Is Jeremy Corbyn the new Centre in British politics? Ed Straw explains how years of privatisation, uncontrolled immigration, and deterioration in public services – combined with the lack of choice that comes with First Past the Post – all call for a leftward turn, and could rejuvenate the Labour Party.
Turning a signpost through 90 degrees at a crossroads in rural parts is a source of amusement for local people. Its intention is to confuse outsiders. The signpost in British politics has long been twisted to portray the prevailing economic and social order as the middle road, and Jeremy Corbyn as a sharp left turn.
Tony Blair was, at least, right about elections being won by the party that colonizes the centre ground. It is just that the centre has experienced a major recalibration. Far from being a threat to mankind, seemingly overnight Corbyn has become a New Moderate. The signpost has been returned to its correct place. Now we know where we are going.
Labour’s unlikely leader has not been struck by a vision whilst walking in the woods of Dolgellau. Rather the world has come to him. I don’t know whether he worked all this out, or whether what he has always believed finally became relevant. Either way, he is the new centre.
Corbyn is more than the beneficiary of serendipity, to be found by chance straddling the centre. He has approached the people with his natural manner – now that we have been allowed to see it – and with political dexterity. The Labour manifesto was a masterpiece of moderation. It signaled direction without being overwhelming. It offered totems of change rather than the full war dress.
Transferring the operation of trains from companies to government is almost a no-brainer to the a-ideological. As for the energy and water companies, does anyone care if they are de-privatised? Some remember the moderate performance of their nationalized predecessors. In contrast, the current incumbents increase costs and thus prices through stock market listing, large pay cheques, profits, switching and advertising. All the while a pretence is made that these are competitive markets and thus to consumers’ benefit. De-privatising them – possibly to the mutual status of Welsh Water – is hardly left-wing. The centre ground would surely be rather pleased if they were.
But for the new centre this is only a start. The country has sleepwalked to a land of such gratuitous disparity in wealth and power, few are not disadvantaged. If there are architects of this psychological dystopia, then they have over-estimated the country’s willingness to accept its marginalisation and loss of personal control in return for the material wonders of modern capitalism.
I asked an Irish friend how the similar prevailing economic order is regarded there. He thought 20% in favour, 60% agnostic, and 20% against. Why then is it so different here? Several reasons have made for Corbyn’s rising.
First, in no other Western European country has hard neoliberalism been pursued with such ardour or allowed with such naivety. The UK has experienced more contracting out and more privatization. The consequence is workers transferred from secure, reasonably paid and pensioned jobs to whatever the private sector offers, driven to cut all costs, not least by the government’s self-harming rules on procurement.
Second, the UK has allowed and promoted the free movement of capital as companies have been bought up by foreign acquirers. Buying Cadbury and transferring its manufacturing to Poland is as night follows day in this branch of the financial markets. But what about the assurances they gave to the gullible government? What about them. That’s what they do. Have governments never looked? Britain is open for employment stripping.
Third, the country has experienced greater proportionate immigration than most, with its real and perceived downsides for many citizens here.
Fourth, services fundamental to all – health and schools – have been subject to endless ‘reform’ and reorganization for 30 years with all the costs and disruption of this perpetual restructuring, without arriving at the European norm of good services for all.
Combine all of this disadvantage with nowhere to go electorally. First Past The Post has restricted choice to slightly better neoliberalism or slightly worse. With Proportional Representation, protest has somewhere to go other than the pub. People can see and hear their representatives proposing alternatives and some being incorporated in strong and stable coalitions.
Tot all this up, and a Labour manifesto planted firmly in the centre would address the following:
- Major surgery for the economic and financial systems.
- Government decision-making to place citizens and consumers at its apex, not large organizations lobbying at our expense – today’s norm.
- Restoring democracy, presently on life support. In practice, it is mostly vote and go away. I have no impact at all on anything national or local government does. Neither do most, besides a tiny coterie of real elites.
- Housing provision, which left to the ‘market’ has failed.
- Proper vocational education, which is vital to the individual and to the economy, and to limit the demand side pull for skills from other countries.
- Sorting this lot out would produce the major redistribution of wealth and power that New Moderates seek.
Into this context, we find a rejuvenating Labour Party. After years of drift, staring into the abyss, and intellectually bankrupt, as if from nowhere it has refound its purpose. It was set up a century ago to end mass poverty, mass disadvantage, and mass inequality. By the 70s, it had succeeded. What now? What do you do once you’ve won?
Like the Family Planning Association, which had also achieved all of its objectives, Labour was thrown into proliferating paroxysms of perplexity. No longer was it the moral nobility. Some trade unions behaved badly, becoming less a mass movement and more solely for the short-term interests of their members and officers. Labour’s core membership substituted the working class with urban professionals.
