Being a millennial socialist in 2025 must feel like being a hippy in 1974: The Beatles have split up; Hendrix and Joplin are dead; Nixon is in the White House; and another, more aggressive youth subculture — punk — is emerging to replace your fading utopian idealism. The party is well and truly over. Keir Starmer has expunged any trace of radical fervor from Labour. And, as a result of his adoption of bland, buttoned-up technocracy, many young, enthusiastic Left-wingers have left the party. To make matters worse, the stuttering launch of Your Party, the new vehicle for Corbynism, turned into a carnival of infighting, undermining the reputations of all concerned. Across the Atlantic, Trump has returned to the Oval Office, and here in the UK, Gen Z voters are more likely to opt for Nigel Farage than for the Greens’ fledgling “eco-populism”. With woke-liberal messaging adopted wholesale by the upper echelons of the corporate world, the contemporary transgressive pole is now the backlash against the painfully self-righteous, the censorious, and the overtly politically correct. When academia, the arts, cultural institutions, the educational establishment and the civil service demand acquiescence with ultra-liberal social mores, it’s little wonder the counter-cultural moment lies with the populist New Right rather than the progressive Left.

In today’s climate, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when the Labour Left, resurgent with the energies of millennial socialist activists backing Corbyn, felt like it was ascendant, that anything was possible, and that the future of the Labour Party, if not the country, belonged to a class of cool kids shaping an ultra-progressive form of socialist revival. Unlike the party’s tired moderate wing, the millennial Left was brimming with ideas and high-minded, quixotic intellectual debate, and it attached itself to the Labour Party like a limpet during the Corbyn era. The Blairite modernizers, discredited by their Faustian pacts with a sub-prime City and the disasters of Iraq, would call for moderation and sober managerialism, but Labour’s millennial Left organized workshops on Italian revolutionary philosophies, followed by grime and acid house listening parties hosted by Turner Prize-winning artists, and set up “mega-games” in which participants could simulate responses to establishment attacks in the first year of a Corbyn government that never quite came. The millennials were riding a wave of optimism as the official opposition engaged in an institutional turn towards what a Marxist shadow chancellor called “socialism with an iPad”. They were enthused, not repulsed, by Jezza, who was lovingly referred to in the activists’ community centers and Glastonbury Pyramid Stage crowd not disparagingly as “Magic Grandpa”, but reverentially as “the Absolute Boy”.

Rather than spend their nights listening to drunken parliamentary staffers belt out “Things Can Only Get Better”, the Corbynista cool kids would retreat to darkened warehouses to smoke roll-ups, talk about Judith Butler and the Kurdish communes, and dance to trendy sub-genres of electronica until the early hours. Ditch the Marks & Spencer apparel and business-friendly media-speak of bland traditional Labourism, and replace it with septum piercings, oversized jeans, vintage T-shirts, mustache-mullet combinations and neo-Maoist views on landlordism, and you’re approaching the world of millennial socialism. It was dynamic and counter-cultural, with an agenda full of knowing nods and winks towards the anti-authoritarian New Left tradition and Sixties creative “happenings” — homo ludens to the old party establishment’s homo economicus.

And this wasn’t a purely British phenomenon. In the US, Bernie Sanders had led an insurgency against the Democrat’s Clintonian establishment, and on the continent a wave of upstart populist parties — Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise and Syriza in Greece — found success in challenging the more moderate proclivities of traditional social democracy in their own countries. Like Corbyn’s Labour, they garnered the votes of mainly young, university-educated urbanites, but also built a larger electoral alliance that included older public sector workers, sections of the low-waged metropolitan precariat, and some ethnic minorities.

But the continental experiments in radical Left social movements-cum-parties have largely faded out or else collapsed completely, mirroring the diminution of the Labour Left. Millennial socialism is on the wane. And so, for the beleaguered cool kids, the outlook is rather bleak. This is the context in which the 2025 edition of their annual Corbynite festival The World Transformed (TWT) took place in Manchester last week, for the first time running separately to Labour’s own official conference. In its earlier versions, during the Corbyn years, the festival took place in either Liverpool or Brighton: suitable bastions of working-class anti-Toryism and middle-class progressivism respectively. Back then, TWT received praise from some unlikely quarters, including from Blairite apparatchiks and Corbyn-sceptic commentators, with innovative events aimed at a more youthful, vigorous and once-dominant Left wing — a Momentum-aligned fringe in vegan-friendly venues. But the millennial socialists are today looking for new solutions to their old problems.

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Britain’s wage slaves are revolting

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The spatial distance from Labour’s powerbrokers matches a yawning political divergence. The mood this year was somber. A hodgepodge of competing Leftist interest groups came to Manchester to state the case for their own version of the socialist creed and to fight over the diminishing scraps of the socialist mantle in a set of graffiti-adorned theater spaces and worthy, charity-run community venues in Hulme and Moss Side. It was not so much a united, popular front but a threadbare, garish patchwork, pulled in different directions and coming apart at the seams.

The millennial socialists were still there in force. They still have their fashions and their radical philosophy, but they’ve lost their mojo, their once-obvious vim. Marooned outside the Labour Party, they are lost, uncertain, divided, without clear strategy, and without a viable or agreed vehicle for power. Gone are the playful attitudes, the joyful optimism and post-ironic, cultural-political exuberance. Instead, there are speakers from the Revolutionary Communist Party, rs21 (Revolutionary Socialism for the 21st century), as well as issue-specific campaigning groups such as the Trans Liberation Group. Every meeting harbors nervous talk of countering an incipient “fascist threat”, by which speakers mean the Reform part. Forget the £40 billion in extra taxes levied on employers, and forget £100 billion in extra capital spending. No: Starmerism is actually “austerity 2.0”. Worse still, the government is “genocidal” and “authoritarian”. And, worryingly for these radicals, nobody quite agrees what a rebuild looks like.

At stake is the future of the British radical Left. There remain several competing tendencies among the millennial socialists, including those who want to build an anarchic, “bottom-up”, ultra-democratic “social movement” rather than a traditional party, uniting Just Stop Oil and BLM-type activist groups into a federated structure that contests elections without sacrificing an ethos of direct action. Others in Corbyn’s own camp of old-fashioned, trade unionist advisors wish for a more conventional “top-down” Left-wing operation, using Your Party’s small parliamentary platform to present an anti-war, social-democratic message to the public, getting support from trade unions, and shifting the Labour Party to the Left just as UKIP shifted the Tories to the Right.

Zack Polanski’s Leftward turn at the helm of the Greens has won more than a few converts, and a so-called “Red-Green alliance” has been mooted by Polanski. But before any formal co-operation is agreed between the Greens and a putative Corbyn-Sultana-led Your Party, recriminations abound over Your Party’s form, policymaking, personnel and purpose. In a forced display of unity, Sultana and Corbyn appeared together to speak in front of a crowd of keffiyeh-clad enthusiasts last week. A well-placed source tells me their allies are in the process of sending legal letters to each other. Nevertheless, the two sat to listen admiringly to a French parliamentarian talk of her party’s refusal to countenance a national retirement age above 60.

But there was no sign of the four other independent MPs who form the parliamentary nucleus of Your Party. Despite having joined with Corbyn and Sultana (for now), these Muslim men have shallow socialist pedigree. They sit in the Commons as the beneficiaries of a groundswell of revulsion toward the Gaza war in their heavily Islamic constituencies. And yet all four of these MPs are landlords; they voted against Labour’s new VAT taxes on private schools; and predictable spats over transgenderism broke into public view weeks ago, with Sultana calling out the gender-critical views of a Your Party comrade.

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One TWT speaker confided to me that the Left “just need to learn how to speak normally. Stuff like this [festival] is important, but we’re not going outside our comfort zone.” But others will militate against any position that doesn’t imply principled, glorious detachment from anything approaching the general public’s values or everyday concerns. Historically high levels of migration are the number one issue for voters, but at TWT any suggestion that we should reduce numbers is enough to invite immediate excommunication. The cost of living and a faltering economy come next on the list of public concerns, but these concerns are little addressed here beyond the illusory panacea of a “wealth tax”. There’s much talk of “the working class”, but few suggestions of how a group of post-graduate Leftists will persuade low-income blue-collar workers in post-industrial towns that they should ditch Farage and instead vote for people who are part of groups with names like “Queers for Palestine”, and who also, by the way, advocate for open borders.

There’s still some lip service paid to actual power among the depleted crowd of millennial socialists, who still talk of strategy, of mass movements, of what a good Leftist might call “hegemony”. But there’s little of its application in evidence. During the halcyon days of Corbynism when the cool kids were in the office of the leader of the opposition, and when TWT speakers and attendees seriously influenced policy, it felt like maybe, just maybe, the millennial socialists might one day win. True enough, the social milieu that they represented would never represent a majority of the electorate. But there was a willingness, a recognition that their project would make a hegemonic offer to the broader social body. Indeed, promises on higher public investment, nationalized utilities and the minimum wage could attract widespread support. At the apex of a genuine, mass party of government that was attempting to weave together a cross-class electoral coalition, millennial socialists were kept on the straight and narrow. But, having rejected Labourism, they have capitulated, relegating themselves to sub-cultural obscurity.

Today, like the hippies in Nixon’s America, the movement is a shadow of its former being, a set of disparate strands goading themselves into ever-more radical positions. Instead of a vehicle for political power, it’s a set of niche, minoritarian fan clubs that hold their purisms as axiomatic. The discord is the latest symptom of an increasingly fragmented body politic, with dozens of separate cultural-political tribes talking solely to each other and consuming reams of self-affirming timeline content that merely buttresses their own group prejudices. Mass politics is over, and the two-party system is imploding. But as long as the Left is kept clean, with all the correct positions, they are seemingly unconcerned that their success in detaching a chunk of Labour’s vote at the next election can only possibly result in a victory march for the very “fascism” they’re claiming to oppose most vehemently. No matter to them — as long as it’s only the cool kids at the table.

It feels good to get this off my chest. Being swept up in the Corbyn frenzy of 2015-17 was borderline compulsory for posh teenagers queasy about their own privilege. It gave me some distinction among friends whose only impression of this strange, shabby Islington MP was that he was determined to take away their holiday homes. This was an embarrassing chapter in my life, during which I never left the house without a velvet choker — the fashion at the time.

That first wave of Corbynism, like my predilection for chokers, was doomed. It insisted on ideological positions untethered from reality, its adherents allergic to the views of those outside the morally pure vanguard. The frenzy of Corbynistas was vibes-based, conviction-lite and fact-free. The faces of that movement were young, vital and countercultural; it was them versus the Tory gammons and the square New Labourites. For a teenager, the choice was obvious. Of course, none of those yelling “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” to the tune of Seven Nation Army at Glastonbury had a handle on the catastrophic economic vision of John McDonnell. Nor would one expect them to; how do you find the time to read a manifesto when you spend all day skulking around the Dalston Oxfam?

Now a chaotic new Corbyn party — a venture with the Coventry MP Zarah Sultana — claims once again to have the answers to Great British inequality and division, this time in an even more vicious political landscape as Reform paws at the door. Proving its proletarian credentials, the provisionally named “Your Party” is offering strangers on the internet the opportunity to suggest its official name. Unfortunately this does not appear to be a straightforward voting system – Party McPartyFace would inevitably result – rather, YouGov has listed some of the top suggestions being mulled over by top brass. Among them are The Collective (which sounds like a high-markup coffee shop in Hackney Wick), Arise (a yuppie pilates studio) and The People’s Party. This latter one, the favorite among those YouGov surveyed, is an interesting choice. How many People’s Parties the world over have ended up being brutal authoritarian juntas? Heed the rule of thumb: parties and states with promising names – “people’s republics” and so on – are often anything but. Just saying.

Once christened, the first hurdle, a rite of passage on the hard-Left, will be surviving infighting. Last week, a squabble straight out the gate showed “Your Party”was still in the mire over antisemitism. Sultana had told the New Left Review that during his time leading the Labour Party, Corbyn had “capitulated to the IHRA definition of antisemitism” (Corbyn adopted the definition in 2018). She went on to describe his leadership as, of all things, “conciliatory”. For those keeping score, it is worth remembering Corbyn’s interview with Piers Morgan days after October 7, 2023. “All attacks are wrong,” was his response. Pushed repeatedly to condemn Hamas, he refused. Some conciliation.

If these early tiffs don’t kill it in the cradle, “Your Party” could be a disruptor. It has already had fairly buzzy beginnings: despite the perceived chaos, at the time of writing, more than 700,000 people had signed up on the website to register their support (though it’s worth remembering that unlike other parties, it does not charge for membership). Ipsos found that 20% of voters would be “very or fairly likely” to back the party — and 33% among those aged 16-34. Corbyn told Tribune magazine that these potential voters were responding to the usual shopping list of gripes: high bills, high rents, sewage in the waterways. He added: “Plenty of good comrades have approached me over the years suggesting that there needs to be a new political voice in this country,” citing his retention of the Islington North seat as an independent. Seen from Upper Street, the future of socialism is bright.

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But the Londoners who cling to Corbyn — he himself admitted they made up an outsized proportion of those who had registered interest in the new party so far — are still the feckless, limp normies voting not for “the many” but against their parents. For them, politics is simply another opportunity for self-expression. Since Corbyn was booted off his perch, these types were left to whinge about gentrification and the scourge of landlordism while moving their Oka furniture into ex-council flats in Mile End and paying £15 for pan con tomate. Feckless, ridiculous, but harmless. It is one thing droning on about cultural imperialism at a flatroofed pub, and quite another being given a genuine political soapbox. Taking them seriously is so 2015. Next!

More so than ever being on the hard-Left is now an empty identity marker, almost guaranteed never to be tested. This is precisely what makes it so appealing to the middle classes: it is a shortcut to radicalism without any personal risk. The movement is emotionally seductive, an imitation of Seventies socialism with the reading comprehension of today’s youth. And with no answers on immigration, welfare abuse and feminism — “trans people are human beings” was Corbyn’s glib response to the Supreme Court decision on the definition of biological sex — it is structurally hollow. One gust of realism on any of these issues, and it topples.

A decade on from the initial wave of Corbynism, Your Party wants to meet Britain’s new challenges with a suspiciously 2015-esque agenda: Sultana has proposed a “resolutely anti-racist and pro-trans socialist program”. So let’s look at what’s on the to-do list as summer winds down in the UK: protesters surround hotels filled with migrants; pedestrian crossings are painted with the St George’s flag; Nigel Farage announces plans to introduce “mass deportations”. Directives to be kind can no longer mollify the working-class communities — Labour heartlands — inflamed by demographic upheaval. Corbyn’s metropolitan socialist movement is disgusted by the concerns of those communities, disappointed that they have strayed so far from his tutelage, that they are not the “good comrades” of Soviet fantasy. What’s the plan, Jezza?

