Since the financial crash of 2008 there have been two moments – just two – when the European left looked capable of taking the political initiative away from both the mildewed centrists whose neoliberalism led to the crisis and the nationalist authoritarians who have successfully exploited it. One was the advent of a Syriza government in Greece, the other the ‘Corbyn moment’ in Britain.* Both insurgencies came to grief, for broadly the same reason: an inability or unwillingness by most of the left to think outside the European Union box. Of course, there were numerous contingent factors at play, but the final coup de grâce in either case was administered by the ‘European issue’, which detached the party leaderships from their working-class supporters.
Syriza capitulated to the EU’s austerity demands in the summer of 2015 despite winning a handsome popular mandate to resist them. Following that debacle, Alexis Tsipras limped on through NATO-and-neoliberal orthodoxy to defeat at the polls. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party ditched its previous commitment to respect the Brexit referendum result, and instead cleared the way for its reversal through a second public vote, setting its face against the considerable majority of working-class people who had voted Leave. Labour was hammered in the December 2019 general election and the immediate future of ‘Corbynism’ now hangs in the balance.
One lesson of post-2008 politics seems compelling, then. The socialist left needs to get its head straight about the European Union.
The EU has been anaesthetising European socialism for a long time now. It owes its success as a ‘left-wing’ project precisely to its pain-killing properties, reconciling the labour movements of Europe to their historic defeat in the 1980s. In Britain, certainly, Euro-enthusiasm was embraced by a movement down on its luck, its self-esteem ebbing. When EU Commission President Jacques Delors charmed the Trades Union Congress in 1988, he did it by retailing the sort of social-democratic palliatives no longer on offer at Westminster. His vision of a ‘social Europe’ offered not a novel route to socialism, but a cover for discarding an objective which had come to be seen as unattainable in favour of trusting to a saviour from on high who might deliver at least something.
In the years that followed, Labour vacated acres of political space by clinging firmly to the Brussels dispensation, even while the EU was brazenly imposing austerity on Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Italy on behalf of neoliberal orthodoxy. Boris Johnson charged into that space in the 2019 election campaign, trumpeting the government’s greater flexibility to offer state aid to industry and prioritise domestic suppliers in public procurement once clear of EU structures.
Jeremy Corbyn undoubtedly wanted to advocate the same line of policy. But he was doubly stuck. First, Labour had to square a desire to deploy state aid with a commitment to align closely with single-market rules that severely circumscribe it. Second, the Party had painted itself into a corner whereby it couldn’t admit that there was anything potentially positive about leaving the EU, for fear of alienating impassioned Remainers in London, other big cities and the university towns.
If anyone asks why the Tories outpolled Labour among the working class in 2019, at least part of the answer may be that Johnson was able to pass himself off as wielding nation-state power to protect the economic interests of the people, the traditional tune of social democracy.
Europe used to present more of a problem for the Conservatives than for Labour, from the controversies over the Maastricht Treaty in the early 1990s to David Cameron’s cynical decision to call an in/out referendum to appease Farage voters. Two preoccupations of the right powered Tory Euroscepticism: xenophobic nationalism and the hope that, if EU regulations were shaken off, Britain could embrace the free market with even less inhibition than hitherto. However, these attitudes had to be set against the interests of big business and the City in continued EU membership, and reconciled with an electorate that didn’t, by and large, share the party’s fixation with the issue. Such were the ingredients of a long-running political malaise.
But the Tories have now put their European agonies to rest, at least for the time being. How did they do it? Step one was the termination of the tortured premiership of Theresa May and her replacement by the exuberant Brexiteer-of-convenience Boris Johnson. Step two was Johnson’s achievement of a new and improved Brexit deal from the EU and his defenestration of recalcitrant Conservative MPs without regard to service record or heredity, two former chancellors and a Churchill among the vanquished. Step three was a general election sweep of a country drained empty of political hope by Euro-fatigue, on a simple ‘get Brexit done’ platform.
