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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.

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.

Splitting Iowa – Clinton, Sanders and the New Left

02/02/2016
politics, USA

To state the obvious up front, Hillary Clinton is going to win the Democratic nomination. There is almost no permutation of the various demographic, political and procedural factors in the upcoming caucuses that permits any other outcome; barring radical shifts in the political landscape or the breaking of huge, unexpected scandals, there’s no way you can run through the maths and arrive at delegate totals for the Democratic National Convention in late July that hand the party’s candidacy to anyone other than Clinton. Anyone predicting or even simply hoping for a different outcome is, of necessity, predicating their hopes upon a black swan – an entirely unpredicted shift in support or the breaking of an as-yet-unknown scandal – and while such things can and do occur, especially in the unpredictable mire of the systematic weirdness of the US’ primary system, they’re not a wise thing to base your predictions upon. So, to hedge slightly; absent something utterly crazy happening, Hillary Clinton is going to win the Democratic nomination.

That’s not to detract from the scale of Bernie Sanders’ success in Iowa. As I type, Sanders is 0.2% behind Clinton in the caucuses, 49.8% to 49.6%, with only a handful of counties still to report. It’s a rounding error; as close to 50:50 as you’re likely to get in the peculiar and inaccurate delegate system used in Iowa’s Democratic Party caucuses. Though even such a tiny margin will allow the Clinton camp to declare a victory, Clinton and Sanders will split the state’s 42 delegates half and half.

Why, then, call this a success for Sanders? Because six months ago, the polls (I’m using FiveThirtyEight’s excellent aggregated polls) gave him around 22% of the vote in Iowa, to Clinton’s 54%. Three months ago, it was 32% to Sanders, 54% to Clinton. A month ago, on January 1st, it was 36% to Sanders, 52% to Clinton. Sanders topped 40% for the first time three weeks ago. Today, in the actual caucuses, he’s on 49.6%. In the past six months, Clinton has dropped 6% in Iowa, and Sanders has surged 29% – suggesting that undecided voters are breaking strongly for the Sanders camp, and a small number of Clinton supporters are changing sides.

It’s not enough to win the nomination. David Wasserman at The Cook Political Report rightly observes that in order to actually win in July, Sanders needed to do much, much better in Iowa, a state whose demographics are much more favourable to him than many of the upcoming states. Sanders resonates with white liberals, while Clinton enjoys a strong base of support among ethnic minorities; it’s easy to forget that the Democratic Party isn’t just the party of white liberals, but also the party of many ethnic minorities who do not share the same degree or form of liberalism as white Democrats. This isn’t to say that those support bases might not move around – Sanders’ momentum could yet give him a boost within groups that have thus far stayed strongly loyal to Clinton – but based on track records thus far, most upcoming races (with the exception of the New Hampshire primary next week) ought to be far easier victories for the Clinton camp.

Nonetheless, Bernie Sanders has accomplished something hardly anyone expected him to; he has turned the Democratic primary into a contest rather than a coronation. Only a few months ago, there was a strong movement to try to “draft” outgoing Vice President Joe Biden into the nomination race, largely because Democrats feared that turning the whole thing into a state-by-state victory lap for Clinton would look extremely bad; voters, the conventional wisdom goes, want to see candidates fight for the nomination, and hate the sense of being handed a candidate anointed by the “party elites”. At that point, Sanders was a rank outsider; a self-declared “socialist”, the reasoning went, could never present more than a distraction, acting as a magnet for a minority of malcontents and fringe voters rather than a genuine contender.

Well, Sanders just came neck-and-neck with Clinton in Iowa, and short of an act of god, he’s going to win New Hampshire next week. The Clinton camp won’t be panicking – she’s still got this in the bag – but the Democrats have a race on their hands, even if it’s a much more politically interesting and ideologically divided race than the somewhat tame pot-shots between a handful of centre-left candidates that the party establishment might have wanted.

Two things are important for the Sanders campaign from here on out. The first is to avoid isolating Sanders too far from the mainstream of the Democrats, for the simple reason that his ability to influence American politics rests not on winning the nomination (which he almost certainly won’t) but on pulling the Democratic Party’s discourse to the left by energising and revealing the breadth of support for more left-wing policies than were previously considered palatable to the party base and, more broadly, to the American electorate. Sanders doesn’t have to win for his policies to win; if his success and momentum proves major support for policies like free college education, those policies can be integrated into the Democratic Party’s mainstream agenda, assuming that Sanders’ campaign hasn’t isolated itself too far from the party mainstream. Thus far, Sanders’ civil and gracious campaign has done a good job of this; assuming things don’t turn very negative in future, there’s a reasonable chance that Sanders’ most popular policies (and perhaps even Sanders himself) could be a part of a future Clinton administration.