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Predictably, this time round Corbyn continues to be paranoid about a conniving press (maybe he and Donald would get on?). He told Tribune: “Many in our media struggled to understand the idea of letting ordinary people shape the future of our party. For the 650,000 people who signed up, it wasn’t so hard to understand.” It is the same reasoning which scuppered the project in 2017 and 2019; again, the real villains are the newsrooms stuffed with cackling hacks throwing darts at Corbyn’s photograph, too venal or too stupid to admire his gleaming vision for a fairer world. And again, we get the same old utopian twaddle about “ordinary people” as a benevolent, uncorrupted but misled mass. These peaceable working men and women just want affordable housing, clean rivers and for everyone to get along, yeah? If they’re angry about the small boats, it’s only because of that dastardly Lord Rothermere. Ordinary people have simply been led astray, and their unsavory concerns can be wafted away with a stick of incense and a bung of Universal Basic Income. , Your Party is bringing a water pistol to a civil war, and in so doing will split the Left and hand the keys to Farage. For this, the migrants will not thank them.

Until then, the movement will serve its true purpose: to make its members feel good about themselves while letting “ordinary” communities roil with discontent. Criticism from the mainstream will only enhance the pleasure. It’s already starting: to crack open the comment section of Jezza’s Instagram page is to be hit with the stench of self-satisfaction. It’s a dumpsite of half-baked sloganeering: “United we rise. Decided we fall,” writes one typomaniac (it’s hard to text one-handed); another, responding to a mini-debate on the efficacy of wealth taxes, trumps their opponent with the scorcher: “Carry on [as] cheerleaders for the big guns… it makes you look great.” How politics looks, remember, is its most important metric. “You think a man who fought Apartheid is worse than the current PM who has allowed genocide?” bleats another, perhaps the only Briton who still believes our leaders can sway global policy. Starmer, why the hell haven’t you just told Bibi to pack it in, you massive fascist? It’s no small irony that one of the issues that killed Corbyn off is the one that’s breathing new life into his insurgent party.

Your Party begs a fundamental question for our time, one also being posed by Reform: what’s the benefit of a political movement “run by the people” when those people are so fatally misinformed? And why lean on the “ordinary” masses when they never chose you at the height of your powers? That the party is emerging from its shell as immigration once again becomes a national flashpoint is a grim omen. Once again, the hard-Left will ponder itself to death. Launder your class guilt elsewhere, Corbynites. We’ve seen this film before, and we all know how it ends.

Jeremy Corbyn’s removal and non-personing has been meticulous. Incredible now how his name — “Corbyn to stand as an independent candidate”; “Corbyn considering running for Mayor of London” — comes at you from what feels like the past, even though he was party leader just three years ago. He is so faded from my consciousness, as indeed from the party, it’s like an acid flashback to a trip that started very promisingly, then went bad very quickly.

Those of us who voted for Corbyn in the 2015 Labour leadership election always liked his policies more than his personality: “irritable traffic warden”. But just remembering the energy of that first rush, after his hilarious elevation to leader, feels so weird and dislocating, the way quite a few things Before Covid now echo from a distant epoch. George Osborne editing the Evening Standard. Labour gaining 30 seats in a general election. Wait, did a political vacuum really open up, sucking in thousands and thousands of highly motivated young people, chanting “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” in a genuinely funny way to the “Seven Nation Army” riff? Was that really him on stage with Run The Jewels at Glastonbury? Was there a palpable sense that the Labour Party once again stood for nationalisation and a rebalancing of wealth from shareholders to citizens?

Yes, dear grandchildren, and I kind of miss whatever that was. “Corbynism” doesn’t seem quite right. I don’t miss Corbyn himself at all. He stood in a distinguished line of similarly totemic, charismaphobic Labour figures. Tony Benn was forever telling us politics was about “issues, not personalities” and he had a fervent following too, including me. Corbyn always seemed so peevish and impatient, stubborn and inflexible. And obviously nobody misses the shitty anti-Semitism, or the Corbitburo’s tetchy, flat-footed apology-via-denial. I don’t miss that chaotic bunker period before the 2019 election, when Labour HQ was panic-burping six new manifesto pledges a day — Milkshake Tax! Badger Amnesty! Municipal Wi-Fi!

Once upon a time I would have felt a surge of glee at the possible mischief of Don Quixotic having a tilt at the London mayoralty: why not, shake things up a bit. But we’ve all had quite enough of mischievous politics in the last four years or so, haven’t we? Particularly at the lying, contemptuous, wine o’clock, Christmas-jumper government level. If Corbyn did enter the race, it would be either tragic or hilarious, depending on which side of the culture war you’re on. Sadiq and Jeremy slugging it out to a pointless draw could seriously harm both of them and allow the Tory candidate in. And please, does London really deserve Call Me Susan, who says she’s political Marmite and who admires Liz Truss?

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Wes Streeting is a man for all factions

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The contrast between Starmer and Corbyn is striking, considering their very different attitudes to floating voters. Starmer would, it seems, do anything to win the approval of Conservative voters, a section of society Corbyn clearly scorned. But just as the current leader is winning admirers from a wide political spectrum, so Corbyn gathered respect from the most unlikely places. We’ve recently discovered how fond Rory Stewart is, but I was astonished in 2015 to read a piece by Peter Hitchens in praise of the old git.

Hitchens had gone along to Great St Mary’s church in Cambridge, one of the stops on Corbyn’s never-ending public speaking tour, the absolute sweet spot in his comfort zone; he found “a shuffling queue of Soviet length”. The church, as with every venue on the tour, was massively oversubscribed. “I warmed to Mr Corbyn personally for two things,” Hitchens wrote. “One was the unaffected, barely conscious way he bent down to scratch the head of a dog belonging to someone in the crowd. The other was when he acknowledged the majesty of the setting, the beautiful heart of one of the loveliest places in England, at sunset.” Even his opponents seemed to recognise a decent bloke. Part of that respect was grounded in the idea that Corbyn stuck to his principles, whereas Starmer is demonstrably willing to bend to win.

I too went to one of those Corbyn On Tour gigs, priority seating reserved for party members. Lancaster’s massive Priory Church, stuffed to its ancient ribs with what looked like the city’s entire middle class. That was the first reality check: where were the horny-handed sons and daughters of actual labour who would power the revolution? I could understand how the Cambridge event might mobilise the bourgeoisie, but clearly the old Dumbledore magic was strong in the North West too. Corbyn emerged to the sort of reception reserved for national treasures, and then, oh God, he started his speech. Obviously, it was the same speech he was doing every night, instead of his actual job. It was increasingly acknowledged by supporters, even at the peak of his popularity, that he was shit at politics but great at preaching. I found him strangely underwhelming, a political curate sermonising from memory.

His words reverberated in the sacred air. He would make the case for a public good, explain the current situation and what should be done to improve matters, reaching an emotional peroration: “and that’s why…” One item on his setlist was music teaching in schools. “And that’s why every single pupil deserves the right to learn an instrument!” This blew the roof off, huge applause. A little later he was into his stride about how British manufacturing had been destroyed by global capitalism, how steelworkers had been sold out by successive governments, and he was dead right. “And that’s why we need to rebuild Britain’s steel industry!” I started clapping, along with two or three other egregious muppets. Our light, quickly-halted smattering carried the social shame of philistines applauding in the wrong place at a classical music concert. Lesson learned: clarinet lessons good, steel industry bad.

Nevertheless, on the morning of the 2017 general election we local volunteers had a spring in our step, leafleting in the pouring rain. The local Labour party HQ was buzzing with hope. Then later, the exhilaration of the exit polls, the narrowness of the defeat. Theresa May forced into a costly Confidence and Supply arrangement with the fun-loving DUP. That’s the point, in retrospect, when Corbyn should have said he’d taken the party as far-Left as he could, accepted that the game was up and that it was clear he was essentially a rebel and definitely not a leader, handed over to someone younger and ideally of a different sex. Angela Rayner would have been a good bet, except of course for her Blairite credentials — as a teenage mother she was an early and grateful recipient of support from her local Sure Start centre. Maybe anyone would have done; nobody, as it turned out, could have been any worse than he was at the job after 2017.

The morning of the 2019 Get Brexit Done election was the antithesis of 2017. Despair was in the air, the messaging supply lines were broken, Corbyn was mostly hiding. I was out leafleting again, but nobody seemed to have a grip on strategy or logistics. One householder remonstrated with us more in bafflement than in anger — we were delivering the third batch of identical leaflets in the space of two days. Corbyn and his team were reduced to the status of a Downfall meme.

And now everything’s set fair for an incoming Labour government. Conference will be a dress rehearsal, a victory parade in advance. And yes, I suppose once in power, Starmer can only become more radical, having already moonwalked several yards to the Right of One Nation Tories. He could not have differentiated himself more decisively from his predecessor, who wanted to do a soft-shoe shuffle in the opposite direction.

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By Aris Roussinos

Now it’s Starmertime, and I’ll vote Labour, of course I will. I’ve voted Labour at every general election since 1974, my first, when we managed to heave nautical Tory Europhile Ted Heath overboard. Sixties legend Harold Wilson was reinstalled, but ill health caused him to be replaced by the bumbling Jim Callaghan, whose chief purpose in retrospect seems to have been as a music hall warm-up act for Margaret Thatcher. Our son was born in 1979; he would live in a Tory Britain until he was 18.

I can’t imagine not voting Labour. If I lived in a marginal and the only hope of hosing out a Tory was to vote Vichy Democrat, I’d hold my nose and do it. But our MP is brilliant, and has established a sound majority. Likewise, I can’t imagine not despairing of Labour. It’s too mad, or too managerial, or too boring, or far too keen to freeze out the interesting headbangers. It’s always felt slightly like being in an abusive relationship. The party can change. There are still good times. Everything will be better once they’re back in power.

Yet again this year I renewed my party membership, eventually. I say renewed, but nobody at local, regional or national level had answered any of the dozen or so emails I sent in response to the reminder, so by the time I got through to someone at Labour’s near-impenetrable centre of operations my membership had lapsed and I had to rejoin. Five years ago, an energetic young person would have rung me to ask if I was renewing but they seem to have drifted off. Starmer and his top table need to remember what powered the brief Corbyn reign: youth. It’s all very well looking at psephological forecasts and laughing about how the Tories are literally dying out. But where are the young people? They are not chanting Starmer’s name. They are not cheering his airless prose. I say this as an old man who would welcome upheaval. Still, head down, one foot in front of the other, let’s win the next one and prepare for disappointment. God, being Labour’s hard work.

51 years later McCluskey, now the leading trade unionist of the last decade, shows no regret as he reveals this scam in his memoir, Always Red (published to coincide with the annual conference of the Labour Party he helped to ruin). Indeed, he seems almost proud of getting away with it — his account mentions no comeuppance for the con. That’s fitting for a man whose career in politics and public life has been defined by two things: indifference to the consequences of his own actions, and the power of money.

Other people’s money, that is. Until recently, McCluskey headed Unite, and his liberal use of the union’s funds is a motif of this book. Even if you’re familiar with the grubby business of political party funding, there’s something startling about McCluskey’s lordly accounts of committing vast sums of his member’s money to whatever politician or campaign he’d chosen to favour. When Tom Watson spends the £50k Len handed him for a campaign, Len casually tosses him another £20k. When Alan Johnson calls about a donation to the Remain campaign, Len agrees £250k — the legal maximum — in one phone call.

The impression of McCluskey as a feudal lord, treating Unite as his fiefdom, grows with his account of using its resources to look after his own affairs. He criticises various adversaries for using expensive lawyers to fight their cause: when a challenger to the Unite throne seeks legal advice “from a top QC” it’s a sign of his “bottomless pockets” and “establishment” backing. Yet McCluskey recalls making repeated use of Unite’s in-house lawyers to threaten journalists who sought to report — accurately — his relationship with Karie Murphy, a close aide to Corbyn. If that relationship was a wholly private matter, why did the union spend members’ money concealing it?

All this is chickenfeed, of course, compared to the millions McCluskey spent propping up the man who would lead Labour to its worst defeat since 1935.

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For a book over-heavy on meetings, deals and chatter among and about politicians, there’s no clear explanation of why McCluskey thought Jeremy Corbyn was right — or just right for Unite. He backs Corbyn because he’s not a “Blairite” or from the “Labour Right”, a group that seemingly includes Ed Miliband — whose leadership campaign he backed — and any other Labour figure who doesn’t agree with Len. Indeed, McCluskey’s primary aim here appears to be to insist that he was right about, well, everything, despite the dreadful consequences of his choices.

Tony Blair gave Labour 13 years in power in part by breaking the unions’ grip on the party — a political success for which many in the Labour movement will never forgive him. McCluskey, interested in power as well as money, appears to see the primary job of a union leader today as reversing those changes. His aim, he writes, was to give Unite more “influence” over Labour. That influence is an end in itself — how it might be used, in the interests of Unite’s fee-paying members, is never explained. All that matters is that Len has senior Labour people at his beck and call. At least Corbyn was consistent in his principles; McCluskey offers far less ideological clarity. His politics are those of the back-scratching backroom deal.

Inevitably, then, McCluskey’s memoir reveals some stark inconsistencies. He expresses interest in Blue Labour, and its regard for traditional “family and flag” values. But without pause, he showers praise and cash on Corbyn, whose internationalism, pacifism and sympathy for identity politics is diametrically opposed to those values. He privately supports Scottish independence in 2014 while funding the No campaign. He thinks EU membership is bad for British workers, but campaigns to Remain.

His post-2016 position — to my mind convincing — was that Labour should commit to accepting Brexit, dismissing a second referendum or other schemes to overturn the result. If his arguments had won out, Labour might not have lost quite so much ground with its traditional voters. Yet even Unite’s money can’t buy him enough influence to make that the party’s policy. He blames John McDonnell and Diane Abbott: “Corbyn now had his two closest friends in politics, one in each ear, telling him to move on the issue — and that’s what he did, committing to a second referendum in all circumstances.”

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Why Starmer is no Attlee

By James Kirkup

Not all Labour MPs backed Corbyn’s position, and McCluskey reports meeting members of the group who wanted to support Theresa May’s deal and “get Brexit done” long before the slogan was coined. They ask for Unite’s backing to go against party policy and deliver the Brexit McCluskey says he wants. But he refuses. Then he blames them for obeying the leadership. “They talked a good game but, whenever it came to the crunch, almost all of them fell into line with the whip,” he writes, failing to note that he funds and supports that very whip.

