Who Is Jeremy Corbyn?
For New Zealand students of current affairs, the contest for the leadership of the UK Labour Party involves four names that will mean little – and, in that, they will not be too different from observers of the contest in the UK itself. Yet the emergence of one of the four candidates – Jeremy Corbyn – as the unexpected front-runner is worth a second look, not least for the lessons it might offer to left-of-centre parties around the globe.
Corbyn is a parliamentary veteran who has spent 32 relatively low-profile years on the backbenches – eleven of them, as it happens, while I was also in parliament. His reputation is that of an old-fashioned leftie – and he may have skeletons in his cupboard, especially involving his links with suspect overseas organisations.
Yet the polls show him leading his middle-of-the-road, “safety first” rivals by a substantial margin. His candidature seems to have enthused Labour voters, both actual and potential, to the extent that over 100,000 new members have joined the party, and his public meetings have attracted huge audiences.
His surprise success has produced an outraged reaction and dire warnings from the Labour party’s usual power-brokers. Tony Blair has predicted the end of the Labour party if Corbyn is elected. Other leading figures have tried to sabotage the election itself or have refused – without actually having been made any offers – to serve in a Corbyn cabinet.
These reactions reflect what are no doubt genuine fears about his likely appeal to the wider electorate – though, unexpectedly, the polls show he is now the most popular of the candidates, not just with Labour voters, but with voters generally.
What is surprising, however, is that the critics focus on the supposedly extreme nature of Corbyn’s policy prescriptions, especially in the realm of economic policy. Yet, as 40 reputable economists have declared this week in an open letter, Corbyn’s economic policy may be at odds with current orthodoxy but is really no more than common sense.
It seems, for example, that – shock, horror – Corbyn and his advisers do not believe that austerity is the proper or effective response to recession. This is more or less the position reached by the IMF and endorsed now by a growing number of (in some cases, Nobel Prize-winning) economists. It is in essence no more than mainstream Keynesian economics. We can see the consequences of its rejection in the problems faced by an austerity-ridden euro zone.
Corbyn also takes issue with the peculiarly British version of austerity – the insistence that the wealthy should be spared, with the help of tax cuts and quantitative easing, from taking any responsibility for recovery, while the burdens are heaped instead on the most vulnerable, whose job prospects and living standards have taken massive hits. Corbyn seems to assert, reasonably enough, that a serious effort to bring about a sustainable recovery requires that every shoulder should be put to the wheel.
A Corbyn government would also recognise, it seems, that there might actually be a case for government playing its proper role in achieving a fair, balanced and productive economy. It’s enough to make the blood run cold! Yet surely, it makes sense for a government to use – alongside the private sector – its powers and resources to do the things that the private sector cannot, or at least will not, do.
And, Corbyn asks, why is quantitative easing fine when used to bale out the banks yet not for investment in new productive capacity and jobs? The fact that questions and policies such as these create so much alarm and despondency among Labour’s erstwhile and would-be leaders tells us more about them and the current state of the Party than it does about the merits of the policies themselves.
Oddly enough, the one point about a Corbyn economic policy that should raise an eyebrow is his acceptance that priority must be given to eliminating the “deficit” – though, like so many others, he seems to confuse the government’s deficit with the country’s. We must assume that this commitment is there as a concession to the ignorance of an electorate that has never been told that to treat the government’s deficit in isolation is an economic nonsense. And getting the economy moving properly is, in any case, the most effective way of getting that government deficit down.
The Corbyn economic policy platform, in other words, is comfortably in line with what is fast becoming the new consensus – less doctrinaire and more common sense than the old orthodoxy. The other three candidates who have said nothing of consequence about the real issues of economic policy and have accordingly left a vacuum for Jeremy Corbyn to fill have no one but themselves to blame if they have been left floundering in his wake.
