From Surge to Sensation: Corbynism and the Unexpected Renaissance of the British Left

CURA director Professor JonathJeremy_Corbyn_speaking_at_the_Labour_Party_General_Election_Launch_2017an Davies reflects on the implications of June’s general election result for the socialist left in the UK.

When Jeremy Corbyn was first elected in 2015, I argued that he would only be able to resist the establishment backlash, especially from his own perfidious MPs, if he could make the surge that propelled him to the Labour leadership infectious. When Theresa May called the General Election on 18th April 2017, there was precious little sign of this happening. Labour was polling in the 20s; the Tories seemed on course for a landslide and the left set for a historic defeat. The renaissance between then and the election of 8th June is staggering and of historic proportions. Corbyn’s election campaign, a simple left wing manifesto, mass rallies, positive media exposure and an appeal rooted in his quiet sense of personal authenticity, has transformed the prospects for the left in Britain.  The Corbyn surge has indeed become infectious.  In the process, it has shattered several myths.

It first shatters the myth of “unelectability” peddled by critics from the now-contrite Owen Jones rightwards. If a Corbyn led Labour Party can achieve more than 40%, only a month after polling 28%, there does not seem to be any inherent barrier to it winning 45% or 50% of the vote. Corbyn’s success is performative: as a Guardian columnist put it, “the more plausible he looks, the more support he will gather“.  This insight was borne out by an initial post-election Survation poll, showing Labour now in a 6% lead. Moreover, even before the surge got going Corbyn was more popular, not only than the toxic figure of Tony Blair, but also Ed Miliband, former leadership rival Yvette Cooper and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. The takeaway lesson from the election is simple: a left wing candidate can win on a left wing manifesto.

Second, and relatedly, the Corbyn campaign shatters the self-serving establishment delusion that we have entered an age of “post-truth” politics, where emotion and belief hold sway over reason and fact. Academia is notorious for making epochs out of fads, and “post-truth” politics is a case in point. Corbyn and Bernie Sanders in the USA both tap into a fervent sense of possibility. There is a craving for authenticity, the hope that sincerely held beliefs can be rendered factual and truthful on the ground: that ordinary people can once again exercise influence, if not mastery, in the political world.

It thirdly shatters another self-serving establishment myth: that young people won’t vote. It rather confirms that abstention was not due to “apathy”, but reasonable and reasoned “antipathy”, or alienation. For decades, the mainstream political parties had nothing to offer people demoralised or repelled by neoliberal groupthink.  For a long time, there has been good in-depth research refuting the theory of “apathy”, ignored by psephologists and pundits (e.g. Marsh, O’Toole and Jones, 2007). The reprehensible Tory claim that Corbyn bribed younger people to vote for ‘free stuff’ is further refuted by evidence showing tuition fees were by no means top of their list of concerns.  Nonetheless, Corbynism resurrects the idea that  “free stuff” funded from progressive taxation is precisely the mark of a decent society and that burdening young people with £80 billion in tuition fee debt was a national disgrace.

Fourth, it shatters the conveniently anti-working class myth that Brexit and UKIP voters are one-dimensional racists. At the start of the election, it seemed that UKIP had done its job and the Tories were set to clean up in former Labour heartlands. To be sure, a large number of working class UKIP votes did go to the Tories, but many were convinced to vote Labour.  Surely, then, more still can be won back. It is worth recalling that until Cameron called his referendum, EU membership was a non-issue. A year later it seems to be a non-issue once again. To the consternation of both Leavers and Remainers, Brexit did not dominate the election. In good part thanks to the Corbyn campaign, nor did immigration. Ideological and everyday racism remains a huge issue in British politics and society. The Leave vote unleashed an appalling wave of hate crimes, as did the recent terror attacks in Manchester and London.  Yet, Labour’s campaign on an optimistic anti-austerity, pro-public services platform has begun to change the narrative on both immigration and security. Given an alternative upbeat political focus, fear of foreigners began to slip down the list of voter concerns.

