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Corbyn’s manifesto is great. Labour is still going to lose.

12/05/2017
politics, UK

The UK’s Labour Party yesterday announced its manifesto for the upcoming general election. It’s a dramatically different vision to the path the Conservative party has laid out for the country, and unsurprisingly, it is the most left-wing manifesto the party has had since the rise of “New Labour” under Tony Blair in the late 1990s. Contrary to the scoffing of some on the right, however, it’s far from being a loony-leftie document that appeals only to the fringes. If anything, it’s an incredibly populist manifesto; the majority of its policies enjoy very broad support from the British electorate.

The right-wing press argues that the manifesto shows Labour, under Jeremy Corbyn, trying to return the UK to the “bad old days” of the 1970s (yes, that’s the same right-wing press that’s had a months-long priapism over notions like returning to Imperial weights and measures, or issuing blue-coloured passports; the existence of irony, it seems, is just another EU strategy to undermine Brexit). To some extent, they’re right; the manifesto does hark back to the pre-Thatcher years in parts, with policies aimed at undoing some of the more egregious mistakes of the neo-liberal policy regimes of the past 35 years. These include the ideologically motivated privatisation of a number of natural monopolies like public transport and energy, or the underhanded social engineering that saw council housing being sold off cheaply and never replaced, both of which date back to the early 1980s and are targeted in the manifesto.

Rather than arguing back and forth about the benefits of various different aspects of the manifesto, though, the point I want to make is that regardless of whether you consider these policies to be economically sensible or politically desirable, they’re undeniably popular. Opinion poll after opinion poll has shown – with margins that defy post-Brexit, post-Trump scepticism about polling – that the British public support the renationalisation of rail and other core services, want to see council housing stocks replenished, and favour the roll-back of the most extreme deregulations of the labour market, such as zero-hours contracts. If you go through the Labour manifesto line-by-line with British voters, you’ll find a strong majority in favour of pretty much every major policy in the document. The last manifesto to enjoy such a strong level of support was probably Blair’s in 1997 – a very different manifesto for a very different time.

Blair won 1997 in a historic landslide. Corbyn, for all that his policies resonate, is going to lose, and lose badly – likely handing Theresa May’s Conservatives a significantly boosted majority in the House of Commons, and perhaps losing key seats once seen as Labour strongholds. This is in spite of the fact that May’s Conservative policies are actually pretty unpopular; “Hard Brexit” is opposed by a plurality of the electorate, and some of her policies around things like education, the NHS and fox-hunting (yes, the fox-hunting debate is back) are opposed by a significant majority. It doesn’t matter; she’s going to win the most convincing Conservative electoral victory in a generation.

What this means, from a political science wonk perspective, is that a significant part of the British electorate is going to go out and vote for a party whose policies they disagree with. It flies in the face of certain fields of theory, which try to link the policy preferences of voters to their choices in elections, or to model the behaviour of candidates as principal-agent relationships – in which voters (principals) elect candidates as their “agents”, who go on to represent the policy interests of the voters in order to ensure future re-election. There’s more complexity to those models, but in essence they all assume the same fundamental thing – that voters have policy preferences, and that they evaluate the distance between their own preferences and those of electoral candidates, and assess the candidates according to that measure. If you have an election in which a large portion of voters who prefer nationalisation, labour market protections and investment in social housing knowingly go out and elect candidates who want to privatise the NHS, deregulate labour markets and leave housing entirely in the private sector; well, something is up.

Specifically, what’s up is valence issues. You can broadly divide the issues of concern to voters in elections into two categories. The first category is position issues – these are issues on which parties, and voters, have divided views. Things like immigration policy, Brexit, nationalisation, labour market reforms and so on are position issues, because different voters and parties have different positions on these issues. Even where a majority of voters lean a certain direction (for example, about 80% of UK voters oppose a repeal of the fox-hunting ban), the existence of a minority who believe otherwise turns this into a position issue. We pay a lot of attention to position issues, because they fit neatly with a lot of fundamental theories about policy preferences. Perhaps more importantly, they also fit comfortably with most peoples’ basic understanding of how democracy is meant to work, and provide points of disagreement and debate which are interesting to follow as they unfold in newspapers and other media.

The second category of issue is valence issues. Valence issues are things on which the vast majority of people and parties actually agree. For example, “enhanced prosperity”, or “lower crime”, or “better education”, or “lower unemployment”; these are all things that just about every voter, and every political party, agrees to be positive. There’s lots of disagreement about how you achieve those things, of course, but fundamentally if you’re talking about issues of economic growth, human security and so on, you’re talking about a valence issue – something everyone wants to attain, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum or how they feel about all the various position issues.

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t going to lose this election over position issues. On position issues, he’s good; the British electorate agrees with him, so much so that in an election where only the position issues mattered, he’d likely win the biggest majority Labour has ever held. You can imagine this in the form of a thought experiment; imagine a voting system where party and candidate names never appeared, and people simply selected their preferred policies, with their vote ultimately going to the party whose policies most closely match the voter’s. Assuming a kind of “veil of ignorance”, wherein voters could not guess which policies belonged to which party and thus couldn’t bias their selections according to party identification, Labour would win a huge majority this time out.

