Corbyn
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These various ends are often in conflict. How does one reconstitute Labour as a party of the Left without paying a cost in terms of party peace? How does one rebuild the core vote while adding enough swing voters to win? How does one change ‘hearts and minds’, shift the ideological ground, without paying a short-term cost in terms of media hostility and resistance from the political class? There are necessary trade-offs in the kind of project Corbyn is engaged in, which can’t even be evaluated if one focuses narrowly, as the Blairites have traditionally done, on short-range electoral phenomena within a narrow band of crucial ‘swing voters’.
Changing the Boundaries of Debate
One of Corbyn’s virtues is that he is not overly impressed by that reified category we call ‘public opinion’. That is not to say he is indifferent to what people think – but he wants to change opinion, to lead it, rather than merely reflect it in various poll-tested triangulations. On the three main planks of the economy and public spending, foreign policy, and a ‘kinder politics’, Corbyn’s agenda is not exactly the Communist Manifesto. It is not even one of the more radical Labour manifestos. In all, it constitutes an attempt to push the boundaries of debate to the left, to open new possibilities, and to push back against some of the nastier forms of right-wing politics. And thus far, by working with the grain of popular discontents, he has been successful.
Much of the raw material for what Corbyn wanted to do was already there when he was elected leader. The bankers were already widely reviled, taxing the rich was popular, spending cuts were unpopular, and most wanted energy firms, rail, and mail renationalised. There was growing discontent about the state of the housing market, with home ownership falling for everyone under the age of sixty-five, and falling sharply for everyone under the age of thirty-five. Even Trident wasn’t particularly popular, and nor had Britain had a popular war for decades.9 British banks and British tanks were not doing most British people any favours, and Labour’s bold manifesto skilfully worked with that.
Corbyn also had the advantage that he understood why Miliband-style triangulations wouldn’t work:
Ed Miliband made some very good points about zero-hours contracts, about young people’s opportunities, about poverty wages, and so on – very good stuff indeed, but the problem was that the fundamental economic strategy of the party was a form of austeritylite.10
Ceding ground in this way had the credibility of Labour’s campaign on living standards (about which it could do little if it accepted austerity), and also defanged Labour in its oddly half-hearted attempts to challenge the Tory narrative that Labour had created the national deficit through public spending.
The Conservatives had been able to profit from the shared assumption across all parties that the current economic model is the one we have to live with: there is no alternative. With that framing assumption, it has been relatively easy to displace attention from Britain’s economic dysfunctions onto Labour’s supposed overspend or, as with the Brexit campaign, onto immigration. Labour’s most pressing task has been to weave an answer to many and various discontents with the existing system into a new narrative about how British industry could grow, as it was only on this basis that welfare and public services could be funded. John McDonnell began work on a modern version of Harold Wilson’s programme for growth based on technological innovation.11 He enlisted a series of high-profile economic advisors whose thinking ran counter to neoliberal orthodoxy, and argued that growth based on inequality, debt, and leaving as much as possible to the private sector was unsustainable.12 In particular, he borrowed from Mariana Mazzucato the idea of an ‘entrepreneurial state’.13 Mazzucato’s highly praised book of the same name describes how major growth vectors arise from extensive public sector investment and experimentation – the prize example being Apple’s global dominion, which owes its iPod, iPhone, and iPad technology to innovations first made in the state sector. McDonnell built a case for this on the pathologies of the British economy. There are, in fact, few truly dynamic sectors – aside from the City’s role as an historic hub of global finance, a status it has held on to by becoming, under Major, Blair, and Brown, Wall Street’s ‘Guantánamo’,14 there are only aerospace and pharmaceuticals. The clamour for ‘export-led growth’ from the Tories and the Bank of England was less plausible since without investment there would be little for Britain to export, its manufacturing industries having been allowed to shrink and rust.
Even so, there were impediments. Depending in part on how the question is put, more Britons have been wary of state intervention than have supported it.15 There is a tradition of support for some limited regulation and intervention, and a degree of public ownership, but the embedded assumption that state intervention cannot work means that a more sustained interventionist thrust has been opposed by a majority.16 Corbyn and McDonnell have thus had to begin to shape and lead opinion in a way that Labour leaders haven’t done for some time. McDonnell took to promoting a series of public meetings supporting the ‘New Economics’ while Labour activists held local events educating activists on economics.17
They have also had to counter some of the trends in public opinion, showing a decline in support for the welfare state among the young, in part because of the legacy of anti-welfare rhetoric from the major parties and the widespread belief in claims about exorbitant welfare payments and immigration costing the taxpayer, with no basis in fact. This left British politics increasingly characterised by a form of social sadism, in which the most popular austerity policies were those harming the poorest, such as lowering the benefit cap or cutting housing benefits.18 The traditional language of ‘efficiency’ and ‘merit’, coupled with high popular abstention from voting, meant that the dominant assumptions about the economy favoured the idea that only those whose work was remunerated by employers – unlike, for example, stay-at-home mothers – were truly deserving.