A fifth myth, now shattered, is that a supine and impotent left could do nothing about Brexit but seek to retain membership of the “single market” described by New Labour spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, as “Mrs Thatcher’s greatest achievement”. To cling to the single market under current rules is effectively to say that corporate interests must always dictate how the British economy is run.  Arch-Brexit Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan pointed out that “several trade union and Labour figures, including some Remainers, now see Brexit as an opportunity to withdraw from EU rules that hamper the nationalisation of industries, and encourage contracting out of public services to private firms”. During the EU referendum campaign, this so-called #Lexit position – for a left wing Brexit – was dismissed as fantasy politics, even by committed socialists. Today, it does not appear quite so fanciful. Labour will undoubtedly have to take a clearer position if it enters government and set out the economic and political parameters of what a progressive Brexit, including the idea of a “reformed” single market, might look like. The defence and extension of free movement remains an inviolable principle for the internationalist left, an issue Labour has fudged. But whatever this position might be, the left is now in a position to influence the debate.

What of the broader significance of the Corbyn surge? I have long been wary of using the word “crisis” to describe the drearily routine politics of the UK under austerity. While there has been enormous suffering for which the term “social crisis” is apt, in politics “crisis” is meant to convey a sense of upheaval conspicuously missing for much of David Cameron’s “age of austerity” (see Bayırbağ, Davies and Münch, 2017). However, in winning over nearly 13 million people, Corbyn may have provoked an incipient full-blown crisis of the British state, something that appeared until recently to have been averted in the aftermath of Brexit. This is partly a crisis of political legitimacy.  The prospect of a weak and divided Tory government propped up by the Democratic Unionist Party, a pre-historically bigoted organisation whose culture and politics are alien to the vast majority of Britons, looks like a recipe for instability and strife.  It is also partly, at last, a political crisis of neoliberalism. This is the authoritarian “free market” doctrine that Britain’s politicians managed to resuscitate after the 2008/9 economic crisis. Presented with an intelligible non-UKIP alternative to the debilitating free market austerity consensus, people were very quickly persuaded and voted for it. Most importantly this is, and has the potential to further become, a crisis of hegemony in which the left in all its forms can fight with renewed confidence for socialist alternatives.  A new wave of anti-austerity struggles is one possibility, linked to the refusal of Tory hard Brexit logics – notably Mrs May’s threat to turn Britain into an offshore tax haven.

From the standpoint of austerity, the revival of the British left through the improbable vehicle of Corbyn’s Labour Party is thus a cause for optimism.  But it certainly is not cause for complacency. Whether the notoriously fractious British left can seize the moment remains to be seen. Little has yet been won and the British ruling class in both its economic and political guises is a formidably ruthless force. The neoliberal Blairite wing is already on manoeuvres. In the Mail on Sunday, Peter Mandelson called for “moderate” Labour MPs to stand by Theresa May, provided she takes a more flexible approach. He enjoined that “mainstream Labour MPs, who worry about the impact of the continuing Corbyn revolution on centrist voters, should be prepared to stand by the wounded PM, and likewise she should welcome their approach in the national interest”. If nothing else, this shocking intervention lays bare the extraordinary lengths to which the Blairite right will go to sabotage the left. On the electoral front, voting preferences are extremely fluid. Since the 2015 election, a working class Labour voter might have migrated from Ed Miliband to UKIP via Brexit and then to the Tories, only to be won back at the last minute by Jeremy Corbyn. This fluidity shows that Labour can no longer rely on traditional working class affiliations: it can only win through building and sustaining political credibility. Nor should we overestimate the influence of socialist ideas. Moreover the battles Corbyn faced as Labour leader seem trivial compared with what he would endure as a socialist prime minster, presiding over an ailing 21st Century British capitalism – potentially severed from its European markets.

But with these necessary warnings this is, at last, a time for optimism among anti-austerity forces and the left. The new politics fits very well with our core research priority in CURA, to explore the parameters and potentialities of the emancipatory city. As his enormous election rallies attest the Corbyn surge is, if nothing else, an urban movement anchored in Britain’s cities. If it is to progress further, with the age of austerity finally brought to a close, urban politics will be crucial.