But Jeremy Corbyn is going to lose, because this election – like many in recent years – isn’t about position issues, it’s about valence issues. What valence issues boil down to is a simple question; given a core value that everyone agrees about, like “prosperity” or “security”, do you trust a given party or candidate to be able to deliver it? It’s not an assessment of policy, or a weighing of manifesto promises; it’s a simple, visceral and quite emotional choice of whether you think a person or a party has the competence to deliver the key social goods that a nation requires. Time and again in recent decades, we’ve seen electorates go to the polls, hold their noses, and vote for a party they fundamentally disagree with on many issues simply because they believe that that party is more competent and capable on the most fundamental issues of all, the valence issues.

Theresa May – for all that she has not been a particularly competent or capable leader, much as she was not particularly impressive as Home Secretary before – understands valence issues to a degree that Corbyn does not. While Corbyn has crafted policies on position issues which most of the UK electorate agrees with, May has focused entirely on projecting an image of strength and competence. She may be mocked for her constant and rather robotic delivery of her “strong and stable government” line, but it’s a good line; it speaks directly to the heart of the valence issues most people are basing their choices on. In fact, it’s rather hard to pin down the Conservatives’ exact policy positions on many things in this election, precisely because the whole party is running on valence. They’re avoiding talking about position issues, partially because they remain a party deeply divided on many of them, but mostly because their entire election pitch is that they’re a safe, competent pair of hands on the wheel, with little reference to where they’re actually planning on steering. Look also at how right-wing media and politicians alike respond to Labour’s policies. Rather than presenting an alternative or a competing worldview, their attacks are always based on claims that Labour is being unrealistic, or living in a fantasy land; that no matter how much you may like Labour’s policies (because the right wing knows that Labour’s positions are more popular), Labour in general and Corbyn specifically are too incompetent, too chaotic and too risky to put into power.

That’s why the Labour manifesto, for all that it’s a great document, isn’t going to mean much of anything in the long run. The problem isn’t that it’s too left-wing or too radical; it’s pretty apparent that the British public is quite receptive to some radical policy prescriptions on key areas right now. Rather, the problem is that Labour under Corbyn has done little to make people feel like the party has the competence to execute those policies. While those of us following the Brexit negotiations closely may be dumbfounded by the lack of competence and professionalism being demonstrated by the Conservative leadership in this area, that’s not the story that’s filtering through to the majority of UK voters. For them, the Conservatives are a competent party with some distasteful policies – and they’ll vote for that over a chaotic, incompetent party with lovely policies any day.

How did Labour get here? The blame, ultimately, has to rest with Corbyn; he’s leader, and the buck stops there. Certainly, the failure of the party’s centrists to unite behind the leader (even after their coup attempt collapsed) is also a major factor, but if Corbyn had cultivated a personal popularity beyond core leftist support then even his ideological opponents would have fallen in line. The party is fractured not because Corbyn has a different ideology to many of the Blair-era MPs, but because Corbyn is an electoral liability to the party. His great failure, I think, is that he truly believes that politics is about putting out the right policies and creating a manifesto people agree with; he has neglected the actual role of a modern party leader, which involves building a personal image of competence and leadership, and being an electoral asset for your party members around the country.

You can blame the media’s coverage of Corbyn and Labour for that negative image, as many of the party faithful do, and there’s some merit to that; but in the age of SNS and new media, Corbyn has shown no aptitude for engaging with the public through alternative channels and effectively challenging the narratives of the right-wing press. Again, I think, the problem is that he wants to let his policies do the talking, not realising that most people will not cast their vote based on policies. That’s a miscalculation that’s likely going to cost Labour a great many seats next month – because the greatest manifesto in the world is meaningless if you don’t believe Jeremy Corbyn is capable of delivering on its promises.

A Brief Thought on Nigel Farage

05/07/2016
politics, UK

Nigel Farage, by far the most extreme of the mainstream cheerleaders for Brexit and certainly the political leader most comfortable with brushing shoulders with actual racism and fascism in his utterances, has resigned from the leadership of UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party. In UKIP’s moment of triumph, pyrrhic though it may be, Farage has stepped down from the party with which he is synonymous. It’s the latest in a series of resignations and retreats which have claimed the man who called the referendum, David Cameron, the man who led the Conservatives campaigning to Leave, Boris Johnson, and now the man who led the only political party to campaign in its entirety for Leave.

Where will Farage go? With Farage having met with media baron Rupert Murdoch the day before his resignation, speculation has inevitably turned to the possibility that his incredibly high media profile over the past few years (far outstripping anything justified by UKIP’s actual political representation) will now translate into a media job. It would make sense in many ways. Farage is nothing if not intensely egotistical (he’s dramatically stepped down as UKIP leader in the past, only to return to the job within days) and it’s hard to imagine that at this, the moment of his triumph, he would disappear from public life. A media role would let him maintain his profile and do what he loves best – lobbing grenades from the sidelines as Britain’s political establishment tries to sort out the mess (whenever they stop making new messes and get around to actually sorting anything out).