While Johnson was flushing out the Tories’ age-old EU blockages with brio, Labour was succumbing to Euro-paralysis, in large part due to pressure from Party membership and the liberal commentariat. Labour had dodged the Brexit bullet in 2017 only to spend 2019 placing a blindfold over its eyes and yelling ‘shoot’ at the general election firing squad. The problem wasn’t only the convoluted policy that the Party ended up with (a second referendum with a choice between the status quo and a new deal that would look and feel very much like the status quo, with no guarantee that anyone in the proposed Labour administration would actually support the deal negotiated and, in fact, every reason to believe that most ministers wouldn’t). It was also the months of agonised indecision that preceded it, and the campaign of parliamentary obstructionism that the Party waged in the meantime.
The story of the period between the relative success of 2017 and the absolute failure of 2019, therefore, is one of Labour’s miserable migration from occupying the role of insurgent agent of radical change to appearing to belong to a stonewalling establishment, besotted with parliamentary and legal arcana and incapable of initiative on the issue overshadowing all others in national life.
In a sense, that perception was unfair. A parliamentary opposition doesn’t have the weather-making potential of government; an obligation to obstruct is almost baked into the constitutional conventions of the Commons. Nevertheless, a hung parliament in which a significant minority of the government’s own MPs were in open revolt offered opportunities that could have been further exploited, had Labour managed to settle on delivering a withdrawal from the EU on something like the terms offered in the 2017 Manifesto, rather than expending all its energies in trying to block and then reverse the whole process.
Labour’s mistake lay in reducing the Brexit crisis to a problem of party management, and of allowing the concerns of the electorate to become somewhat marginal. The Labour membership – weighted towards London and southern England and relatively disconnected from the Party’s deindustrialised regional heartlands – was preponderantly pro-Remain, if that was the question being asked. However, members were far keener on securing a Corbyn government than fighting the Brexit referendum all over again. Instead of drawing on that strength and building on the foundation of 2017, the Labour leadership was immobilised by a combination of creeping parliamentary cretinism and the well-funded, well-organised campaign – run mainly by Corbyn-hating New Labour figures – for another ‘people’s vote’.
The Brexit crisis highlighted another problem besides misapprehension of the EU project, a problem that has been incubating for far longer and is now rampant on the left, namely a confusion between liberalism and democracy, and between liberalism and socialism.
The European Union is liberal in the classical sense of upholding the rights of private property against the state and of entrenching market relationships, and also in the more modern connotation of supporting individual freedoms – including, saliently, the right to live and work anywhere within its borders – and opposition to gender, ethnic, religious or other forms of discrimination. Its ‘internationalism’ offers the free movement of people within the Union (if not free movement into it from the rest of the world), as well as mandating the free movement of capital, goods and services.
That makes it good enough for some on the left. But though it may be liberal, the EU is no more than a parody of a democracy, governed by an inaccessible bureaucracy barely answerable to a powerless Parliament. The ‘remain and reform’ mantra with which left-Remainers concealed their nakedness was absurd. There is no prospect of serious reform in the EU’s purpose and functioning, absent the election of Corbyn-type governments in all the decisive countries in Europe: a circumstance which would be as likely to precipitate the end of the EU as presently constituted and its supersession by some form of socialist federation.
Socialism stands for social equality for all. That is a different programme to the individualism embraced by significant strands of the left, sometimes as a substitute for class politics. These demands can doubtless be reconciled, but only through a democratic process. It is the misfortune of the left today that it sometimes appears to prefer the imposition of virtue by decree to the exercise of democracy. How did a movement which had made opposition to ‘judge-made law’ one of its foundational principles come to support the judicial overruling of elected governments? Any radical Labour government would come to rue the day it conceded so much ground to the apparatuses of unaccountable bourgeois authority.
Tony Blair’s response to the 2019 defeat was to urge Labour to unite with the Liberal Democrats, healing the twentieth-century schism between liberalism and social democracy ‘to correct the defect from our birth’. Liquidation of independent labour politics through an alliance with a party deeply compromised by its support for austerity, and equipped with a philosophy fundamentally inimical to socialism, would represent not only the culmination of the former New Labour leader’s lifework; it would also constitute a serviceable replacement guarantee against left radicalism in government with the EU taken out of the equation.
Nevertheless, there are good reasons to hope that the liberal road will not be the one that Labour takes. Blair used to say that his project would be complete when the Labour Party learned to love Peter Mandelson, an event not now imminently anticipated. Never mind loving Peter, even getting the Labour Party to like Tony seems out of reach.