Jonathan Davies is Professor of Critical Policy Studies and Director of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University.

The EU Referendum and the ailings of contemporary democracy

In this post Adrian Bua argues that Brexit highlights fundamental failures in contemporary British democracy.

Democracy was a key element of the debate around whether the UK should exit or remain in the EU. One of the main criticisms of the EU from both right and left is the distant and unaccountable nature of its institutions. And now, calls for the referendum to be repeated by those shocked by the actual and potential future consequences of ‘Brexit’ are increasingly popular. This move is condemned by Brexiteers as an affront to democracy. On the face of it, they make a valid point. The referendum result gave a clear, if narrow, mandate to leave. Ignoring it would further underline the reality of a pro-EU elite that has lost touch with those ‘ordinary people’ that politicians such as Farage argue have been oppressed by migration.

However, contemporary democratic theory places serious doubts on plebiscitary forms of decision making. In deliberative models it is not only the process of aggregating votes that matters, but also the processes of opinion formation preceding the vote. Leaving aside the widely debated, complex and unresolved issue of whether, and when, direct democratic processes are appropriate to make complex decisions – the phenomenon of the EU referendum highlighted clear deficits and inconsistencies in our representative democracy. In characteristically opportunistic fashion, David Cameron called a referendum to avoid a Tory split that could have been fatal for his 2015 election ambitions.  Martin Lodge and Will Jennings argue that this reflects a broader phenomenon whereby referenda are used not to advance democracy but for political leaders to control divisions in their own parties.

These inconsistencies reflect deep rooted problems in our political system. During the post-war consensus, the institutional landscape of British democracy was enriched by collective mass-membership organisations that had close relationships with political parties and kept them grounded in people’s lives. However, the current turmoil is arguably symptomatic of what Colin Crouch termed the UK’s condition of ‘post-democracy’.  The institutions of the social democratic consensus remain, but have been hollowed out by the de-politicising consequences of neo-liberalism and the dominance of politics by privileged individuals and big business. For citizens, elections have become a spectator sport, managed by experts and reported on by private media monopolies. The rise of single-issue politics has been a salutary development, but in no way has it matched the capacity for the institutions of collective action that heralded the social democratic era to channel demands into the political system.

I would argue that the vote in favour of Brexit is a symptom of Britain’s ‘post-democratic’ condition. It is no secret that it is the constituency that suffered the most from the economic re-structuring over the past few decades that favoured ‘Brexit’. The faith that neoliberal policy makers had for entrepreneurial private sector activity to replace the gutting on manufacturing and heavy industry never materialised in peripheral regions. Instead, what Colin Hay has termed an “anglo-liberal growth model” emerged – based on a service industry concentrated in London and consumption fuelled by private credit and a housing boom in the South East. Gordon Brown’s infamous declaration that boom and bust had been abolished revealed the institutionalisation what Colin Crouch termed an “unacknowledged policy regime”. The election-winning machine that was New Labour contributed to the post-democratic condition. Its obsession with “scientific” approaches to evidence based policy making cohered with Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis – politics becomes a managerial and technical endeavour. Citizen participation becomes limited to focus group and survey research designed to optimise the party’s chances to reflect public opinion and thus win elections. Importantly, this left behind the concerns of those working class constituencies that “have nowhere else to go”, as New Labour architect Peter Mandelson put it.

But the chickens have come home to roost. The financial crash, and ensuing recession, deepened the economic woes of peripheral regions. Public sector employment and redistribution from the proceeds of the economy in the South East reduced through austerity. This was compounded by the deepening of the, already established, ‘beggar thy neighbour’ politics that generated contempt for a dependency culture. The Brexit campaign deepened a discourse which was already well developed and increasingly propagated by corporate media empires, that blamed immigrants for economic woes – as well as a lack of ‘control’ over our borders and burdensome EU regulation. At the time of writing, the Labour Party which had given hope to so many people that this situation might change with the election of Jeremy Corbyn, is ripping itself apart with internal struggles between its left and right. It is unclear what the outcome will be, that is a debate for another day, but – regardless of whether Brexit materialises – it will certainly be of great importance in the struggle to shape a fairer, more inclusive and democratic Britain. Should the right win, we can expect even more tea mugs and headstones promising to control immigration than in the campaign ran by Ed Milliband.