As a major player in the Corbyn project, McCluskey needs an excuse for its shattering failure in 2019 — and Brexit, rather than the infighting he’s implicated in, is it. In his account, Corbyn’s muddled position on leaving the EU was the sole reason for Labour’s collapse, especially in its working-class heartlands. To support this argument, McCluskey offers some second-hand anecdotes about Unite members’ dismay over Brexit, including some quotes that to my weary ear sound about as convincing as his testimony about his youthful broken arm. “At a meeting of the stewards I was told: ‘Jeremy is regarded as a traitor over Brexit’,” McCluskey recalls, conveniently.

He concludes with the bizarre claim that he and Unite were “vindicated” by the electoral catastrophe that he funded and “influenced”. Far from accepting any responsibility, he repeats a favoured Corbynite talking point about his man “winning the argument”, as if that makes up for reducing Labour to barely 200 Commons seats.

He also overlooks or cynically downplays the other major factors in that 2019 humiliation — most grievously anti-Semitism. “No evidence that antisemitism was more widespread in the Labour Party than in wider society has ever been produced. All the evidence that exists suggests the opposite,” he writes, dismissing the views of several Jewish Labour MPs, peers and members, and the Board of Jewish Deputies, and the Community Safety Trust, and the Jewish Chronicle. What, after all, do they know about anti-Semitism?

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Also dismissed is the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, which found that Labour, under Corbyn, had been “responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination”. Far more important to McCluskey is that accusations of institutional bigotry “demoralised” Corbyn and — worse — “devastated” poor Len himself. Will no-one think of the real victims here?

Besides, even if Labour was a little bigoted, voters didn’t care, in McCluskey’s telling. “I don’t believe antisemitism,” he writes, “was much of an issue on the doorsteps of Darlington or Doncaster in the 2019 general election.” Perhaps McCluskey, devoid of principles in politics, finds it hard to believe others might have them. Or perhaps this is just part of his wider habit of claiming the support of whoever he likes for whatever position he likes.

McCluskey has a habit of grandiosely speaking for the “ordinary workers” of Britain, the idealised grafters he allegedly represents. Despite a six-figure salary and a life spent in London offices and upmarket restaurants (as an aside in the book, he says he’s partial to Black and Blue in Borough Market, where a ribeye steak is £31), McCluskey insists that he retains a gut understanding of the workers, who, naturally, agree with him in all things.

But, strangely for a book by a union leader, Always Red pays little attention to trade unions and their members, at least in contemporary Britain. There’s lots of rose-tinted memories of earlier decades, and too many dull stories about the backroom politicking that saw McCluskey reach the top of the movement. But precious little about where unions stand now, and what their future might be.

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Stop pretending to be working class

By Julie Bindel

McCluskey led Unite for a decade, until this year. He proudly reports that under his leadership, its funds grew tenfold to almost £500 million, “more than all the other British unions combined”.  For him, financial clout is all — and apparently more important than the number of people who actually support him and his union. He fails to mention some other numbers. In 2007, when Unite was formed by merging Amicus and the TGWU, it had 2 million members. Its most recent official filing shows it now has just 1.1 million members paying into its general fund.

That’s in keeping with overall union membership, which remains in long-term decline. Today barely 13% of private sector workers are union members. Perhaps the most stunning figure on the unions’ decline is that members are now more likely to be university graduates (28%) than to have no qualifications (17%). Education is the dividing line of our age, and trade unions speak for those at the top, not the bottom.

Why have those workers least able to bargain for higher wages turned away from the Labour movement?  Could that trend be stopped or reversed? Union sympathisers like to explain the decline by pointing to legislation and the growing power of big employers, which makes “exploitation” easier. But if that’s the case, why haven’t supposedly exploited workers become more inclined to seek the unions’ protection? McCluskey offers a few cursory paragraphs about automation and technology, and a lot of blaming Thatcher and the Right-wing media — but makes no real attempt to answer such questions. He’s more interested in himself.

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And money, of course. He’s not the only one. Could it be that the unions, in search of members with solid and reliable wages to pay membership dues, have been more interested in representing public sector workers? Almost 52% are now union members. And the public sector now has twice as many high-skilled roles than the private sector, since many jobs — teachers, nurses, the police — now require a degree.

No doubt those workers need representation, in the workplace and Parliament. But a labour movement that focuses on relatively secure and affluent state employees, while neglecting those in more precarious positions, is a movement that has lost its way. The “Blairites” share some blame for that, but it’s been more than a decade since Ed Miliband disowned Blair’s “naive” faith in markets — and 14 years since the man himself left office. 2019 was the nadir of the modern Labour movement, and that’s the responsibility of those who led it at the time.

It was Corbynism that turned Labour into the party of the middle class. But he was aided and abetted by the man who was being paid to speak for British workers — who instead spent millions of pounds of their money trying to buy himself influence over a political project that repelled them. And McCluskey is about as sorry for it as for lying about that broken arm.

Or is it?

Jeremy Corbyn may have led Labour to its worst election defeat since 1935; the Corbynite candidates may have been trounced in the leadership and deputy leadership contests; but to quote the man himself, “we have won the arguments”.

Indeed, the allure of Corbynism is so potent that even the Tories have succumbed to it! In his interview with Laura Kuenssberg, the departing Labour leader said that he had been proved “absolutely right by the amount of money the government is now prepared to put in”.

So does that make Jeremy Corbyn the Obi-Wan Kenobi of British politics — “if you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine”?

Er, no. The Corbyn years have had no influence whatsoever over what the Government’s doing now in response to the coronavirus. Exactly the same thing would be happening had Andy Burnham become leader in 2015 or Yvette Cooper or Liz Kendall.

Of course, we’re all searching for silver linings these days. One can hardly blame the Corbynites for seeking to salvage something from the wreckage.

And yet there’s something else going on, something more important — a delusion not just of the hard Left, but of the modern mindset in general. It’s a basic misunderstanding about the way history works — and to explain it I’m going to take you back to the start of history itself.

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By Peter Franklin

*

Ancient Egypt is old. It was ancient to the ancient Greeks. The Roman Empire is closer to us in time than the Old kingdom of Egypt was to the Roman Empire. When the Pyramids of Giza were being built, the last of the woolly mammoths were still walking the Earth. Even if one excludes the Ptolemaic dynasty (Cleopatra et al), the history of ancient Egypt is longer than all of history since ancient Egypt. How’s that for continuity?

That said, there were upheavals along the way. Famines, invasions, entire dark ages. But nothing quite compares to what happened in the 14th Century BC. The pharaoh Amenhotep IV was on the throne, doing what pharaohs do. Then, in the fifth year of his reign, he changes his name to Akhenaten — and declares a religious revolution.

The old gods of Egypt were pushed from their pedestals, their names erased and their temples destroyed. In their place, the pharaoh instituted the worship of one god and one god alone: Aten, a solar deity.

It was an extraordinary event. A belief system, developed over millennia, cast down by the actions of a single man.

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The new belief system, Atenism, held sway for 20 years or so. But it didn’t last. A great plague and the death of Akhenaten himself weakened the new religious establishment. When Akhenaten’s son, Tutankhaten, became pharaoh he changed his name to Tutankhamun (yes, that Tutankhamun). This signified that Aten was out and the old pantheon of gods was back, including the chief god, Amun.

The old order reasserted itself and would endure for centuries to come — Akhenaten’s revolution had came to nothing.

To the modern mind that’s rather disturbing. You see, we love our revolutions — not every specific instance, but the general idea of them. The quintessentially modern belief in progress requires that the old give way to the new — and if that does not happen continuously, then episodes of very rapid change must do the job instead. Revolutions, whether religious, political, scientific or sexual, all help to keep the wheels of history turning.

At a safe distance in time, just about any revolutionary — however un-PC — can be co-opted to the cause of progress. Take the leaders of the Reformation: men such as Martin Luther and John Calvin. They may have said and done some very illiberal things, but there’s no need to ‘cancel’ them; not when they can be woven into a Whiggish or Marxist scheme of history. Viewed through such a lens, early Protestantism is just a stage along the way to secular liberalism or atheistic socialism, depending on one’s preferred variety of progress.

But that brings us back to the Akhenaten problem. Here we have a revolution that made a huge impact while it lasted, but which ultimately went nowhere. It didn’t push history forward. It didn’t lead to the next stage in our intellectual development. It was a dead end — and modern man can’t abide a dead end.

In the 20th century, attempts were made to reconnect Akhenaten’s revolution to the through-roads of history. Atenism had some of the characteristics of a monotheistic religion, so could it be that it directly inspired Judaism? Sigmund Freud thought so and wrote a book about it, suggesting that Moses was an Atenist priest. There’s no real evidence though, and these days the theory isn’t taken seriously. The rise of the great monotheistic religions did eventually bring antiquity to a close — but they had nothing to do with Atenism.

*

History is full of dead ends. Consider, for instance, the aeolipile, which was an early steam engine. When do you think it might have been invented? During the Enlightenment, perhaps? Or was it a Renaissance experiment — the sort of thing that Leonardo da Vinci tinkered with in his workshop? Plausible guesses, but out by more than a millennium. We have descriptions of the aeolipile that date back to the First Century AD. And this suggests a tantalising scenario: that the industrial revolution could have started over a thousand years before it actually did. Just think, we could have reached the stars by now!

So what went wrong? Why was no further progress made? Some people blame the Church — which supposedly stood in the way of scientific progress until its power was broken by the Reformation and modernity. That’s ahistorical nonsense, of course — as are specific myths like the story that Christians burned down the Great Library of Alexandria. The prosaic truth is that the aeolipile was an idea ahead of its time — unsupported by the scientific knowledge and technical expertise required to take it to the next stage.

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The myth of the anti-science Middle Ages

By James Hannam

The fact is that not every departure from the norm is the start of something new. It might not even be the end of something old — just another dead end or temporary detour, with no long-term significance.

Our pre-modern ancestors wouldn’t have had any trouble accepting that. They lived in a mostly static, unchanging world, and if change did come it usually wasn’t good news. But in the modern era — an age of invention, liberation and noticeable economic growth — change became something to welcome, and continuity a disappointment.

Our revolutionary mindset is also tied up with the Neo-Darwinian account of the natural world. The process of evolution depends on mutation to supply the raw material for the forces of natural selection to work upon. Indeed, evolutionary change is often revolutionary — long periods of stasis punctuated by shorter periods of rapid development. We can view human history in the same way, with new ideas and movements serving the same purpose as mutation (i.e. memes = genes).

It’s a useful analogy, but it has to be followed through. Most mutations confer no advantages. Many are downright maladaptive. They are generally selected against in the survival of the fittest. Nature is not kind to her freaks.

In trying to interpret current events, we should always bear in mind that there are freaks of history too — anomalies without legacies.

*

It’s too early to be sure, but this may be the best way to think about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. I realise that’s easier said than done. Whether one welcomed it or not, the rise of Corbynism was an extraordinary thing to witness — and it’s in our nature to ascribe to significance to the unusual.

However, its precisely in these circumstances that we should be most sceptical. Strange things happen in troubled times. Ever since the global financial crisis, politicians who offer change have pulled off one political upset after another. 

That our times are troubled is, of course, significant — as is the fact that people are so desperate for change. It is entirely right that we should try to understand the underlying trends. However, an excessive focus on the essentially random outcomes of such chaos means that we end up investigating the effect and not the cause.

When a dramatic shift takes place we feel compelled to explain it as some sort of historic inevitability. But what if no explanation is necessary? There was nothing inevitable about Corbyn’s rise to (almost) power. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time to benefit from disruptive factors that had very little to do with him. As soon as the time and the place stopped being right, his position collapsed. Shift happens; and very often it shifts back again.

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America's elite is plotting revenge

By Justin Webb

Donald Trump is, I think, another example of over-interpreting the abnormal. Yes, the unhappiness of American voters is real. The backlash against globalisation, mass immigration and military intervention is deeply rooted and highly significant. But the phenomenon of Donald Trump himself, his conduct, his language, his general lack of decorum, that is where we must be careful not to be caught up in the moment. Though his misrule has consequences, it is important that we don’t obsess over what won’t outlast him.

He is so different from how we expect a President to behave that we think he’s broken the mould and that US politics will never be the same again. It’s more likely though — and for exactly the same reason — that Trump is a one-off. The next President, whoever he or she is, will probably be, well, presidential.

*

The danger posed by the freaks of history isn’t just the mayhem that some of them sow in their wake, but that they distract us from what really matters in the long-term.

Try to picture in your mind the entire output of every current affairs publication from 2015 to the start of 2020. Imagine the towering pile of words devoted to the subject of Donald Trump. Then, next to it, picture the smaller, but still mountainous, heap of stuff about all things Jeremy Corbyn. Finally, imagine those two piles compared to the little that’s been written about the risks of pandemic disease in a hyper-connected global economy.

It strikes me that we’ve been searching for significance in the wrong places. It’s not that there’s none to be found. I’m not a nihilist and I believe in a universe suffused with meaning. Nevertheless, the meaningful things aren’t always obvious and the obvious things aren’t always meaningful.

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The last thing Labour needs is 'unity'

By Stephen Pollard

The past flashes into view. It is 1956. Britain has led an Anglo-French expedition to retake the Suez Canal which has been nationalised by the Egyptian President Abdul Nasser. America has forced Britain to abandon its expedition. The humiliation exposes our faltering role in the world. The British empire has gone and our economy is failing.

The solution of the governing class is to join the EEC. But, in 1963, Charles de Gaulle refuses Britain’s entry and warns, “the nature, the structure, the conjuncture that are England’s differ profoundly from those of the continentals”. Once we finally join, this difference never substantially changes.

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Why Britain needs a De Gaulle

By Peter Franklin

Now we are leaving. Brexit, the controversies of immigration, and the fraying of relations between the four countries of the United Kingdom, are symptoms of the long and chronic unwinding of Britain’s imperial role and identity. Just as the Union was constructed out of the growth of empire, so its post-Brexit reconstitution will need to evolve out of the making of the UK’s post-imperial role in the world.

We are in the early stage of a new political era. Boris Johnson exploited the opportunity of Brexit to realign British politics. In doing so, he inadvertently broke with its liberal consensus and changed its primary agents. Agents are those forces, groups or classes that play an active role in producing a political settlement. Over the past 40 years, four primary agents have determined British politics and reshaped the country: globalisation, the rise of the metropolitan middle class, social and market liberalism, and a top down managerialist approach to politics. 

These are now being superseded. The new agents of the coming political era are the antithesis of the liberal global settlement. They are the nation state, the working class, social conservatism, and unconstrained democracy. “What was previously secondary and subordinate, or even incidental, is now taken to be primary.”[1.  Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, Lawrence and Wishart, 1986, p. 195] They were forged in the political battle around Brexit and they belong to the winning coalition of Tory provincials and working class.

