Could Jeremy Corbyn Have Beaten Boris the Actual Incompetent One?
Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn revived the hopes of many people who had given up much hope for real leftward change through electoral politics. On June 8 2017, the Corbyn-led British Labour Party defied the polls, and all the expert predictions of certain doom for a ‘too far left’ party with a leader who did not look anything like a leader. Corbyn’s party won 40% of the votes, their second-best voting percentage in over forty years, and held the Theresa May led Conservative Party to a minority, so that they could not ram through her Brexit deal.
On December 12 2019, Boris Johnson led the Conservatives to a whopping 80 seat majority, with the relentlessly repeated slogan that he would “Get Brexit Done” in a hurry, and the promise that the money saved from dues for EU membership would permit massive spending on the National Health Service (both lies, but ones that had worked well enough in the successful Leave campaign of 2016, and did so again in 2019). It was enough to cause Labour to lose net 59 seats, almost all in the Leave-voting north England mining and factory towns, that had long ago been deindustrialized and fallen into decline, starting in the 1980s under the Margaret Thatcher Tories. The Labour vote percentage dropped to 32%, but that was actually slightly higher than most Labour votes going back to 1979, except for Tony Blair’s elections.
Was Corbyn’s loss avoidable? Why did he lose? Most of this article is grounded in dozens of articles in the Guardian, plus a few in other media sources. Many academics, journalists and Labour Party members and supporters say what they think the key reasons were for the loss, and cite their experiences in canvassing voters, and other facts, in support. Some are pro-Corbyn and others are anti-Corbyn. Despite holding often opposite views on the desirability of the political project and leadership of Corbyn and his team, there is a remarkable convergence of thinking on the main causes. Four causes are brought up repeatedly.
The Vote Against Corbyn Was Personal — He Was Viewed as ‘Unpatriotic’ Because of His Life-long Participation in Protests That Were Always For Foreigners Not Britons
First, an often angry and even emotionally violent rejection by many voters of Corbyn individually as someone who was “unpatriotic”, and not competent to lead.
The second reason is difficult to distinguish from the first, but people do so: the Corbynite leadership, and the half million Labour Party membership that is perceived to be largely London-based university educated millennials who also are “protesters” who participate in social movements, are “too far left”. The Momentum campaign organization that came together to support Corbyn in 2015 (when he shocked all sorts of establishments by winning 59.5% first preference votes) and again after June 26 2016, immediately after the Brexit referendum, when 80% of sitting Labour MPs voted non-confidence in Corbyn, and he had to run a second time for the leadership (where he upped his first ballot victory to 61%), is routinely treated as the organized expression of this block of young pro-Corbyn members (and that is by supporters – opponents cast darker aspersions). Momentum provided the core of the social media and IT savvy organization of official party canvassing by hundreds of thousands of volunteers in both the 2017 and 2019 elections.
The third reason is Brexit, and the desire by both supporters and opponents to get it over with, that ended up dividing Labour Party voters, but not anti-Corbyn and non Labour Party voters, when it came to the actual voting. Before the election, many people who were publicly pro-Remain, and wanted a second referendum to reverse the result, nevertheless did not advocate voting Labour. This was odd on the surface, since Labour was the only party with a chance to form a coalition or majority government (or simply have the votes necessary to get a vote for a new referendum through Parliament in the case of a minority Conservative government in a “hung Parliament”) that promised to hold a second referendum. These Tory Remainers, and Labour Party Remainers (like the strongly anti-Corbyn former leader Tony Blair), and ‘moderate MPs’ who had left both parties in part over their Brexit stance, all called instead for “tactical voting”. This was dog whistle code to vote Liberal Democrat or for the defecting ‘moderates’ who stood as independents (or in Scotland and Wales for the regional nationalist parties and in one constituency for the sitting Green MP) everywhere, except where the Labour candidate was the only one with any chance at all of beating the Conservative.
