21-27 August issue
Corbyn Wars
Featuring
Jeremy Corbyn: How I’ll unify Labour.
Leader: Why we endorse Yvette Cooper for Labour leader.
Laurie Penny: Corbyn forces us to ask – is power without principle worth having?
George Eaton on Jeremy Corbyn v the parliamentary party.
Stephen Bush: Blair and Brown created a monster to frighten the voters – Old Labour. Now it’s fighting back.
Here’s how, as Labour leader, I will unify MPs, rebuild the party and win back power in 2020
As the Labour leadership contest intensifies, the favourite, Jeremy Corbyn, outlines how he would take the party to victory at the next general election. He writes: “All wings of the party need to reflect on the lessons for us in 2015,” and suggests that Labour both right and left will be welcome in his shadow cabinet:
Harold Wilson’s cabinets reflected the diversity of politics on the Labour benches, with Tony Benn, Barbara Castle, Anthony Crosland and Roy Jenkins all serving together. The debate and exchange of views in cabinet were strengths, not weaknesses.
We need to draw on all the talents and ideas, no matter which wing of the party they come from. The way we settle disagreements must be through democracy, not back-room deals or leadership diktat.
So I will welcome a plurality of views, with strong shadow ministerial teams in each department to hold this government to account and to lead public campaigns against the damage of cuts and privatisation. We need people dedicated to their brief who are able to work co-operatively with the party to set out a shared vision for their area consistent with a more equal, democratic and inclusive society.
He also writes that he would not hold shadow cabinet elections, but would develop policymaking backbench committees:
I will appoint a strong, diverse shadow cabinet to hold this government to account from day one. A more participatory Parliamentary Labour Party is vital to our unity and strength, so I believe there should be backbench committees of Labour MPs for each department to ensure a dialogue between all Labour MPs and the shadow cabinet, and to drive policy development.
Corbyn hits back at “tabloid-style” attacks on him and his opponents:
The scurrilous nature of some of the tabloid-style attacks on me and other candidates, as well as on our families, has been painful. It is easy to sympathise with Chuka Umunna’s reconsideration of whether to stand when he faced this onslaught in the days after announcing his leadership bid.
[. . .]
For my own part, I have not engaged in any personal attacks or abuse. We should debate policies, not personalities.
Leader: The choice before Labour
The NS endorses Yvette Cooper as the best candidate to lead the Labour Party. We note the impact that Jeremy Corbyn has made:
Those who lament Mr Corbyn’s success should try to understand it. An unapologetic socialist, Mr Corbyn has run an excellent and disciplined campaign, rich in policy proposals. He believes what he says and says what he means and people like this. His anti-austerity rhetoric, comparable with that of Nicola Sturgeon, has attracted many. It is heartening to see such a large number newly engaged or re-engaged in politics.
[. . .]
Mr Corbyn, who will be 70 at the next general election in 2020, has surpassed all expectations, including his own. The role of leader is one he neither wanted nor expected. More troubling for him is that, if elected, he would struggle to command the authority and respect of the parliamentary party after breaking the whip 534 times since 1997. He has never been a minister. Many senior shadow cabinet members have said they would not serve under him; many other MPs have indicated that they would seek to undermine his leadership from the beginning. Labour is in open revolt.
However, the NS Leader presents a number of objections to a Corbyn leadership:
One of our principal objections to Mr Corbyn is on foreign policy, so little discussed in the contest. We live in an era of crumbling world order. The Middle East is riven by civil war and the Syrian tragedy is one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of recent decades. The emergence of the barbarous Islamic State and a revanchist Russia pose powerful threats. Yet Mr Corbyn is a resolute unilateralist. He advocates withdrawal from Nato – which would leave Britain vulnerable, our peace and defence alliances in tatters. We believe Britain’s interests are best served by seeking to reform the European Union from within the bloc. By contrast, many on the radical left consider the EU to be a “neoliberal” institution and support “Brexit”.
As for Mr Corbyn’s economic programme, the policy of a “people’s quantitative easing” would risk rampant inflation and is not a sustainable means of financing infrastructure programmes. We believe that a 7 per cent rise in National Insurance for those earning £50,000 or above to fund a return of the student grant is the wrong policy, and would not win support in those marginal seats Labour must win in the south of England if it is ever to form another government. The proposed renationalisation of the energy sector rests on tax projections that have been shown to be heroically optimistic. For these reasons and others, though we recognise his qualities as a principled campaigner, we cannot support Mr Corbyn’s candidacy. Labour’s next leader must be drawn from the party’s mainstream and must command the loyalty and respect of his or her MPs.