Regardless of what Farage does next – and it is also possible (if a little out of character) that he’ll fade away for a little while to spend more time with his £80,000 MEP salary – he won’t be gone for long. His departure now is a calculated one. Unlike Boris Johnson, who never intended for a Leave victory and whose best-laid plans were thrown into disarray by it (and by Michael Gove stabbing him in the back), Farage likely believed that Leave could win the referendum all along. He’s got a plan, not for Brexit – nobody had a plan for Brexit – but for himself and his future career.

Farage is a rabble-rouser, and he knows that the rabble he has roused is going to stay roused. Brexit isn’t going to deliver what Leave voters want, not least because what many Leave voters actually want is impossible by any means short of a full embrace of fascist authoritarianism. Britain will muddle through somehow – economically and politically damaged, perhaps outside the EU, and perhaps with the UK no longer intact. Migrants will still be there, though. Businesses owned and staffed by non-white people will still be there. EU regulations will mostly still be there. The people who have been left behind by successive waves of neoliberal policymaking over the past 35 years will, if anything, be even worse off than before. Their vote to leave the EU won’t have changed their economic misery or removed the visible manifestations of the immigration which they blame for that misery. Their anger with politics, with governments, with elites and with all of the institutions which make up the British state will only intensify and curdle as they come around to the belief that the politicians have screwed them again. They voted to leave, and the politicians found a mealy-mouthed way to wriggle out of it. The people, the real people, the proper English people, spoke, and all those lying experts and self-serving intellectuals and greedy politicians just found a way to ignore it.

Nigel Farage will be right there to nod, to listen and to focus that outrage, fear and fury – just like he did prior to the referendum. He wants to be out of politics for now, because he doesn’t want to be seen to have anything to do with the stitch-up that’s inevitably coming. In his absence, UKIP will likely fall into a terminal decline. It’s never truly been more than the Nigel Farage Party, with other senior figures like Douglas Carswell and Neil Hamilton having none of his profile, his charisma, or his political nous. It doesn’t matter; UKIP was a vehicle and has served its purpose for now. Farage gets to play the tired, noble statesman who has achieved his purpose, slide out of politics (whether into the media or into temporary obscurity is a moot point) and ready himself to step back in down the line. He’ll be just as outraged as the Leave voters. He worked so hard for this result, to secure the UK’s independence, and those grasping, sleazy politicians in Westminster have undermined it all and ignored the voice of the real English people. He will be the perfect chalice to hold their anger, their frustration and their hate, and they will power him onwards to whatever his next political goal may be.

We’re not done with Nigel Farage. The people currently scorning him for running away from his responsibilities as the UK falls asunder aren’t the people who matter; they’ve never understood or been in thrall to the cult of Farage the Everyman, Farage the Proper Englishman, Farage Who Only Says What Everyone Is Thinking. Those who have believed in him this far won’t see his resignation now as any kind of cowardice or betrayal – hasn’t he earned a rest, after putting it to those smug Eurocrats and Westminster slimeballs for so long? – and will embrace him with open arms and ample spittle-flecked fury when he returns.

Needless to say, it’s not exactly reassuring that the politician who has most openly flirted with fascism is the only one who actually seems to have a game plan…

Labour’s Badly Planned, Graceless Coup

04/07/2016
politics, UK
1 Comment

The attempts of Labour’s parliamentary party to defenestrate their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, rumble on – but this coup has become an aimless, witless and utterly artless thing that threatens to damage the Labour Party far more than Corbyn’s leadership ever could. What began as a calculated and focused attempt to quickly remove Corbyn ahead of a likely 2016 General Election rapidly turned out to have no Plan B and no exit strategy. The party’s MPs now find themselves in a bitter and destructive struggle against their leader which threatens a complete implosion of the UK’s official opposition at one of the most crucial junctures in the nation’s political history.

I don’t think that Jeremy Corbyn is the right leader for the Labour party at this point in time. I think that many of the MPs who voted No Confidence in him last week did so in good faith – not from disloyalty or ambition, but from concern for the party and for those it represents. What has happened since the No Confidence vote, however, represents the most bone-headed act of self-destruction I think I’ve ever seen a political party commit.

Whatever your view of Corbyn’s leadership or his policies, the general sense of the man himself is that he’s a fundamentally decent guy – stubborn perhaps, even to the point of intransigence, but a decent human being nonetheless. It was this sense of being honest, decent and unpolished that led to his election in the first place. Years of slick candidates moulded by spin doctors to match target demographic preferences, yawning ideological emptiness concealed behind dazzling white smiles, left Labour supporters fatigued, disenchanted and desperate for something different. Corbyn doesn’t look like a modern political leader; he doesn’t talk like one; he doesn’t act like one. A bit frumpy, grizzled and utterly sincere, his appearances across the despatch box from former PR man David Cameron (a PR man being elevated to Prime Minister being the most worrying real-world instance of lunatics taking over an asylum that I can imagine) have only emphasised how different he is from everything else on offer.

