What does Corbyn have to lose?

For a long time, I thought that the Conservative government was a weak regime depending on a slight majority in Parliament. This starting point was necessary to proceed on the assumption that the Labour Party stands a chance of winning in 2020. Particularly as Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing supporters are trying to turn the party around from Blairism. However, the new terrain of Brexit shows 2020 is far from a certain defeat for the Tories.

What I failed to take into account: The Conservatives could well expand their majority by swallowing up the UKIP vote. The Tory majority, the smallest since 1974, counts on just 24.6% of the eligible electorate, which translates to 36% of the vote under our antiquated electoral system. Note UKIP counted for 12% of the vote in 2015 - that's 4 million votes. So Theresa May is going for a full-blooded Brexit because she thinks she can steal back these right-wing voters.

If the Corbynistas are to succeed, the Labour leadership needs to refocus its policy initiatives around a few key areas, adopt a permanent campaigning style to remobilise the base, a voter registration drive and, perhaps most importantly, reshape the media debate. This is vital if Labour is to answer the questions facing the country. In short, Labour's only hope is to increase voter turnout (which is easier said than done) to thwart Tory incursions and expand into enemy territory.

Stoke and Copeland

This is why the by-elections are not simply reflective of future prospects. For starters, the victory in Stoke was partly based on a low turnout and yet Labour came out on top: the Tory-UKIP vote fell by 4,000 votes, but remained split in the end. So the first-past-the-post system favoured Gareth Snell's Blue Labour campaign to rescue English nationalism from the racists. In other words, this win was not an unambiguous one. Though it is possible to rebuild the party's Stoke base over time, it just depends on what happens over the next three years.

That being said, it was great to see Paul Nuttall knocked back on his ass. It wasn't just because Nuttall lied about Hillsborough though, more importantly UKIP has lost its raison d'etre since Leave won the referendum. Still, Paul Nuttall was thick enough to believe the bogus media narrative that the Northern working class vote was more UKIP than Labour. The UKIP base has always been a strange right-wing coalition: one part Tory lite, one part fascist, one part libertarian fruitcake. This is a multi-class bloc, but the working class element are unlikely to come from the Labour base.

At the same time, the real triumph of Nigel Farage may be that the Conservatives are taking up UKIP's nationalist agenda. The May government has made it clear it is going for a hard Brexit and that it is open to restricting immigration, even at the detriment to economic growth and stability. Farage has already won without ever coming close to real power. The electioneers around May will have calculated that the party can survive the social fallout, while Labour remains divided and weak.

By opting for a hard Brexit, Theresa May has successfully neutered the UKIP threat to her party. UKIP was only gaining in Labour seats because it was subsuming the right-wing opposition vote under one umbrella. If the Tories had been more focused on Stoke they might have eaten through Nuttall's base and squeezed Labour's majority even further. But the Conservative leadership decided to focus on the easy target. This brings us to Copeland.

There's no doubt about it, the loss of Copeland was a serious blow. It revealed three factors: 1) the Conservatives were able to swallow up UKIP, while the Labour vote was squeezed on two fronts by 2) the Tories over Sellafield and 3) the Lib Dems over Brexit. The lack of a clear message on nuclear power cost Labour the jobs vote, whereas Corbyn's three line whip on Article 50 cost the party support among Remain voters. The latter factor may be far more important in the end, compared to the more localised nuclear issue.

None of this takes place in a vacuum, the Labour Party is in historic decline because the Blair years cost the party 5 million voters. The New Labour strategy of taking the working class vote for granted, as it chased after middle class families, has cost the party dearly. This is why the 2010 and 2015 elections were lost. It's partly why Scotland was lost. Despite the flaws of the Corbyn leadership, the Blairites and Brownites lack an alternative. A return to New Labour is not possible in a world where the combined Tory-UKIP vote stands at 48%. But a nationalist turn won't cut it either.