Electing a Corbyn-led Labour Government was the Only Chance for Self-Declared Remainers to Soften Brexit or Even Get It Reconsidered — But They Chose Instead to ‘Vote Tactically’ in Order to Defeat Corbyn
This was all the more odd, on the surface, because Brexit also led to a very ill-advised decision by the pro-Remain Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson to promise to support legislation in the next Parliament to ignore the Leave referendum result and stay in the EU. Perhaps it was not immediately obvious, but this stance (and Swinson’s clearly right-leaning voting record for brutal anti-austerity cuts in social spending in the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition government of 2010-2015) made it next to impossible for any left-leaning voter who had voted Leave, but did not support the hard Brexit Boris Johnson version, to vote Liberal Democrat. Ditto for many either left or right leaning Remainers who felt the referendum result had to be respected, and the goal had to be a non-Tory Brexit that aligned Britain as closely possible with the EU.
Only Remainers who would rather have a hard Brexit (or even no deal), complemented with a jump into a more dependent economic (and uncritical political-military) alliance with the USA, than a Corbyn government could possibly risk voting ‘tactically’ for the Liberal Democrats rather than Labour. Most of these people evidently voted Conservative. So did a lot of Liberal Democrats, as admitted by their former leader Vince Cable. As one observer put it after the election, there was tactical voting alright, but it was all on the right and its primary driver was anti-Corbyn, not stance on Brexit (except for the older voters in traditionally Labour seats where a majority of voters had voted for Leave, where attitudes to Corbyn and to Brexit were not at odds but perfectly aligned).
The fourth reason is often mentioned, but never given top billing: a series of disastrously wrong tactical decisions about messaging, deployment of campaign organizational resources, and everything else about the back and forth battle with the Conservatives for voter support -- stretching back to the handling of Brexit in the 2016 referendum and then in Parliament, forward to the suicidal decision to support having the 2019 election with a leader with a net minus 40% voter approval rating (what if Corbyn had resigned the leadership to give away to another left-winger at his highest point, just after his impressive showing in the April 2017 election?), and then the 2019 campaign itself. Corbyn, and the small minority of Labour MPs and Blairite former party officials who weren’t constantly briefing against him behind his back or quite overtly in the mass media, and the party apparatus and campaign organization that worked loyally for a Corbyn Labour victory, have to accept the responsibility for this tactical ineptness.
Four Years of Literally Daily Smearing of Corbyn Made the Odds Long for a Labour Majority — But Whatever Chance There May Have Been Was Squandered by the Tactical Ineptness of the Entire Pro-Corbyn Leadership
The fact that virtually all previous Labour leaders going back to 1974 other than Tony Blair were equally, or even more, tactically ‘inept’ is one of many clues to how it is more complicated than this. Some of this will be briefly explored below, but they made too many mistakes. Yes, there were no transparently good choices that did not have big bad consequences attached to them, especially ones related to Brexit, but that is always the case in politics. And it is hard to imagine any leader, and any group of people supporting him or her, who could have overcome the non-stop daily misinformation and outright lies about Corbyn and his supporters in all forms of media from the day he was first elected on September 12 2015. But tactically nimble leaders and organizations make enough right decisions to maximize their voter support and election results, and the Corbyn team did not.
Could Corbyn have won? What are the lessons the Left in Britain and elsewhere should learn from the defeat? I will review each of the four reasons, to consider what might have been done differently, and then draw key lessons.
REASON ONE: MEDIA-AMPLIFIED HOSTILITY TO AN ‘UNPATRIOTIC’ AND ‘INCOMPETENT’ CORBYN
Jeremy Corbyn famously came to be elected Labour leader almost by accident. He was not put into power by left activists from outside the party, as many critics who opined about a takeover by Stalinists or Trotskyists or anarchists liked to allege. Nor was he the candidate of a supposed latent or hidden far left within the party or, equally laughably, within the top leadership of the major unions. There were not even enough left-wing MPs to sign his nomination papers in 2015 – he had to rely on the kindness of a few strangers who believed the left should be allowed a candidate (they won’t make that mistake again).