Whether these factors will actually produce a Corbyn leadership remains to be seen, but he has certainly re-vitalised the Party and enthused potential Labour voters. By opening up a long overdue debate, he has re-defined the political landscape and offered new hope to those who have been conditioned to believe that “there is no alternative”. Labour leaders elsewhere, not least in New Zealand, will – or should – be watching closely.
Bryan Gould
22 August 2015.
How Left-wing Is Jeremy Corbyn?
As the warnings about a Corbyn leadership become more and more hysterical, we need to ask – just how left-wing is Jeremy Corbyn? His critics may not like him much, and may doubt his appeal to the wider electorate, but there seems little in the policy stance he has adopted to warrant such extreme alarm.
The fears voiced by his critics seem to depend for substance entirely on the critics themselves. Their warnings are likely to become self-fulfilling prophecies if we do not pause for a moment to examine what Corbyn and his supporters are actually saying. Writing in the Guardian, his ally, John McDonnell – presumably speaking with the authority of his leader – quite reasonably set out the substance of a Corbyn economic policy. So, how irresponsible and terrifying is it?
It seems that – shock, horror – Corbyn and his advisers do not believe that austerity is the proper or effective response to recession. This is more or less the position reached by the IMF and endorsed now by a large number of reputable (even Nobel Prize-winning) economists. It is in essence no more than mainstream Keynesian economics. We can see the consequences of its rejection in the travails faced by an austerity-ridden euro zone economy.
Corbyn also takes issue with the British version of austerity – the insistence that the wealthy should be spared, with the help of tax cuts and quantitative easing, from assuming any of the burdens or responsibilities for recovery, while both are heaped on the most vulnerable whose job prospects and living standards have taken massive hits. It is surely the merest common sense to assert that, if we are serious about a sustainable recovery, every shoulder should be put to the wheel.
A Corbyn government would also recognise, it seems, that there is actually a point to electing a government that is ready to play its proper role in achieving a fair, balanced and productive economy. It’s enough to make the blood run cold! Yet surely, it makes sense for a government to use – alongside the private sector – its powers and resources to do the things that the private sector cannot, or at least will not, do.
And isn’t it time that we reclaimed from an irresponsible banking system the central responsibility for a monetary policy that serves the interests of everyone and not just those of speculators of one kind or another? Why does so much of the huge volume of lending created by the banks out of nothing go on house purchase and asset inflation rather than productive investment?
The fact that policies such as these create so much alarm and despondency among Labour’s erstwhile and would-be leaders tells us more about them and the current state of the Party than it does about the merits of the policies themselves.
Oddly enough, the one point made by John McDonnell – and made forcefully at that – about a Corbyn economic policy that should give cause for concern is the acceptance of the priority to be given to eliminating the “deficit”. We must assume that it is there to pander to the ignorance of an electorate that has never been told that to treat the government’s deficit in isolation is an economic nonsense.
John McDonnell, like almost everyone else, appears not to distinguish between the government’s deficit and the country’s. If we are to focus on a deficit, it should surely be the country’s failure – over more than three decades – to pay its way in the world. It is that deficit that measures our deep-seated economic failure, and that inhibits us from putting in place policies that would allow us to grow at a satisfactory and sustainable rate.
Indeed, for as long as the country’s deficit is ignored, our recent experience confirms that the government’s deficit is virtually inevitable. An external deficit will exactly match the combined total of the private sector and government deficits; they are accounting identities. For as long as we have an external deficit (and there is no sign that anyone is proposing to do anything about it), a government that wanted to move into surplus could do so only at the expense of a larger and larger deficit for the private sector (that is, households and businesses) – and that would simply intensify the imbalance between consumption and investment and all of our other problems.
The Corbyn economic policy platform is, in other words, disappointing, but only in this one respect. Far from being too left-wing, it is based for the most part on what is now becoming the new – less doctrinaire, more common sense – orthodoxy. And getting the economy moving properly is, in any case, the most likely way of getting the government deficit down. Its deficiency arises because it makes too big a concession to economic nonsense – but then, those other candidates who have had nothing to say of any consequence about the real issues of economic policy and who have left a vacuum for Jeremy Corbyn to fill can at least have something to agree on and applaud.