Corbyn's Promise

The promise of Corbynism to reverse this trend has not yet been realised. I put this down to a lack of political strategy and coherence on policy and message, as well as the overwhelmingly hostility of the media and the efforts of Blairites to undermine Corbyn. The illusion is that Corbyn is the fundamental problem for Labour, when it was clear that the Brown government lost power and Ed Miliband lost Scotland. Putting a David Miliband or a Dan Jarvis in Corbyn's place will not change the reasons why Labour is in a losing streak.

It's not about your jawline or what suit you wear. The bid to transform Labour is still real for as long as there is no alternative to the radical left in the party. But it takes work to repair 40 years of damage. Some pessimists would argue it is hopeless. If Labour is unsalvageable, then Corbyn may go down with the ship - taking the blame for decades of rot. Even still, I think it would only ensure the collapse of the party to turn back now. It's not about Corbyn, it's about what kind of country we want to live in. The old phrase "socialism or barbarism" is more than rhetorical now.

Bizarrely, Conservative Lord Finkelstein has offered some recommendations in his Times column. Far from arguing for retreat in the hope of saving face (as Owen Jones has done), Danny Finkelstein suggests the only hope for Corbyn is to instigate a new antagonism within the Labour Party to change it forever:

"[Corbyn's] only hope must be as a subversive challenger, relentlessly organising to take over the party and talking about his efforts to do so. He should come out with huge, earth-shaking radical left-wing policies and not care that Yvette Cooper and I both think that they are bonkers. He should skip prime minister's questions in order to attend protest rallies. He should organise to deselect critics and win selection contests for his people."

Finkelstein is not alone, but it's interesting to hear this from a prominent right-wing journalist. Another writer, Benjamin Mercer, has taken to the pages of The National Student to make the case for far-reaching democratic reform within the Labour Party. This is surely the best case for Corbynism, and the best hope of the Labour left:

"Much as the franchise has been expanded for the leadership elections, so it must be expanded at the level of the CLPs. power should be transferred downwards from the General and Executive Committees to the grassroots. Participation should be made easier and the decisions should be made by a committee of the whole membership, not merely a clique of the same. Every member of the CLP must have the right to become its MP, and the membership should be ballotted before every election - or by-election - in order to choose the party's candidate. This should end the practice of 'parachuting' supposedly orthodox candidates into allegedly safe seats. No more Hunts in Stoke. labour Party MPs will be accountable, first and foremost, to their constituencies and not to the leadership, the PLP or the NEC. Re-selection at every election will ensure that this remains the case."

Up until now Jeremy Corbyn has stuck to a centrist style of leadership. However, the Labour coalition of liberals, social democrats and socialists, may just be too broad for the new situation. The broad church approach has been a recipe for incoherence on policy and a lack of strategy on the media. If Corbynism is to succeed, the party has to be transformed in the long-term and that requires thinking beyond 2020. A surrender or a retreat would just offset this process of democratic reform.

If the experiment ends with Corbyn stepping down in 2020, the opening for transforming Labour into a mass democratic party would be lost. This would close the space for a radical leadership. Not only would it mean that the left would not be able to contest the elections in 2025 and 2030, it would mean Labour would fall back into the hands of the extreme centre. Contrary to Blairite illusions, the party would resume its lacklustre performance under Ed Miliband, or, worse, try to stake out a position as the party for English nationalism under the guise of Blue Labour. Either way, Labour is dead meat.

This article was originally written for Souciant on March 3, 2017.

Miliband's 'Lesser Evil'.

It is timely given that it was Ralph Miliband who predicted that Labour would always fail the working-class. He couldn’t have been more right. Yet the failures of Ed Miliband will be portrayed as the inevitable disaster of a leftward shift. To understand such a falsehood is to grapple with history. The Labour Party surrendered the ground of opposition long ago. It was set in motion years before Ed Miliband took on the leadership role. The battles waged in the 1960s and 70s internal to the Establishment have had consequences which are still living with. Monetarism filled the cracks of the decaying post-war settlement with James Callaghan stepping in with just the rhetoric the IMF demanded of the British government. That was 1976. By 1979 the choice we faced was between a right-wing Labour government and an even more right-wing Conservative government.

