Feeling Sorry for Labour Party supporters - Part 4 – Gotta Have Soul

[philmophlegm]

In Part 1, I looked at Jeremy Corbyn's views and his economic policies. In Part 2, I looked at who was supporting him and in Part 3, I asked why.

In this final part of my four part series, I'm going to examine issues of soul and faith in the Labour Party.

"Labour has lost its soul"
When you add up all the factors I talked about in parts 2 and 3, I still don't think they explain all of the support for Jeremy Corbyn. The final factor in his support is this argument:

The Labour Party has lost its "soul" and "only Jeremy Corbyn can get it back".

I've seen this a lot in social media comments from Corbyn supporters.

So what exactly is Labour's "soul" and when did it lose it? The second question is easier to answer than the first. Sometime between Michael Foot's resignation as party leader in 1983 and the rise of 'New' Labour under Tony Blair in 1994. This is the period when the party moved away from the hard left position it took under Foot and moved towards the centre ground. Under Blair, the party changed to accept the modern world. It recognised that mainstream free market economics were not only compatible with making working people better off, they were indeed essential. Meanwhile, social liberalism could bring in new types of voters and firmly identify them with the party. This would make up for the fact that there just aren't as many unskilled, poorly-educated, factory-working trade union members around as there used to be. It was a strategy that was enormously successful for the party, but was not without opposition from those on the left.

Which brings us back to that "soul" question. It seems that those on the far left (whether within Labour or outside the party) strongly believe that the party should be committed to a) state ownership of key industries, b) increased welfare spending and c) increased power for trade unions. There are probably other policies that some or even most of them believe in (e.g. anti-American foreign policy, anti-Israel, unlimited immigration, various aspects of political correctness), but those three seem to be the core left-wing policies that the various far left groups agree on. Since the other three leadership contenders all seem to broadly share the view that a) most industries do better in the private sector (although Burnham would nationalise the railways), b) the welfare budget needs to at least be constrained and very possibly reduced, albeit moderately and c) giving too much power to trade unions is dangerous and a vote-loser, then Jeremy Corbyn is indeed the only candidate who can give Labour back its "soul".

Those people on the more moderate, reality-based left I think feel instead that Labour's "soul" should be about improving the lot of ordinary working people, by whatever means necessary. They aren't as ideologically committed. They recognise to varying degrees that Marx was wrong (possibly because of that "good knowledge of 20th and 21st century history" I mentioned right at the beginning). They think that a) the private sector is essential to drive economic growth, b) raising taxes on ordinary working people to pay for the lifestyles of people who would prefer to live off benefits is a massive vote-loser and c) trade union leaders are hugely unpopular with much of the general public. And they conclude that nationalisation, increased benefits and higher taxes, and more power to union leaders does nothing whatsoever to improve the lot or ordinary working people.



Keep the Faith
There is another word for "ordinary working people":

Voters.

Supporters of Corbyn differ from supporters of Cooper, Burnham and Kendall in one crucial respect. For supporters of the latter three, the most important thing is that Labour has the right leader and the right policies to win the next general election*. For Corbyn supporters, that seems to be a secondary objective. What matters more is that Labour has the right policies (i.e. far left ones). I genuinely get the impression that they would rather a far left Labour Party under Corbyn lost the election badly than a centre-left 'Blairite' Labour Party under say Kendall won it with a big majority. Evidence of this? Well look at how much they despise Tony Blair. He is the most electorally successful Labour leader in the history of the party by a wide margin and yet huge numbers of Labour supporters openly despise him. Some Labour candidates in the last election even refused campaign donations from him.

To understand why, you need to understand something about Labour. Something that is tied in with concepts of "soul" and party history. It is this:

The Labour Party is not a political party in the conventional sense; it is a religion.