Born in 1949, Corbyn was a 1960s activist, but not the typical kind who were first politicized at university, further radicalized into some kind of Marxism in 1968, and then developed their primary political identities as part of an extraparliamentary ‘new left’, and as activists in one or another of the post-1968 autonomous social movements. The son of two middle class, peace activist Labour party members (an electrical engineer and a maths teacher), Corbyn had joined Labour in high school, and from 1966 on was an active campaigner with the extraparliamentary CND, that called for unilateral renunciation of Britain’s nuclear arsenal. Corbyn did poorly in his final year of high school and never graduated from university. He quit school and spent two years as a youth worker and geography teacher with Voluntary Service Overseas in Jamaica in 1967 and 1968, and then traveled around Latin America in 1969 and 1970.
Corbyn Was an Activist in Extra-Parliamentary Social Movements from the 1960s Onwards — But He Was Also a Prototypical Believer in the Traditional Labour Party Vision of a Socialism Achieved Gradually Through Elected Governments
Corbyn participated very actively in, or publicly supported, the post-1968 autonomous social movements but his primary identity and activity was as someone who believed in the idealized mission of the Labour party going back to its founding, as the vehicle of electing working class trade unionists and middle class reformers to Parliament and municipal councils. He also had a traditional view of socialism going back to Labour’s beginnings, namely not just a welfare state plus Keynesianism as Labour’s official view of socialism became after 1956 (and was in practice well before that), but a public ownership economy and democratization of all institutions achieved very gradually by reformist means through elected government. (He also supported the ideas of workers control and democratization of all social institutions achieved by popular movements ‘from below’ that grew out of the 1970s shop stewards movement and the group around Tony Benn in the Labour party, only to be sidelined once Thatcher won in 1979.) After returning to Britain in 1971, Corbyn worked and got elected to local union office or was employed as a union organizer in several unions. He also wrote frequently for various left wing newspapers and magazines. He ran successfully for municipal council in 1974 and was first elected MP for Islington North in 1983, where he has been re-elected every time since by large majorities. Hence, he is a paradigmatic example of someone active in conventional parliamentary politics. The difference is that his commitment to a traditional Labourism and socialism made him a very left-wing one, who was marginalized within the party.
Why then was Corbyn relentlessly attacked as an extremist from the day he announced his candidacy for leadership in 2015? Because he held the views (and consistently walked the talk, no matter how much pressure was applied by party leadership) that most of you reading this article take as sensible and mainstream for someone on the extraparliamentary left. That fact will be an important ground for one of the main lessons I propose that we draw from the history of the left within the Corbyn-led Labour party. It is important to recognize that even the moral principle of non-violence and pacifism, that many people say they applaud when expressed by extraparliamentary activists like Martin Luther King, was treated as beyond the pale when expressed by Corbyn. Why? Because if elected prime minister he could actually act on those values, and he had answered a journalist’s question years earlier saying that he was unwilling to push the nuclear button if ever he would be in a position to do so. He was an early and vocal opponent of the Iraq war launched in partnership with the United States by his own Blair-led Labour party’s government. He had called for cuts in defence spending and mused once about leaving NATO. He was therefore weak on national defence, support for the US-led alliance of Western countries, and support for the military in both the Middle East and Northern Ireland.
