Wednesday 19 August 2015

The Corbyn train wreck

Something which no one anticipated has happened – there has been a major shake up in the Labour leadership contest, and it looks likely that Jeremy Corbyn will win a landslide victory. This has come as a shock to everyone, including Corbyn himself, but on some level it was inevitable. The surge in support for the Greens, the SNP and UKIP over the last parliament shows that voters are fed up with carefully-tailored, spin-doctor-managed politicians who talk a lot and say nothing of value.

Corbyn's success is partly because the other Labour leadership candidates are all so hopeless. However, Corbyn's success is also partly because he has a narrative that members have engaged with, a narrative that Labour can return to its traditional socialist values rather than drift to the right.

Having a successful narrative is essential to politics. Labour lost the election because the electorate did not trust them with the economy. This could be more accurately phrased as the electorate bought the Conservatives’ narrative that Labour over-spending caused the recession and the Tories are sorting the problem out. This is why, despite Labour's spending lock and commitment to austerity, voters still felt they were not economically credible.

Corbyn has given the party hope that politics can change society for the better. His narrative of what is wrong with the country has engaged people with Labour politics on a scale not seen since the halcyon days of Blair. I greatly admire the way in which Corbyn has engaged so many people alienated by politics in general and the Labour Party in particular.

Corbyn's narrative is a radical departure from what senior Labour Party figures have been saying for a long time, and it conflicts directly with the narrative which both the Blarities and the Conservatives are putting forward as to why Labour lost the general election. This is one reason why so many Labour bigwigs have lined up to warn party members not to support him in the leadership election.

A narrative of a return to socialist values speaks to a lot of people about what they think is wrong with society – namely, that there is too much focus on wealth creation and not enough on inequality, and there is too much privatisation driven by ideology and not enough public ownership. It appeals to people who think there are too many benefit cuts and too much blaming the poor for being poor. We are becoming a less caring, meaner and more selfish society under the Tory government, and a narrative that is counter to this is engaging many people.

Corbyn is the only candidate saying we should not blame all of our social problems on immigrants and benefit claimants. Corbyn is the only candidate saying we need to tackle our environmental problems and invest in infrastructure. Corbyn’s narrative is based on values Labour should remember and that the Blarities have tried their hardest to forget. It is a narrative that has changed the leadership election and could become the narrative of the Labour party as a whole.

This new narrative does not fix all of the Labour Party's problems. The main issue with it is that it is a fundamentally backwards-looking narrative. Corbyn's policies are traditional old Labour socialism: nationalisation, higher taxes, more spending, re-opening the coalmines, and withdrawal from NATO. All of these, apart from the last one, are policies I support but they need to be accompanied by a narrative that looks to the future and not the past.

What the left needs right now is powerful narrative about the sort of society we want to create in the future. Ideas like redistribution, basic income, and solutions to the crises being faced in health, education and housing. The left needs to think about how capitalism will change, how to protect the environment and how to protect a minimum standard of living in a world where machines now threaten to take away middle class jobs. The left needs a narrative that brings old Labour values into a current context.

None of the other Labour leadership candidates have any form of narrative, which is one reason why Corbyn is so far ahead in the polls. The other candidates have no means to explain what is wrong with society and how they could change it for the better. Corbyn's narrative of going back to the past is better than the empty sound bites that the other candidates offer.

However, Corbyn’s narrative could cost Labour the 2020 election. Labour wins big when it has a vision for the future and is forward looking. What Labour needs right now is a "white heat of technology" moment, a narrative which describes current circumstances and how society will progress under a Labour government. Corbyn is not offering this.

There is another issue with the Corbyn campaign, and that is the messenger and not the message. Corbyn has supported a number of unpopular causes over the years, including the IRA, Hamas and Hezbollah. Many of the groups he has supported have become legitimate political forces, such as the ANC, but some are still considered enemies of Britain by many voters. Regardless of how good his narrative is, it could fall on deaf ears because of his history and the hammering that he will get in the right wing press, In the end, Corbyn could alienate as many people from the Labour Party as he attracts.