This is merely to indicate just how much Corbyn’s Labour has had to overcome in its first two years, and just how precarious its gains may be. Corbyn has necessarily been compromised in waging this battle by the necessity of finding intelligent mediations between what is desirable, what is electorally feasible, what his parliamentary party will tolerate, and what can realistically be implemented in government. And yet it moves. What the election result showed was that, though the weight of received opinion and ingrained assumptions should not be dismissed, they are also no longer decisive. There is an opening.
To ensure that Labour is able to keep moving in this direction, it would be useful to think about a division of labour, wherein the grass roots continually sought to push the agenda farther than Corbyn is able to. Indeed, since ideology is not just about a ‘battle of ideas’ staged in the national media, but about where those ideas connect with lived experience, activists in their local communities are best placed to win ideological battles. Ideology in this sense is close to what Raymond Williams meant by ‘culture’, when he argued that ‘culture is ordinary’.19 It is what people take for granted in their everyday practice, the basic axioms they live by and which shape their tastes, their sense of justice and fairness, as well as their sense of the possible. It is also the beliefs, conscious or otherwise, which they take pleasure in, cherish, and are passionately committed to. One reason why it simply isn’t good enough to ‘win the battle of ideas’ is precisely that people take far too much pleasure in their beliefs to give them up for a well-put policy statement.
Put like this, winning ideological space is clearly not something that can be separated from organisation. There is no way of shifting people’s beliefs and assumptions without regularly spending time with them. There is no way of winning volunteers, recruits, converts, the sort of people who will proselytise and keep the faith through good and ill, without at least talking to them, and ideally doing something alongside them.
The Church Is Not Brick and Mortar
Christians are apt to say that ‘the church is not brick and mortar’. It is, rather, made up of a community of
believers. A secular way of putting this is that the party is not primarily its money or its bureaucracy, but its members. Insofar as Corbyn aspires to rebuild the Labour Party, his brief is to recruit active members. Activity aside for a moment, there has been no shortage of success in attracting members to the Labour Party, thus reversing the almost universal trend in party politics in Britain and across most industrial democracies for some decades. The first wave of grass-roots supporters, the potential missionaries of twenty-first-century socialism, were disproportionately young and working class. As Freddie Sayers of YouGov put it in the Guardian,
Corbynmania was a youth movement and a social media movement, but it was also a working-class movement. As a group, the Labour ‘selectorate’ that voted in the leadership election were more educated and well-to-do than the population at large, but within that the most ‘normal’ group were actually Corbyn supporters. Only 26% of Corbyn supporters had a household income of more than £40,000, slightly less than the national figure of 27%. (Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall supporters were progressively better off at 29%, 32% and 44% respectively.) So Corbyn got the cool kids and the working-class leftwing.20
They were, in short, exactly the sort of people who, as voters, Labour has been losing hand over fist. Subsequent recruits included more older voters, especially ex-members, so that the average age of party membership didn’t fall overall. Most of the new members are either party virgins, people who have never joined a political party before (58 per cent), or prodigal members, those who left during the Blair years and came back for Corbyn (31 per cent). They tend to be slightly poorer than the old guard, a lot more female, and a lot more socially liberal. There are also more graduates, but a much higher proportion of university graduates on incomes of less than £25,000. The result is that Labour has more members today than it has had since the late 1970s – and quite possibly well before that, since the Labour Party grossly overstated its individual membership before 1979.21
The problem the Corbynistas have faced is that the Labour Party did not suddenly become a democratic organisation just because they got their man elected. The power did not shift to the grass roots. It remained with the party machine, and a largely right-wing parliamentary group. The institutions of Labour have been overwhelmingly ranged against Corbyn and his supporters, and they have had the advantage of their connections to the state, the media, think tanks, and businesses. Nor, for that matter, did parliament become more democratic overnight. The same imperviousness to popular pressure that allowed successive governments to implement unpopular privatisations and pursue unpopular wars persisted. The establishment is ancient, well entrenched, set in its ways, and difficult to shift. And the political class that emerged from the Thatcher era is callous, indifferent to popular will, and determined to cling on. The mere fact of having members, therefore, was never going to be enough. It is a question of organisation.