New Labour attempted to find fresh purpose through its programme for social justice and economic efficiency. But it missed completely the creeping deleterious effects of neoliberal economics. It was a case of the classic if overused metaphor of the boiled frog. Drop a wriggling frog in boiling water and it will jump out. Pop it in warm water and heat it up slowly and it will remain – till dead. If we had known where neoliberalism would end up very few would have gone along with it.
But where it has ended up is with the return of mass disadvantage and mass inequality. The absolute levels are light years from conditions when Labour was founded. But gross disparities have returned.
New Labour’s confusion was perhaps most evident over immigration. Being liberal of mind and pro-minorities, the party regarded all immigration as good. But this view missed entirely that a key component of the neoliberal economic system is the free movement of workers, without which it would not function. Its economic point is to lower labour costs. Pro-immigration think tanks and academics reported with statistics showing that the British working person was not affected. The working person had had a different experience. The moral dilemma was acute. The error was to treat it as a moral issue, rather than one about people’s lives.
For Arthur Scargill, former president of the National Union of Mineworkers there is no such confusion. Listening to him recently in the North Wales slate quarrying town of Bethesda, this former militant trade unionist surprised several of us in the audience – given his reputation. He has a clear construction of a well-functioning society. It is founded on the nation. A boundary around a group of people has to be drawn somewhere and the nation is not so big to be impossible to cohere nor so small to be weak and dependent. Within this nation, we look after each other.
He sees as wrong substituting home miners’ jobs with child labour in Indonesian mines. Not unreasonable. He opposes the EU as it is undemocratic – it is. Democracy is the bed rock of a good society. Scargill’s construction has a coherence, security and equality that the European Commission and its economic and federalist agenda does not. My guess is that a similar world view underpins Jeremy Corbyn’s thinking.
I dislike political labeling. Labels make for lazy policy making and are often about displays of ethical superiority. Enduring answers to modern problems are usually sabotaged by ideological referencing. Personally, I see loads of problems, and want to find workable effective solutions. But since neoliberalism is the ultimate in hawkish right wing economics, in the jargon of our day the antidote has to be leftward.
In those terms then, so-called left-wing policies are central to the solutions needed. Whether, in practice, they are left or right, progressive or conservative, or indeed four legs good and two legs bad, there is a major job of work to do.
Can Corbyn do it, if elected prime minister? For Brexit, he has a far better negotiating style, which should help. He will bring significant advantage just by not doing a lot of what is now taken as de rigueur. He will also run up against a government machine that struggles to operationalise most policies. The hope has to be that he will do what none of his predecessors have done and grasp the system reform essential to his full programme. That would mark him out as a true radical.
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About the Author
Ed Straw is a writer and campaigner for the reform of government, and a visiting fellow in Applied Systems Thinking in Practice at the Open University.
The UK elected its first-ever majority Labour government in 1945. If the ConDUPs last until 2022 then, in the 77 years which will have passed since 1945, we will have had 47 years with the Conservatives in power and 30 years with Labour.
Although FPTP has served the Conservatives well over the long term, it has been thirty years since it gave them a big majority, in 1987.
This was followed by the 1992 general election in which John Major won a 21-seat majority for the Conservatives. In the six subsequent elections they have never bettered that performance.
Hello Ed, This is a great analysis of the stealth by which neo liberalism became the dominant ideogical force and the only way that economics could be managed successfully. A couple of points of difference. The left has only ever been successful when it has galvanised a consensus across large parts of society, many of whom would be appalled to think they were supporting ‘leftys’so the conversation should be as you allude to about issues of substance rather than doctrinal lectures. Yet, we have a problem with many of our left colleagues who have become almost messianic about Jeremy Corbyn and so to criticise his stance or approach on any subject brings the approbation of being a class traitor (often less politely phrased) and very much risks the whole project of a more civilised engagement with political debate. Of course our debates should be robust and and rigorously contested, but we see quite often is people vilifying each other with personalised attacks that make the far right look like a harmony workshop. The new Labour (pun intended) machine therefore needs to get a grip of the zealots and fundamentalists within our ranks, else risk turning away the broader population that we need to take any new redistribution aryl system forward. The other issue which isn’t going to go away is the dreaded Brexit. The vast majority of Labour members and Trade Unionists whilst acknowledging that there are fundamental problems with the EU itself dominated by neo liberalism, still wish to remain in the EU. Many remain silent so as not to ‘rock the electoral vote’ but, when push comes to shove these people will remain opposed to Brexit. If and when Corbyn is elected to lead the country there will be a huge push for a sensible negotiation to mange Brecit, but also to seek concessions on reforms within the EU itself which would have major support from left centrist across the 27. This as a substantive change would allow and justify the 2nd referendum that many wish to see.