Corbyn Was Serious About Personal Non-Violence and Rejecting Nuclear Weapons and Ending Rich Country Wars Against Poor Countries — That Made Him ‘An Anti-Western Extremist’ in the Eyes of Both the Labour and Conservative Party Establishments
Examples of Corbyn’s moral and political stands on issues from 1966 onwards take up many pages in the Wikipedia entry for Jeremy Corbyn, which I encourage you to scan through. Like Bernie Sanders, Corbyn was quickly recognized by left-leaning millennials as someone who had maintained his moral and political integrity over many decades and was honest, egalitarian and “authentic”. He did not just pay lip service to values that liberal and democratic societies are supposed to uphold, but applied them. And he did not change, once elected Labour leader. This made him easy to caricature. He thought Britain should be a republic, without a monarch as official head of state funded extravagantly out of the public purpose. The media caught him not singing God Save the Queen once, and it became the lead item in the news. He supported a united, republican Ireland achieved through peaceful means, but he also met with Sinn Fein leaders linked to the IRA, and was therefore regularly declared to be in support of IRA terrorism. He accepted the legality of the Israeli state, but he also was a strong advocate of Palestinian rights who once spoke on the same platform as a representative from Hamas, so he was repeatedly attacked by his political opponents as a sympathizer with Middle Eastern Islamic ‘terrorist’ organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. He supported left-leaning governments elected in Latin America, including Venezuela, and during the 2019 campaign he opposed the military coup in Bolivia that was presented in the media as the triumph of ‘democracy’ (as was Juan Guiado when he openly sought to orchestrate a military coup against the elected government in Venezuela with overt backing from the United States).
Corbyn had also written a regular column for the Morning Star daily newspaper, that had previously been the organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, after the CPGB dissolved in 1991, when a range of social-democratic, socialist, communist, Green and religious left writers also wrote for it. This became proof positive for both the media, and for some Trotskyists and others on the left, that Corbyn was a “Stalinist”. So did Corbyn’s hiring of Seamus Milne as his strategy and media advisor, a Guardian journalist who also wrote for a magazine that opponents labelled as both communist and sympathetic with Putin’s Russia (ignoring the fact that Putin was and is an avowedly Christian Orthodox anti-communist and supporter of right-wing nationalists across Europe). The truth of the matter appears to be that Corbyn is a traditional Labour left supporter of the original type of socialism achieved by parliamentary means advocated by the Labour party, a conception that overlaps with the stance of non-Trotskyist communists in the era of the CPGB and since.
While his approach may depart from Trotskyist views in ways that led some to label him an ‘economic nationalist’, Corbyn publicly opposed the expulsion of the entrist, Trotskyist group Militant in 1982 during the media-fanned frenzy that led to their expulsion by the moderate Labour leaderhip. He also supported individual membership of the former leader of the IMG Trotskyist group Tariq Ali when the Labour leadership opposed it. The pattern here is clear. Corbyn is not a Marxist-Leninist, neither of the Trotskyist or so-called “Stalinist” (i.e. non-Trotskyist) persuasion, or a supporter of achieving socialism through revolution. But he is prepared to work – in both the parliamentary Labour party and in the extra-parliamentary movements -- with all those who support the goals and (non-violent) means of those (mostly or entirely non-Marxist) movements. This fact is again important to remember when drawing lessons about how far left a parliamentary party can possibly be, before its leadership is widely considered by many voters and elites alike as extremist and, in Tony Blair’s phrase, “unelectable”.
Corbyn Supported Remain but Criticized the EU for Its Neoliberal Policies — Tony Blair and 80% of Labour MPs Deliberately Twisted This into the Lie that Corbyn was to Blame for the Tory-caused Brexit
Corbyn is also a supporter of maximum economic and political autonomy for Britain who joined former Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn in the 1980s in expressing concerns that the EU was promoting what we now call neoliberal policies. Benn argued that the EU might restrict a future Labour government from implementing reforms leading incrementally to a radically democratic, public ownership and worker control socialism. Subsequently a consistent supporter of EU membership, Corbyn nevertheless had the temerity (and honesty) to say in his pro-Remain speeches that he wanted to remain in the EU, but would insist on fighting to reform it. More specifically he would fight for changes to the (interpretation of the ) clauses in the EU treaty and the many EU economic rules and policies that actively insist on neoliberal structural reforms in member states, most visibly in Greece and other South European members. This was enough to earn Corbyn the reputation as a secret supporter of Leave (a “Lexiter”) who had intentionally held back in campaigning for Remain in the 2016 election. Indeed, the 80% of MPs, who started to try to remove Corbyn the day after the Brexit referendum, claimed that they were motivated by his incompetence in making the case against Brexit strongly enough to prevent the 52% vote for it.
