The debate about Jeremy Corbyn’s legacy as Labour leader, and the future of the left, is taking place in entirely unforeseen circumstances as a public health emergency grips the country and threatens a slide into deep economic recession. The broad realisation that the UK entered the coronavirus crisis with little resilience in the health, social and economic sectors has exposed the impact of a decade of austerity, while the inadequate response of the Johnson government is already prompting reflection upon the role of the British state and for whom it acts.
It is worth recalling just how extreme the UK’s austerity programme really was. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein quotes Milton Friedman laying out a core principle of capitalism: that ‘only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change.’ When crisis occurs, those who leap to the foreground with a convincing explanation of the problem and its required solution can transform what previously seemed politically impossible into the only sensible course of action.
Austerity was neoliberalism’s response to the 2008 financial crash, with a narrative that turned a real crisis of capitalism (at the time the deepest and sharpest recession the UK had experienced since the Second World War) into a perceived crisis of ‘too much public spending’ and ‘too large’ a deficit – a clear and graspable explanation of what had occurred, despite being factually untrue. This sleight of hand successfully laid the blame for a global economic crisis at Labour’s door.
Austerity was more than simply ‘cuts’ to public spending. It used economic language to cloak the political purpose of driving down wages and eroding workers’ rights – with well over 3 million now in insecure work – while further skewing the tax system to benefit the very wealthiest even more.* As well as slashing spending on our public services, privatisation was ramped up and extended into areas not previously opened up for profiteering. Social security was restricted and cut to punishing levels, justified through the whipping up of ‘scrounger’ accusations directed at disabled people. The public investment urgently needed to upgrade our economy, that would have produced a stronger headline economic recovery, was held back.
These measures were accompanied by attacks on civil liberties and the legal rights of campaign groups, charities and trade unions. The tightening of the legal shackles on trade unions through the Trade Union Act 2016 was the most serious attack on the collective rights of trade unions and their members for a generation. This followed attacks on public sector unions over facility time and check-off subscriptions, along with the slicing away of employment rights, for example making it easier to sack people.* Many of these and the other attacks came in the form of a procession of specific, individual assaults against technical regulations but which taken together exaggerated the exploitative aspects of our labour market and the growth in insecure work. As ever, labour market deregulation required increasing restrictions on the collective organisations of working people, the trade unions. This demonstrates why it is a fallacy to suggest that the state is ever ‘hands off’ when it comes to the economy: what matters is how governments intervene, and on whose behalf.
The cumulative impact of government measures taken under the banner of austerity meant the deep recession of the financial crash has been followed by the slowest economic recovery we have ever experienced. It has meant workers in Britain suffering an unprecedented ‘lost decade’ of earnings growth. Across the OECD, only in Greece did wages perform worse in the aftermath of the financial crisis. TUC analysis found that four in five jobs created in the first years of the Cameron coalition were in low-paid industries. Average real wages only returned to their pre-2008 level on the eve of the pandemic, by which point 8 million people in working households were living in poverty – having to work more hours (and more jobs), because their earnings covered less. The impact of years of stagnant wages has stripped 60 per cent of low to middle-income households of all savings. Women have borne the brunt of austerity, not just in their incomes but in their financial autonomy and access to security, safety and justice. It has also weighed heavily on black, ethnic minority and migrant communities, who are overrepresented in lower-paid roles and targeted by the ‘hostile environment’ regime, along with the rise in racism.
Overall, the result has been a massive transfer of wealth away from ordinary people and into the bank vaults of the very wealthiest, while at every turn diminishing the power and voice of the majority. The richest 10 per cent hold almost half of Britain’s wealth while the poorest half hold just 9 per cent; during an unprecedented lost decade in earnings the gap between the richest and poorest deciles has grown in absolute terms from £1.9 million to £2.5 million.*
While austerity wasn’t a new concept for a government using its economic and political power to advance the interests of the few – it did after all build on previous decades of neoliberalism – it was so extreme that it acted as a tipping point enabling ‘Corbynism’ to break through, with Jeremy Corbyn first becoming Labour leader, then being re-elected and finally achieving an unexpectedly strong result in the 2017 general election. As he told Conference later that year, ‘2017 may be the year when politics finally caught up with the crash of 2008’.