This coalition promised a profound shift in the balance of political forces, but it found no representation in Westminster’s two-party political system. In 2019, the Conservatives succeeded in winning it over and took the wind out of the sails of nationalist populism. Victory however remains tentative.

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By John Gray

The new political era begins with the estrangement of the governing class from the country. Neither a liberal progressive Labour Party, nor a Conservative Party dominated by market liberalism has the necessary politics to forge a new hegemony. Both parties are products of the liberal settlement which favoured state driven, technocratic and legalistic responses to political problems. Institution and nation building democratic politics is an alien concept. Neither has shown the capacity to think big and strategically about Britain’s future role in the world.

No 10 appears to understand the new political imperatives, the Conservative Party does not. Conservatives have put capital and the market before democracy and society. They have sold off key national strategic assets and favoured global trade over protecting the national economy.

Their treatment of the working class has been callous and destructive. George Osborne’s austerity was born of a deep class arrogance and indifference toward people in need. Their admirable conservative disposition — which valued country, the small platoons of society, and family relationships — was crushed beneath the Hayekian liberal juggernaut. The Conservatives have been a heartless party.

Corbynism, meanwhile, was supposed to be a decisive break from New Labour and the neo-liberal consensus, as embodied by those four primary agents, globalisation, the metropolitan middle class, social and market liberalism, and a top down managerialist approach to politics. In fact, it only succeeded in breaking with market liberalism, while reinforcing Labour’s drift toward a globally, socially liberal, progressive party of the middle class.

Corbynism with its focus on the individual and the state is the unruly offspring of New Labour and a product of the liberal political settlement. It misunderstands social conservativism and holds it in contempt, denouncing it in a litany of Maoist vitriol as racist, misogynist, fascist, imperialist, and white nationalist. Under Corbyn, Labour has been indifferent to England, hostile toward the idea of the nation, and believes patriotism is jingoism. Its claim to democracy has been compromised by the many in its ranks who spent three years undermining the Leave vote. It has now lost the majority of the working class.

And yet, the future of our country rests upon these two parties rising to the historic challenge of re-establishing the foundations of our nationhood and Union.

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By Tom Chivers

The first task is to restore a national economy that prioritises work and wages, families, and local place, with the purpose of correcting the class and regional inequalities of productivity, wealth and income. The kind of centrally imposed, city region devolution with limited powers, exemplified by the Conservative’s Northern Powerhouse, will have only a limited impact.

It will require a national economic development strategy which focuses on improving and modernising the everyday economy of child and elder care, health and wellbeing, education, utilities, and the low wage sectors of hospitality, retail, food processing and supermarkets which sustain daily life.

These are the basic building blocks that form the foundations of economy and society. The everyday economy is the key to a one nation politics that bridges the divisions between towns, cities and regions, and between different classes and ethnic groups.

The second task is to instil a social and democratic politics of belonging about how we are to live together in our multi-ethnic, multi-national Union. A shared sense of national identity is fundamental to social cohesion and upholding our democracy and the equality of citizen’s rights and obligations. It involves re-founding the United Kingdom to secure it for the long term; deepening and extending democracy, notably in England, in order to strengthen the accountability of governing elites; and reforming our structures of governance to devolve power and resources to regions and localities.

And thirdly Britain must define its role in the world.

China is becoming a major global power. Russia is asserting itself as a pivot between Europe and Asia, but leaning toward the latter. Economic and geopolitical power is shifting east of Suez. The Atlantic as the fulcrum of global influence is giving way to the Pacific. The strategic competition between the US and China will define geo-politics in the 21st Century.

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A manifesto to rescue Labour from irrelevance

By Paul Embery

Globalisation will not be predicated on our western interests. The time when Europeans could determine the course of world affairs is passing. In this global interregnum Britain is well placed to construct a role for itself as a strategic actor. It is not the global power it once was but nor is it in decline. It is well placed to exert strategic influence if there is the political will and capability.

Our Union has been the most successful in the world, but it needs re-founding to safeguard its future. England is one of the oldest nation states, but it needs a democratic refit. The economy has suffered from the uncertainty of Brexit and its structural weaknesses create social division and high levels of class and regional inequality. It needs reform. Britain remains a world power with an economy and technology to match but we are diminished by a governing culture of decline management.

On Friday we take our first step into the world unencumbered by empire. Verhofstadt is wrong. Globalisation has slowed in response to the disruptive impact of hyper-globalisation. Western democracies are looking to restore their nation states and repair their domestic social contracts with their alienated voters. Britain is leading the way, overcoming populism to forge a democratic nationhood, open to building a strong relationship with our European neighbours and further afield. It is time to end the doom-mongering. The future is in our hands.

The leadership campaign has, so far, been thoroughly uninspiring. The only candidate who has demonstrated any sign of comprehending the scale of the mountain to be climbed, and what it might take to reach the summit, is Lisa Nandy — but, even then, one suspects it doesn’t come from gut. On the issue that, beyond all others, caused the meltdown in the Labour heartlands — Brexit — none of the contenders could claim with sincerity to have placed themselves unequivocally on the side of the 52%.

The most pressing question now is whether the party wishes ever to govern again. I genuinely fear that some activists — particularly those on the dogmatic, infantile far-Left — would be willing to see Labour relegated to being a party of permanent protest. That is, after all, where many of them have spent their lives and is the type of politics with which they are most comfortable.

If, however, it is serious about winning power in the future, Labour must elevate above everything the task of reconnecting with the millions of working-class voters who have abandoned it. These people are the party’s very reason for existing; without them it is nothing.

An attitude of “No compromise with the electorate” would consign Labour to irrelevance. So would attempts to pass off December’s annihilation with excuses about the hostility of the media or the “false consciousness” of workers. We were hammered. And we were hammered because our appeal was far too narrow. We were seen, justifiably, as a party for students, social activists and middle-class liberals in the cities. We had too little to say to everyday folk in post-industrial, small-town and suburban Britain. We ceased to be the “people’s party” and became instead the party of Twitter.

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The first step to recovery is accepting this painful reality. Then we need to embark on a journey of transformation. The working-class in the provinces will listen to us again only when we start speaking their language. That’s why a “one more heave” strategy would be fatal. It would make Labour that arrogant English tourist who, when faced with a foreign shop assistant who doesn’t understand him, thinks the solution is to shout a bit louder.

Corbynism was right to demand the end of austerity and articulate an economic alternative to neoliberalism — one built around government intervention, redistribution, investment, public ownership of key industries and services, and tackling regional inequality and boardroom excesses. That approach remains popular, and there is no need for Labour to shift off that ground. But, as the election showed, it isn’t just “the economy, stupid”. Voters want a bit of cultural security, too, and here they saw that Labour had nothing to offer them.

That’s why there needs to be a sharp recalibration of emphasis in Labour priorities. There is, of course, a place for debate about climate change, homelessness, gender identity, universal credit, multiculturalism, and LGBT and migrant rights. But Labour’s disproportionate focus on these things has given voters the impression they are all the party cares about.

For the next five years, Labour must dedicate itself to talking incessantly about issues that hit working-class voters in the solar plexus: certainly the economy, but also work, family, community, law and order, immigration, the nation and suchlike. These are not ‘Tory issues’. These are issues important to voters across the political spectrum, and Labour cannot afford to absent itself from the debate any longer.

But simply to talk about these things wouldn’t be enough. The message needs to be right. And, once again, that would mean a seismic shift in thinking.

The party must start to focus on the value of vocation — rooted in the philosophical concept of the dignity of labour — and not measure success only by how many kids it can ram through university.

It must begin to view the family unit as the bedrock of a civilised society, recognise the overwhelming evidence showing that children brought up in stable homes with two parents have far better outcomes than those who aren’t, and argue that government policy should be geared towards facilitating that end for as many as possible.

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By Paul Embery

It should acknowledge the misery that crime and anti-social behaviour bring to working-class communities, stop pretending that the solution lies in a determinist view that sees all wrongdoers as victims, and develop policing and justice systems – including much earlier intervention – around the principle that individuals must take ultimate responsibility for their own actions. Law-abiding citizens living on housing estates blighted by high crime are sick and tired of hearing politicians – especially Labour politicians – attribute the destructive activities of a minority to a lack of youth services.

It must end support for open borders — a crackpot idea once supported only by Trotskyists, anarchists and radical liberals — and understand that rapid and large-scale movements of people have, as with those of capital, the capacity to cause social and economic disruption in hard-pressed working-class communities.

It should promote the nation state as the best form of democratic government at its highest level and, particularly, as a bulwark against the agents of globalisation for whom national borders represent an obstacle to neoliberal priorities. On that theme, it must see patriotism for what it is: a genuine love of country, and not something motivated by xenophobia or a hankering for empire – a misconception that causes Labour politicians and activists to look down at their shoes in embarrassment at any mention of the ‘p’ word or to redefine it in a way so banal as to render it meaningless.

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By Paul Embery

On matters of defence and national security, it must leave voters in no doubt that, while operating an ethical foreign policy, a Labour government would keep them safe.

Some of this stuff will be anathema to many inside Labour, but if they want the party to remain relevant, they had better start understanding it. In fact, those activists doubtful that such a programme would be in keeping with the Labour tradition would do well to read up on the history of their own party. For much of its existence, Labour was a deeply patriotic, socially-conservative party, entirely in step with the values of working-class Britain – values that chunks of today’s party, chiefly the soixante-huitards and their political descendants, would dismiss as ‘nativist’ and ‘reactionary’.

Labour must become that patriotic, communitarian, proudly working-class, one-nation party once more. The woke liberals and toytown revolutionaries responsible for leading us to electoral oblivion — and ushering in potentially a decade of Tory rule — must be brave enough to admit they got it spectacularly wrong. If their hearts and minds cannot be won, they must be vanquished. They cannot be allowed to drive a once-great party into the abyss.

We weren’t going to be suckered into the tiresome gradualism of the Labour party. Things needed to change faster than that. There needed to be a revolution. And the way to bring this about was to make things worse before they could get better. Capitalism, if allowed free reign, would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. We were living in the end times, and with just one more little shove the whole evil edifice would fall in on itself and a new socialist utopia would dawn. Oh, how clever we thought we were.

But this time was different. This time, I meant it. I wasn’t sure that I would be able to do it, though. Even on the way to the polling station, I was uncertain. The days of my flirtation with the SWP were long past, but there was something particularly sticky about the moral pull of socialism. And, I suspect, there always will be. The “hope” that Labour activists kept on talking about. Yes, I want wealth redistributed. Yes, I am perfectly happy to pay more tax. And yes, Labour’s manifesto – if a little overblown – was the sort of thing I had in mind, particularly when it came to economics. But in the end, my cross went in the Conservative box.

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Does Labour understand why it lost?

By Graeme Archer

Back in early 2017, I was still cheerleading for Corbyn. I made a short film for the BBC’s This Week programme about why Corbyn was the right way to go. Later that evening, Andrew Neil would destroy me as I struggled to fend off his questions about Hamas and the IRA. I may have looked like an idiot, but I felt as though I had taken one for the team.

A few days later I suffered a major heart attack. As I awoke from surgery, still groggy with anaesthetic, my wife told me the news. Corbyn had done much better than expected. Even Kensington has been taken from the Tories. Hope springs eternal.

But in the weeks and months that followed, something began to shift. The EU referendum had been the crack in the dam, and it was getting bigger. I got my Euroscepticism from Tony Benn, a great man and friend, who had long been alert to the way in which our membership of the European Union was diluting national sovereignty, and thus slowly undermining the one power that the poor shared equally with the rich: the power of their vote. Without this, capitalism would run unchecked.

I was genuinely shocked at how many on the Left lent instinctively towards Remain, preferring to cede their precious rights over to some distant authority whose main aim was to allow capital to move around unhindered between hitherto sovereign nations. Like Esau in the book of Genesis, we had sold our democratic birthright for a measly pot of capitalist pottage.

It wasn’t the referendum debate that changed me. It was the establishment’s reaction upon losing it. Slowly at first, then increasingly as the campaign against the referendum result began to pick up momentum throughout 2018 and 2019, as the opposition took to the courts, my indignation burned. 17.4 million people were being denigrated as racists. Democracy was being deliberately sabotaged because it didn’t square with world view of liberal metropolitans who had become all too used to getting their own way. On Twitter, I was discovering what it was like to be on the receiving end of the Left’s unquenchable self-righteousness. I had become “Tory scum”. It felt like my default allegiance to the Left had turned into something like an abusive relationship. Perhaps it had been like that for longer than I realised.

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Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

Being religious had long made me a suspect on the Left, a potential traitor within. So, too, my sense that patriotism wasn’t a dog whistle for racism but a basic instinct for national solidarity and togetherness. So, too, my love of Israel as a place of salvation for the Jewish people — it was something I had learnt to keep quiet about for too long. Mea maxima culpa. Now, all that was released. The cognitive dissonance had reached impossible levels. And the more the Left piled in, the more space it opened up for me to re-think my political commitments.

So by the time I came to place my little X before the name of the Conservative candidate it wasn’t with any sort of shame – it was with relief. I was no longer a prisoner of my past allegiances. The Left didn’t get it. The more they abused Boris Johnson, the more we leavers recognised the same abuse that we, too, were experiencing. It made many of us naturally sympathetic to him personally— despite his several and obvious faults.

Being cast out of the club now feels like a liberating experience. If Labour believes that people like me are so much the enemy that they don’t even want our support, then they can hardly be surprised when they don’t receive it. If “good riddance” is their attitude towards people as naturally sympathetic as me, then Labour should expect not just years of opposition, but annihilation. For once tribal loyalties have been broken, even just the once, the weight of the past allegiances can no longer exert the same emotional pull they once did. And now this has happened across great swathes of former Labour heartlands, Labour will no longer be able to take any votes for granted.

Suggested reading

Stoke, the city that Britain forgot

By John Lichfield

The fallout from Brexit is far from over for Labour. Their dark night of the soul is just beginning. For the reason Brexit presented – and still does — an existential threat to the Left is that it exposed how much one side of the party loathes another. It is the sort of hatred the People’s Front of Judea has for the Judean People’s Front. For like some sort of religious purity cult, parts of the Labour party have been far too invested in the idea that the kingdom would only be ushered in when their own ranks had been sufficiently purged of heretics and unbelievers.

Protestantism is littered with thousands of inward looking churches with dwindling congregations all at the throats of another little church down the road whose divergence on some obscure matter of doctrine has become all consuming. The ridiculous thing is that I still have much in common with the hard Left. Like them, I still believe that there is a deep moral flaw within capitalism. Even so, unless the Labour party can learn to accommodate a far greater bandwith of political commitment it should not be surprised that some of us will be content to remain as ‘Tory scum’.