In an effort to capitalise on the energy of Labour’s ranks of new, radical members, some of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters set up the campaigning group Momentum. The idea was that members who had mobilised in the heat of a campaign should not just be ignored and left to their own devices once the election was concluded. The evidence is that Momentum members have been more active than other members of the post-2015 intake, who, research suggests, are overwhelmingly passive and limited to so-called ‘clicktivism’.22
One difficulty in evaluating the research, however, is that it tends to take for granted the electoralist focus of Labour, focusing on leafleting, canvassing, or party meetings. What if there are party members who are active on other scenes, for example in anti-gentrification, or anti-bedroom tax campaigns? Such people would be deemed politically passive in this kind of research, but that would miss the point. After all, the Labour Party, if it is to become the kind of party Corbyn wants it to be, has to be centrally involved in organising workers, communities, and groups who would otherwise be politically weak and trodden upon. This is something that Labour activists are acutely aware of, and they have been debating how to reorganise the party in order to prevent ingrained electoralism from, as Hilary Wainwright put it, monopolising the energies of activists and thwarting the ‘necessary preliminaries of raising and extending socialist consciousness and grass-roots organisation among working people in general’.23
Momentum, in this situation, was initially a quite ambiguous organisation. It wasn’t clear whether it was to be a lobby, like Progress, or a left-wing version of the Fabian Society, or an activist network. And if it was an activist network, should it be a Labour network, or something that spanned the periphery of activists all the way out to the far-Left groupuscules? Or would it simply become a machinery for getting the right people elected to different parts of the party apparatus? It didn’t help serious analysis that the organisation was being constantly demonised in the press, with Tom Watson coming out to denounce it as ‘a rabble’ and claiming to have ‘proof’ of ‘Trotskyite infilitration’, and a huge amount of invective about it being a repackaged Militant Tendency – Owen Smith went so far as to suggest that it wasn’t a coincidence that Momentum’s name began with an M.24
These issues ended up being resolved in the autumn of 2016. It began, in the course of panic over the ‘chicken coup’, with a power struggle between those who favoured a delegate system for decision-making, and those who favoured an online, one-member–one-vote system. The practical difference between these two positions was that the former lifted an emaciated and politically bunkered far Left to power, by favouring self-selecting activists, while the latter would favour those with some existing semi-celebrity status, or those favoured by the Momentum office. At stake, therefore, was political control over an apparatus with 20,000 members and a much bigger database of supporters and contacts, high media profile, and £20,000 a month income at the time.
But to reduce it to a simple power struggle would be an apolitical travesty. Behind the issue of power was a pair of fundamentally different strategic conceptions. Those who wanted a delegate system were essentially looking for a party-like structure that was both inside and outside the Labour Party, through which an activist cadre could be forged and which would act as a left-wing pressure group within Labour. Unfortunately, they tended to drag local Momentum groups into unproductive factionalism, one symptom of which was an ‘anti-Zionist turn’ taken by some activists in response to the anti-Semitism scandals, in the belief that Israel had become the key line of attack coming from the Labour Right. Ironically, they merely created new opportunities for attack. Those who favoured an online, one-member–one-vote system wanted a Labour-only group, which would fight to keep Corbyn as leader, secure positions for the Left within the party, campaign for Labour in elections, and wage online publicity battles. This was, in principle, perfectly laudable: it had been demonstrated that Corbyn’s position was weak and needed support, and the Corbynistas had been struggling to win their positions in the party as a result of toxic displacement activities.
However, those who favoured an online, one-member–one-vote system ultimately carried out an internal coup, and forced their reforms through. This followed an extraordinary publicity campaign in which, having spent enormous amounts of energy rebutting claims that Momentum was some sort of Trotskyist stalking horse, leading members began claiming that there was a Trotskyist plot to take it over. Owen Jones even appealed to Jeremy Corbyn to intervene and save Momentum from the ‘saboteurs’. This, and the undemocratic resolution of the fight, was a reflection of a political weakness. You don’t, on the Left, go in for public red-baiting unless you’re panicking about being unable to win the argument. And their problem was that they feared they were unable to defeat their opponents in an open contest. The fact that one’s opponents are better at manipulating democratic structures (it was often claimed in the prelude to the coup that the destructive sectarians were better at sitting through long, boring, pointless meetings) isn’t an impressive justification for cancelling them at will.25
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Nonetheless, Momentum comes out of the last two years with, particularly after the snap election, tremendous and well-deserved credit. Having decided their remit, as effectively a party faction and an electoral campaigning organisation, they’ve proved to be exceedingly good at it. Having won seats for Labour, in defiance of Labour HQ’s death drive, they are now, with Corbyn, in permanent campaign mode, training thousands of activists for a fight to win more seats from the Tories. They have 24,000 members, and are winning their positions within the party, their activists gaining control of a string of local constituencies in the run-up to conference.26 The left-wing candidates for the conference arrangements committee, which decides what the annual conference will debate, are well ahead, with three times as many nominations as their Progress-and Labour First-backed opponents. And, as Labour First activist Luke Akehurst complains, with a touch of petulant hyperbole, this would make ‘conference a free-for-all where every fantasy politics piece of “resolutionary socialism” gets debated’.27
Of course, this leaves a fairly huge gap to be filled. If Labour activists are just defending a left-wing leadership and winning positions within Labour, they’re neglecting the organisation of society beyond the party. Whence, then, the ‘social movement’ upon which a radical Labourism is to be predicated? Beyond Momentum, of course, there are other left-wing groupings, such as the Labour Representation Committee, or Red Labour, but none with the clout and resources that Momentum now has. Nor, of course, are any of them any kind of match for the immense, lordly dominion of the parliamentary party and the electoral-professional caste running daily party life. The foam-flecked scare stories about activists seeking a ‘ruthless purge’ of Labour, which continue to this day, obscure this basic reality.28