The second thing the Sanders campaign needs to do is to keep up its momentum and energy, not because it’s going to win off the back of those things, but because it needs to be in position to catch the ball if – if – Clinton drops it. A huge scandal (something we don’t know about – email improriety and conspiracy theories about Benghazi don’t count, as any negativity resulting from them is a) largely confined to Republican voters anyway, and b) already baked into Clinton’s polling numbers by now) could upset the apple cart; the Sanders campaign needs to be firing on all cylinders for a couple more months, just in case. It’s not wise to base your political predictions on black swans; it’s equally unwise to leave yourself in a position in which you’re unable to capitalise upon a black swan if one should hove into view.

While the American commentariat is losing bowel control in shock at a socialist – a socialist! – being even an outside contender in a high-profile primary race, Sanders is arguably most interesting when you consider him in a global context. In the context of other developed nations, the emergence of a more radically left-wing candidate with strong support, especially from young voters, isn’t shocking; it’s perfectly in keeping with the patter of the past five years. Across Europe, the New Left has surged, starting in countries most traumatised by the financial crash of 2008 but growing in strength in nations simply suffering from the widespread malaise of the world’s developed economies – where decades of neoliberal policies have almost completely decoupled GDP growth from income or quality of life improvements for most of the population, and especially for younger people who face a markedly more insecure and uncertain future than their parents’ generation did. The success of Bernie Sanders in the US is, in this context, a mirror for the success of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK or even the recent resurgence of Kazuo Shii’s Communist Party in Japan; signs, perhaps, of the Millenial generation (born in the 80s and 90s) rejecting the neoliberal consensus of their immediate predecessors (Gen X, those born in the 60s and 70s) and turning to “outsider” figures, rejected by Gen X and the Boomer generation, as an immediate alternative. It’s notable that Sanders, Corbyn and the Japan Communist Party are all rather venerable; their messages aren’t new, they’ve simply finally found a generation with whom they resonate.

There are, however, essential differences between Sanders and his overseas counterparts in the New Left – not least that American politics is a rather different environment. Most notably, the New Left in most countries has had an untapped well of young people engaging with politics for the first time to draw upon; in many countries, voting turnout among under-35s (the Millenials) has been tiny, and energising this group to turn up and vote that has produced such remarkable results as Jeremy Corbyn’s election as UK Labour Leader. In America, though, this well has already been tapped, to some degree; Democrats already had a “Corbyn moment”, way back in 2008 with Barack Obama. A significant cohort of Millenials boosted Obama in 2008; some of those may wish Obama had been more radical, and side with Sanders, but the reality is that Obama’s approval rating among Democrats is pretty great, and the natural flow for Obama supporters who approve of his record is to back Clinton, the key member of his administration, not Sanders, the radical outsider. Sanders still does very well among the young, but they’re not the untapped wellspring of radical support that they have transpired to be in the UK and across Europe.

One final thought. Older voters may roll their eyes at the radicalism of the Millenials, but I think a great many older voters genuinely fail to comprehend the economic mess that faces the Millenial generation, who are bearing the brunt of some disastrous and short-sighted policy-making dating back as far as the 1980s. No post-war generation in the developed world has ever been expected to pay so much for education, or been greeted with more uncertain employment prospects after graduation; no post-war generation has faced so many formerly “middle class” occupations being reduced to low-paid, short-term, unstable work; no post-war generation has faced such a dizzying ratio of housing costs to average wages, or such a grim ossification of social mobility. The Millenial generation is, for the most part, saddled with huge debts and told to repay them with earnings from the least worker-friendly labour market in post-war history. That they would turn to alternative politics for solutions is entirely unsurprising and reasonable; it’s the notion that the existing neo-liberal business-as-usual consensus can continue under these circumstances that is ridiculous.

Given that, the eye-rolling should perhaps be replaced by sighs of relief, because populations under severe economic pressure do not necessarily flirt with the radical left; there is a far uglier alternative on the radical right. In the 1930s, economic catastrophe for ordinary people drove them towards radical-left and radical-right solutions; the radical-right won the day in many countries, and, well, the 1940s happened. Today’s radical-left solutions, shorn of the dead-end revolutionary ideology that made the far-left just as unpalatable as its far-right counterpart in the 1930s, are a much more appealing thing for the set-upon Millenials to flirt with than the far-right alternatives – which, based on the rhetoric of the Right across Europe and the USA, have evolved far less in the past 80 years and represent a far greater threat to democracy, stability and security.