Since Corbyn refused to step down following the vote of No Confidence, we’ve been presented with the gruesome spectacle of Labour MPs launching attacks on him in the press which have veered towards the intensely nasty and personal. There’s been a resurrection of the smear campaign attempting to link him to anti-semitism (he is a long-standing supporter of Palestine, a firmly mainstream political position in the UK and not one that implies any link to anti-semitism). There have been accusations that he is a bully, that he has ignored or sidelined MPs, that he runs some kind of “secret police” within the Labour party. There have even been claims that he might have voted Leave in the EU referendum or that he failed to campaign effectively for Remain. The former claim is baseless; the latter seems rather unfair given that Remain was ultimately supported by a larger proportion of Labour voters than even SNP voters. Corbyn is at heart suspicious of the EU – it has, after all, demonstrated radically neoliberal tendencies and its financial institutions in particular have supported brutally damaging, economically hawkish austerity policies. His speeches in support of the Remain campaign did take account of those concerns rather than being bombastically pro-Remain – but that’s exactly the sort of thing Corbyn’s supporters expect of him. Nuance rather than soundbite; honesty rather than spin.

Aside from the outright unpleasantness of resorting to (often anonymous) press attacks on Corbyn’s character when the main gambit of the coup had failed, these claims are politically naive to the point of astounding stupidity. They don’t make Corbyn look bad; to a public who generally see Corbyn as a nice, genuine old chap (if perhaps not a potential Prime Minister), they make him look embattled and set-upon, not by concerned Labour MPs but by bitter, grasping plotters. They make the Labour Party look like a nest of vipers, and nobody votes for nests of vipers.

Whether his MPs like him or not, whether they respect his leadership or not, Jeremy Corbyn is the most popular Labour politician in a generation. With Tony Blair’s reputation permanently ruined by the perception of gross dishonesty over the Iraq War, and Tony Benn sadly no longer with us, Corbyn is the closest thing Labour has right now to a populist figure. This is the second facet to the political stupidity of those continuing to push a coup against Corbyn; any future Labour leader needs Jeremy Corbyn on board. Any future leader will need Corbyn’s blessing, because they will need Corbyn’s movement – the tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who have joined Labour because of him. These people are the party’s best hope for being able to effectively run the kind of grass-roots campaign that might raise turnout and put them back in power some day. Labour’s MPs may not realise this, but local Labour parties who actually have to engage in on-the-ground campaigning do, and have overwhelmingly backed Corbyn. Unions recognise it too, and have also backed Corbyn. The MPs seem increasingly isolated.

The original coup plan wasn’t a bad one, and I maintain that many of the MPs who went along with it signed up in good faith. A vote of No Confidence would see Corbyn recognising that he no longer had the faith of the MPs he leads, and stepping down to make way for Tom Watson as interim leader and a new leadership election – which would hopefully deliver a unity candidate who could earn the support of both the parliamentary party and of Corbyn and his faction. Job done, Labour unified. The coup itself was planned because the alternative – a leadership challenge – would just see Corbyn’s huge grassroots support returning him to the leadership again. Thus, a way had to be found to get him to leave voluntarily, or at least with a semblance of voluntary choice.

That’s not what happened. Corbyn refused to step down – he’s stubborn, remember, that’s one of the qualities people elected him for in the first place – and while I personally think that was a mistake on his part, what followed after that from the most strident of Corbyn’s foes was not just a mistake, it was disgraceful and stupid. Labour’s MPs find themselves now in open, aggressive conflict with Labour’s most popular and well-liked political figure. Whatever electoral benefit might have followed from replacing Corbyn has been thrown away; by failing to back down from their failed coup, Labour’s MPs have dumped the party into a petty, nasty civil war, played out on a public stage in front of an electorate who need a competent opposition now more than ever.

Corbyn isn’t the right person to lead Labour today, but the coup has failed, and should have been abandoned the moment this became clear; if Labour MPs want Corbyn gone, they need to show the party membership a better alternative rather than trying quick and dirty measures to force a resignation. The only hope for the party is that those MPs who signed on to the No Confidence motion in genuinely good faith will reverse course before any further damage can be done. I remain hopeful that those MPs are in the majority. To believe otherwise would be to believe that 172 Labour MPs, the vast majority of the parliamentary party, are conniving traitors and schemers. Perhaps that’s true, but to believe so is to believe that the Labour party is utterly finished. I’d rather proceed on a somewhat more hopeful basis – an alternative to Labour will take many years to build, and many years without strong opposition to Conservative rule is not something Britain’s working classes or minority communities can contend with.

(Hat tip to @RichStanton, with whom a brief Twitter exchange helped to clarify my own thoughts on the coup and Corbyn’s position.)

No Confidence – and not just in Corbyn

29/06/2016
politics, UK
1 Comment

Five days after Brexit, the impact of the UK’s vote to leave the EU is becoming clearer. Nowhere is that impact being felt more keenly than at the top of the country’s major political parties. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, has quit – declining to trigger the Article 50 negotiations on EU exit, stating that this would be a decision for his successor, and reportedly saying to aides in Number 10, “why should I have to do the hard shit?” For a move being hailed in some quarters as a scheming act of political calculation deserving of a sub-plot on Game of Thrones, it looks remarkably like a surly table-flip from a man who had just lost a very foolish bet. The Conservative party finds itself in disarray. People like George Osbourne and Boris Johnson, whose support for Leave was entirely designed to undermine Cameron and vacate the Prime Minister’s job for himself, have recognised the the land-mine that Cameron chucked underneath the chair as he departed and are backing rapidly away from the top job. Meanwhile, political lightweights barely deserving of the term “mediocrity”, like fatuous NHS hatchet-man Jeremy Hunt, witlessly toss their hats into the ring.