“It is a new dawn, is it not?” Boris in victory couldn’t help himself, regurgitating the 1997 remark with which Blair proclaimed his own era. Laughing at Blair’s messianic pretension, throwing it back in Labour’s shocked, defeated faces.

Boris has a talent, shared by no other politician, of being able simultaneously to poke fun at his overblown Churchillian rhetorical style, without undermining the seriousness of its message. It’s (one reason) why he drives his opponents to insanity – did you see that sliver of malice, Alastair Campbell, snarling about “Johnson” on Friday morning? He hates that we think of the PM as “Boris”. Snarl away, Campbell, for all the good it’ll do your shrivelled, impoverished politics. Snarl right off, in fact, and close the door behind you.

Because this was a victory, above everything, for decency; a rejection of every strain – not just the Corbynite variety – of the linguistic and psychological thuggery that Labour has dressed up as virtue and forced down your throat since 1997. The political map is redrawn, and the Tory Party entirely re-invented. The consequences of that reinvention deserve many articles – it is literally a new party. But first let’s pick over the brittle, dusty bones of a dead one.

Suggested reading

How Boris can cement his new coalition

By David Goodhart

The Labour Party (not “The Left”) is history. Even when Blair reduced the Conservatives to their heartlands in the 1990s, the party still had heartlands. Labour, in 2019, doesn’t. It’s a collective noun for student Marxists, trades union hard-men, and spiteful anti-Semites. That’s not a political party: it’s a pathogen. A pathogen with nowhere to replicate.

The Blairite leftovers in Parliament have no sociological constituency to give them hope. Were some miracle to strike the planet and, for example, Yvette Cooper to become leader: do you think her approach to immigration, or those robotically-repeated platitudes about equality, sprung from the deathly pages of an identity-politics HR manual, could win back the good people of, say, Sedgefield?

Neither will intellectual renewal come from the fourth estate for ‘moderate’ Labour (the scare quotes around ‘moderate’ are apposite, because I’m unclear how MPs who willingly empowered a hard-Left, terrorist-succouring leadership, and wanted you to vote it into power, could label themselves thus). The columnist cheerleaders of ‘moderate’ Labour, social democracy, whatever – they’ll keep coughing up their pro-EU yawn pieces, laced with their Boris hatred, until economic reality catches up with their increasingly un-read newspapers, and The Guardian closes its doors.

Could the Left’s future come from the gut, rather than the brain? Perhaps a mission can be discerned within the screech-sheet manifesto of Jess Phillip’s Twitterfeed: Boris-is-a-racist, Boris-hates-women, Boris-eats-your-kids, I’m authentic, me, I care therefore you can’t.

Suggested reading

Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

Phillips is only one example of this category error made by so many Labour MPs, this conflation of the needs of human beings with their own desire for power. All that bleating in the concession speeches of defeated Labour candidates about their “real fear” for the ill, the old, the unemployed in their seats — the very voters who had just rejected them. As though no-one who isn’t Labour could either care or devise a politics to help the troubled souls in our midst. They have no idea why they lost.

I do. He’s called Keith, and he’s my husband. He’s never been political — once or twice in the distant past, when we lived in Hackney, I dragged him out leafletting with me. He loathed it, and told me to stop asking. He’s a working-class Plymothian, an electrician, but with a capable brain and a heart every bit as large as Jess Phillips’s.

Do you think men and women like Keith don’t notice, Jess, when you claim that only socialists like you care about people? That his vote in the Brexit referendum was tarnished, because he doesn’t have a degree? Do you believe him so arithmetically incapable that he couldn’t predict what your policies would do to the savings accrued from decades of average-income work?

Suggested reading

Who will speak for today's working class?

By Paul Embery

And do you think he was deaf to the anti-Semites in your movement, blind to your party’s tolerance of them? He’s an unexamined Anglican, and the only Jewish people we know are the married couple next door; did you assume, therefore, he would swallow all that guff about Labour being the sole repository of moral virtue, that he couldn’t draw a line between your leader’s “friends” and the fear we could smell on our street?

Labour treated Keith – and the millions like him – like a fool, Jess, like your property, to be told what to think and how to speak and how to vote. How to feel shame for his instinct for Leave. He saw your Twitterfeed, and Hugh’s, and Richard Osman’s, and that of every smug ex-footballer with a gig pushing junk food to children, so he understands that you think he’s either ignorant, or wicked, for not being Labour.

The result? Keith hates your party, Jess, at a much more visceral (and therefore irrevocable) level than the intellectual dislike I feel for socialism in general. You – and all those sleb out-riders – might feel better for the constant display of Tory-hatred you share on social media. One of the many mistakes you make about men like Keith is to confuse the fact that he’d never dream of mentioning his feelings about the Labour Party in public, with the idea that somehow those feelings don’t exist, that they can’t have consequences.

But they can, and do, have consequences. On Thursday, without telling me, Keith took time off work. For the first time in his life, he went to the Tory office on the High Street, picked up lists of names, and walked round the homes of our neighbours, in the rain, in the dark, encouraging Conservatives to come out and vote.

Suggested reading

How pessimism is poisoning our politics

By James Bloodworth

The dramatic irony! Labour finally achieved its ambition to empower and politicise the working-class: Keith walked 15 miles on Thursday, but he’d have crawled over broken glass to keep people like Corbyn from winning seats like Barnet. Not quite what Hardie had in mind, but there you go. I love Keith, of course: I’m only just beginning to understand why.

There’s so much more to be written – how to deal with Sturgeon, the BBC, the re-centering of power out of London and into the North, how to renew our misdirected Academy … but that’s not for today, and probably not for me.

Today, I’m just a guy who’s feeling humble, but proud. Proud to live in a nation where working-class and middle-class, North and South, stood in solidarity against a common threat.

Humbled to be married to a man called Keith, who saw Corbynism for the wicked filth it is, and so did what he does every day of his life: he rolled up his sleeves and went to work. To keep Barnet, our home, safe. Keith (who will be mad at me if he sees this) would probably call it his “duty”; an inability to comprehend that word is just one more reason why Labour deserves its extinction.

It will be the country’s 22nd general election since 1945. And it’s the fifth nationwide election to be held in the past four years — something which reflects not only the record rate of volatility in British politics, but the extent to which the ‘Europe question’ has pushed one of the world’s most stable two-party systems into a state of almost continual flux.

For Prime Minister Johnson, the election will determine whether his premiership ends as a brief footnote, or full chapter, in the history of British politics. The campaign should throw light on whether ‘Johnson-ism’ really exists; whether a small but intriguing collection of ‘one-nation’ policies can find their full expression as a coherent body of thought.

Could these ideas make a meaningful contribution to a conservative philosophy that for much of the past quarter-century has appeared timid, lost and devoid of serious thought? Or will they, in the shadow of defeat, be quickly forgotten?

From the same author

How it could all go wrong for Boris

By Matthew Goodwin

His party’s future hangs in the balance, too. If the Conservative party can embrace a realignment of its electorate, then it stands a chance of not being cast into opposition. What started as a home for elites, before turning to more liberal middle-class professionals, the party is now having to speak ever more loudly to blue-collar Britain and social conservatives. The logic of this election demands that the Conservative Party develop a new language in order to connect with groups that have felt left behind and left out by the relentless onward march of social liberalism. The coming weeks will reveal whether Conservatives are willing to fundamentally re-orientate themselves to find success.

For the Leader of the Opposition, the election will ultimately decide the fate of his more radical and quixotic left-wing project. Either Corbynism will be consigned to history as a curious, disruptive but ultimately ephemeral detour in the history of the Labour movement — as dictated by the unwritten law that mainstream parties must be punished for ideological radicalism — or it will, instead, morph into a genuinely transformative government that paves the way for a fundamental and radical restructuring of Britain’s economy and society. The former leaves room for a rebooted challenge from moderate social democrats; the latter will shut them out for a generation.

From the same author

Can Boris win back Brexit Party voters?

By Matthew Goodwin

As for Labour itself, this ballot will determine whether the party that was founded to represent an alienated working-class continues to move away from these people and increasingly toward middle-class graduates, the capital and university towns. Inevitably, the few  remaining ambiguous politicians will be pushed into adopting unambiguous positions on Brexit. The volume on their support for Leave or Remain, a second referendum or not, will have to be turned up. Already, Jeremy Corbyn is underlining his support for a second referendum. But what this will do to latent tensions in the party’s political geography, between the winners and losers, remains to be seen. Come December, it could be tearing them apart.

For those advocates of a second referendum, meanwhile, the next election will clarify the future of their proposal — whether it remains rooted in reality or, instead, drifts further and perhaps finally into the realm of fantasy. For them, an election loss will force a campaign to ‘remain’ to evolve into a longer-term and far harder campaign to ‘re-join’. An election victory, on the other hand, will provide a rare opportunity to remedy the failures that led to the defeat of 2016. What does victory look like? Anything other than a strong Labour majority or Labour-led coalition will, almost certainly, bring the lingering conversation about a second ballot on EU membership to a close.

Suggested reading

How Jeremy Corbyn could get the top job

By Peter Franklin

Lastly, for the country’s increasingly fragile party system this is an election that will determine whether it remains gridlocked in the world of multi-party politics or returns to its natural state of two-party dominance. Fragmentation and resurgent populism have surged to the surface of our politics over the past three years; this election should tell us whether this is a fleeting phenomenon or new reality.

Below the surface, nearly half of all voters have, since 2010, been switching their allegiance from one party to another; December 12 could see this underlying church reach new heights, or provide a sign that voters are beginning to settle into their new, albeit weaker, attachments. And it should also signal whether our new divides over Brexit really are replacing the traditional idea of ‘Left versus Right’ to the extent that some claim. The 2017 election provided good reason to be sceptical of those who argue that ‘everything is now about Brexit’. This one may yet deliver further surprises for exactly the same reason.

Overall, this is an election that has been called to resolve the Brexit crisis. We are returning to the people because of the failure of parliament to successfully navigate through this crisis. It is, for this reason, an election that offers something for everybody — Remainers and Leavers, liberals and conservatives. As Richard Nixon said: “There’s nothing wrong with this country which a good election can’t fix!” Let’s hope it’s fifth time lucky.

Indeed, one of those rulers, the villainous Queen Cersei, puts on a hypocritical show of piety – while empowering the Sparrows to move against her rivals at court. Too late, Cersei realises she has created a monster she can’t control and she too falls victim to its zealotry.

It’s a marvellous study in power politics, in particular the cluelessness of the high-and-mighty in the face of a grassroots revolution they didn’t see coming.

More from this series

How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

First broadcast in the Spring of 2015, the storyline gained a special saliency in the UK – where the Corbynite takeover of the Labour Party was about to take place. It helped that the leader of the Sparrows, ‘the High Sparrow’, bore such a resemblance to Jeremy Corbyn. Jonathan Pryce was rightly praised for his portrayal of the role – a subtle but chilling combination of personal humility and swivel-eyed fanaticism.

The following year, it was America’s turn – with the Trumpian takeover of the Republican Party. On this occasion there was rather less in the way of personal humility, but once again a ruling establishment was overwhelmed by a radicalised rank-and-file.

The latest example of this phenomenon comes not from politics, but business – specifically the tech industry.

In an in-depth report for Fortune, Beth Kowitt documents the growing power of employee activism within Google and other big tech companies:

“As the so-called techlash has cast a pall over the entire sector, organized employee pushback is slowly becoming part of the landscape: Amazon workers are demanding more action from the company on battling climate change; at Microsoft, employees say they don’t want to build technology for warfare…

“But nowhere has the furor been as loud, as public, and as insistent as it has been at Google. That’s no surprise to Silicon Valley insiders, who say Google was purpose-built to amplify employee voices. With its ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra, Google was a central player in creating the rosy optimism of the tech boom.”

We’re not talking about conventional industrial action here. This is a highly skilled, well-paid workforce. In Silicon Valley, company employees are the cosseted insiders – with a lot less to personally complain about than the outsourced workforce.

More from this series

The human staplers of Silicon Valley

By Peter Franklin

However, this is about a lot more than pay and conditions:

“…Silicon Valley [is] a place that has long worshipped at the altar of meritocracy and utopian techno-futurism. But in the past few years, the industry’s de facto mission statement—change the world (and make money doing it!)—has been called into question as examples of tech’s destructive power multiply, from election interference to toxicity on social media platforms to privacy breaches to tech addiction. No one is closer to tech’s growing might, as well as its ethical quandaries, than the employees who help create it. “

Rather like the characters in the Mitchell and Webb “Nazis” sketch, tech employees are taking a look at themselves and asking “are we the baddies?”.

For a long time, a rebellious, anti-establishment culture was not only tolerated but encouraged by the tech companies. If you’re in the business of disrupting entire industries by developing breakthrough products then what you need is an insurgent force of t-shirted mavericks, not an army of grey-suited corporate clones.

But the incentives are changing. The disruptors have become the new establishment – and thus want to keep a lid on their own tradition of dissent. However, this comes an awkward time. The fresh talent these companies need to recruit and retain is no longer drawn from the devil-may-care individualists of Generation X, but from the Millennial and Post-millennial generations. This lot seek meaning as well as money from their careers – and what they find meaningful is strongly influenced by the orthodoxies of the middle-class Left.

These may be the days of the ‘woke corporation’, when big companies seek to associate themselves with progressive causes, in the hope their own corporate sins go unnoticed. However, media-savvy Millennials aren’t so easily fooled. It doesn’t matter how many millions a big company spends on diversity training and other good works, its activist employees won’t be happy if it’s also chasing billions from defence contracts.

Unlike the more downtrodden kind of worker, it’s hard to threaten alpha-geeks with unemployment. The big tech companies are the kings of ‘clustering’ – i.e. the geographical concentration of an industry in a few high profile, urban centres. This gives employers access to the widest possible pool of talent, but it also maximises options for talented employees.

More from this series

Can Big Tech save its soul?

By Charles Arthur

Big tech, therefore, is in a tight spot – dependent on a footloose workforce (or should that be a wokeforce?) that can afford to move on should their employers not meet their exacting ethical standards.

On the other hand, it is quite funny. The tech lords, having exploited their own unconventional image, and pandered to political correctness, now find themselves on the receiving end of the radicalism they once used as a weapon. Indeed, the Sparrows of the tech industry might just prove to be the most effective means of keeping its power in check:

Knowledge workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your troubled consciences!

Many attempts have been made to find a better yardstick. One of the best is the PwC-Demos Good Growth for Cities Index. Like GDP, it avoids subjective, hard-to-measure criteria like happiness; unlike GDP, it represents whether or not people can access the benefits of growth. For example, it takes into account factors including jobs, skills, income distribution, home ownership and housing affordability. Furthermore, the index , as the name suggests, is localised: it shows what’s going on in different parts of the country. Best of all, this is not a one-off exercise, but an ongoing project that started in the immediate wake of the global financial crisis.