Syria: A Triumph of Action over Intelligence

03/12/2015
politics, UK

Insanity, we are so often told, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Quotes to that effect are regularly attributed to both Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, though there’s no evidence that either man ever said it. Even shorn of the weight of authority that comes from being uttered by men of genius, the concept sticks with you because it makes obvious, intuitive sense. You don’t stick your hand into the fire a second time to see if it burns again; “once bitten, twice shy” is a powerful instinctive behaviour for good reason.

The comparisons between Tony Blair committing the UK to war in Iraq in 2003 and David Cameron committing the country to bombing Syria, as passed by Parliament yesterday, have often referenced this convenient definition of insanity. Blair’s misadventure in Iraq, its horrific consequences and the calculatedly dishonest “intelligence” which supported it remain a millstone around the neck of the Labour party. The strides the country made under Blair’s premiership are forgotten under the weight of opprobrium heaped upon his arrogance and egotism over the war and his stubborn refusal to acknowledge, even now, the awful mistake it represented. Twelve years later, Cameron’s insistence that Britain must join in raining bombs on Syria certainly feels like deja vu, and has left many wondering out loud if another Prime Minister will find himself so despised over another committment to another hopeless war.

There are key differences, of course. Cameron has not committed troops to Syria, as Blair did to Iraq; there will be no British soldiers returning in coffins on carrier planes, at least not yet. Cameron has also, bluntly, made little or no effort to make or manufacture a case for war. Blair and his spin doctors burned the midnight oil to create a compelling, if almost entirely dishonest, case for the invasion of Iraq; Cameron, perhaps recognising that the lies supporting the Iraq War were the very petard upon which Blair was hoist, has instead chosen to justify the bombing of Syria in only the most broad, rhetorical strokes. It’s a cynical masterstroke; opponents of the war find themselves grasping at thin air, because there’s no case for war to rebut, no intelligence to question. The logic is as ephemeral as mist; ISIS may back attacks in the UK, as they did in France (though the extent to which ISIS in Syria actually aided or participated in the organisation of the Paris attacks, as opposed to merely lending their name to an attack from domestic extremists, is entirely unclear), so Syria must be bombed, not because bombing will reduce the risk of terrorism – the government isn’t getting pinned down into claiming that, oh no sir – but because something must be done, and suddenly we’re off into the realms of pure rhetoric, where anyone daring to question whether dropping more high explosives on a volatile region that’s already essentially hosting a proxy war between NATO and Russia might be a bad idea is a “terrorist sympathiser”.

You can’t argue with that; you can say it’s mad, or offensive, or grotesquely stupid, but you can’t argue with it because it isn’t a coherent argument in itself. In the absence of a case for war, counter-arguments are like tilting at windmills; Cameron has won the debate by refusing to participate in it, instead sitting back and letting the British media work itself into a froth over the internal politics of the opposition, leaving the position of the government nigh-on unquestioned. What few facts have been permitted to enter the debate are so nebulous as to be almost laughable; 70,000 moderate rebels are ready to liberate the ISIS positions Britain will weaken with bombing, apparently, but who those rebels might be, where they’ve been up until now, and why British bombs are going to accomplish what could not be accomplished already by American bombs, Jordanian bombs, Canadian bombs, Australian bombs, French bombs, by a veritable fusion cuisine nightmare of international high explosive flavours; these things could not be explained, to the exasperation of even many in Cameron’s own party.

Do David Cameron or his closest advisors honestly believe that British bombs falling on Raqqa are going to make the slightest positive difference to the situation in Syria, or to the security situation in the UK and around Europe? I wouldn’t dare to judge – I’d note that for all his dishonesty, one thing that’s clear about Blair’s intervention in Iraq is that he genuinely, truly believed that it was the right thing to do, his failure not being hypocrisy but rather an egotistical belief that the facts should adapt themselves to his gut feelings. Perhaps Cameron, too, is possessed of a genuine and fervent belief that bombing Syria is the correct course of action; but if so, what a terrible indictment of Britain that a man who graduated from its finest university and now resides in 10 Downing Street is unable to articulate or explain his belief to the people he is meant to represent and lead.

It’s hard to escape the notion that what Cameron is actually bowing to here is the powerful one-two punch of the domestic urge to Be Seen To Do Something, and the international need to Be Involved. The former urge is found in every political system; no matter how intelligent or advisable the “do nothing” course of action may be, conventional wisdom and opinion polls alike prefer politicians to be people of action – even if the action is awful. I compare and contrast the UK with Japan a lot in my research work, and here I’d note that in Japan, Prime Minister Abe’s policies are disliked by the majority of Japanese voters – but the same voters seem to like the fact that he’s doing something, even if they don’t like the actual thing he’s doing. Inaction earns you no brownie points, and no votes, it seems.

