Bad Mathematics
Jeremy Corbyn and the Future of Labour
I wrote about the Labour Party’s demographic woes in June last year, and more recently to suggest that Corbyn needed to produce his own “Brexit white paper” ahead of the government one. Labour seems unable to be coherent and compelling on what may be the most important political shift in seventy years. It’s tragic, because it hands the initiative to an amateurish clique of fantasists on the Right of our political spectrum and delivers us, as we’ve seen over the last week with painful clarity, into the hands of Donald Trump and America’s new rage politics.
So what is Corbyn up to?
Here’s my best shot so far at understanding.
Labour voted >60% Remain. Or rather, crucially, >60% of Labour’s 2015 vote went Remain. Labour, of course, lost the 2015 election, with the UK returning 40% again as many Tories and Labour MPs. Corbyn identifies immigration and the EU as an electoral problem for him, and he’s right about that, but he analyses the problem wrongly. He’s a man of his time, and there is a perspective within the Left which asserts that all the various intersectional issues of society can be analysed as aspects of class struggle. I don’t know whether he sees it that way, though certainly there will be people near him who do. More importantly, it looks as if he’s calculating his electoral chances based on the idea that a person’s Left-Right conviction is a kind of anchor line which may be elastic but which will, if other forces are removed, draw voters back to Labour.
The thing is, I don’t think that’s true. The dissolution of Left-Right as a defining aspect of selfhood and British politics began with the end of the Cold War and was at its height in the Blair years, but it didn’t go away just because Tony Blair took Britain into Iraq. Politics post-1991 is complex and multipolar, and apt to become more so.
It seems to me that Corbyn thinks that if he chases towards the Communitarian sensibility which is bleeding voters to UKIP he can reclaim some of that grouping: remove the tension between their natural class allegiance and their sense of being overwhelmed by immigration, and they will naturally ping back to where they should be. His mistake is in believing — as he must, because he’s defined his life on the basis of a Marxian economic analysis of identity — that the position on the left-right axis of his target voters is relatively stable, and it isn’t. What if the Communitarian-Cosmopolitan axis is more defining these days than the Left-Right one? (Or indeed, what if it always has been, but the blending of need and political alignment made the priority imperceptible?) He cannot — will not — match May in travelling down the road of dogwhistle prejudice that attended the Brexit campaign. All he can do is come second, and alienate the other half of his base which comes from the cities and hates Brexit and Trump with a fiery passion — another warning about economic identity as an anchor; a large part of the urban Left belongs to Labour partly as an identity statement, partly because Labour expresses social mobility and Cosmpolitanism. There’s a desire for social justice, and for liberal and evidence-based policies. The allegiance to Left economic policy and class conviction is more tenuous, and in any case the overlap of the parties on the Left-Right axis is considerable. Brits mostly self-identify as centrist in one form or another, and just as plenty on the Right back the renationalisation of the railways, so there are plenty of the Left who would consider, say, a flat tax rate if it could be made a progressive tool, perhaps by pairing with a UBI. He’s taking an economically essentialist view of political identity, and if he’s wrong — which I think he is — he’s going to be in very big trouble indeed.
And it doesn’t stop there.
A recent study found that the economic hit from Brexit will kick in after 2020. That means Corbyn will have quite possibly have to go into the election fighting on the basis that Brexit is a success but that he’d be doing it differently. It’s not a powerful talking point. The Brexit discussion will very likely still be running high, particularly if A50 is invoked in March 2017. The Right of the Tory Party is presently in the driving seat on Brexit, and TTIP is likely to form the template for any US trade deal. Various protections will be lost in that exchange. Labour will have to decide between a bad deal with the US and being seen to block a deal with the US, locking us out of not only the EU but the only economy of equivalent size. All the moves in the chess game, once Brexit occurs on its current trajectory, push Labour into worse and worse positions and ultimately move the political-economic window to the Right.
When the economic bite finally happens, what will the party be able to say of itself? That it did what it did for the Will of the People? Voters won’t say thank you. A surprising number of them will abruptly remember that they always had reservations, because that’s what people do.
In sum: Corbyn’s chasing the bottom half of the graph because he thinks they naturally belong to Labour, but May and UKIP between them have that staked out. At the same time, he’s angering the top half, who feel he belongs to them but is heading away for political expediency.
Bad Mathematics.