Tony Blair and other pro-Remain parties have gleefully repeated this claim until it became a common sense belief in the media and among many liberal elites and some voters (likely not very many of the latter). A very convenient fiction serving multiple purposes for Blairite MPs and Liberal Democrats and Conservatives alike: removing Corbyn; outlawing any discussion of the EU in terms of neoliberalism, instead of Brexit being 100% a battle between the cosmopolitan educated middle class and the ignorantly nationalist working class; most incredibly, blaming Corbyn for Brexit, when over 60% of Labour voters voted Remain, and over 60% of Conservative voters voted Leave, in a referendum that would never have taken place if the Conservatives had not called one (there was no organized movement from below pushing for one, only the Farageist wing of the Conservatives and the Farageist party UKIP funded by right-wing bankers).
Tony Blair told interviewers right after the December 12 election that Labour lost because of “Corbyn”. It was not due to Brexit per se, nor to the machinations of a flagrantly dishonest US Republican and Trump style Conservative campaign, preceded by three years of the Conservatives themselves making a deal with the EU impossible, thereby ramping up public opinion to want a Strong Leader (which Theresa May was not) to come in and impose a Brexit deal, that will just get it over with. More specifically, the loss was due to Corbyn’s “misguided ideology” and his “utter incompetence [that] let Brexit happen”. The misguided ideology that Corbyn “personified” was “a quasi-revolutionary socialism, mixing far-left economic policy with deep hostility to Western foreign policy”. The Corbyn led party, made up of the literally several hundred thousand new Labour members that he attracted into the party, were “a glorified protest movement with cult trimmings”, who had joined to express a childish “cry of rage against the system”, instead of presenting “a programme for government”.
Tony Blair: Corbyn was Unpatriotic Because He Did Not Support Our Soldiers in Ireland and Iraq or a Law and Order Approach to Crime or Pride in Britain
The not too subtle implication, one that was spelled out explicitly by Roy Hattersley and multiple other former Labour eminences, was that a wholesale purge was necessary, not just replacement of Corbyn as leader, and this needed to be accompanied by repeal of the changes to party rules that had significantly increased the power of the Labour membership relative to the elected MPs and party functionaries (this, in addition to the “unpatriotic” hostility to Western foreign policy, is what made the Corbyn-led party like a ‘glorified protest movement’). Blair wrote an article for the Guardian on January 11 2020 that crystallized his point that what Corbyn personified above all was being “unpatriotic”, and that this was lethal to Labour’s electoral chances. “[P]atriotism matters, but I’m afraid we [on the left] don’t get to define its basics. These are pride in our country; support for the armed forces; being strong on law and order”. Corbyn was deemed to be unpatriotic on all three counts.
There is more to say about Corbyn’s competence as a political leader, but I will take those points up in discussing the fourth reason for the election defeat, the making of fundamental tactical errors by the Labour party campaign. I will also postpone the issue of Corbyn’s handling of anti-semitism within the party until the discussion of reason three, Brexit and how it was handled.
REASON #2: NOT JUST CORBYN, BUT A LABOUR ELECTION PLATFORM THAT WAS ‘FAR LEFT’
The second reason cited for the electoral defeat is that the policies proposed by the Labour party during the 2019 campaign, and other policies expressed since Corbyn became leader in 2015, were too “far left”. Blair tries to make this case, but it is without factual foundation. Indeed, most people watered this argument down to a claim that, while most of the points in the 2019 election manifesto were seen by winnable non right wing voters as reasonable, and not as scary “semi-revolutionary socialism”, Labour messaging presented the manifesto disastrously badly. They did it so badly that the Conservative and media accusation that Labour was promising unaffordable give-aways was accepted by a large number of those winnable voters. This point will be taken up in discussing Reason four.