As to the international need to Be Involved, this is also a strong drive in some countries, but Britain suffers from it particularly; it seems intolerable to some parts of the British public, and to a much larger swathe of its political classes, for the likes of France and Australia to participate in a military operation alongside the United States while Britain abstains. Is this a legacy of empire? A deep-seated desire to confirm and reconfirm the “specialness” of the US-UK “special relationship”? It’s impossible to say for certain; perhaps a little from Column A, a little from Column B, but the effects are easy to see. Britain, which since bailing out its financial sector has been aggressively tightening the belts of all the children, disabled people, low-paid nursing staff and single mothers who caused the global financial meltdown with their wanton investments in high-risk financial instruments, is never short a few billion quid to throw at putting Union Jacks alongside the Stars and Stripes while the bombs rain down.

Britain is committed now; the first strikes on Syrian targets begin today, though one wonders how many of them will turn back, as bombing flights from some other nations have, upon finding that there isn’t anything but rubble and civilian homes left at their target coordinates to drop ordinance upon. The origins of ISIS are complex and varied – I don’t buy the simplistic account of their creation being a direct consequence of the invasion of Iraq, though that was clearly a major contributing factor. A catastrophic drought in Syria; the malign influence of Saudi Arabian wahabbism; the machinations of embattled Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who nurtured the rise of ISIS as a “common enemy” in hope of restoring Western support for his rule; the violent melting pot of the Syrian conflict itself, in which a rapid evolution towards more and more extreme, aggressive tactics occurred as more moderate leaders were killed off; all of these things have fuelled ISIS’ rise. If you want to go right back to basics, the very borders of the Middle Eastern states, drawn for the convenience of the departing Imperial powers and the puppet governments they left behind, and entirely ignoring religious and ethnic divides across the region, arguably made for a volatile group of states effectively ungovernable by anything but strongmen. The bottom line; it’s complicated, and I struggle to think of an instance in history when a complex Gordian knot of politics, economics, religion, identity and history has ever been cleanly cut by bombing it from the sky.

What, then, should Britain do? This question is the trump card of the pro-bombing argument, one that plays directly into the Be Seen To Do Something urge of the political system. If not bombing, then what? If not attacking the vicious, medieval state that is ISIS, then what would you do about them? (And it’s about here that anyone saying “maybe we shouldn’t be doing anything at all” gets called a terrorist sympathiser.)

Well, maybe Britain shouldn’t be doing anything at all. Maybe, bluntly, it’s not Britain’s place to do anything at all; maybe the share of the responsibility for the godawful mess in Syria which is borne by the UK (for some of it most certainly is) is not best assuaged with high explosives, or bullets, or terrifying close encounters with Russian jets in foreign skies. Maybe what Britain should be doing instead is helping those who need help – providing support to refugees in the region, and finding the moral courage and backbone to assist those who have come to Europe fleeing the very Islamist terror it claims to be so committed to defying. Maybe, instead of sending British bombs plummetting after the American ones already raining on Syria, Britain could do far, far more to secure itself and help the Middle East by bringing its diplomatic and economic strengths to bear – by putting actual pressure on Saudi Arabia to pick a damned side and pull its weight against ISIS; helping the embattled Kurds could be accomplished by convincing the UK’s supposed NATO ally, Turkey, to stop attacking them.

Doing these things would require a long overdue reconsideration of Britain’s role in the world, and its relationships with some deeply unsavoury countries (particularly Saudi Arabia) with which it’s altogether too cosy. Far easier, then, to Be Seen To Do Something; to be the Prime Minister who set his jaw, Took The Tough Decisions and decided to drop bombs on some people in Syria. After all, any grumbling in the media will be easily eclipsed by their ongoing hounding of Jeremy Corbyn, whose role in the vote on bombing has been discussed in far more depth than Cameron’s own. There will be a legion of armchair war experts to mumble adages about eggs and omelettes in the event of any unfortunate images of dead civilians being circulated. Finally, should this all go terribly wrong, as Iraq did, and merely spread further extremism across the region and put more lives in the UK and Europe at risk, the proponents of war can always suck at their teeth, shake their heads and wonder out loud why some Muslims are so violent. The utility calculation is a no-brainer. Cameron has Done Something, and for now, at least, he’ll be rewarded for that – even if there’s no sense or reason to what’s actually been done.