Further reading

People not places: the real hope for a northern powerhouse

By Phillip Blond

The most recent report was published last year and covers the 2015-2017 period. The top three cities on the Good Growth Index were all in the South – Southampton, Reading and Oxford taking bronze, silver and gold. However the top three most improved cities (compared to the 2011-2013 period) were all in the North – Hull coming third, Middlesbrough-and-Stockton second and Preston in clear first place.

Writing for CityMetric, Neil McInroy and Jonty Leibowitz say that Preston has become “the poster child for an insurgent economic approach known as ‘local wealth building'” whose purpose is to “[rebuild] wealth from the bottom-up rather than the top-down”.

The core strategy is to develop “a dense local supply chain of local enterprises, employee-owned businesses, social enterprises [and] cooperatives” using the purchasing power of what are called “anchor institutions”,

“…such as housing organisations, universities, schools and hospitals. These institutions hold a unique position in the local economy, as they employ people, buy things, hold property and assets and are unlikely to relocate from the local area.”

An allied strategy is to increase “flows of investment within local economies by, for example, directing the funds from local authority pensions away from global markets and towards local schemes and community-owned banks and credit unions.”

Further reading

Westminster's broken: To rescue our British parliament, establish an English parliament

By Peter Franklin

As reported in The Economist, this has made a significant difference to the amount of money being spent locally:

“The Centre for Local Economic Strategies, a Manchester-based think-tank, audited the spending of six such institutions last month and found that they spent 18% of their most recent year’s budget in Preston, compared with 5% in 2013. In cash terms, this meant an extra £75m being spent in the city—around £530 per citizen. The share of their spending in Lancashire doubled from 39% to 79%. It required no extra money nor new legislation.”

The Economist describes Preston as “Jeremy Corbyn’s model town”. Preston City Council is Labour controlled – as is Manchester City Council, which pioneered the local wealth building approach together with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES). Nationally, the Labour Party has established a Community Wealth Building Unit.

Messrs McInroy and Leibowitz, who both work for CLES, use Left-wing language in praise of the Preston model, claiming that “it slays the neoliberal dragon of trickle down economics”. Fans of the “neoliberal dragon” would no doubt protest that trickledown economics is a bogeyman of the Left’s invention – and nothing to do with them. However, I doubt they’d think much of the Preston model either – regarding it as a Lancastrian version of Juche (the North Korean doctrine of self-sufficiency). 

Narrowly interpreted, a market-based approach would require public institutions to spend our money sparingly and guided by the price mechanism alone – anything else, like trying to grow a local economy through parochial preference, would undermine market discipline and lead to inefficiency.

Except that local councils and other public institutions have an interest not only in how little they pay for something, but how much they get in return. That, of course, includes the quantity and quality of the purchase itself, but also wider benefits to local jobs, skills and investment – things which eventually flow back to the council in the form of local tax revenues and reduced demand on the local public sector. The council might get a better upfront price from, say, a London-based company, but if the money flows away into distant coffers, then it does nothing more for the community.

Free marketeers ascribe the global decline in poverty to the wealth-generating powers of capitalism – and not without reason. And yet while the countries that account for the bulk of this progress (above all, China) have moved in a capitalist direction, they’ve also been careful to trade on terms that achieve strategic objectives such as building up the strength of homegrown industries. Private enterprises and individuals in the West also make purchasing decisions on non-price criteria; the long-term strategic value of a close relationship with a particular set of suppliers and customers often counts for more than a short-term financial saving.

It seems odd that the public sector alone – and especially the local public sector – should be robotically required to accept the lowest bid irrespective of other considerations.

Fortunately, the 2012 Public Services (Social Value) Act empowers councils and other public sector institutions to take into account the wider economic, social and environmental value of their purchasing decisions. It was a Conservative MP, Chris White, who introduced the legislation as a private members bill – securing the support of the Conservative-led Coalition government. Moreover, it was the Coalition that pursued a broader programme of decentralisation – giving towns and cities more control over their future development than they’ve had for decades.

Further reading

What's the point of central government?

By Peter Franklin

I’m not saying the Conservatives should claim credit for the Preston model – after all, the whole point of decentralisation is that the key decisions should be made, and be seen to be made, locally.

However, Theresa May’s government should have been a more vocal champion of this agenda – striving to find new ways to support it. To have allowed local economic empowerment to become associated with Corbynism is yet another example of this government’s political ineptitude – and yet another failure to understand what ‘taking back control’ actually means.

It’s a question being asked with renewed urgency at the moment. Is there a way of being Labour that doesn’t fall into the centrist liberalism of the TIG’s new breakaway party – “Blairites” has understandably become a term of abuse – yet one that avoids the excesses of the Marxist analysis?

A possibility could lie in the retrieval of one of the original strands of Labour’s historic formation, now almost forgotten: that of moral socialism. And there can be no better figure to remind us of that once important aspect of Labour socialism than the economic historian and educationalist R H Tawney – a Labour man to his core, and one described by his biographer, Laurence Goldman in his biography The Life of RH Tawney: Socialism and History, as “the most influential theorist and exponent of socialism in Britain in the twentieth century”.

Suggested reading

The trouble with TIGgers

By Graeme Archer

It was nearly a century ago that Tawney, described the empty moral centre of capitalism in his classic The Acquisitive Society (1920):

“To the strong it promises unfettered freedom for the exercise of their strength; to the weak the hope that they too one day may be strong. Before the eyes of both it suspends a golden prize, which not all can attain, but for which each may strive, the enchanting vision of infinite expansion. It assures men that there are no ends other than their ends, no law other than their desires, no limit other than that which they think advisable. Thus it makes the individual the centre of his own universe, and dissolves moral principles into a choice of expediences.”

Tawney is often described as a Christian socialist, though he wore his Anglo-Catholic faith lightly in public. For him, socialism was primarily a moral project; one, above all, concerned with the moral betterment of all of society. His quarrel with Marxism, and indeed with the utilitarianism of the Fabians too, was that both were unremittingly materialist in outlook, concerned with the redistribution of wealth – something of which he wholeheartedly approved – but without any accompanying interrogation of what money was supposed to be for and the part it played in a fulfilled life.

There is something “devilish”, Tawney insisted, in the idea that “human life, justice etc should be measured as items on a balance sheet”. Like Ruskin, one of his great heroes, Tawney maintained a distinction between wealth and “illth”, as Ruskin called it – the sort of wealth that is not conducive to human flourishing.

“It will be said ‘abolish economic privileges, and there will be enough wealth for all to live, and for all to lead a spiritual life’. This, I take it, is the Webbs’ view. Now economic privileges must be abolished, not primarily because they hinder the production of wealth, but because they produce wickedness.”

In his Commonplace Book (or diary, kept between 1912 and 1914) Tawney also attacks “Marxian socialists” as “not revolutionary enough”. Goldman explains: “By this he meant that they too accepted the conventional ends of life and merely argued over the distribution of spoils.”

Not that Tawney drew back from the need for wholesale redistribution of wealth or from a thoroughgoing egalitarianism. Indeed, he was among the first to recognise that capitalism cleverly seeks to buy off revolutionary politics with the offer of social mobility – the “golden prize” – for a few clever and talented individuals.

For Tawney, social mobility was “merely converting into doctors, barristers and professors a certain number of people who would otherwise have been manual workers” (The Radical Tradition, 1964) – something that is fair enough for those who get ahead, but as a substitute for social justice it is woefully inadequate, since it leaves the underlying structures of inequality fundamentally intact.[1. Professor Diane Reay from the University of Cambridge has done important work in this area.]

As an academic historian, Tawney argued that rot set in way back in the 17th century.

In his classic study, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1922), Tawney described how Calvinists transformed Christianity from a religion that, from its very beginnings, had been (in theory, at least) thoroughly suspicious of money and material wealth into one in which being rich became a mark of inner virtue. For these puritans, wealth was understood as the consequence of hard work and thrift, of Christian asceticism. And thus it became an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace: salvation.

“The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all human relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of social power and hunger for economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, ‘What shall it profit a man?’ carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well.” (Religion and the Rise of Capitalism)

This, argued Tawney, was a pivotal moment in social and economic history – and a disastrous one – his reference to “less enlightened ages” is sarcasm. The world of the middle ages, founded on God and the institutions of the church, ideologically suspicious of individual wealth and its corrupting power, was transformed into the beginnings of modernity where the individual is king and money is the mark of his or her majesty.

Mr Morgan Phillips, when he was General Secretary of the Labour Party, said that the Labour movement “owed more to Methodism than to Marx”. It was an unhelpful and misleading comment. Methodism took many of the Puritan assumptions for granted.

Suggested reading

Ruskin's modern message

By Melanie McDonagh

Rather, it was the Anglo-Catholic/Gothic revival of the 19th century that provided Labour with many of its core values. John Ruskin, William Morris, Charles Gore, F D Maurice and so on – these were the key thinkers. They shared a sense that that the reformation – and the subsequent industrialisation of capitalism that it paved the way for – had broken a whole way of life in which human beings were understood as flourishing within a settled stable and mutually supportive community. They looked back to a world of guilds and collectives, where economic activity was not divorced from a sense of social good and moral purpose. And it was Tawney who became their most eloquent spokesman:

“The revolt of ordinary men against Capitalism has had its source neither in its obvious deficiencies as an economic engine, nor in the conviction that it represents a stage in social evolution now outgrown, but in the straight-forward hatred of a system which stunts personality and corrupts human relations by permitting the use of man by man as an instrument of pecuniary gain.” (The Radical Tradition, 1964)

Can any of this be revived? Or is it a world lost forever? Frank Field is the most obvious inheritor of this tradition. And Blue Labour has its roots here too, though it is rightly more ecumenical in scale. It may be that, as both a churchman and a socialist, I look back with an unhelpful nostalgia to a time when Christianity played a greater role in the thinking of the Left.

But trying, if I can, to set such personal preferences aside, it still strikes me that the Labour party could do with a moral revival of the sort described by Tawney. It certainly needs a moral revival of some sort. “Tawney reminds us that there was a socialism that aspired to ‘the higher life,’” writes Goldman. It would be hard to say that of socialism today.

I have exhumed Orwell myself on occasion. It is hard not to; Orwell is one of the great twentieth century writers. As such, his influence is everywhere. To mull over a certain set of political questions in print – war and peace, freedom versus authoritarianism, socialism or capitalism – is invariably to tread upon ground previously walked by Orwell. And so while it has become something of a cliché to quote Orwell, it is also a sin of omission not to.

Columns and polemics that begin by asking ‘What would George Orwell do?’ (WWGOD) are ubiquitous. To see what I mean, type ‘Orwell and Brexit’ into Google – you’ll find page after page of articles purporting to know what Orwell would have made of the 2016 referendum.

Suggested Reading

How moral is mockery?

By Giles Fraser

Brexit is only the latest incarnation of WWGOD. Casting an eye back more than a decade ago to the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, pro- as well as anti-intervention pundits frequently sought to borrow Orwell’s perceived moral authority to push their own respective positions.

One of the favoured Orwell-isms deployed by proponents of the war was that pacifism was “objectively pro-Fascist” – a phrase Orwell used in his correspondence with Alex Comfort, a pacifist who drew parallels between Nazi concentration camps and the British wartime state. Yet Orwell himself recanted on the phrase, later describing it as one of the “propaganda tricks” that “I have been guilty of… myself”.

More recently, Orwell’s famous jibe at fellow socialists has been applied to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters:

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”

There is undoubtedly some truth to any comparison of Corbynism – with its conspiratorial thinking and flirtation with antisemitic tropes – to the cranks who flocked to socialism “like bluebottles to a dead cat” during Orwell’s day. One can also imagine Orwell being appalled by the gruesome communist apparatchiks that Corbyn has chosen to surround himself with.

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By Julie Bindel

Yet Orwell remained a committed socialist until the end of his life, and his insistence that he “belong(ed) to the Left and must work inside it” has little in common with those who have chosen to ‘resign’ from the Left rather than stay and fight against a new generation of communist fellow travellers.

Orwell today is all things to all people. As Orwell himself wrote of Charles Dickens, but which might as easily be applied to himself, “The Marxist claims him as ‘almost’ a Marxist, the Catholic claims him as ‘almost’ a Catholic, and both claim him as a champion of the proletariat”.

In Orwell’s case this is partly a consequence of his political inconsistency. I do not mean this in a pejorative sense. On the contrary. The very worst quality in a political writer is an unwillingness to change his or her mind or to hold rigidly to some point of view or doctrine that has long since ceased to be applicable.

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Corbyn's intolerant populism

By James Bloodworth

Orwell was “a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies”, as Orwell himself wrote of Dickens in the same essay about the great Victorian novelist, precisely because he was prepared to change his mind about things: “when the facts change[d]”, as his contemporary John Maynard Keynes famously remarked.

This is why communists detested Orwell; but it is also why neoconservatives feel able to distort the meaning of his two great novels – Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – in order to adopt him as one of their own. If you look at Orwell long enough, you can find whatever you are looking for.

Orwell arrived late at many of his arguments. As the English were reconciling themselves to the prospect of war with Germany, Orwell’s position was about as “objectively pro-Fascist” as he would go on to accuse others of being. Until March 1939 he was in Marrakesh “writing a pacifistic novel in his shirtsleeves”, as Orwell biographer Robert Colls puts it.

For far longer than many of his more clear-sighted contemporaries, Orwell viewed fascism in orthodox far-Left terms as merely capitalism in extremis. This is hardly the visionary George Orwell we are so used to hearing about.

Yet this apparent inconsistency does not detract from Orwell’s qualities as a writer. Indeed, Orwell’s value lies in the fact that he held firmly to first principles, extrapolating his practical ideas – which he was notoriously reluctant to thrash out comprehensively – from these broader starting points: solidarity with the oppressed, opposition to totalitarianism, and the beauty of “solid things” over abstract teleology.

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How social media makes fascists of us all

By Jamie Bartlett

Orwell was a pessimistic pragmatist at root – but one who was nevertheless given to ideological flights of fancy characteristic of the Left-wing literary intelligentsia of his day.

Thus Orwell detested poverty and sought to understand the experience of the lower classes – yet he knew from his own experience in Spain that a state espousing altruism could easily turn into a repressive Leviathan. (Orwell witnessed first-hand the Russian-backed communists crush a genuine working-class revolution).

He saw war as a “racket” – yet he came to understand that peace depended on defeating Hitler’s Germany with bombs and bullets. He hoped to see a “Socialist United States of Europe”, viewing it as the “only worthwhile political objective” – yet he had few illusions as to the likelihood of such a federation coming into existence during his lifetime.