Bryan Gould
13 August 2015
Who Are the Ideologues Now? (UK)
It is a truism of today’s political analysis that, over the three or four decades since the so-called “free-market” revolution swept across the western world, the centre of political gravity has moved substantially rightwards. Most of those of middle age or younger will have grown up, after all, in a world where it has been widely accepted that markets are infallible, that government spending is wasteful and a drag on economic development, that running a country is just like running a business, that we all benefit if the rich get richer, and that private profit justifiably overrides all other considerations.
So insidious and comprehensive has been the advance of this orthodoxy that even those who choose to question or oppose it are hard put to understand how complete has been its victory. As we see from the current plight of the Labour Party, political leaders who seek to offer alternatives are disarmed and enfeebled, without realising it, by their experience of growing up within its confines. They are, in any case, urged – on electoral grounds and even by their friends – to accept the new reality; and that reality, of course, keeps on moving inexorably rightwards.
This re-definition of the political landscape has meant that what would once have been regarded as the extreme outer edge of what is politically possible is now the new centre ground. Any divergence from this central position is, by definition therefore, literally eccentric; and any move away from “free-market” orthodoxy is condemned as either a return to the past or an irrational lurch leftwards.
These definitions of centrality and divergence have the further advantage, for their proponents, of confirming a long-held public perception. In the days when the political left was prepared to challenge existing power structures, they were undoubtedly helped by their development of an ideology of sorts that allowed them to ground their objections to orthodox policies in some loosely defined analytical framework. The consequent identification of the left as the doctrinaire element in the political spectrum seems, however, to have inhibited today’s leaders of the left, if the current contest for the Labour Party leadership is any guide, from straying too far from orthodoxy for fear of appearing too ideologically driven.
The right, by contrast, was usually seen as pragmatic and concerned solely with what would work. Politicians of the right still seek to prolong that advantage by clothing their steady move rightwards in the language of experiment and exploration of what is possible, rather than of ideology. They have also learned to proceed stealthily, one small step at a time, with the intention of concealing from the public that each new step is in reality a further development of a highly ideological agenda.
That may, however, be about to change. As the tide of ‘free-market” orthodoxy has reached its high-water mark and appears to be receding (at least in most parts of the western world other than the euro zone), it is more and more likely to leave exposed to public view those new policy initiatives that seem to have little to do with common sense and practicality and to reflect much more clearly what are doctrinaire preoccupations.
Those preoccupations are becoming increasingly apparent. The priority accorded to the drive for private profit, for example, has led to well-publicised failings in delivering what were once public services, epitomised by the misfortunes of Serco – an international firm operating, among other things, as a private manager of prisons and under pressure for its failures in a range of countries.
Privately owned academy schools, an idea that has now been shown even in Sweden, its country of origin, to produce disastrous results in terms of educational standards, will nevertheless no doubt continue to be supported by enthusiasts on the ground that business people are best placed to decide educational priorities for our children.
And what about the wacky idea, now being contemplated by New Zealand’s right-wing government, of financing the delivery of social services to some of the most vulnerable, including the mentally ill, by selling bonds to private investors who will then look to make a profit from their “investment”?
What links all of these and many other similar ideas is that they have little to do with what will work and best serve the interests of society and its citizens. They are instead all statements of ideologically driven preference – in each case, a preference for private provision, not because it works better, but because it is a faithful rendition of “free-market” theory.
It seems, in other words, that the usual view of the left as doctrinaire and the right as pragmatic is in course of changing. It is now the right that espouses the ideological approach and that will go on doing so for as long as it is not held to account and its bluff is not called. It is the left (when it can make up its mind and, like the lion in the Wizard of Oz, reclaim its courage) that has the opportunity to offer new alternatives to free-market orthodoxy – alternatives that are not the product of doctrine, but that are simply sensible and practical and likely to produce better outcomes. Isn’t it time that Labour’s leaders caught up with this new reality?