Almost 35 years later and we’re still ensnared by the politics of frugality. The election of 1979 should not be forgotten even if the old hag has finally given up the ghost. The lesser evil offered by Labour in 1979 set the course for the way things have transpired and before we knew it the lesser evil of Tony Blair was on the television. The incessant bleating of John Major’s scandal government couldn’t have made the Third Way more appealing. Blair would make a few gestures to his base – such as minimum wage, devolution, fox-hunting ban etc. – only to institute tuition fees, crackdown on civil liberties and leave the banks to run amok. All the while the Labour government sat back as income inequality steadily grew to its highest point since 1961. As if all of this isn’t bad enough, by 2005 Blair had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq with all the gusto of a child playing with toy soldiers. There ceased to be a lesser evil at all in other words. 

The afterbirth of Blairism first appeared before us as the mound of Brown, only to be left inert and solid by the cold winds of the 2010 election. Since then Ed Miliband has tottered about as Labour leader making as few commitments as humanly possible. The gutter-press went on a pre-emptive offensive against any possible imaginative thoughts in Miliband’s head and dubbed him ‘Red Ed’ for good measure. Yet Miliband soon brought on board Maurice Glasman to engage in ‘Blue Labour’ shenanigans to siphon off the communitarian appeal of ‘Red Tory’. The competition is over a very small slice of votes, while the working-class vote is taken for granted. So he’s had plenty of experimentation with ‘Blue Labour’, ‘predistribution’ and, finally, ‘One Nation Labour’ which was literally plagiarised from the Conservative government of 1868. In spite of this inconvenience, Matthew D’Ancona described Miliband’s speech as ‘divisively left-wing’.

Serious minded people can see that the trilateral consensus has reached an impasse where the only task left is to dress up right-wing policies as cute and cuddly. Brown’s odour remains very much with us. Even though the financial crisis was a product of decades of economic policy around the world the Conservatives have succeeding in shifting the terms of the debate from growth to cuts. The Labour Party works within the same field of assumptions. Appropriately Blair is all for austerity and Ed Miliband has, in effect, signed on for austerity lite (at best). The reddest moment might’ve been last September when Miliband said “We will repeal [the Coalition’s] NHS bill” on the grounds that “it puts the wrong principles back at the heart of the NHS.” That’s not a bad statement, yet the NHS bill isn’t specified (thereby leaving open the possibility of a U-turn). Around that time Labour leader was saying that the next Labour government wouldn’t spend £3 billion to undo the restructuring currently underway. Again, the Health and Social Care Act remained unnamed. Then in June of this year the same walking disappointment reiterated his desire to repeal Cameron’s ‘Health Act’. None of this wordplay inspires confidence.

It seems obvious that the Labour Party is not settled in leadership, let alone in policy where Miliband has insisted that he won’t make promises which he cannot keep (so he makes no clear promises at all). The cowardice is for all to see. Blair and Brown managed to lose the Labour Party around 5 million votes in a period of 13 years. It may be too early for the Labourites to distance themselves from the legacy of New Labour. That would concede ground to the Conservatives who seek to blame everything that they are doing on Brown’s juggernaut-like spending spree. It is significant that the Conservatives failed to achieve a parliamentary majority against this backdrop of mass-disaffection. In fact, the Conservatives could only muster a 3% increase since 2005 and they haven’t seen a majority victory since the glory days of John Major. Perhaps it was a sign of inexorable decline when the carcass of Stephen Milligan was found festooned with electoral cord, bin bag, fruit and stockings.

The state of crisis within the Labour Party may be obvious, but the parallel crisis in the Conservative Party has received little discussion. The plump-lipped Michael Portillo has speculated that the Tories might not see a majority in this decade either. No governing party has ever increased its majority in Parliament since Anthony Eden. In that case it will have been 30 years since the Conservatives held a majority share of the seats in Parliament. No opposition party has achieved a majority swing for a good eight decades. It looks as though Parliament may still be hanging in 2015. Only the well-disciplined bootlicker Liberal Democrats can secure another coalition with one of the real parties. And the psephologists of the Labour-Conservative oscillation know it. In other words, the conditions are there for a left-wing alternative to challenge the centre-ground. We can even build that alternative, or sit and wait for the lesser evil to reappear.