Although she has run a quieter campaign, the New Statesman therefore comes out in support of Cooper:
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has run a cautious campaign that was designed to maximise second-preference votes from her rivals’ supporters, but in recent days, responding to the Corbyn surge, she has been bolder. Her experience of government, intellect and credibility mark her out. She has made a passionate and persuasive case for policies such as universal childcare and has forcefully resisted the Conservatives’ fiscal dogmatism. Labour, which purports to be the party of progress and opportunity for all, has never had a better chance to elect its first woman leader.
[. . .]
Labour remains traumatised by an election defeat that it never saw coming and by Ed Miliband’s hasty resignation, which plunged the party into a leadership contest for which it was not prepared. The temptation for some is to write the next election off in advance and elect the candidate who provides most consolation. This must be resisted. History teaches that even the strongest governments can unravel with remarkable speed, which is why Labour must be in a position to offer a credible alternative. The best hope of it being able to do so, in the present circumstances, is the election of Yvette Cooper.
We say this knowing that Mr Corbyn is the clear front-runner and the likely next leader. Yet there are important elections next year in London, Wales and Scotland. If Mr Corbyn’s Labour Party performs poorly in each of these and its present dire position in the polls remains unchanged – and if civil war has broken out in the parliamentary party – his leadership will be in grave danger. Ms Cooper’s moment may yet come.
Laurie Penny: At long last, the left is asking itself whether power without principle is worth having
Laurie Penny writes that Jeremy Corbyn presents a “delicious paradox” to the left – is power worth having at an ethical cost?
Rumours of the death of the political left have been exaggerated. Corbyn, like Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the Scottish National Party, is an immune response from a sick and suffering body politic trying to fight off a chronic infection that threatens to swallow hope for ever. There is a crisis in representative democracy in the west and it was established well before the stock-market collapse of 2008. The old centre left is at odds with its electorate because it decided for itself the limits of what was politically possible a decade ago.
The logic is this: it’s all very well to talk about fairer taxes, rent controls, sustainable wages and an end to the scapegoating of migrants and minorities – of course, we would all get behind those ideas if we could – but, in the end, all of the things for which the public has been crying out for decades just won’t make us “electable” and it is better to have power than it is to have principles. So, much as it pains us, we will continue to capitulate to the austerity consensus and wait around for another five years for our next polystyrene leader to fail to inspire a nation.
Corbyn bucks that trend, terrifying a political class that chose power over principles long ago without once asking itself whether power without principles is worth having. The paradox is delicious. For the first time in years, Labour is popular and interesting, but apparently it would rather not be. In some people’s estimation, a surge in party membership of almost two-thirds, from organised labour, the working poor and disenfranchised young people, would be considered a good thing for a party that claims to represent the interests of all three.
She argues that despite being painted as a figure from the political past, Corbyn understands the voters of the future:
Today’s voters are not the voters of 1997 or 2005. We are digital and post-geographic; we mobilise fast and we want more. We are not wedded to the electoral machine. Our disenfranchisement has been mistaken for apathy for too long by a political class that claims to want young people to vote but turns out to want young people to do as they’re told and vote for it or not at all.
We want someone to remember that democracy does not begin and end at the ballot box. We want someone to represent the interests of the young, the poor and the marginalised in parliament. These are simple, modest demands. And the most damning indictment on the British political machine is the way in which these simple, modest demands look like a revolution.
George Eaton: Labour in open revolt
George Eaton considers the furore surrounding Labour’s leadership election and the split that could face a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn:
“The party’s processes were never set up to cope with this situation and nor was it foreseen that you would have a potential infiltration issue of this scale,” a shadow cabinet minister told me. “We don’t have copies of the TUSC [Trade Union and Socialist Coalition] membership list, or the Green Party list, or the Left Unity list, or the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty list. You can’t know how in-depth this has become.”
Speaking to several Labour MPs, Eaton assesses the mood in the party as voting in the contest opens:
The tens of thousands who have signed up explicitly to vote for Corbyn will not be dissuaded by apocalyptic warnings from Labour grandees. The shadow cabinet minister Jon Trickett, one of the left-winger’s most senior allies and a former adviser to Miliband, told me: “It’s become an article of almost blind faith for the anti-Corbyn camps that he can’t win an election. But nobody’s actually bothered to set out the case in detail to show he can’t win.”