Bryan Gould
3 August 2015
Are “Realistic” Labour Leaders Best Placed to Win An Election?
Conventional wisdom has it that the outcome of the Labour leadership contest most feared by the Tories would be the election of the candidate perceived to be nearest to the middle ground. Conversely, it is suggested that a candidate who espouses policies seen to be further to the left, (which seems to mean simply offering something different from the Tory programme), would gravely prejudice Labour’s chances of winning the next election.
There are, of course, many criteria that might be relevant in deciding which candidate to support – age, gender, personal accomplishments, and so on – and a candidate’s electoral appeal, based on such criteria, might well be important in determining which candidate would be most helpful to Labour’s election chances. But the suggestion, constantly made even by Labour’s friends, that the willingness to offer a clear alternative to Tory austerity, Tory attacks on the public services and Tory victimisation of the vulnerable is somehow a disqualification is surely to be resisted.
The advice to Labour members that they should eschew potential leaders who do not “move forward” (or, to put it more starkly, do not acknowledge the inevitability if not actual desirability of Tory policy) is based surely on a damaging failure of political analysis. It can be justified only on the unstated but mistaken premise that the Tories always occupy the centre ground and that any departure from that centre ground is quite literally eccentric and a mistake, and is doomed to fail.
Yet it is the acceptance of this premise that leads most of the candidates for the Labour leadership to vie with each other in demonstrating how “realistic” they are, how thoroughly they accept that resistance to each new Tory initiative is pointless, how little interest they have in the supposedly hopeless task of developing a credible alternative to Tory orthodoxy.
The paradox is that opinion in the world beyond the Labour leadership contest has moved on – not backwards or leftwards, as the conventional wisdom has it, but forwards to a growing recognition that Tory neo-liberal orthodoxy has had its day. There is now a substantial body of opinion that understands that austerity is not the correct response to recession, that markets are not self-correcting, that running the country is not the same as running a business, that growing inequality is the mark of a failed society and a failing economy.
Among the many who share these understandings, we can now count hard-headed bodies like the IMF and the OECD – hardly raging revolutionaries. What the Labour Party now needs is a leader who can articulate these understandings persuasively. It would not be too difficult. All that is needed is an awareness of how the debate on these issues has progressed and a modicum of competence and courage in putting that to the voters.
It is, in other words, not the left but the Tories, with their determination to press on with a discredited orthodoxy, who now occupy the far reaches of ideology. It is a complete misapprehension to position them in the centre ground, when their policies so clearly represent a distorted and prejudicial view of how real societies and economies work.
It is not just in the context of the leadership contest that this error of analysis is likely to cost Labour dear. If the advice tendered to Labour is followed, and a “realist” is elected to the leadership, the Tories – contrary to the conventional wisdom – will heave a sigh of relief. They will enjoy discrediting a rival who complains about outcomes but is at a loss to explain how things could be done differently. They will know that their task has been made easier, because they will face an opponent who has already conceded the greater part of their policy stance.
They will not have to defend the fundamental assumptions on which that stance is based. Their principal rivals for power will, by failing to engage them in a real debate, provide in effect the most persuasive evidence that there really is “no alternative”.
By positioning the Labour party as a sort of cordon sanitaire around an incumbent Tory government, a so-called “realistic” Labour leadership would insulate their opponents from any truly effective critique of their policies and actions. The contention that it need not be like this would easily be dismissed by pointing to Labour silence and timidity as proof that the Tories had got it right.
The “realism” urged on Labour and the advice that they should not “fight the electorate” would not, in other words, improve Labour’s chances at the next election. On the contrary, a Labour leadership that – inadvertently perhaps – acted as a sort of praetorian guard for Tory extremism so that they were protected from outside criticism could only increase the chances of that extremism doing yet more damage.
And, if by some chance the voters tired of the Tories and elected a Labour government, a “realistic” leader of that government could then no doubt be relied on not to veer too far away from Tory orthodoxy and would thereby disappoint its supporters all over again. Haven’t we been there before?
