Bernie Sanders has Changed the Conversation Around Trade Policy. So Should Jeremy Corbyn.

As part of his trip to the UK, Barack Obama spoke to an admiring audience at Lindley Hall in London yesterday.

The purpose of that speech, while not explicitly stated, was to persuade British voters of the merits of choosing to remain in the EU this June.

Obama is one of the most popular politicians in the world. Domestically his approval rating is a solid 51%. That figure rises to around 70% among Brits. If there is a single foreign politician who could make a meaningful intervention into the debate, it is Obama.

One sentence in that speech really stood out for me. It would have been unthinkable a decade ago:

“I know it can seem that the order we have created can seem fragile, maybe even crumbling, maybe that the centre can not hold”.

Such candour from a politician, let alone a US President, is rare. What is more, from failed intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, those words seem like a pretty decent assessment of what is going on. The post-1989 order of American global hegemony, combined with a Europe that was politically stable and economically prosperous, is in decline.

The last eight years, contemporary with Obama’s two presidential terms, have witnessed the near collapse of an economic orthodoxy which ruled the roost since the mid-1970s. ‘Free market’ economies were only saved by measures they were meant to fundamentally oppose: bank nationalisations, massive state intervention and quantitative easing.

Alongside that, there has also been the re-emergence of Russia. 2008 was the year Dmitry Medvedev started his presidency by going to war in South Ossetia. That proved to be a foretaste of events in Crimea in 2014 and Syria late last year.

And its been under Obama’s watch that we’ve seen failed revolutions across the Middle East and North Africa. In turn this has led to confused US foreign policy in the region, prompting the rise of Iran and the Gulf States as players that are ready-and-able to project military force and political influence.

And while its not yet a genuine rival to the US, we’ve seen China shift its growth model from exports to domestic infrastructure since 2008. That has allowed GDP growth to continue, but at a clip of 6 or 7% rather than the average 10% its been during my lifetime. While that has been a solution in the short-term, its not a sustainable model.

So a lot has changed these last ten years: America is politically and military weakened; Europe looks like a low-growth economy with increasingly volatile politics; and we are seeing the first glimpses of a multilateral order. While not global powers, Iran, Turkey and Russia all now exercise a role unthinkable at the turn of the century.

While Obama was implicitly attacking UK exit from the EU, at times the register of his speech felt more appropriate in describing US Senate Republicans, “We see people hunkering down in their own point of view, unwilling to engage in a democratic debate…these are reactions to changing times and uncertainty”.

I’d hardly call a referendum on something shying away from debate, but there you go. More importantly, however, those words reminded me of another speech Obama gave eight years ago. Then, he referred to working-class voters in industrial towns in clear terms, “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Those comments, while poorly judged, didn’t feel inaccurate. And yet more and more people, are explicitly stating such ‘anti-trade’ sentiments in the US. Only now it isn’t just NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) but the TTIP (the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) and the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) too.

Those voices emanate from both the left and the right.

Donald Trump has said NAFTA should either be re-negotiated or broken, and is a major critic of TPP.

Bernie Sanders says similar things. He’s been an outspoken critic of NAFTA since the early 1990s and has said he would ‘fundamentally re-write’ it if he became President along with CAFTA and a range of other free trade agreements. He is similarly opposed to TPP and TTIP.

While people are eager to point out similarities between Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, here that simply isn’t possible. That is because while the US government decides US trade policy, the British government does not. As a member of the European Union, UK external trade policy is decided by the unelected European Commission.

What has been a major feature of the Sanders campaign, arguing for a different trade regime that helps working people in both the Global North and South, remains completely overlooked by the UK left who avoid it while making vague claims about reforming the EU. Corbyn, while a critic of the EU for over thirty years, has made the political calculation that backing Brexit is a step too far for his leadership.

So while Sanders says that neoliberal trade policy has created massive income inequality both in the United States and abroad, Jeremy Corbyn has called the exact same policies good for jobs and growth.

Its Not Cynical to Criticise Global Trade Policy. Its Principled.

While Obama did say something unsayable ten years ago in yesterday’s speech, much of it was reminscent of his first presidential campaign in 2008. None more so than this line:

“Don’t give up and succumb to cynics if after five years poverty hasn’t been eradicated … It’s OK. Dr [Martin Luther] King says the arc of the [moral] universe is long, but bends towards justice.”

Only now it isn’t just ‘cynics’ questioning globalisation and extant trade agreements. It isn’t just the right, although Donald Trump has certainly taken the baton from the Tea Party here. Its the left as well. Its a politician who has mobilised half a million volunteers, attracted five million individual contributions and declared Wall Street the enemy of everyday Americans. If Obama hasn’t got that memo its because, for his entire life, successful politicians haven’t said this kind of thing. Now they are saying it.

Sanders and the movement behind him are profoundly ‘anti-trade’ in the context of free trade agreements. But rather than clinging to ‘guns and the bible’ they are involved in the most radical, progressive party primary in modern US history.

When he was asked a question about TTIP yesterday Obama replied, “the answer to globalisation is not to pull up the drawbridge and shut off.” Only that isn’t what Sanders is proposing. Like millions protesting at the beginning of the century his position, like mine and so many others, is that another globalisation is possible - one where freedom of movement, instant communication and globalised production don’t have to mean falling real pay and a race to the bottom. That has to be the fundamental ambition of any Twenty-First Century left.

The Sanders candidacy has transformed the political conversation in America. If Jeremy Corbyn is going to allow policies on migration, trade and industrial policy to be outsourced to Brussels, he’ll fail to do likewise here. He will fail to change the debate.

Sanders is helping re-define public opinion in these crucial areas. The left can do the same here in the coming years. I think thats confirmed by similar demographics behind both politicians.

So what would it take to change public opinion in these key areas? It would require principled and consistent politics. It would take ideas backed up by social movements and media counter-power. It would take a timetable and a plan. I see that as a lot more realistic than nebulous calls to reform Europe.

Kissinger once allegedly asked “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?” The same can be said for any multi-national movement in regard to reform.

For me changing Europe isn’t really in our hands. The good thing, however, is that the other stuff totally is. After all, a world order is crumbling.