While the Tories were fractured throughout the campaign and now find themselves split more deeply than ever before, Labour backed the Remain campaign with fairly solid party unity. My former MP, serial dissenter Kate Hoey, was one of only a handful of Labour MPs to rebel and support Leave; 99.2% of Labour MPs supported Remain. Given the anger, fear and upset over the Leave vote, the disorganisation of the leaderless and rudderless Conservatives, and the potential for striking strong alliances with strongly pro-remain local parties in Scotland and Northern Ireland, you’d think that Labour would be out there making plenty of hay in the bright sunshine, wouldn’t you?

Well, you’d think that. Instead, most of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet has resigned, and a vote of no confidence in the party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been passed by a huge margin. 172 MPs voted no confidence, to 40 who supported Corbyn (13 abstained, and 4 MPs spoiled their ballots, which I hope was a slightly pointless protest and not an indication that Labour has four elected MPs who don’t know how ballot papers work). Corbyn says he won’t resign. There’ll probably be a leadership challenge. Just as the Conservatives find themselves in crisis, Labour has found a way to sink into an even deeper crisis.

Of course they have. We’re talking about Labour, a party riven right down the middle by a deeper divide than Tory Euroskeptics could ever create; the divide between the shiny-faced, PR-groomed New Labour generation, and the frumpy, stubborn and sincere old socialists. The former group are career politicians who, though often possessed of fine qualities and beliefs, fundamentally pursue little other than re-election, and believe fervently in the pursuit of politics through opinion polling, focus groups and post-modern campaign methods. The latter are generally drawn from activist or trade union backgrounds and see their socialist beliefs as a hill worth dying on; hardened by Labour’s years in the electoral wilderness in the 80s and 90s, they regard electoral failure as a price worth paying for staying true to their principles.

Right now, one of the old socialists is in charge of the Labour party for the first time in a generation. Corbyn was voted in by a huge margin by a combination of long-term rank-and-file Labour members and a wave of newcomers shocked by the Conservatives’ 2015 election victory and enthused by Corbyn’s sincere, unpolished approach. The party loves Corbyn – polls of Labour members suggest he’s actually grown in popularity since his landslide election. Labour MPs, on the other hand, hate him. They’re mostly drawn from the ranks of New Labour and remain starry-eyed over the success of the Blair era, thus innately suspicious of the resurrected spectre of 80s and 90s Old Labour – but even among those who aren’t, their immediate concerns and motivations are simple; they want to keep their jobs. They want to be re-elected. To the MPs who make up the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP), the principles and policies of the Labour leadership play second fiddle to the leadership’s ability to retain its seats in parliament.

Ever since Corbyn took the helm of the Labour party, he’s struggled to maintain control of the PLP. Some MPs are loyal to him because they genuinely believe in him and his principles. Others are loyal because they respect the position of leader and the decision of the party members. On the other side, some are intrinsically, vehemently opposed to him because they disagree with his principles and positions. In the middle rests the majority of the PLP – who fear that Corbyn can’t win an election, but were willing to hold their peace and give him a shot at the leadership, since the next election wasn’t scheduled until 2020.

It’s now extremely unlikely that the next election will be in 2020. Brexit has upended all political calculations. By far the most likely outcome is a general election before the end of this year. The new Conservative leader will not only face an impossible decision regarding the EU exit trigger, he or she will also be seen to lack a mandate to govern. That will be even more the case if, as is likely, it’s one of the party’s rather less impressive specimens at the helm, with “big beasts” like Boris Johnson, George Osbourne and Theresa May keeping their distance from the poisoned chalice.

When Jeremy Corbyn took over Labour and the centrist / right-leaning sides of the party and the media brayed with horror about his consigning the party to electoral purgatory, I argued that Corbyn’s job was not, for now, to win elections. With five years to the next election, his job was to move the Overton Window of Britain’s political conversation; to shift the range of “acceptable” policies and positions, which has drifted inexorably rightwards since the late 1970s, back towards the centre-left. He needed to make it possible to discuss economic inequality, workers’ rights, trade unions, the social compact and redistributive justice without being automatically labelled a “loony leftie” – so a leader, himself or another, championing those things in 2020 could actually stand to win an election. The only way to do that is to keep discussing those things, to be called a “loony leftie” and far worse so many times that the words lose their meaning and your views start to become not crazy, or wild-eyed, but a regular part of political discourse.