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Camus' rejection of tyranny is worth remembering today

By James Bloodworth

For all his inconsistencies, we can, however, be fairly certain as to who Orwell would have been interested in were he alive today: the homeless, the working poor, those suffering under the auspices of fashionable dictatorships. But then, it is only the ideologue who is uninterested in such people.

Orwell was never one of those. Which is why those who try to claim his spirit in our own age are as misguided as those who tried to fortify their arguments back in Orwell’s day by resurrecting the ghost of Charles Dickens. We know who Orwell would’ve sided with in the broadest sense – the poor and downtrodden – but extrapolating a doctrine or policy position from this and seeking to apply it to the present day is a form of shabby demagoguery.

Orwell’s brilliance lay in his willingness to re-think arguments he’d made just a few years earlier. Such people are rare; their inconsistency is arguably their greatest strength, and they can never be truly claimed by anyone. In today’s ideologically tribal atmosphere, that is the greatest lesson we can take from Orwell the writer.

Might she not lose the support of this group if she pushed ahead with her plan? Thatcher was unmoved. Looking at me coolly, she said: “We’ll win without you.” Our conversation was over.

By 1987, Thatcher was in control of her party. This was far from being the case when she became leader in 1975. When, in April of that year, Keith Joseph submitted the first major policy paper under her leadership, entitled “Notes towards the definition of policy” — a reference to TS Eliot’s Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948) – her Shadow Cabinet ridiculed it.

Ranging far beyond specific policy proposals, the paper argued for a radical reorientation in Conservative thinking. Britain had been in decline since the Second World War, and fundamental change was necessary. The Keynesian state that managed the post-war settlement must be rolled back. Public spending and the money supply had to be reduced, along with taxation, regional subsidies abolished and the power of trade unions curbed. (Boldly, Joseph also floated the possibility of introducing a British Bill of Rights and even decriminalising drugs.) What was needed in this time of national crisis was not the pursuit of consensus, but regime change—a move from one national settlement to another.

Further reading

How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

Framing Eliot’s analysis of cultural decline in political terms, Joseph’s paper wrote off the entire post-war exercise in reconstruction as a failure. The Shadow Cabinet was aghast. Joseph’s way of thinking, one member declared, was “a recipe for disaster”. But it was the self-styled exponents of pragmatism who were undone by events. With the financial crisis of 1976, Labour was forced to negotiate a loan from the IMF to stave off what was believed to be looming national bankruptcy. Britain’s post-war settlement had reached its limits. The question was no longer whether radical change could be avoided but what sort of change it would be.

Perhaps you need to have lived through this period to understand the mood at the time. Stories of uncollected rubbish in the streets, power cuts and people hoarding candles are not the stuff of urban legends. These things did in fact occur. Businessmen such as Jim Slater and James Goldsmith talked of a crisis of capitalism, while many in universities expected a dramatic shift to socialism. Wild rumours circulated of coups and counter-coups. Yet the political class and the academy were wholly unprepared for the regime shift that actually occurred.

Deploying a few simple ideas and policies, Thatcher demolished much of what remained of the post-war settlement. She left the NHS and the welfare state largely intact, and spending on public services increased during her time in office. But by rejecting the belief that government should actively promote full employment, privatising swathes of industry, selling off large parts of the social housing stock and curbing trade unions she altered Britain fundamentally.

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The rise of post-truth liberalism

By John Gray

Many doubted whether a lower-middle-class woman backed by a few fringe intellectuals could survive the rigours of practical politics. In the academy, the programme Thatcher implemented came as a bolt from the blue. An intelligentsia that was confident it understood the logic of world history was left gawping blankly when the social order it took for granted in Britain was suddenly dismantled, and looked on thunderstruck when communism collapsed and versions of the Thatcherite programme swept across the world. Beginning as a particular response to British difficulties, Thatcherism morphed into a universal ideology.

In Britain, as elsewhere, the Thatcherite project was self-undermining. While the country Thatcher brought into being was very different from the one she inherited, it was nothing like the country she intended to fashion. Insofar as it ever existed, her Britain was a country of dutiful middle-class families prudently saving for the future. But rather than consolidating and expanding this middle class, she consigned it to the memory hole. More individualist, post-Thatcher Britain is also less bourgeois.

Aside from their homes, few middle-class people have assets of any importance. Beyond the public sector, pensions are dependent on the vagaries of the market. Without job security, much of the middle class lives only months from penury. Incomes have increased for many, but so has debt. While distancing Labour from its past and turning it into an overwhelmingly middle-class party, Tony Blair continued the hollowing out of middle-class life that Thatcher began.

A type of capitalism emerged in which the practices that shaped bourgeois life as it had been known in the past – saving for the future, pursuing a lifelong career, self-sacrifice for the sake of family stability – became redundant or dysfunctional. Adapting to ceaseless change came to be regarded as the primary virtue. Accelerating and accentuating processes that globalisation was driving anyway, Thatcher created a society she could not have imagined.

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How the liberal West is dismantling itself

By John Gray

Nearly 30 years after she was toppled from power in November 1990, the insecurities of post-Thatcher Britain have produced Corbynism — a type of Leftism ideally suited to the ambitions and illusions of the penniless bourgeoisie. The idea that Labour has reverted to the far-Left politics of the late Seventies and early Eighties, which has become commonplace on the Right, is at best a half-truth. Like the neo-liberals against whom they constantly rail, Corbynites regard the working class with distaste and disdain as an obstacle to progress. With their retrograde attachment to national identity and borders, the proper role of these remnants of industrial society is to submit to re-education by the party. Otherwise they are useless or dangerous.

This is a Leninist rather than a Marxian way of thinking, and underlines the differences between the far Left then and now. Owing more to Trump than Trotsky, Corbynite Labour is shaped more by identity politics and inchoate populist anti-capitalism than by any coherent socialist ideology.

As led by Michael Foot, sections of Labour cherished fond illusions about the Soviet Union and Mao’s China being imperfect embodiments of a socialist future. But the party did not automatically endorse terrorism directed against Western countries and contained little, if any, of the reflexive anti-Semitism that is today embedded at its highest levels. The Trumpist indifference to fact that is regularly displayed by the Labour high command today was unknown, and there was no personality cult surrounding the leader. In all these respects, Corbynism is very much of the present time.

A Corbyn government would mark a decisive shift from the regime that has been in power for nearly 30 years. Whether this would be a shift to another settlement is an altogether different matter. Another scenario looks more plausible. Having left behind the Thatcher regime, Britain could find itself unable to forge any new governing consensus.

Further reading

The fake patriotism of the liberal Left

By Paul Embery

A party that lacks a realistic policy programme cannot produce a regime shift in Britain comparable to that effected by Thatcher. Right or wrong, Thatcher’s core policies were practicable. Corbyn’s flagship policies — large-scale renationalisation, subsidies for selected industries, abolition of student fees – are not. Thirty years ago, influenced by the maverick Cambridge economist Wynne Godley, the Labour Left imagined an autarchic economy that would enable a socialist experiment in Britain to proceed behind a wall of tariffs and capital controls.

A similar insulation from world markets would be needed today. But globalisation is far more advanced than it was then, and both capital and production are much more mobile. The immediate effect of a Corbyn government would be capital flight on an unprecedented scale. Sterling and gilts, property and equity markets would be in danger of collapse. If Corbynite Labour persisted in the attempt to enact its policies, much of the already half-pauperised bourgeoisie would be ruined.

Yet, as Matthew Goodwin has shown in his piece How Corbynomics is winning over Britain, this unworkable economic programme is supported by large numbers of middle-class voters. Alienated from Thatcherite capitalism by their daily experience of its failings, “they are clearly willing to roll the dice on an alternative settlement”. With no alternative vision or programme, some Conservatives resort to the ideologue’s excuse that “true capitalism” has not yet been tried. But voters are not interested in a rerun of Thatcherism, and there are few signs of any new thinking. In practice, all Conservatives can do is mount a last-ditch stand on behalf of a status quo that much of Britain rejects.

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How the Third Way lost its way

By Bill Galston

It is impossible to know what will emerge from Theresa May’s seeing off the no-confidence motion against her.  What is clear is that the Brexit process as crafted by her has been derailed. An ultra-soft “Norway” deal — by now probably the least divisive compromise — may be done, or a second referendum held. But another referendum is not in Labour’s interest, since the party will have to leave behind its carefully crafted ambiguities on Brexit and risk a backlash in its Leave constituencies.

Nor is the result of such a referendum at all foreseeable. The decision to leave could be reaffirmed and the political class plunged into an even more intractable quandary, or a decision to remain could be narrow and leave the country more divided than before. The prospect of a disruptive no-deal Brexit has not been removed. Parliament may have seized control only to find itself incapable of converging on any course of action. In these circumstances the DUP and an alliance of ultra-Brexiteers and hard Remainers could side with Labour and the other opposition parties and trigger a general election. In these circumstances, a Corbyn government could well come to power. If it did, however, it would find itself facing a country that had ceased to be governable.

As Labour struggled with the constraints and compromises of power, sections of its mass membership would sniff betrayal and peel off to form more ideologically intransigent groupings. Working-class voters disgusted by the derailing of Brexit would be tempted to support an EDL-like version of UKIP or some new party formed from splintering Tory Brexiteers. The far Right would for the first time be a major political force. Britain would be what hard Remainers have always wanted, a European-style polity.

When Thatcher told me she would win without her academic supporters she was right. She departed from office earlier than she wished, but shaped a settlement that endured for a generation. Now that settlement is history, and there is no new one on the horizon.

That was the Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, on the campaign trail in 2014. He came to power on a hard-Left platform promising to take on the EU and its reviled austerity measures; he would, he said, force it to surrender. Greeks would get their dignity – and their lifestyles – back.

He failed abjectly.

*          *          *

The DVD hawkers in Exarchia Square are more desperate than usual. They brandish their pirated DVDs under your nose for a few seconds longer; refusal is harder to take. The scent of cannabis hangs even thicker in the air. Drug dealers, swollen in number, moodily stalk the area, offering everything from pills to cocaine. And among it all are the immigrants: Afghans, Iranians, Pakistanis, Congolese, Iraqis, Somalis, Bangladeshis, Albanians and of course Syrians. They idle and loiter. Work is near non-existent: the drift to crime is inexorable.

Greece is the first European port of call – literally – for the great migrant tidal wave of our era. And Exarchia, the hotbed of Leftist radicalism in Greece’s capital city, Athens, is one of the places where they are most welcome.

Exarchia once loved Tspiras and his once hard-Left, populist party, Syriza (an acronym that stands for Coalition of the Radical Left). In an area known for its anarchists who refuse on principle to vote, there were a lot of people talking about their support for a political party four years ago.

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The permanent punishment of the Greek people

By Peter Franklin

“Redistributing the wealth”; attacking the “corrupt elites”; telling “Madam Merkel and her Fourth Reich” to get stuffed: Syriza brimmed with populist far-Left rhetoric, and the people, strafed by austerity, lapped it up.

In this sense, Greece was merely part of a broader trend – albeit a frontrunner, given the near existential financial crisis it faced. Following the Great Recession of 2008, there was a deepening in the West of the mass crisis of faith in its institutions that had begun just after the turn of the century. The trajectory was as clear as it was linear. The political class was discredited by Iraq; the financial establishment by the Great Recession; the media by repeated scandals and the rise of social networks; and, finally, the security services by the 2011 Snowden revelations.

This crisis coincided with the digital revolution: an advance in information technology of an order of magnitude not seen in human history. And, like the advent of all new information technologies from the printing press onwards, it has disrupted and destabilised the existing order.

The result has been that mainstream parties have suffered at the hands of extremes on both Left and Right. From Gert Wilders in the Netherlands to Viktor Orbán to eventually Donald Trump in the US, populist demagogues have either gained support or taken power at the expense of the technocrats that once dominated our governing class.

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By Angus Robertson

But with Greece we were able to witness, in almost perfect laboratory conditions, an experiment with the hard Left in government. The country was made for it. Following the end of the military junta in 1974, Greece moved Leftwards, and from 1981 onwards was almost permanently governed by the social democrat PASOK party. Leftism was in, and for a while it worked. PASOK removed the excessive powers of the President, various repressive laws, created a national health service and boosted wages.

But social democracy soon curdled into clientism. PASOK created and expanded a middle class that lived off the public sector. People retired in their forties; taxes went unpaid; bribery became endemic. The cheap credit of the early 2000s meant that Greeks lived lifestyles they simply had no right to – before it all came crashing down in 2008.

As Daphne Halikiopoulou, Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the University of Reading, observes: “What was different about Greece’s left-wing populist explosion was that it was based on anti-corruption. It wasn’t and isn’t about identity politics. PASOK imploded because the system upon which post-dictatorship Greece was based – called Metapolitefsi– had become totally rotten.”

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By Henry Olsen

She continues: “What happened was that PASOK and then the short-lived New Democracy [Greece’s centre-right party] government created and expanded a middle class that lived off the public sector – the system was about to implode and the middle class suffered the most so they became radicalised.”

And in Greece, as in almost all developed countries, the middle class controls electoral politics. Lose it, and you have lost all chance of remaining in government.

The destruction of PASOK from a once dominant force to a minor player in Greek politics was so great that “Pasokification” has become a catch-all description for the general phenomenon of Social Democrat parties withering in the face of populism from both the Right and Left. Orbán and Trump may be ascendant but that is only half the story. The other is the decline of the centre Left. In the 2017 general election the Netherlands saw the Labour party’s share of the vote collapse from 25% to 6%; Spain saw its centre Left decline with the emergence of the hard-Left Podemos party, while in the UK the Labour Party has undergone internal Pasokification as Jeremy Corbyn and his hard-Left allies have taken it over.

Corbynism may have captured the apparatus of the Labour Party, and its adherents may consider themselves the government in waiting, but the Syriza example should give them pause for thought.

*          *          *

“Tsipras! He is a traitor,” the man makes a spitting motion, but thankfully nothing comes out. “He sold out on everything – and after only five minutes, too. And it has only gotten worse. He has surrendered to the Germans. It is shameful. He is shameful.” The man is Manolis, and he owns one of the many periptera – simple kiosks that sell everything from sweets and fizzy drinks to newspapers – that dot the Athens cityscape.

His complaint is not new. The only surprise is that he still bothers to express it so long after the hard Left’s disillusionment with Tsipras hit, which came just months after he took power and is at the centre of the political homily that Greece’s experiment with Leftist populism has become. To many, Tsipras has long been seen as a traitor.

Tsipras promised to make both the EU and the financial markets dance to Syriza’s tune. It is fitting that hubris is a Greek word. Nemesis followed more quickly than even the majority of his most ardent detractors could have thought.

