The Bitterites
Most sensible commentators could tell you that the break from neoliberalism wouldn’t be smooth, yet few could tell you how bumpy the ride would be in the Labour Party.
Under Corbyn’s reign the party proposes steps towards a minimally mixed economy, pro-growth policies that prioritise longer-term returns on investment over quick cash and speculation, and some serious thinking and commitments around climate change. In all, Corbynism amounts to efforts to make capitalism work again. Blairite resistance, therefore, cannot be understood according to a simple class-based rationality; even a factional one, a defense of the City, of landlords and BAE systems, for example. It is far better understood as a pathology: ‘Understanding the psychological imprint on the minds of Tony and Gordon, of what they saw as their political inheritance is crucial to understanding their actions in government.’ [1]
There are two components to this outlook. First is that the New Labour mindset, we shouldn’t forget, was never truly hegemonic in the party, it remained a minor influence in the membership and the unions, its seat of power was the leader’s office, the party staff and a fickle media. As such it had an overcompensating, anxious, controlling character. Second, the crucible of its view was its account of the Winter of Discontent, the disaster of ’83, the bitter fights with Militant. Labour was thought to be self destructive. Kinnock too tepid, too cautious. The party failed to get with ‘new times’. It was a relic. A dinosaur. A nightmare.
‘One woman said to me [Philip Gould] just weeks before the 1997 election, “When I was a child there was a wardrobed in my bedroom. I was always scared that one night, out of the blackness, a monster would emerge. That is how I think of the Labour Party.” This was typical.’
It was in the early ’90s where what began as a particular analysis of the structural limits of corporatist social democracy turned to an embrace of Thatcherism vis (Atlanticist) ‘globalisation’. It was in the second and third terms of New Labour in which the analytical component of the outlook began to fall away. Blairism became an ideology, an attitude, a pallet of emotions. It was driven by belief and nostalgia rather than insight or claims to ‘truth’. No doubt the defense of an illegal war under a false pretext, the defense of slaughter despite no notable gains or rational purpose, cannot but damage a human mind. It damaged Labour’s activists and voters, but one wonders what it did to those who promoted it and who continue to defend it now?
And this is what Corbyn represents. He is more than a guilty conscience. He is the very embodiment of Old Labour, the ‘centre-piece of a past that was constructed and imagined for political purposes.’ New Labour offered the diagnosis: Old Labour was the disease. It was electoral failure, it was suicide, it was everything that created Blairism, its constitutive other. It was exactly what made New Labour new: ‘the dazzling white of the new against the tawdry.’ Corbyn is all of that. He represents, for them, a ‘spent force irretrievably bound to a stockpile of ill-conceived, irrelevant, dogma-driven and damaging polices.’ Just like in days gone by, Corbyn gives Lord Mandelson a reason to get out of bed each morning.
Understanding the pathological outlook reveals the inability of the New Labour hangers-on to grasp the extent to which the certainties of their era have changed. It explains just why it fell to the so called hard left to point out the alternative to austerity, the one that voters wanted. It shows how the Gould methodology has become an arcane myth, if ever if was anything else (take the case of nationalisation). It explains the pervasive kitsch authentocracy in place of substance. How, today, can one make sense of Brown’s apparent horror at Old Labour’s boom and bust, stop and go, after 2008, the greatest stock market crash since the 1930s and the slowest recovery on record? None of it makes any sense, and yet.
Even as a dead generation weighing on the minds of the living their will to power is seemingly endless. It howls and it is heard; in the press, at least. The Blairites whose reflex today is the horror of ‘fake news’ yesterday spun webs among the reporters, the pundits, the producers and the venders of second hand ideas in Westminster. ‘The success of the courtship (with the Sun backing New Labour in three successive general elections) was, in Alistair Campbell’s mind, his biggest achievement in politics.’
Where does a mirror for princes turn when his master has been dethroned? What happens to elite ideologies that, in spite of their platform, loose their capacity to explain or appeal? They become death drives. Sheer compulsion. Optimism of the will without the intellect. Faith. ‘Extremism’. The pleasure comes from not letting go. From the cult of not forgetting. From the club of hate and righteousness.
Thus the question what do they want is better posed as who are they, these Bitterites?
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[1] Peter Hymann, a number 10 staffer in the Blair years. The following quotes are all taken from Eric Shaw’s “Loosing Labour’s Soul? New Labour and the Blair Government” (2007). Shaw is at pains to stress that New Labour were less constrained by globalisation than both Blair’s rhetoric and left wing critics would lead us to believe. He claims that New Labour’s trajectory is best explained by their peculiar ideology.