Just like other religions, there are disputes between modernisers and fundamentalists. And as with some other religions, to a fundamentalist, the most hated enemy is not someone outside of the religion, it is someone who interprets the religion's creed differently. While most of the Labour Party is analogous to that nice Mr Khan who runs the corner shop or that friendly vicar, the far left who support Corbyn and who want to get Labour's "soul" back are analogous to the Taliban or the Spanish Inquisition.



Those Union Leaders
Remember when I said that some of the far left types who left Labour in the 1980s concentrated on working their way into positions of power in the trade union movement. Well, thirty years later, those are the very same people who are now leaders of those unions. Len McCluskey, leader of the UK's largest trade union Unite is the perfect example. A supporter of the banned 'Militant Tendency' in the 80s, he was re-elected to the post of union leader in 2013 despite less than 10% of union members voting for him. Because of "Red Len", Unite is seen as a very left-wing union, yet a study of union members showed that the two most popular daily newspapers among its membership were the right-wing Sun and Daily Mail. Yet McCluskey controls the Labour Party's largest funder. And while he no longer commands a block vote representing all of his union's members, he can certainly influence them. Like many similar left-wing union leaders of not so left-wing unions, he's a vocal Corbyn supporter. He boasted that he could sign up 75,000 supporters eligible to vote in the leadership election. And some unions are taking advantage of their membership databases to pass on details of members eligible to vote to the Corbyn camp but not to the other campaigns.




Feeling Sorry for Labour Supporters
So there you have it. I find myself feeling sorry for those Labour supporters who belong to the reality-based section of the party. The left-wing (but not far left) columnist (and somewhat surprisingly, wargame designer) Dan Hodges spoke for quite a few supporters of the party I suspect when we wrote that "the lunatic wing of the Labour Party is still calling the shots" after Corbyn had secured the requisite number of nominations. I particularly feel sorry for the low-level party workers who volunteer their time stuffing envelopes, knocking on doors at election time and standing for unwinnable local council seats, and who face a future of having to justify policies that they know are absurd for a leader they know cannot win.

Meanwhile, the leadership election is tearing the party apart more than leadership elections for other political parties ever do. Already there are calls for the election to be postponed over fears that many of the new members are not really supporters of the party. Labour MPs are calling for a coup against Corbyn if he wins. There are dirty tricks campaigns (especially against Liz Kendall) - some quite clever, others rather nastier. Tony Blair has warned that Labour "faces annihilation" if Corbyn wins.

And all this because twelve MPs thought that the party needed a wider debate.








* Which one of the candidates would stand the best chance of winning the next election? An interesting poll of Labour MPs showed that those backing Corbyn had the safest seats of the four candidates while those backing Kendall had the most marginal. Might be reading too much into it, but the clear indication is that MPs wanting to keep their jobs back Liz Kendall. Similarly, the feeling in the Conservative Party is that beating Corbyn in five years' time would be easy while Kendall would be a tougher opponent. This is supported by a poll of backbench Conservative MPs released today. In the most recent polls, Kendall is consistently trailing in fourth place. Read into that what you will.

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I was thinking of the filter bubble effect the other day. I'm a socialist. Many of my friends are socialists. I decided to go on a little trawl of what the right were saying -- so I just went to the TElegraph, Times, Mail, Sun and Express and sucked down a few months of their take on Corbyn. The Express and Mail went with the usual "terrorist lover" "communist" and "anti-semite", which these days are the standard accusations against any left wing politician in Britain. But the Murdoch papers were actually unduly soft with remarkably few anti-stories especially after he looked like he might be soft on the causes of Corbyn. I was wondering for a few days and then Murdoch pretty much came out and backed Corbyn.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/20/rupert-murdoch-backs-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership

I'm at least 50% convinced this is a cynical "Back the winner because there's no chance he'll be the ultimate winner" -- that is Murdoch would quite like Corbyn to win this election as it gives the conservative party a great deal of freedom to move a little further to the right without fear of losing in 2020. Perhaps this is unduly paranoid.