That approach takes time. Labour has run out of time. An election in 2016 could, some argue, see Labour wiped out in northern seats that voted strongly to leave the EU. Even with the Tories crisis-struck and infighting, Labour hasn’t had the time or opportunity required to shunt the national debate to the left; Labour MPs fear for their seats even in the most favourable electoral climate for them in a generation. So they want Corbyn gone; they want someone more traditionally “electable”, more slick in presentation, more willing to listen to focus groups and do what’s needed to win an election today, not to change a national conversation in five years’ time.

They’re not wrong. I believe that Britain’s political debate has been utterly poisoned by a shift to the right that has made voices of fascism and authoritarianism more valid and credible than voices calling for centre-leftist redistribution and justice. I believe that the only way Labour reclaims its heartland districts and the trust of the British working classes is by re-embracing social democracy and being willing to grit its teeth and champion unpopular things like trade unions and workers’ rights, fighting through the scorn until they’re re-established as a pillar of British society. I believe that a leader like Corbyn, for all his failings, could play a vital role in that slow, difficult and necessary process.

I also believe in political realities, though, and the political reality is that Corbyn lacks authority within his own party and has yet to make significant headway on making his arguments sound valid to the electorate. Those plotting against Corbyn are despicable opportunists in many regards, but even while finding their nakedly careerist ambitions contemptible (Hilary Benn, a profoundly unimpressive politician who owes his entire career to the fact that his father was Labour stalwart Tony Benn, is a particularly egregious example) it’s hard to deny that they have a point. Labour going into a 2016 election under Corbyn poses a profound risk not only to the Labour Party and their seats, but to the people they are meant to represent.

Consider; whatever Conservative party emerges from its current mess will almost certainly be more right-wing and illiberal than its current incarnation. It’s unlikely to win many extra seats in the election – it’s more likely to slide backwards, and Labour may even win some seats from them. However, emboldened by Brexit, the even more aggressively far-right UKIP could win several seats, granting the far-right party more MPs from traditional Labour heartlands. The Tories, losing their slim majority, would face another coalition – either with their old partners, the Liberal Democrats, whom Cameron used effectively to hold back the right-wingers in his own party during the last coalition government, or with UKIP. With the right wing in control of the Conservative party, unleashed by Brexit and Cameron’s resignation, they’re unlikely to countenance another coalition with the Lib Dems; a nightmare coalition of a right-leaning Conservative party, the borderline fascist UKIP and the Ulster Unionists seems perhaps the most likely outcome of a Labour stumble in the 2016 General Election.

That would spell catastrophe for the UK as a whole, but even more so for the British working classes whom Labour is tasked, often thanklessly, to represent. The further austerity and erosion of rights for workers, tenants and consumers that would result would be nothing short of obscene; the damage to Britain’s hard-won and fragile social cohesion between diverse ethnic groups would be absolute, and absolutely heart-breaking.

Corbyn was the right leader for Labour when the task was to drag the party, and then the British people, back to firm centre-left ground – when stubbornness and a willingness to shrug off unpopularity were the key requirements for the role. Corbyn hasn’t changed, but the job has. The job now is to mitigate the damage of Brexit and to avoid plunging Britain into an even deeper crisis at the likely impending election. Corbyn isn’t the man for that job. While the disloyalty and scheming of those who have plotted against him from the outset should never be forgotten (we can hope that several of them will be de-selected by their local parties in retribution), many of the 172 who voted against him this week have done so out of genuine fear not just for their own jobs but for the future of the UK. Corbyn is the right man, but this is the wrong time.

Sadly, the very stubbornness that made him perfect for the job of changing the Labour party is now preventing him from doing the decent thing and stepping down. Labour’s best hope is a quick challenge, a decent new leader (Angela Eagle wouldn’t be a bad choice, all things considered) and a rapid healing process allowing them to get this behind them before the Conservatives get their house sufficiently in order to consider a general election. The Corbyn “project” will have to be paused – but the alternative is so very much worse.

Brexit Stage Right: What Now?

24/06/2016
economics, politics, UK
1 Comment

As of a few hours ago, the United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union. The BBC reports that the final result is around 52% to 48% in favour of Leave – or, to give it its catchy/annoying portmanteau, Brexit.

I’m writing this post largely because I’ve been asked pretty often by friends from outside the UK what this actually means, why it’s happened and what the next steps will be. If you’re a UK resident, you’re probably very well informed about what’s going on, and won’t find this terribly useful.

The Brexit Referendum was called by UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who campaigned for a Remain vote. History isn’t going to judge Cameron very kindly; he promised the referendum for purely party political reasons, because he felt that the only way to keep anti-EU rebels in the Conservative party from tearing the party apart ahead of the 2015 General Election was to mollify them with the promise of in “in-out referendum”. Cameron also calculated that this would reduce the threat to his party’s seats from UKIP (the UK Independence Party), a niche right-wing party which campaigned on anti-EU sentiment and threatened to overtake the Conservatives in a handful of seats.

Cameron, and much of the political establishment, assumed that a Remain vote would prevail. Polling suggested that voters actively opposed to Britain’s membership of the European Union were a vocal minority. Every major political party, business organisation and economic expert backed a Remain vote. Moreover, history suggests that voters in the UK are cautious when it comes to major change, ultimately preferring stability to uncertainty at the polls – in recent years, the UK voted to keep its existing (rather terrible) electoral system and Scotland voted to remain in the United Kingdom, both votes which skewed towards the status quo.