Corbyn's opponents argue that his leadership could be a train wreck. The combination of a backward-looking narrative and a messenger who will be painted as a sympathizer of terrorists could alienate moderate voters and drive them straight to the Tories. If the Tories win in 2020, they will continue their plan to demolish the welfare state and privatize the NHS with a zeal we cannot imagine right now. The people who need an effective opposition the most will be the ones who lose out.

That is one possible train wreck narrative of the future. The other is the train wreck of signing up to the Tory narrative or of having no narrative – these are functionally the same, and are what the other candidates offer. Labour cannot help the people most hurt by the Conservative government by agreeing with benefit cuts, austerity and the mass transfer of assets from the poor to the rich. The Tories have the demographics locked down who support austerity and controls on immigration, and if Labour agrees with them it only makes the Tories look more credible to these people. The Tories could not win under Blair by matching his narrative of spending and Labour cannot win by agreeing with the Tory narrative – it needs to present an alternative.

I do not know which of these two outcomes is more likely. So far, Corbyn's narrative has worked very effectively for him. In just eight weeks he has gone from a no hope candidate to almost certain victory. Will he be able to repeat this on a larger scale over the next five years?

Personally, I feel that the greater trap is not having a narrative or accepting the Tory narrative, which is what cost Ed Miliband the election. A lot of voters want change from the direction the country has gone in over the last 30 years, and Corbyn's message of a return to traditional socialist values seems to be working.

The other candidates’ complete lack of a challenging narrative is a major problem. It will hand electoral victory to the Tories. Over Blair, Brown and Miliband years I have seen too many people of principal alienated by a Labour Party that is walked over by big business and the rich, while failing to stand up for the most disadvantaged people in society. Corbyn is offering a narrative that can change this. Will it be strong enough to counter the muck the right wing press will throw at him? That remains to be seen.

Maybe Corbyn can use his narrative to shift the support of the electorate in his favour. I hope he can. Make no mistake, the chances of a train wreck are high if he fails - but the chances of a train wreck are also high if we do not let him try.

Welcome to the new Tory Britain

NB: This blog post was written a while ago and not posted due to computer problems. The debate has changed since it was written, mainly because of Jeremy Corbyn, who will be the subject of the next blog post, but I felt it worth posting anyway. It was supposed to go up shortly after the budget was announced.

We were all surprised when the Tories won a majority in the general election earlier this year. Polls had showed Labour and the Tories neck and neck for weeks. No one expected what happened when the polling stations closed and the BBC announced its exit polls. The Tories were going to be the largest party in a hung parliament by quite a long way.

Paddy Ashdown's comments that he would "eat his hat" if the polls were right summed up the belief that this could not have happened. Over the next few hours, the results backed up the exit poll. The Tories would be the largest party and hold the balance of power. By the early hours of the next morning it was clear that even the exit poll was an under-estimate and that the Tories would form a majority government.

A taste of what the next five years would bring was immediately served in the form of July's emergency budget, the first purely Tory budget since Ken Clarke's 1996 budget 18 years before. The budget contained tax cuts for the rich in the forms of reductions in inheritance tax and corporation tax, the later to become lowest level in the G7 and joint lowest in the G20. The budget also contained £12bn worth of cuts to welfare, much of it for people in work but earning less than a living wage. The people who have insecure jobs, the people with low incomes, the people who have been suffering from years of stagnant wages, rising rents and high costs of living would bare the brunt of Tory austerity. We were told that it was essential to cut back aid to these hard working families in order to balance the books of the nation.

At the same time as those who work hard for a low wage were having money taken away from them, Chancellor George Osborne has announced the sale of the publicly-owned Royal Bank of Scotland at a cut down price. The net loss to the public purse of this sale is £13bn. The conflicting message is our society cannot afford to be generous to the poor but it is essential that we continue to be generous to the rich, if we do not then the entire mechanism of our society would ground to a hault. If we give the poor money they will not work, but if we stop giving the rich money they will not create wealth.