If Gordon Brown’s intervention on 16 August was regarded as insufficient, those of Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson (who suggested that the three other leadership candidates try to halt the race by withdrawing) were regarded as actively helpful to Corbyn. “Mandelson and Blair are making it look as though the three other candidates are interchangeable, as if there are personality differences but no real political differences,” Trickett said. “There are clearly some differences – but essentially the effect of the these grandees’ interventions is to make the three look as though they are all a part of the same political establishment while Jeremy’s in a different camp. The consequence is that all those members who want to use their vote to achieve real change will clearly go to the only candidate who apparently represents something different.”
Despite these doubts, the NS political editor notes that support for Corbyn is growing:
In spite of “the resistance” (as it has come to be known), most believe Corbyn would be able to form a shadow ministerial team. “The party always comes first,” a senior MP said. Contrary to reports, Corbyn does not intend to bring back shadow cabinet elections, and so could unite MPs from Labour’s old left and from the new intake (13 of whom nominated him). In addition, Clive Lewis told me: “A number of MPs I’ve spoken to who supported both Yvette and Andy are quietly very excited at this turn of events.” He also predicted that “many others, sensing an opportunity to move from virtual political obscurity to front-line politics, an option that wasn’t there three months ago, will do so with guarded enthusiasm”.
Eaton concludes:
In Labour, all sides are preparing to enter what feels like a looking-glass world, or an alternate universe. “There is going to be a new establishment: Corbyn, [Michael] Meacher, [John] McDonnell, [Ken] Livingstone, [Diane] Abbott,” a shadow cabinet minister told me. “They are now, for the first time in their political careers, going to be the political establishment. They are going to have responsibility and they will be running things. They won’t be able to pose as being outsiders or insurgents any more: they will be the establishment.”
Stephen Bush: Blair and Brown created a monster to frighten voters – Old Labour. Now it’s fighting back.
Stephen Bush argues that stories matter in politics, from myths of benefit-hoarding neighbours with loads of designer clothes to the Brown/Blair-authored tale of Old Labour:
Like Victor Frankenstein, they started with the best of intentions. [Tony] Blair had been a member of the Labour Party for close to two decades when he became leader – and he had seen only defeats. Both he and [Gordon] Brown had spent 11 years in parliament, almost completely powerless, while first Margaret Thatcher and then John Major carried all before them. So they created a monster – and the monster’s name was Old Labour.
Old Labour did everything that voters disliked about Labour governments past, while New Labour, Blair promised, would do the reverse. That worked well, when New Labour was doing things that people liked, such as winning two successive landslide elections, spending record sums on schools and hospitals, introducing a minimum wage and making museums free. Who would want to be the opposite of that?
Bush explains:
What mattered was the story, and New Labour won – and kept winning. But, by the end, New Labour came to mean something very different. New Labour meant disastrous and bloody wars. New Labour meant financial crises and bailed-out banks. It meant home-flipping MPs and cash for honours. It meant infighting and, eventually, defeat. And who wouldn’t want to be the opposite of that?
That is the impulse behind Corbyn’s surge. For Labour Party members, the story of Old Labour is no longer a cautionary tale, but a road map. Corbyn’s age – which most Labour MPs regard as a crushing disadvantage – is a feature, not a bug, as far as his supporters are concerned. Attacks on the Islington North MP as a throwback hit the target – but the problem for those levelling them is that Corbyn’s supporters want to go back. They want to unwind the past 30 years of British politics.
He concludes:
This has happened to Labour before – Ukip and the SNP, in different ways, claim to be staking out territory once occupied by Old Labour, as the BNP used to do – and the consequences are mostly lethal. Never mind that Ukip is a party of the unashamed right and that the SNP in office is more fiscally conservative than Labour: stories matter more than reality in politics. The parliamentary candidate who knew that entrepreneur [a woman who the neighbours said sat at home all day on benefits and always had designer clothes] lost. Labour was swept aside by the SNP in Scotland. Frankenstein’s monster is expected to be crowned Labour’s next leader.
But there is another risk to all these stories. It is that the country at large still believes the original tale about Old Labour and sees, on 12 September, just another profligate, dangerous, uncompromising socialist.
Plus
Helen Lewis meets Kezia Dugdale, the new leader of Scottish Labour.
Lionel Shriver reads Jonathan Franzen’s novel Purity.
Sarah Churchwell on the fictions that sustained the American South.
Tim Stanley on changing right-wing attitudes to the Confederate flag.
Tim Wigmore decides not to follow Nigel Farage.
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