Bryan Gould
28 July 2015
Labour’s Failure
Nothing more starkly demonstrates the parlous state of the Labour Party than the failure of its leaders (and almost all of its would-be leaders) to resist cuts in benefits that will drive many thousands of the most vulnerable into deeper poverty and despair.
No one prepared to look at the evidence can doubt that the inevitable outcome of this further Tory attack on the notion of social responsibility will mean misery for many of those who have traditionally looked to Labour to fight their corner. Nothing could strike more directly at Labour’s raison d’etre over the whole of its history.
I have watched in disbelief, from 12,000 miles away, as Labour leaders have sought to explain their unwillingness to stand firm and fight for what they supposedly believe. We are told that the voters’ support for further victimising those who have been left to pay the price of a recession for which they have no responsibility means that there is nothing further to be done.
“We can’t fight the electorate” is the siren call. But how are the voters likely to view a Party that so manifestly lacks the courage of its convictions? Will they not conclude that Labour is fatally short of both courage and convictions?
Opposition parties, even those that have recently lost elections, will usually have enough self-respect to stand up for what they believe in, even if the parliamentary arithmetic is against them. What Labour is doing shows that it no longer has a bottom line of any sort but will readily bend with whatever wind happens to blow.
Even in the shortest of short-term electoral calculations, this waving of the white flag looks like bad politics. If the battlefield is to be abandoned so easily whenever the public are thought to have reached a view, the Tory advantage in resources and media support will always ensure that the fight for public support is over before it has begun. And the voters can be excused for concluding that, if even the party’s leaders cannot stick by their guns, there can be little in Labour’s position that deserves support, let alone warrants being fought for.
What confidence can anyone, let alone the Party’s supporters, have in politicians who have so little stomach for the fight? Are we to be governed entirely by opinion polls? Are even the most fundamental of Labour values to be abandoned if “triangulation” does not support them? These failings could just about be tolerated by a party of the right, since their goal is simply the maintenance of power, but they are entirely destructive of any pretension from a Party of the left that professes to have an analysis and a programme that will produce a change for the better.
In past and better days, the Labour Party willingly and bravely took on the task of changing and leading opinion. Campaigning for a better society was the Party’s life blood. Labour was “a crusade or it is nothing.” It was understood that the Party, as the proposer of change, had to do more than wait for public opinion to change of its own accord and could not afford just to trail along in its wake.
Public opinion will move only if the voters see the Party standing up for what it believes in. That is true not only of specific issues but also of perceptions as to whether the Party is fit for government across the whole gamut of policy. The voters are likely to conclude that a Party without the confidence to fight its corner on a specific issue, especially one that has historically been important to it, will be even more handicapped and powerless when facing the multifarious problems of government.
The Party’s stance on benefit cuts is, of course, even more worrying and comprehensive than it at first appears. It is of course a negative – a failure to say no to a change that it is expected to oppose. But it is more than that. It exposes a vacuum. The capitulation by Labour’s leaders is not only a misreading of the electoral runes but is a damaging revelation that the Party has literally nothing to say that is positive either.
On virtually every policy issue, Labour has been reduced to saying “me too”. They may try to tack on a qualification – “not so much” or “not so fast” or “we’ll do it with a kindly smile”. But, in essence, Labour’s leaders evidently believe that they have nothing new to offer. They may carp and cavil at the outcomes of Tory policy, but they seem to have neither the competence not the capacity for hard work that are needed to come forward with real alternatives.
The only way forward they see is accepting – even if only passively – yet more of the Tory agenda, which they are constantly advised, even by their friends, is the only option. Yet the world is changing fast. Long-held orthodoxy about macro-economic policy, about the role of the market, about Europe, about Britain’s role in the world, is being effectively challenged. Labour desperately needs a leadership that is no longer becalmed but that can ride that wave. The Party, and a large part of the electorate, cannot prosper without it.
Bryan Gould
21 July 2015