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He took power in January 2015. It took until just July for him to reverse – unequivocally – on his promises to end austerity and take on the EU. On July 5, 2015 Greeks voted to reject further austerity. The so-called Troika (the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund) then told Syriza in no uncertain terms that if it did so, Greece would be booted out of the Eurozone, and possibly even one day, the EU. Oh, and by the way, they would also have to get rid of Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, who had managed to alienate all of Greece’s negotiating partners with his obnoxious behaviour.

Tsipras had a choice. Stick to his populist bombast and watch his country go under, or abandon it and try to save Greece. He chose the latter option, putting forward a package which accepted even more arduous austerity measures. Greece survived.

His “radical coalition”, however, did not. The most Left-wing faction of Syriza, a hard-Left party within the party, decided to break away.

Twenty nine MPs headed by the Communist former energy minister Panagiotis Lafazanis, formed the new Popular Unity party to contest new elections after Tsipras resigned to let the population make their decision on his U-turn. The people had to choose: between the hard-Left populist who had, just months before, promised them everything but veered, almost immediately, toward the centre; and the purists who had remained true and set up their own party.

They chose. Tsipras was returned with almost double the seats of his nearest challenger, New Democracy. The Popular Unity party failed to make the threshold for even a single MP in parliament.

And that was the end of Syriza’s hard-Left project.

*          *          *

It is said that all parties campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Simply put: it is easy to promise the earth when you don’t have to deliver. But what makes Syriza’s story so remarkable, and instructive, is the degree of change the party underwent and how quickly it did so – and, critically, how it has continued to do so. Syriza today is essentially a party of social democrats. It is PASOK Mark II.

The extent to which Tsipras abandoned everything is hard to exaggerate. Take the hated ENFIA property tax. This is a tax levied on homes that is so high it has essentially pauperised a large percentage of the property-owning class. Tsipras promised to abolish it. The Troika refused to allow him to do so. But, crucially, he has continued to keep it to this day, even as Greece has exited its Troika-funded bailout.

It’s a great source of income – and governments run on income, of which a sufficient amount is always hard to find. Populist bombast runs on air, which is available far more freely.

In the words of Stathis Kalyvas, Gladstone Professor of Government at All Souls, Oxford: “It is of course possible that a populist leader proves electorally successful (Orbán, Erdogan). But not because of radicalism: radical economic proposals simply do not work: there is nothing to deliver. And that was the case in Greece.”

Now Greece is facing elections next year and the centre-Right New Democracy party looks favourite to win. Meanwhile, Tsipras has come to be seen as a pragmatic politician by both the EU and, to make matters worse, for someone who was once such a strong “anti-imperialist”, the US.

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Test article

By Peter Franklin

The political battle raging in Greece right now is the deal with neighbouring Macedonia in which Tsipras has agreed not to veto the country’s membership of NATO and the EU if it changes its name to “North Macedonia”. The political issue is that the name “Macedonia” implies a territorial claim on Greece; the larger cultural one is that it implies that Alexander the Great was not Greek but Macedonian. The majority of Greeks oppose the deal while the EU and US support it to strengthen NATO in the Balkans as a counterweight to Chinese and Russian influence there.

Aris Hatzis, an Athens University law professor and political commentator, was recently quoted in the FT as saying: “Tsipras is determined to complete the… agreement even if there are political costs. It would cement his transformation over the past three years from radical leftist politician to a Western partner who can deliver both on foreign affairs and the economy.”

He was right. From hard-Left firebrand to centre-Left darling of two of the world’s greatest hegemons, the transformation is complete – and total.

We live in the age of populism; the rejection of the expert and of the ‘elites’. Technology that balkanises our information environment furthers political divides through subverting nuance and discussion in favour of sensationalism, which enables extreme parties on both Left and Right. Never has the post-war political climate in the West been more fecund for demagogues. What Greece shows, however, is that hard-Left populist parties are not fit for purpose. Syriza promised to end austerity, take on the EU and various other delusions. It failed on every single one of its hard-Left populist policies. Corbyn’s Labour party is already disaster-prone and riddled with chaos. Greece should be seen as a lesson.

As Kalyvas concludes: “Radical-left populism is pretty much dead in Greece and has morphed into the old, clientelist socialist party. I don’t think it could have been otherwise. Radical leftist plans have a way of being always unworkable.”

For many years, he relished his role as Britain’s Islamist troll-in-chief, inflaming the public with statements about how when Sharia law was implemented in the UK it would spell the definitive end of democracy, pubs, bookies and the national lottery, and put the Queen in a niqab.

He praised those who carried out the 9/11 attacks in the US and refused to condemn the 2005 London tube bombings. For the most part Choudary, a former solicitor, was ingenious in treading the fine line between offensive speech and criminal offence. His prison sentence, in 2016 – a five and a half year term, of which he has served half – finally came about because he was found to have voiced explicit support for Islamic State.

Choudary’s role was much more significant, however, than simply that of a self-appointed provocateur: such was his radicalising influence that Choudary has been linked to 15 terrorist plots since 2000. His followers included Khuram Butt, who was part of the attack on London Bridge that killed eight people last year, and Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby.

Further reading

CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics

By Ralph Leonard

He can lay claim to a leading role, too, in radicalising a small proportion of the English white working class. The English Defence League (EDL) was founded in 2009 – by Tommy Robinson, among others – in response to the presence of the Islamist group Aluus Sunnah wal Jamaah in Luton. Anjem Choudary, predictably enough, was present at the launch of Aluus Sunnah wal Jamaah, which campaigned for holy war and in 2009 took part in a protest against homecoming British troops returning from Afghanistan – the very event that first invigorated the EDL.

The EDL directed its main ire at Islam: it made much of backing a multi-racial but not a multi-cultural society, in which Hindus, Sikhs and black members were officially welcome. Some members didn’t get the full memo, it seems, and Tommy Robinson left the EDL in 2013, reportedly because of concerns over far Right extremists within its ranks. At the time, Robinson denounced the far Right, and publicly apologised for generalised language that may have made British Muslims feel afraid.

Yet while Choudary has been in prison, Robinson has experienced a fresh rush of celebrity among the alt-right in the US, for whom he has recently become something of a cause celebre. After Robinson was tried and convicted of contempt of court in May (he already had a conviction for the same offence from 2017) Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former advisor, later called him a “solid guy” and “the backbone of this country”. Bannon recently described Robinson “a movement in and of himself now. He represents the working class and channels a lot of the frustration of everyday, blue-collar Britons.” For Robinson’s defenders, his brushes with the law are explained away by an excess of passion in opposition to Islam – although Robinson often shifts his criticism, without apparent distinction, between Islamism, Islam and Muslims in general.

Further reading

Marine Le Pen: a populist who will never win the popular vote

By John Lichfield

Robinson’s second conviction for contempt of court was deemed procedurally flawed by the Court of Appeal, and his case will be reheard. In his first conviction, in May 2017, he was deemed to have potentially endangered a sex abuse trial involving British Muslim men and a young female victim. It unfurled against a wider background of costly, complex sex abuse cases involving mainly British Pakistani men and mainly (but not exclusively) white teenage girls in towns such as Rotherham and Rochdale, long-term abuse which was prolonged by appalling inaction on the part of the authorities.

The goal of those who worked courageously to bring such abusers to justice – people such as the journalist Andrew Norfolk and the former crown prosecutor Nazir Afzal – would naturally be a series of criminal trials. For Robinson, however, the smooth operation of such trials appears secondary to his desire to publicise his own outrage: a telling priority.

If the intricacies of the UK justice system don’t much concern Robinson, the same goes for his US supporters, who include not just Bannon but Donald Trump Jr. Beyond Robinson and his anti-Islam stunts and rhetoric, too, there is an ominous rise in far Right terrorist activity: Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, said last July that “the threat from extreme Right-wing terrorism is growing” with four extreme Right-wing plots disrupted since May 2017. The tiny but deeply nasty neo-Nazi organisation National Action has now been proscribed in the UK.

Further reading

The fake patriotism of the liberal Left

By Paul Embery

Choudary, therefore, will emerge from prison into a Britain in which Islamist extremism remains a threat, and Right-wing extremism is expanding – a combination that will suit his agenda very well. It is doubtful that he will have converted to reticence during his time behind bars. And he will be energised by the noisy and vitriolic hard-Right opposition, from which he will hope to gain converts to his cause. When rival extremisms begin to take root, there is a kind of pinball effect, whereby those – often young men – who are repelled by one are bounced more forcefully towards the other.

Islamism and the hard Right, however, are not the only pinball flippers in town. The third is the hard Left, which is now in charge of the British Labour Party and has united around the cult of Jeremy Corbyn, a party leader who has, in the past, sympathised with both the IRA and Hamas, and recently been accused of anti-semitism by Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi.

Although Corbyn’s rhetoric invokes championing the working class, the direction of the Labour party itself under his stewardship suggests otherwise. As The Economist pointed out in July, 77% of Labour party members now hail from middle-class, or ABC1, social groups. Only 3% of its MPs have any history of manual work (in 1979, it was 16%). The article argued that the most notable rise in party involvement was among “ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims; public-sector professionals; and frustrated millennials, most of them the university-educated children of the salaried middle class who can’t get their feet on the property ladder”.

Further reading

Deluded liberals can't keep clinging to a dead idea

By John Gray

In the wider ideology of the hard Left, which swirls around Corbyn, a version of ‘identity politics’ has taken hold which speaks not of a shared struggle understood in class terms, as was old-style socialism, but of a hierarchy of victimhood which places all ‘white men’ in the most despised position, as the greatest inheritors of ‘privilege’.

By framing a ‘progressive’ movement in a way that largely ignores class to concentrate on gender and race, the new hard Left offers white men a role to play mainly in the perpetual utterance of a performative mea culpa. This vision is likely to be particularly unpopular with white working-class men with very little economic or educational privilege, who would once themselves have been natural Labour voters – and some may be flipped elsewhere, including towards ‘movements’ such as Tommy Robinson’s which offer up an alternative ‘identity politics’, with its own set of vociferous grievances.

Islamism, the hard Right and the hard Left are each distinct ideologies, operating in separate and often complex ways: even within each of those categories, there are manifold fractures and contradictions. It would be misleading to pretend that all three offer the same level of threat to wider UK society, certainly when one looks at the record of UK terrorist attacks in the last few years, the bulk of which were Islamist in origin.

Further reading

How political correctness ate itself

By Bruno Macaes

But it would also be foolish to dismiss the possibility of intensifying violence at the extremes of the hard Right and the hard Left. In 2016, Thomas Mair, who was motivated by far-Right views, murdered Jo Cox, a Labour MP. Last June, a former spokesperson for the neo-Nazi group National Action, Jack Renshaw – who left the EDL early on, dissatisfied because it was not anti-semitic, racist or homophobic enough – admitted buying a replica sword with the intention of killing the Labour MP Rosie Cooper.

Nothing has reached that pitch yet from the hard Left, but the atmosphere remains highly and unpleasantly charged. The Labour MP Luciana Berger, who is Jewish, felt the need to attend this year’s party conference with a police escort. The group Labour Against Anti-Semitism said: “The atmosphere of bullying and intimidation towards Labour Jewish MPs is not coming from the far-Right but from a hard-Left membership.”

There are, however, certain similarities between the three groups that I have talked about. They are all active on social media, using it energetically in a way that prioritises fast reaction and emotion above reason, and are explicitly contemptuous of ‘mainstream media’ or MSM, while using it to garner more publicity. The slow and intricate processes of the judicial and legislative system do not interest them greatly.

Further reading

Insincere politicians are cheapening public debate

By Douglas Murray

They hunger for dramatic action that moves beyond talking and voting. While one naturally associates Choudary and Robinson with street protests, such events also excite the current Labour leadership: when feelings were running high over the Grenfell fire last year, John McDonnell memorably called for a million people to come out on the streets to protest against the Government (they didn’t).

Their style of speech is angry, declamatory, and persistently claiming the moral high ground while conceding none to others. On certain policies, the hard Right and hard Left unite, such as in their admiration for Assad and Putin. And the anti-semitic conspiracy theories that flow from banned Right-wing groups such as National Action, for example, uncannily mirror those of Al-Muhijaroun.

Where will the intensifying game of ‘British pinball’ take us? Its frame is being constructed in a Britain where the political system is in open disarray, and the population is already fractured by the national argument over Brexit. Those of us who grew up in Northern Ireland will know how quickly the Troubles grew out of a peaceful situation that was nonetheless riven with grievances.

Further reading

Victimhood culture will tear us apart

By Jenny McCartney

I would hope that England would be insulated from such horrors by the absence of a long sectarian history, the activity of the intelligence services and by the innate mistrust of political extremes that has long seemed hardwired into wider English society – but we should never forget the grim possibility that extremist movements can start to interact violently, nor what ensues thereafter. Quite apart from any such scenario, even the non-violent interaction of Islamist fundamentalism, the hard Right and the hard Left is starting to damage the nature of our national conversation.

The tone of public debate is now one of permanent rancour: as it grows fiercer and more vituperative, many reasonable people are shrinking from open participation. It becomes harder, not easier, for British Muslims publicly to criticise aspects of Islamic fundamentalism, or for British Jews to criticise Israeli government policy – although they may do so privately – when those communities increasingly feel under broader attack from the Right or the Left. In such circumstances, voicing reservations about wrongs within the community is often seen as siding with the outsiders who are insulting the community: that is precisely what occurred over so many decades in Northern Ireland, with courageous exceptions.

This process could be clearly seen in action during the row over Boris Johnson’s article about the burqa. The Muslim journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who has long publicly opposed the wearing of the veil, described how, when Boris Johnson made his remarks about “bank robbers” or “letterboxes” in reference to the burqa, a young Muslim student said to her: “So, are you for Boris or for the burqa? You can’t sit on the fence.”

Further reading

A culture war the Founding Fathers couldn't foresee

By Henry Olsen

Johnson’s essential view on the burqa was not the main point: many Muslim women also take the view that it is a ridiculous and unlikeable garment, and dislike it even more vociferously than he does. But Johnson’s mockery came as he was praised by Trump and Bannon – both of whom have made sweeping statements about Muslims – and in that heated atmosphere was interpreted by many as encouraging ridicule or worse of veiled Muslim women. Non-Muslim liberals who, ten years earlier, would themselves have attacked the burqa as a garment designed to oppress and erase women, now attacked Johnson for being ‘racist’ for mocking it.

Yet the fundamental point had not changed: only the climate of its reception had, to one clouded by emotion, hurt, suspicion and anger. To counteract the growing danger of political pinball, it will be a job to re-establish a new way of talking to each other. But this is the Britain that Choudary will re-enter. Wish us luck.