As
Labour MPs pick up the pieces after their battle with the left wing extremists
led by their leader and his enforcer John McDonnell, it may be time to take
stock and assess where to go from here.
The
(second) election of Jeremy Corbyn (to his supporters, the second coming of the
Messiah) demonstrates a deep shift in party politics. The question is whether
this transformation of the Labour Party heralds a fundamental change in the
attitudes of the wider electorate as well, signaling the long expected ‘move to
the left’ once announced by Corbyn’s predecessor Ed Milliband.
There
can be no doubt that societies in the developed world have undergone a
significant alteration of the political radar since the economic crisis in
2008. What used to be an attitude to wealth and income inequality best
described by Tony Blair as ‘relaxed’ made way to a vibrant debate on social
justice. At the forefront of this debate is the issue of wage stagnation since
the 1990s in the US and as Thomas Piketty argued, the growing income inequality fuelled by rising income from assets.
Where
the picture veers into the strange is when we look at the responses to the
crisis by the individual parties. Centre right parties moved gradually to the
centre and tried to develop policies to counter wage stagnation, broadly
trusting in the power of the economy to lift everybody’s boat at some time.
The
left of centre parties, many of which were in fact in power when the crisis
hit, showed a staggering lack of ideas. Gordon Brown’s inaction at the
moment of economic disaster was symptomatic. Tired of Brown’s dithering, his
chancellor, Alistair Darling, had to take the reigns and protect the banking
sector by bailing out some of the largest lenders. The next two years were largely wasted with inactivity by the Labour government. Not a single policy was launched by the Brown
government to counter the growing wage gap. It was as if Labour politicians who
had started their tenure in 1997 with so much gusto were frozen like rabbits caught in
the headlights before the car bumps them off the road.
Following
the 2010 election, the Conservatives continued to move into the centre with
modest welfare reforms under George Osborne, the introduction of the national
living wage and fiscal consolidation. The next five years are
generally acknowledged to have been a wasted opportunity for the Labour Party. Under Ed Milliband’s
leadership an endless number of policy reviews was conducted with very little
outcome or impact. As the next election was nearing, Labour struggled to put a
manifesto of pledges together that amounted to a coherent programme for
government. Instead it opted for an oversized tombstone inscribed with
several vacuous statements that prompted ridicule and laughter in the wider
public.
Thus,
in a sense, Jeremy Corbyn’s election to leader was actually the first proper
response of the Labour Party to the economic crisis and its related problems such as wage stagnation and income inequality. And this is where the
story assumes surreal proportions. Instead of embarking on a profound reassessment
of Labour policies and a wider debate on how to tackle social injustice under
conditions of low productivity, how to address the disappearance of low skilled jobs and the rise
of the professional classes under conditions of a fiscal straightjacket that is likely to
continue for the next decade, Labour members opted for a type of unrestrained
sloganism, a simplistic populist left wing version of Donald Trump. The most
notorious aspect of this move to populism is the striking absence of any hard thinking
about policies, the slavish adherence to abstract slogans, and a determination
not to let reality impinge on the simplistic worldview those slogans purport.
An
important side effect of this return to the 1970s is that Corbyn’s ideas show little traction with the
working class voters he pretends to represent. As so often before, the
proletariat appears to refuse to play along with the Marxist leaders. Corbyn
acolytes appear to be mainly young middle class voters who should have little
investment in a Marxist worldview that assigns to them a diminishing political
role as the proletariat ‘gains class consciousness’. But then, as so often,
paradoxes abound in English Socialism, once led by an aristocrat, Tony Benn,
who virulently campaigned against the very educational standards he benefited
from.
Where
does that leave the political landscape in England? Labour’s move to the
extreme left may just open up some electoral space for moderate social
democrats and liberals. LibDem’s leader Tim Farron seems to sense that when he
appealed to disenchanted moderate Labour voters to join the Liberal Democrats.
It is customary in the British media to write off the LibDems but the party
still has a significant number of councillors and some parliamentary
representation (at Westminster and in Cardiff), more than other fringe parties
such as the Greens and UKIP. Councillors are usually the knights in shining
armour when it comes to trudging through the English rain to deliver leaflets
to potential voters or placing calls to the ‘pledged voters’ to go to the
polling booths. So, the LibDems are electorally in a better position than the
Greens and UKIP.
The
biggest threat to Conservative rule is however amy come from inside the Tories themselves, through a prime minister who ditches the
moderate compassionate Conservatism that served David Cameron so well in the
last 6 years. Part of the reason why Labour shifted to the extreme left was
that the Conservatives firmly occupied the centre ground with progressive
policies once popular under Labour, such as national minimum wage, welfare
reform and the academy programme. The biggest mistake Theresa May could do is to vacate this centre ground and encourage moderate Labour politicians to
formulate their own policies. Let’s hope she is a closet Cameroonian.