Inside and outside the Labour Party, the left should counter this discourse by finding improved ways of communicating the message that the difficulties faced by many supporters of Brexit are not due to immigration, EU regulation of lax border controls, but by a deliberate, and by no means irreversible, re-shaping of the UK political economy since the late 1970’s.  An integral part of this is to articulate a left politics based on democratic participation, empowerment and investment in social services. As Adam Przeworski pithily stated “to discuss democracy without considering the economy in which that democracy must operate is an endeavour worthy of an ostrich”. The left needs to develop a coherent and convincing vision for an alternative political economy that delivers genuine equality of opportunity, and meaningfully redistributes wealth and power. In this vein, Jonathan Davies has called for the UK and European nations to develop a “Marshall Plan for the 21st Century”. It is imperative to put flesh on the bones of this idea, and organise for its fulfilment. Social democracy should end its flirtation with neo-liberalism and regain the necessary confidence to regenerate itself on its own grounds. There is a rich legacy of thinking on participatory forms of socialism to draw on here. EU elites seem keen to make an example of Britain through a painful divorce, and the disposition of the likely UK post-Brexit leadership will be to turn the UK (or what remains of it) into some sort of libertarian utopia and international tax haven – “a free-wheeling island nation” as put by one article outlining a terrifying blueprint for a post Brexit Britain. This “scorched earth plan” is the way we are currently headed, and it is not pretty.

Dr Adrian Bua researches for the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity and the New Economics Foundation.

After The Corbyn Surge

The election of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour Party leadership is a seismic event in British politics – perhaps even more so than the SNP landslide in May 2015. For the first time, a committed socialist and anti-austerity activist leads the Labour Party at Westminster.  Many commentators were busy writing his obituary long before he became leader. Yet, serious thinkers on the right aren’t fooled. They know Corbyn taps into a popular mood, the desire for authentic opposition to the Tories, and an alternative to the right wing populism of UKIP. They fear that he really could threaten the enervating austerity consensus.  Making that threat a reality is his only chance.

Corbyn faces formidable opponents in the state, business, media and the Labour machine itself.  Can he survive as leader?  Is it remotely plausible that he could become PM?  It will be extraordinarily difficult, but it is possible whatever the psephologists might say.  Politics can change. Political activists can be agents of change.  The challenge, simply, is to make the “Corbyn surge” infectious: translate his campaigning energies to the national stage and use his position as Labour Leader to win credibility for his socialist worldview. In practice, that means he must mobilise a movement capable of stopping austerity in its tracks. To win credibility, the Corbynistas must find a way of making austerity ungovernable. Accomplish that, and they might regain credibility for socialist politics and bring millions of working class people alienated by the Blairite era back into the political and electoral fold.  Since Corbyn’s astonishing victory on Saturday, there have been stirrings within the leadership of the trade union movement – even threats of “civil disobedience”.  But we heard all that in the heady days of 2011. At the height of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement, we saw a trade union demonstration of more than half a million people in London, and mass strikes against cuts in public sector pensions. But the unions backed down and nothing came of it. Talking a good fight against austerity isn’t remotely the same as delivering. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is a huge gamble and the odds are stacked against him. If the Corbyn surge does not prove to be infectious, he will quickly be toast.  But by sticking his guns he could just lead a renaissance on the left and transform British politics.

We will be discussing this and many other issues at the inaugural conference of our Centre for Urban Research on Austerity on 18th and 19th November 2015. See http://www.dmu.ac.uk/CURA2015.

Jonathan Davies

Director – Centre for Urban Research on Austerity