This article was written for and posted at The Third Estate on August 26th 2013.

A Party for the Grafter.

Yesterday Ed Miliband began his speech with a couple of wearisome anecdotes that had been chewed for him by a public relations team, and then spat into his mouth, only for him to unload such trite in front of the British public. The first of these pre-chewed tales featured a father living on incapacity benefit, who had not worked since he was injured 10 years. Miliband stresses that the injury was real and that he was a good man, but only to strengthen his point that there was a job out there for this man. According to Ed Miliband it is not right for the tax-payer to support a man who was injured and has not been able to find work for a decade. He then moves on to the story about Southern Cross care homes, which left families betrayed and elderly people at risk and treated as commodities whilst millions could be pilfered. This is an obvious attempt to use two emotionally charged examples, there is a great deal of anger about both cases thanks to the mass-media.

For Miliband the story of Southern Cross and the story of the man on benefits are linked by an absence of social responsibility. Too many people see the Labour Party as representative of the people ripping off our society, Miliband is referring to bankers as well as benefit claimants. So the Labour Party has to change, though not to crackdown on an out-of-control financial sector. The "change" will come in the form of more cuts to benefits, because people who have been injured and out of work for 10 years are just lazy feckless cunts. The incisions to welfare being made under the Coalition were drawn up by an investment banker under the Labour government. We hear 'Red Ed' speak of a corporate culture which rewards wealth creation and not failure, don't forget this is the same line spewed on a regular basis from the politicians of the established Left and Right. So we know what it means, it means responsibility for poor people and not rich people.

You don't have to be a rabid communist to be pissed off about what happened in the Southern Cross care homes, which the right-wing press has demonstrated well. We heard from Peter Mandelson that New Labour was "intensely relaxed" about people getting rich and now we hear Ed Miliband say he "applauds" people who get rich. In the background lurks the trickle-down theory, these people generate wealth and jobs so we should be ever so grateful for the crumbs they're willing to throw to us. Though Miliband has some words to say about executives paying themselves huge bonuses, it all boils down to a lack of "responsibility" a the bottom. When he says "we will be a party that rewards contribution not worklessness" Miliband is really saying he will shower the mega-rich with tax-cuts, loopholes which can be used to avoid even more taxes and plenty of subsidies. For the poor Miliband has essentially promised the prescription of cuts drawn up under Gordon Brown and now being implemented under David Cameron.

Ed Miliband wants to make Labour the Party of the Grafters. The problem here is that the bankers, Miliband refers to early on, are just individuals who have adjusted to the conditions of the financial system. So to use the term "grafters" as distinct from the archetypal "greedy banker" is ridiculous, as the character of the banker has little to do with the way in which the financial sector works. The contradictions inherent to capitalism and the chaos of market forces cannot be overcome by the virtue of "responsibility" among individuals. And still Miliband goes on about Fred Goodwin. The system is about business-oriented individualism with self-interest as a key value, to hold the poor to the standard of altruism within this system is a complete double-standard. Especially as "responsibility" for the rich has nothing to do with acknowledging the huge disparity between rich and poor in this country, let alone even trying to deal with that inequality.


There is no real reason that this speech could not have been made by David Cameron. It sounds familiar, like the twaddle pumped out by Maurice Glasman which has now been recycled by the Conservatives in order to appear more moderate. The Nasty Party have become Red Tories. The platitudes of Miliband's speech are indicative of the ongoing trend of Blue Labour within the Party. The Labour Party has to play the game of appealing to a plurality of constituencies, to win over the middle-classes and the wealthy whilst holding onto the working-class vote. For a long time the Party has taken it's working-class base for granted, in power New Labour tossed some scraps to the poor - e.g. the minimum wage, working tax credits - whilst keeping to the status quo established in 1979. The relaunch of conservative rhetoric about "social responsibility" is an attempt to win over the middle-classes and eventually win back support from Canary Wharf.


