefit the hard, nationalist Right. They assumed that the only strategy open to the Left was a defensive, centre-seeking strategy. That the Left’s only option was to depoliticise the economy, accept the verities of ‘globalisation’ and of the post-Thatcherite settlement, and uncritically defend the European institutions.

  The Left has long had criticisms of the European Union, from the Commission to the central bank, the single market, the customs union, and the Eurozone. But, so the logic ran, it had to suppress these for the sake of unity in a Remain campaign pivoted on a technocratic defence of ‘the economy’ – as if anyone still believed that the economy was socially neutral. The kernel of truth in this was that, though Corbyn’s leadership signalled a revival of the Left’s fortunes, it was still relatively fragile and unprepared for the European referendum campaign. A Left exit campaign would surely have little social resonance in a terrain dominated for so long by the hard Right. For that reason, Corbyn had campaigned for leader on the basis not of his traditional Euroscepticism, but as a critical Remainer – he argued that the EU needed to be reformed, but that leaving would be worse than staying in.

  Nonetheless, Corbyn’s mild criticisms of the EU from within the Remain campaign, and his refusal to campaign alongside David Cameron, were regarded by journalists as weakening the campaign, and by Labour centrists as sabotage. This became the basis for a failed coup attempt against his leadership within Labour. And in the aftermath, Brexit having won, the logic became that Labour’s urgent task was to give up its insurgent leftism and cleave to the nationalist Right by taking a hard line on immigration. The long-gathering commentariat chorus, especially from its liberals, had suggested that Labour’s electoral problems were crucially about its failure to connect to the nationalism of ordinary voters, and speak in an unembarrassed way about patriotism. This found a fitting apotheosis in the absurd persecution of Emily Thornberry for implicitly ‘disrespecting’ the flag-toting white van man. Unsurprisingly, then, when the liberal knee jerked after Brexit, it jerked right in the direction of immigrants. Typical of this was Polly Toynbee, who faulted Corbyn for defending ‘free migration on the eve of a poll where Labour was haemorrhaging support for precisely those metropolitan views’, before adding, ‘if Labour wants to get its voters back, it can’t block its ears as Corbyn, the party’s leader, does.’ Likewise, Andy Burnham insisted that the Brexit vote was ‘against free movement’ and that Labour must now find a new ‘balance’. He added the gloss, shared by UKIP, of blaming free movement for ‘a race to the bottom’ in living standards.3

  The Left indeed looked weaker and more isolated as a result of the Brexit vote; Labour seemed aimless and adrift, and having recovered some of its lost core vote in the year before the decision, it began losing more seats than it won. The loss of the by-election in Copeland and the just-about-victory in Stoke, precipitated by two right-wing Labour MPs resigning, appeared to have seriously weakened the leadership. As with the independence referendum in Scotland, the Brexit referendum looked to have remoulded politics in England and Wales along nationalist lines. And immigration was the number-one issue. The Tories took a huge lead in national opinion polls, and it was predicted that with UKIP votes filtering back into the Conservative fold, many Labour majorities in traditional heartlands of the North, the West Midlands, an
d Wales would succumb to a blue tide.

  With a few notable exceptions, that did not take place. Labour politicised the economy from the Left, promising nationalisations, redistribution, an offensive against the wealth-hoarding rich, an end to the public sector pay freeze, workers’ rights, a higher minimum wage, housing, and an expanded social wage especially in terms of free education. The Labour manifesto completely changed the terrain, so that class was as important as nation to the final outcome.

  On Brexit, Labour insisted that it would not oppose the referendum verdict, and adopted a position of productive ambiguity as regards any final settlement, although Corbyn let it be known that he would prefer tariff-free trade outside the single market. On free movement, Corbyn stated that Labour was ‘not wedded’ to it, but also refused to offer any target for reducing migration, and refuted right-wing arguments blaming immigrants for low wages and austerity. Many media outlets interpreted the election result as a surge of young middle-class people furious about Brexit – the ‘revenge of the Remainers’, as Robert Ford claimed, despite his predictions about the impact of Brexit having been falsified. According to studies by Loughborough University, the course of the election campaign saw a definite shift away from Brexit as the number-one issue.4

  It would be glib to reduce Labour’s appeal entirely to a class-populist one, not least because class is so critically tied to other social distinctions, such as race, gender, and generation. The effects of precarious employment and low wages, of welfare cuts and the marketisation of the university system, are all borne disproportionately by the young. The lethal effects of poor housing and gentrification, as Grenfell tragically showed, are disproportionately borne by ethnic minorities and migrant populations. And Corbyn was swimming with the generational tide on a whole range of issues, from trans rights to Trident. The younger generations are, to put it crudely, less impressed by flags, authorities, and men with guns. This generational polarisation was painfully apparent during a special BBC Question Time edition in which both Corbyn and May, separately, faced questioning from the assembled audience. Corbyn was grilled intensively on his opposition to nuclear weapons, his meetings with Hamas representatives, and his supposed ‘IRA links’ by a number of older white men in the crowd. In particular, the fact that he refused to commit to pushing the button infuriated these audience members, leading a young woman to comment, ‘I don’t understand why everyone in this room seems so keen on killing millions of people.’

  However, what this showed, and what the punditry largely did not understand, was that the working class was changing. The assumption for a long time had been that the melancholic, older, ‘white working class’ was the authentic voice of working-class Britain. Corbyn’s campaign demonstrated that this was yet another point on which received wisdom was wrong.