That assumption, that Leave was an outside chance, may explain why what happens next is so unclear. No country has ever left the European Union, just as no state has ever seceded from the United States of America. Procedures exist – Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty outlines how a nation may leave the EU, and makes slightly grim reading for the UK, as it’s fairly clear that the terms of departure will be decided upon by the other member states in negotiations which do not involve the departing state. The EU, anxious to preserve its stability, isn’t going to be inclined to show the UK special favour in these negotiations. However, it’s not even clear whether this vote actually triggers Article 50 negotiations; the referendum was not legally binding, and the decision to leave the EU still needs to be voted upon by Parliament and formally announced to the EU authorities. Could the UK Parliament ignore the results of the referendum and stay in the EU? Legally, yes. Socially, politically; god knows. The ramifications of simply ignoring a referendum result are impossible to calculate.

Here’s what we can calculate. Firstly, David Cameron is toast. There is simply no way that a prime minister can survive losing a referendum such as this one, especially when the primary opposition he faced was from members of his own party. The Leave campaigners in his party, notably Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, may well negotiate to allow Cameron to remain for a while in order to let him soak up some of the flak that will inevitably come as a result of the chaotic days and weeks ahead. He is, however, now a lame duck and will have to leave soon. George Osborne may be gone even sooner; the Leave team will want a scalp, and while Cameron is useful to them for a little while yet, Osborne is not, and will be seen as a possible threat in a future leadership race. (Equally, both Cameron and Osborne could be defenestrated by the end of the day – it would be wise to keep Cameron on to maintain some continuity while things are figured out, but the Leave team are little if not impulsive.)

(Update: David Cameron has just announced that he will resign, but will remain in place as Prime Minister for a few months while the Conservative party selects a replacement. This does essentially allow him to absorb flak over the referendum – but he’s pushed the toughest part of the whole affair, the actual triggering of EU withdrawal, out into the long grass, saying it will have to be handled by the next Prime Minister. That leaves several months for Parliament to weigh its options and figure out if it really has the brass neck to simply ignore the referendum result and refuse to exit the EU. As for Osborne, no idea, but Cameron’s legislation probably protects him to an extent, and he’s a likely candidate for the Tory leadership from the pro-Europe side of the party.)

Secondly, the United Kingdom is toast. Of the four nations which comprise the United Kingdom – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – only two voted to leave the EU. Every single district in Scotland was firmly in the Remain camp, and the country’s political leadership has been very clear about the need for another independence referendum should the UK leave the EU. A second referendum so soon after the first may seem crazy, but the notion that Scotland would not be permitted to remain in the EU should it leave the UK was one of the major arguments of the anti-independence campaigners last time around. With the UK now departing the EU, the landscape has changed dramatically; Scotland swallowed its pride and voted for stability, which England has now abandoned.

Northern Ireland also voted to remain in the EU, but that’s a far trickier situation – one which creates a political and constitutional mess that it’s going to take very delicate work to untangle safely. Voting in Northern Ireland was to some degree along old sectarian lines; nationalists voted to remain in the EU (of which the Republic of Ireland is also a member, of course), while unionists voted to leave. As soon as the results became apparent, Sinn Fein demanded that the UK leaving the EU should trigger a referendum on the reunification of Ireland – which Sinn Fein believes should count votes on the entire island of Ireland, Republic and Northern alike. The details will need negotiation (a plebiscite simply of the people of Northern Ireland seems more reasonable at first glance), but with Scotland likely winning its independence, it will be incredibly hard to deny Northern Ireland a referendum on its future – and that would represent a change to a status quo which remains very delicately balanced. The Good Friday Agreement which largely ended terrorist violence in Northern Ireland is almost 20 years old, and that period of peace has hopefully been long enough to endure through fresh political unrest; but whatever happens next in Northern Ireland, whether it’s a referendum (likely to be won by the Nationalists) or the denial of a referendum, it’s going to seriously upset one side of what used to be a very bloody conflict. So yes, David Cameron could end up going down in history as the prime minister who accidentally withdrew the UK from the European Union, broke up the United Kingdom and destabilised Northern Ireland after nearly 20 years of peace. I suppose at least he can console himself that with all that to discuss, most history books won’t have room to address the whole “intercourse with a dead pig” issue.

Thirdly, the impact on immigration will be minimal. While much of the Leave campaign has been focused on controlling immigration or “taking back control of the UK’s borders”, the reality is that the UK’s membership of the EU makes zero difference to its ability to control migration from outside the EU; and freedom of movement within the EU is a condition of membership of the single market. Non-EU members like Norway have to accept freedom of movement (along with most EU laws and regulations) as a condition of participation in the single market, and there is absolutely no way that the EU will permit the UK to enter the single market without also continuing to honour those rules.