Although the Labour Party was founded as the Party of organised labour, it was literally born out of the labour movement at the end of the 19th Century, it did manage to garner the support of the mega-rich and even the likes of Rupert Murdoch under the leadership of Tony Blair. The call for "responsibility" for the rich will appeal to the traditional base of the Labour Party whilst more serious calls for "responsibility" for the poor will appeal to Big Finance. The long-term aim of Miliband's speech is to organise a convergence of support for Labour, from bases which are in conflict, in order to propel the Party to victory in 2015. It probably will fail. It may even be a sign that the attempts to drive out the unions by Peter Mandelson will be taken to an even more thorough level in years to come. Though the Labour Party might always be the mainstream party to throw more crumbs off of the table, in terms of major decisions the Party might never differ greatly from the Conservatives.

Red Ed, Blue Labour and other Bollocks.

Better Red than Ed.

The current leader of the Labour Party was elected on the basis of his centrist credentials, which contrasted with the Blairism of the preceding 16 years, which were welcomed by the labour movement who were imperative in his victory. The way that Ed Miliband was elected over his brother was not a victory for socialism or even social democracy, but it did signal the end of New Labour. If David Miliband was elected it would have furthered the right-ward shift of the Labour Party which began steadily in the 1980s. The transformation of the Party was taken to its fullest expression under Tony Blair in it's civil authoritarianism, interventionism and all-out market liberalism. In simpler terms, Blairism introduced killing Iraqis for oil to the Labour Party along with kidnapping "terror suspects" and sending them to be boiled alive in Uzbekistan at the pleasure of a regime no better than the Taliban. All the while New Labour only raised the bar on what Thatcher pulled off in the 80s.

The Labour Party is not active in the opening up a space into which the working-class can enter as a political agent for radical change, though the Party looks to pose as providing a means for the working-class to pursue reform of the system. This is more accurate of the Labour Party that was led by Clement Attlee, which achieved important reforms in the 1940s. But it is not true of New Labour and it definitely isn't true of Labour under Ed Miliband. There was a time when the Labour Party consisted of socialists, social democrats and Christian leftists. The particular form of hegemony which was New Labour might be understood as compromised of a neoliberal strand, with a subordinate strand of social democracy which is systematically transformed into neoliberalism. The objective being that the privatisation of public services can be defended as in line with the history of the Labour Party. The Right turn the process of transformation on it's head, neoliberalism becomes social democracy or even socialism, in order to label the leader "Red Ed".

Ed and David are the sons of Ralph Miliband, a committed Marxist intellectual of the New Left, who argued that there are tendencies within the Labour Party that will always betray the working-class and we now know just how right he was. Ralph Miliband stood for a kind of socialism predicated on self-emancipation, without a dictatorship or a one-party state. For the Murdoch press, Ed Miliband is 'red' because he demonstrates some social democratic sympathies when he called for Britain to adopt a "capitalism that works for the people". Even though "Red Ed" still endorses 'Blue Labour', which is not so much a movement as a small collection of intellectuals calling for the Labour Party to address the concerns of a more conservative working-class than it has done in the past. Maurice Glasman has argued that 'Blue Labour' is in line with the role of the Labour Party in British history, the way it has represented working-people and has asserted the role of the ordinary person in society.

The Conservative Socialist.

Maurice Glasman thinks that the Labour Party can defeat the Con-Dem Coalition if it follows the 'Blue Labour' line of becoming more conservative and heavily critical of financial capitalism at the same time. Apparently, Gordon Brown was not 'conservative' enough to secure a Labour victory in 2010. Even though Brown is supposedly an avid reader of Gertrude Himmelfarb, the neoconservative cheerleader of the Bush administration, who thinks that the West has been in a state of moral disorder since the 1960s when traditional values were torn apart by a frenzied youth. In office Gordon Brown was a market liberal and never differed from the orthodoxy established by Thatcher. Then there is Tony Blair, who has been described by Douglas Murray as the "ideal" neoconservative and has also been praised by Richard Perle. This is down to Blair's superb interventionist credentials. Glasman would no doubt argue that 'Blue Labour' was never fully tried under Blair or Brown.