I agree with every word of this. Beautifully expressed, too.
Dear Mr Straw,
Your observations make a lot of sense to me, here are a few of my thoughts based on 62 years of political participation and frustration with the destructive and wasteful two party system.
UK Parliamentary System to make it fit for purpose in the 21st century and beyond.
Events of the past twenty years or so have increasingly demonstrated that the UK parliamentary democracy is seriously failing the British People. The failure impacts on every aspect of public and private life and now is threatening the very essence of British Nationhood. In short the time is right to recreate our democratic institutions from the ground up. Even the material condition of our venerated houses of parliament has deteriorated to the extent that urgent and profound restoration is needed before they crumble into ruins.
Renewal of the UK system of representation
Phase 1 :
The most urgent before wasting enormous sums of public money being to physically and permanently relocate our houses of parliament geographically to approximately the centre of England and to design and construct a completely new development incorporating the means of housing every element of parliamentary activity including residential accommodation for the government the members of parliament and the peers, as well as offices for all required for administration, estates management, press and communication personnel etcetera.
This proposal in its own right would vastly reduce the future running cost of housing our national government and perhaps more importantly make the most profound unifying promise to the British People itself, thus ending the north-south divide and creating a truly United Kingdom. Such an enterprise would give the British People an enormous sense of national pride and self confidence and elevate the United Kingdoms status in its world ranking, it might even bring about a reduction of cronyism.
Naturally such a project would be enormous since necessarily it would involve extensive infrastructure developments but many of such developments are already on the drawing board, such as HS2 etcetera. (A suitable location might well be a site such as Alton Towers the present Midlands adventure park)
Phase 2 :
While Phase 1 is in its planning stages phase 2 could be embarked upon so that the modernised democratic changes could be voted by parliament to correspond with the completion of Phase 1.
Phase 2 could take the existing democratic framework to a format more appropriate and more transparently, scrupulously and rigorously structured. A dual chamber system should be retained, the first in resembling the existing House of Commons but renamed the General Counsel of Parliament, the second, the existing House of Lords being renamed the Senate and populated by Senators rather than Peers of the Realm. The fundamental difference between the proposed parliamentary system and the existing parliamentary system would be in that of the selection or electoral process for each house.
The selection for both houses would be considered as both a duty and an honour for all candidates. A national body of suitably qualified individuals would be constituted and monitored by parliament and Senate alike and referred to as the Parliamentary Selection Committee. The duty of such a committee would be in the case of the General Council of Parliament to compile lists of equal numbers of men and women researched from the entire eligible population of the United Kingdom who would be selected according to personal qualities such as honesty and integrity, educational and professional qualifications as well as lifetime experience and political preferences in order to establish a balanced reservoir of candidates from which individual candidates can be selected for election by universal suffrage. Potential candidates could be both invited or apply to serve assuring a willing selection of candidates. Partisan grouping will inevitably remain within such a process and the continuity of party representation would be universally assured on all ballot papers for all general elections and bi-elections. Ballot papers for every constituency would include the name of the preferred candidate for every registered party however the establishment of the governing cortex must be structured in a proportional manner to reflect the political balance of the entire parliamentary assembly. In this way it is reasonable to expect that the electorate is provided with a choice of candidates of all registered parties from which to choose.
In such a system as proposed members of the General Council of Parliament and the Senate would be rewarded commensurately with the importance of the post in the usual way however each member would be provided with identical purpose designed individual accommodation within the parliamentary complex as personal lodgings for the duration of the members term of office in order to enable the member to fulfil his or her obligations. This would include the residential suit for the Prime Minister and the his or her close ministerial colleagues and staff
Initially a parliament should be established for a fixed period of 5 years as the present and the age range of the membership would fall within the ages of say 20 to 60 years.
The Senate on the other hand would be elected by universal suffrage for a period of 10 years and the age range of the membership would fall within the ages of say 60 to 80 years. The electoral periods should however be in a fixed relationship timed at the mid term of that of members of the General Council of Parliament.
The Government itself would be formed in the same way as the existing but the ministerial structure in terms of its departments would be predefined and fixed changeable only by the approval of the General Council of Parliament and the Senate. Ultimately the entire Whitehall administration could be transposed to the same site. (Subsequently the entire Whitehall property could be sold off to developers to recover much or even all of the cost of the transition).
This restructuring should provide for a vast improvement in the quality, equality and fairness of the governing of the peoples of the British Isles long due to the British People and set the nation up with a truly fit for purpose administration for centuries to come , it could even become a model for many other nations with outmoded and struggling institutions.
Allan Sanders © 26:02:2017 e&oe