The optimistic bent of Corbyn’s agenda, his authentic record of standing up for peace, social justice and equality, disrupted the neoliberal consensus and set out to change how politics was being done. As part of the ideological dominance of neoliberalism over the last four decades in much of Europe and North America, politics has become increasingly alienating for the public at large, and has instead been practised as an elite sport. Over recent years we have seen the return of mass engagement in British politics; the growth of the Labour Party over this time is to be cherished.
It has meant more than a Labour Party standing firm against cuts rather than ceding to that framework. It has offered a vision of how a state should intervene into the economy – for the many, not the few, as the slogan went. Under Corbyn, Labour’s policy agenda aimed for a decisive shift in the distribution of wealth and power in our society so as to improve the living standards of all, not least in policies such as extending public ownership to embrace the collective, democratic provision of basic human necessities, giving everyone a stake in future infrastructure and widening universal public services. These policies proposed the largest ever extension in individual employment and collective trade union rights. Ideas that had long been popular with the public finally found expression in the upper echelons of British politics.
Since the emotional hammer-blow of the 2019 result, there has been a drive to obscure and distract from the political foundations of Corbynism. But these foundations were well understood by Boris Johnson, who on becoming prime minister cloaked himself in the language of insurgency – the people versus Parliament – to tap into the deep desire for overturning (in any way) the status quo. This was used in the run-up to and during the 2019 general election campaign. The dominance of Brexit as an issue between 2017 and 2019, and the focus on parliamentary manoeuvres, enabled Johnson to paint Labour as part of the establishment. Among wider progressive political layers, the claim that Brexit was the new divide in British politics not only played into this Johnson strategy to a certain extent, but also allowed some elements to re-imagine the Liberal Democrats as part of a ‘progressive alliance’ despite their direct implementation of austerity measures only a few years before. Meanwhile through 2017 and 2019, as austerity slipped off the headlines, its impact on local communities continued unabated.
As part of this attempt to obscure the political foundations of Corbynism, there have also been efforts to sweep aside discussions about the distribution of power as well as wealth, to present austerity as a matter of cuts, to be solved simply by ‘turning the spending taps on’. That is not tenable in the current circumstances: events are putting questions about who benefits from government action, and who carries the consequences of inaction, at the heart of politics. You can see it in the Treasury’s response to the coronavirus crisis, in whom the Conservatives intervened to protect first and in who was left hanging. Working from home during the lockdown was mainly a perquisite of the higher paid, while the lowest paid and precariously employed still had to be physically present at work, and face the risks of contagion.
It has become painfully clear that the austerity decade left our public services, communities and households in a fragile state, with little resilience to withstand such a severe social and economic shock.
The coronavirus crisis is likely to be era-defining. It has revealed our mutual dependence and demonstrated the power of the state and the resources that can be mobilised when needed. Corbyn was right to call attention to this in his final appearances as Labour leader.
The combination of the climate crisis, the impact of the austerity decade and coronavirus all make the case – if one was needed – for the profound transformation of our economy through a democratic, transformative socialist agenda. The scars of austerity would – even before coronavirus – have been felt for at least a generation, unless the type of action Corbyn’s Labour put forward had been taken. As we undergo a global and national shock much greater than the financial crisis we need to learn the lessons of the past decade. As a movement we will have to win the argument and prove that our democratic, transformative agenda is the only one that makes sense. This has to build on the work of the anti-austerity, left and labour movements in all their guises, within the Labour Party and outside, rebuilding as a mass movement and becoming part of the social fabric in local communities and workplaces, as well as gaining ground in Parliament. Over the last five years, the left has moved beyond campaigning to prevent things getting worse – rather, we have been developing concrete proposals and ideas about how to make things better. As socialists, our resistance to this Conservative government must continue in the same vein.
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* For TUC analysis showing 3.7 million, or one in nine workers, in insecure work, July 2019, see tuc.org.uk.
* Changes included extending the eligibility qualification period for unfair dismissal from one to two years, introducing employment tribunal fees (later overturned) and reducing the statutory period for collective redundancy consultation from ninety days to forty-five.
* See, for example, Financial Times, 5 December 2019.