  IV

  What did the punditry misunderstand about class? In part, the melancholic ideology of the ‘white working class’ was corroborated by polling practices. The majority of polling organisations called the result badly wrong. Only YouGov and Survation consistently showed results close to the outcome, and YouGov made some final adjustments on its standard polling to reduce Labour’s share to 36 per cent. Why did this happen? In some ways, for perfectly good reasons. In 2015, polling companies had significantly overstated the level of Labour’s support, suggesting that there might be a hung parliament, when the Tories won the election with a comfortable lead. Their own inquiries suggested that they had overrepresented the young and the unemployed, groups with a tendency to show a low turnout. On the basis of this, the polling companies made weighting adjustments to account for likelihood to vote based on past turnout.

  In 2017, for YouGov’s and Survation’s estimates to be correct, one had to believe that these voters, especially the young, would buck the trend and turn out in much bigger numbers. This, of course, is exactly what they did. Turnout among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds rose by 16 per cent in 2017, according to Ipsos Mori figures.5 However, while this shocked most pollsters and pundits, it did not surprise those involved in the Labour campaign. When I interviewed one of Corbyn’s aides, Marsha-Jane Thompson, for the first edition of this book, she argued that the polls might have been underestimating Labour’s support because they were assuming that the electorate would be the same as in 2015. Indeed, part of Corbyn’s strategy was precisely to reach out to previous non-voters with a programme of radical social democracy.

  On what basis did psephologists and commentators assume this couldn’t be done? Simply, a senior Labour advisor told me, because it was a truism: non-voters never turn out. The empiricist model of polling didn’t bother to ask why non-voters were non-voters in the first place; it simply noted habitual non-voting and weighted the results accordingly. Insofar as anyone did attempt an explanation for non-voting within the commentariat, it was often insulting. A Times column published before the election summarises the main idea nicely. Taxing Corbyn for a ‘cynical’ approach to young people, promising them all kinds of goodies to get their votes, it added,

  As everyone knows, come election time under-25s are the worst group at showing up to vote. This isn’t for any profound reason: some young people are, as Catherine Tate would put it, simply not ‘bovvered’ about politics and may not even know who Theresa May is, let alone be able to make educated choices about her or her rivals. The left, which can only win by exploiting their ignorance, therefore sets about trying to buy them with gimmicks, whether it’s Snapchat videos or promises of student funding which don’t stack up.6

  To reiterate, this piece was arguing that it was Corbyn who was cynical about the young. The unspoken fear of such pieces, that the young would actually turn out for a party that offered them something to vote for, was echoed in the cynicism of Rod Liddle in the Sun, who advised readers that ‘the civic thing to do is to stop them voting’. ‘Let them lie in,’ he suggested, ‘introduce them to LSD’ or ‘tell them the election is tomorrow’.7 Notwithstanding this contempt for the young as a vacuous horde of un-bovvered, lazy, ignorant social media addicts, as Chapter 1 shows there is ample evidence that non-voting has been linked to protest against the choices on offer, and that those least likely to turn out are not just young, but more likely to be poor and unemployed. The gerontocratic fear of the young was in part also a fear of the disobedient working class. Nonetheless, most polling firms insisted that they wouldn’t turn out, and most pundits agreed.

  The problems with polling go deeper than its tendency to reproduce received wisdom. Polling measures individual opinions as though they were roughly equivalent units, and the resulting ‘public opinion’ is the aggregate of these units. Methodologically, it makes the assumption that those answering the questions each have the same force of conviction and the same range of competences, before applying post hoc ‘weighting’ to surveys of voting intention based on past turnout. But opinions don’t work that way. People are often conflicted in their views, an ambivalence that becomes obvious when the same question worded slightly differently produces sharply different results. Posed a question that they don’t care about or feel competent to answer, respondents often feel pressured to give an answer that may not reflect how they will in fact act. Often, moreover, people form opinions in group contexts, organised by class, religion, race, occupation, or gender, in ways that aren’t individualised. Therefore, an opinion asked for in an individual context, on a subject on which the respondent may not yet have reflected, may be more a reflection of media buzz than of conviction. The overstatement of Nick Clegg’s support in 2010 – the lamentable ‘Cleggasm’ – might be a case in point.

  The final way in which polling is giving us a fundamentally misleading impression of what is happening in the country is directly related to class. To figure out what is going on with class, most polling companies use a poor measurement called ‘social grades’. This is a system devised by the National Readership Survey approximately half a century ago, which helps market researchers split respondents up into c
onsumer blocs: A, B, C1, C2, D, and E. The standard way in which pollsters and media interpret these grades is to say that ABC1 grades are ‘middle class’ while C2DE grades are ‘working class’.8 On the basis of this, some pundits using YouGov’s post-election polls have claimed that the 2017 election showed a complete class dealignment, since the Tories and Labour were evenly split in the two blocs.9

  A couple of obvious questions arise here. First, what is the ‘middle class’ in the middle of? Where is the upper class? Where is the class of employers and owners? If there is no upper in this schema, then what we’re calling the ‘middle’ is the upper – which is absurd. Second, what does it mean to be in the ‘middle’? According to this standard reading of the scheme of ‘social grades’, the middle includes everyone in ‘white-collar’ work, from clerical workers to professionals, supervisors, and senior managers. This, surely, is an illusory levelling, as if to say that everyone who works in a call centre, from the receptionist to the chief executive, is ‘middle class’.

  But the world evoked in this conception of class isn’t really the modern world, where there even are such things as call centres. It is a world in which workers use their hands and leave the brain-work to their social betters. Therefore, as long as you don’t use your hands, or if you have a degree, you can be patronisingly called ‘middle class’ even when you’re working precarious shifts for minimum wage. The nation tacitly evoked here isn’t even the Britain of fifty years ago; it is an imaginary past, an Upstairs Downstairs ideology of class relations. Weirdly, the same ideology which tells us that the middle class is a majority, and that class voting is a thing of the past, on another level communicates that nothing fundamental has really changed.