There’s good news and bad news here. The good news is that for EU citizens living in the UK, and UK citizens living in the EU, the impact of Brexit is likely to be minimal – at least in terms of their right to live and work. The nightmare scenario of EU citizens being deported from the UK in droves while the millions of British people who live in the EU are forced to return will not come to pass; access to the single market is simply non-negotiable for Britain’s economy, and Britain’s exit from the EU will of necessity include making whatever concessions are required to retain this. In practice, this will be humiliating for the UK; it will essentially be forced to accept whatever rules the EU passes in future, without having a place in the negotiation or the ability to veto proposals. Dressing up the EU exit as a triumph for sovereignty and nationalism will be a fig leaf for this, but the truth of the new arrangement will hit home eventually.

Fourth, this will cause a serious economic shock. Already we’ve seen an enormous loss to Sterling’s value, trading ceased on stock markets in the USA and Japan, a collapse in the value of several commodities and a rise in the value of gold as investors run for the world’s oldest safe haven. Whether this is just a short sharp shock, or the beginning of a loss of confidence that turns into another slump comparable to the one triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, nobody really knows. We’ll find out soon enough.

Either way, these things seem abstract, but they have real world consequences. People are going to lose their jobs, and they’re going to see their spending power seriously eroded. A weaker pound has some benefits – it’ll mean British exports are more competitive – but it’ll also mean that imports are much more expensive and that British consumers’ buying power is much lower. Moreover, pulling out of the EU will end EU subsidies for many regions of the UK and for many sectors including agriculture. Remaining in the single market will probably mean that not many companies actually leave the UK en masse, but many deprived regions of the UK will likely be surprised to discover just how much of their industry and infrastructure has been backed by funding from the European Union, not from the UK itself.

Fifth and finally, this isn’t just about the UK. Brexit has come about as a consequence not so much of the European Union or its policies, but as an expression of a general anger and dissatisfaction that has also reared its head across much of the developed world. It’s not unreasonable to compare the UK’s Leave campaign with Donald Trump in the USA, Le Pen in France or Wilders in Holland. Voting for Brexit was characterised by nationalist sentiment and a strong desire to “take back” Britain’s sovereignty from the ill-defined others who have appropriated it. It thrived in communities that have seen widening inequality and economic malaise even as they watched political leaders turn up on TV night after night to talk about economic recovery; communities that may have been delivered a mortal blow by the 2008 recession and the austerity policies which followed, but which had already been suffering from neglect and economic abuse for decades before that, as successive governments tore up more and more pages of the post-war social contract in favour of the shiny new religion of markets and efficiency. There was a time when those communities turned to left-wing movements for their salvation, to unions and to the Labour party; with much of the power of the unions broken and the Labour party pursuing aspirational middle class voters, opportunities have been opened for new and far less savoury political movements to take root. At their core is a deep dissatisfaction and anger not just with individual political actors but with the very institutions of democracy and representative government; a deep conviction that it is not merely that specific parties or policies that have caused people’s quality of life to decline, but that the whole system is stacked against them. Thus, anything that’s seen as part of the system – be it politicians, the media, or even academics and independent experts – is suspect. It is not an attitude that calls for political change, for a new party in power or a new prime minister; it is an attitude that calls for the tearing down of everything, and offers nothing with which to replace it. It is frightening precisely because, in its absolute conviction that the institutions of democracy themselves are a vast conspiracy against the common man, it ends up being insatiable; even if today’s Brexit leaders become Britain’s leaders, in doing so they will become part of “the system” and face the anger of the same people who now cheer them on. The cycle will continue until someone turns up with the capacity to tame the monster that has been conjured up by economic hardship, inequality and unthinking nationalism. Unfortunately, the lessons of the past tell us that such a person is unlikely to be benevolent.

None of this is unique to Britain, and none of it can be fixed by anything less than a fundamental rethink of how we have chosen to structure our society and our economies. Even as market capitalism and globalisation have done wonders at lifting the world’s poorest people out of poverty – an achievement for which capitalism does not get remotely enough credit – it has begun to run out of rope in the developed world. In nations from Japan to Western Europe to North America, inequality is growing and standards of living are slipping. Labour market reforms have turned whole generations into disposable people; I can’t blame British people for laughing off the notion that the EU has protected them in the workplace, when companies like Sports Direct have based their business model off exploiting every loophole, legal and otherwise, no matter how desperately cruel and inhumane, that might allow them to wring more money, more profitability out of their vulnerable, poorly paid staff. “If you leave the EU, you’ll lose your workers rights!” is no argument at all to someone whose zero-hours contract leaves them in desperate financial instability, or whose exploitation by an avaricious, unscrupulous employer has been rubber-stamped by the government itself in the form of a Workfare deal.

The Brexit vote wasn’t just a rejection of the EU; it was a rejection of the whole system, of the whole establishment, of the whole set of institutions and practices that make up the developed world. It was, in ways, a rejection of modernity – a demand to turn back the clock. Turning back the clock isn’t in anyone’s power to deliver. If we want to break this dangerous cycle of economic inequality, social cleavage and political extremism before it rolls out of control, though, it’s beholden upon our countries and institutions to start paying attention to inequality, to public services, to quality of life and to the huge swathe of the electorate for whom every mention of the phrase “economic recovery” in the past two decades has just been salt in the wound.