The game Glasman is playing might be called comfortable reaction, it is a game played by the Right in general and also has parallels on the Left. Glasman can criticise Blair and Brown on the grounds that 'Blue Labour' was lost, the Party became ensnared in finance capitalism and ultimately abandoned patriotism. At the same time the values of reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity were lost. For Glasman the Labour Party essentially became a liberal party which acted along utilitarian lines under Blair and Brown. Note the absence of any reference to civic authoritarianism and liberal interventionism. Though there is an inkling of truth in Glasman's thesis, the Common Good was lost or more accurately never advocated by Blair. Solidarity was traded in, along with liberty and equality, for an atomised interpretation of society which could easily be reduced to a spiritual and economic wasteland. Further problems emerge when Glasman advocates a "conservative socialism".

The dreaded s-word is only used to "domesticate" the concept, to reassure us that we have moved on and the ideal can now be discarded except in tame variants - e.g. aspirational socialism. The links between Glasman and Labour are at once tribal and parasitic, 'Blue Labour' is window-dressing to put it bluntly. The same can be said of the relationship between the Conservatives and Phillip Blond. Since the end of the Cold War we find that politics are increasingly about management, but there is a need for 'big ideas' in order to effectively manage society. The Establishment has grasped at the most malleable ideas around, there is room in 'Red Toryism' for cuts and room in 'Blue Labour' for race-based populism. The rift between Labour and the unions has been growing for decades, 73% of trade unionists voted for Labour in 1964; in 1974 it was 55% and in 1983 it had slumped to just 39%. Since then Labour has drifted further right-wards and Peter Mandelson has acted to stamp out the influence of unions even more.

Expect Failure.

Incidentally Gordon Brown is currently looking to become the head of the IMF, to the chagrin of David Cameron, it is hardly a leftist position of power in the world. Though Brown has called for financial reform at an international level, which is what is needed to bring the banks back into the realm of 'sanity'. A tempting hypothesis is that the Crash has made room for a tamed liberalism based on Keynesian theories to enter the world stage once more. From here we could be led to conclude that Brown could lead the IMF apparatchiks to challenge their own ideas. Though it could just be that Brown is looking to outshine Blair on the world stage, the war of ego between them have now moved onto the world stage. The fact that the politicians only dug up Keynes in order to save the economy from imminent collapse only to recreate the unsustainable boom of the preceding decade. Brown's pitch might be a capitalism with better management, but in effect it is only to defend the system as it is.


The joke about 'Blue Labour' is that the Party has not been left-wing for almost 30 years. Labour accomplished the most when Clement Attlee was in power from 1945 to 1951, even in defeat the Party went down with the votes of 48.8% of the electorate - the largest proportion ever won by a single party - and only lost because of the First-Past-the-Post system. Old Labour enjoyed such success as it had succeeded in establishing the National Health Service along with a system to provide benefits, care for the elderly and sick. Under Labour the Bank of England, coal, gas and electricity were nationalised. What Labour began in 1945 would last until around 1975 when the social democratic epoch began to be challenged. In those 30 years there was high economic growth, low unemployment and incomes increased alongside productivity. The workers' share of the GDP peaked in the 1970s and has been in decline since the rise of Thatcherism.

It looks like the country faces the usual predicament that there are no viable alternatives to takeover from the incumbents and the result could be a Conservative government in 2015. The Liberals are taking all of the flak for selling out, which is fair enough. But the effect has been to strengthen the position of the Conservatives. The only way Labour will be able to lead a charge against on the Coalition will be if the Party returns to it's left-wing roots. There is no hope of a more 'moderate' Blairism bouncing back. The Labour Party has to shake-off the tenets of Blair, whether it be torture, wars for oil, spending cuts for the poor and tax-cuts for the rich. Only the labour movement can salvage the Labour Party from the abyss and lead a successful campaign against the Coalition. That is the only way Labour can mobilise working-people again. In the meantime, we should bare in mind what Ralph Miliband taught us about Labour - expect failure and we will never be disappointed again.