In January this year, YouGov polled Party members on their attitudes to past Labour leaders. Remarkably, Blair was the only one of thirteen figures stretching back to the 1920s to receive a negative rating: 37 per cent of respondents had a favourable assessment of him and 62 per cent an unfavourable one, a net deficit of 25 percentage points. Even Ramsay MacDonald scraped into positive territory (+ 6), which is more than he deserves. Blair’s score contrasts with those for Jeremy Corbyn (+ 42), Ed Miliband (+ 43) and Gordon Brown (+ 32). Harold Wilson scored a sensationally positive rating of 55, although when one reaches that far back in time, the ‘don’t know/who was he?’ replies start to pile up. History primer: Wilson won more general elections than Blair and resisted US blandishments to assist with its invasion of Vietnam.
The same survey also canvassed members’ opinions of particular organisations. Unsurprisingly, Labour’s two largest trade union affiliates performed best. The 19 per cent of respondents who have a negative view of Unite – the Party’s biggest funder and Corbyn’s staunchest supporter – are presumably the same 19 per cent who support Labour First and Progress, the two organisations around which the right wing of the Party has coagulated. Labour First represents traditional pro-capitalist Atlanticists, while Progress was the Blairite vanguard in the heyday of New Labour.
If these right-wing factions speak for less than a fifth of the Party, they can console themselves that this is more than the 4.5 per cent which Liz Kendall, their standard-bearer, polled in the 2015 leadership contest. There was no repeat of this derisory outcome in the 2020 leadership election, since for the first time the tradition of Herbert Morrison, Hugh Gaitskell, George Brown, Roy Jenkins, James Callaghan, Denis Healey, Roy Hattersley, Tony Blair and David Miliband was unrepresented on the ballot paper.
Further good news from the YouGov poll is that the non-union organisation which Labour members like best is the Stop the War Coalition (+ 41), followed by Labour Friends of Palestine (+ 35). By contrast, only 17 per cent of Labour members have a positive view of Labour Friends of Israel, the least popular of the campaigns featured, which is perhaps unsurprising given its devotion to banging the drum for a country that has been under hard-right leadership for most of the century and that is engaged, in the West Bank, in an active colonisation programme no less oppressive than other such endeavours throughout history.
The views of Party members should influence the next Labour leader’s room for manoeuvre on that aspect of policy which was most important to Jeremy Corbyn, and which provoked the most strenuous opposition to him in the media and within the Parliamentary Party: his anti-imperialism. Solidarity with the Palestinian people, support for the anti-war movement, unwillingness to commit to nuclear destruction, opposition to the Anglo-American embrace of Saudi Arabia, defence of Venezuela’s embattled socialists, scepticism about the further expansion of NATO – these positions are popular with Party members. The new leader will therefore struggle to strike out in a different direction. There will be no support for a Trump war against Iran, nor any other military adventure in the Middle East. Pressure to cut the strings tying British diplomacy to Washington’s apron will remain potent within the Party. This shift in sentiment – a direct negation of Blair’s foreign policy – may prove to be a significant part of Corbyn’s legacy, although not one the right wing will ever be reconciled to.
For the rest, the ‘Corbyn project’ was a bold attempt to create a new socialism fit for the twenty-first century and an electoral coalition to underpin it, even while under unremitting political fire from the Labour right as well as the avowed enemy. The attempt to reformulate the historic objectives of the labour movement after a prolonged period of retreat, and to defeat the entrenched opposition of a powerful and experienced establishment, lacked nothing in ambition. The dull epigones of a rancid ‘extreme centre’ are free to crawl over every error, bray at every shortcoming and exult in the superiority of their own Potemkin village programmes. But there is no road back to their comfortable end of history.
Today – the barbarism of Boris Johnson, a carnivalesque synthesis of neoliberalism and authoritarian populism, debauching democracy and inflaming social division. Tomorrow – well, socialism is once again on offer, the lasting achievement of the past four years.
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* A left alliance has governed Portugal for several years, with modestly beneficial results but limited international resonance. At the time of writing, Podemos has entered coalition in Spain as a junior partner with the PSOE. How this will fare remains to be seen.