This cut to the poor and subsidy to the rich represents an enormous transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest. The welfare state is being bled dry out of a sense of necessity, a necessity that does not extend to selling the government's RBS shares at market price. This shows what the Tories really believe in and what we will get for the next five years: help for big business and the rich, punishment the poor for being poor.

Osborne has pushed back his deficit reduction plans. The national debt will now be paid off in 2019, and it will take longer to repay the deficit under Osborne's plan than it would have under the plans laid out by Labour Chancellor Alastair Darling in 2010 and Labour Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls in 2015. Both of these alternatives, dismissed by the electorate, involved fewer cuts to public services. The Tory plan is not to rebalance the nation's finances but to rebalance society in favour of the “wealth creators”. This not a conspiracy organised by a public school elite, it is simply what the Tories believe will encourage economic growth that will eventually trickle down to everyone. The mass transfer of assets from the poor to the rich is supposed to benefit the poor at some later date. However, that day never arrives and we are becoming an increasingly unequal society.

Following their surprise defeat, Labour are searching for a new leader. This has not prevented interim leader Harriet Harman from endorsing the Tory welfare cuts. The electorate sent a clear signal that they did not trust Labour with the economy, that they completely accepted the Conservatives’ line on Labour overspending, and they wanted the deficit cut. Harman wants to regain some electoral credibility for Labour during her brief time in charge and her approach to this is to sign up to the Tories plan to hack away at the safety net the poor rely on.

By signing up to the Tories’ anti-welfare agenda, Labour have moved the middle ground of politics towards scaling back welfare. When Labour fails to offer an opposition to Tory cuts they become more acceptable to the electorate. This gives the Tories licence to cut welfare further than they initially planned.

It is not a coincidence that on the day that Labour agreed not to oppose the Tory welfare cuts, Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has suggested that workers save for their own sickness and unemployment by paying into a private fund out of their wages. This is fundamental redrawing of the social contract and an attack on the basic premise that the state provides assistance to those who are unfortunate enough to be sick or unemployed.

This new assault on welfare is partly ideological: there are many Tories who would like to abolish welfare alltogether and move to system entirely based on self-reliance. That would be a system entirely based on how wealthy your family is, which suits the Tories perfectly. Another reason for this assault on welfare is the cut and thrust of politics. The Tories have a simple plan: to paint Labour as a party of the unemployed and themselves as a party of the hard workers, and this was one of the reasons why they won the election.

The Tories will keep hacking away at welfare until Labour stand up to them, at which point the Tories will accuse them of being on the side of the scroungers and against the strivers. If Labour try to avoid being accused of supporting scroungers by voting with the Tories, then the Tories will cut welfare further and further. While the two main parties play games of positioning over the issue of welfare, the people who rely on welfare are losing their livelihoods.

Labour, and other people on left, need to stand up to the mass transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich through welfare cuts and discount privatisation. However, the position faced by Labour after the surprise electoral defeat is a difficult one. They need to find a new way to present themselves, because the way that former leader Ed Miliband presented Labour completely failed to resonate with the electorate.

While Labour are going through this period of introspection, we should appreciate the size of the challenge. The electorate voted for the Tories and gave them a mandate, however slim, to cut further. The arguments of Miliband fell on deaf ears, the electorate is not interested in a Labour Party that offers a milder version of what the Tories are offering. The electorate would clearly just prefer the Tories.

If Labour and the left are going to start winning again, then we need a pursue new narrative about what has gone wrong in the past and what will go wrong in the future unless we change direction. This new narrative needs to be bold, radical, different from what the Tories argue, but it also needs to resonate with ordinary people and their experience of the world.

For my part, I intend to write articles looking into this question of a new left wing narrative and what shape it could take. Whatch this space for new ideas of how we change the political debate. The Tories are rolling out their vision for Britain for the next five years and it is a painful vision of welfare cuts for the poorest and the mass transfer of assets to the richest. The need for the left to express a narrative which could oppose the new Tory Britain has never been greater.