In actual fact, whether constrained by his commitment to a democratized, membership controlled party or simply by the fact that most of his MPs were against him, Corbyn did not impose a radical socialist politics on the party. His policies in office were significantly to the right of his previously expressed personal views. The manifesto included a few select (re)nationalizations of rail and utilities. It was stated or implied that there might be some increases in taxes on the rich and corporations (but never to exceed rates that had existed in the recent past). This enabled them to say that their promises of increased social spending had been costed. Labour’s vision of a socialist Britain was not a public ownership economy, or radically democratized society, or anything remotely close to it. If there is a problem with these policies, it is certainly not that they are far left. It is that they are not imaginative and “new” enough to excite people about the possibilities of change (although, as will be argued below, it was clearly not a hope and change election, but a fear and threat one, so it might not have made much difference anyway).
Blair’s Claim that Corbyn’s Platform was ‘Far Left’ is Laughable — The Truth is that Blair’s Labour Party and Most Other Social Democratic Parties Long Ago Went Too Far Right
A more sellable argument is that Labour policies were not substantively far left per se, but appeared to be so because public ownership and ‘collectivist’ solutions make no sense in a society, in which [the common sense is that] all social problems ultimately come down to free (if unequal) individuals making choices, and wanting to make freer ones. Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote angrily that Corbynites “are tone deaf to the country with their talk of collectivism and internationalism”, saying that “I have been patronized my entire life by [leftists like] them. As a woman, as working class, as a single parent, as a patriot. I don’t want handouts – I want freedom”.
The problem with both versions of the ‘far left’ argument, either that the Corbyn-led Labour party was too far left, or that it was tone deaf to today’s individualistic common sense so that it came across as out of date as well as too far left, is that they deny the bigger, and more decisive, picture. Yes, the four years of wall to wall hostile media coverage of Corbyn, and changes in the prevailing common sense over the past 40 years, meant that Labour faced an uphill climb to challenge voter preconceptions. The problem is that that a variation on this picture has been present in almost every country where socialist or social democratic parties used to win government. Most of those parties have been moving right (except on ‘cultural’ issues), just like Blair’s Labour party, for decades. In a few places (like Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France) the rightward drift led to more left-wing social movement parties being created, and in some cases those parties were rewarded with government, or a share in it. Most of the parties though continued to present themselves as slightly left, centrist parties, that “understood” popular fears of immigration and excessive taxation and social spending and violent crime. Virtually all were still successfully labelled as wishy-washy liberal multiculturalists, in a threatening and precarious world, where it is naïve to trust others, or to hope for new social programmes that improve people’s lives. Many of these parties have lost badly in recent elections. Some have literally collapsed in baseline voter support. And that is not to even address the rapidly escalating and most recent world-wide trend of populist racist nationalism, that we will address next in discussing the impact of Brexit.
REASON #3: WORKING CLASS VOTERS OUTSIDE LONDON JUST WANTED TO ‘GET BREXIT DONE’
Many Corbyn supporters argued that the desire of a large part of the electorate, not just Leavers but Remainers too, to just get Brexit over with, was the number one factor in Boris Johnson’s winning a big majority in 2019, where Theresa May lost her small one in 2017. Most everyone else said that the biggest factor was a rejection of Corbyn, as ‘against my values’ and as ‘not competent to be prime minister’. I think that both were important. Voters rejected do-gooder internationalism (i.e. what left social movement activists protest about), and what was portrayed as a weakly led party controlled by London-based millennials, in favour of a desire for a strong government, even a Strong Leader, who would ‘Make Britain a Great Power Again’ and ‘Put Britons First’.
A Strong Plurality of Voters Wanted a Strong Leader who would ‘Put Britons First’ and ‘Make Britain a Great Power Again’
The Make Britain a Great Power Again sentiment was every bit as strong in the upper and middle classes as it was in sections of the working class, indeed it may even have been stronger at the top. As noted already, the Brexit referendum was a project of the majority of Conservative MPs and voters and of the right-wing generally. Britain’s version of ‘blame the immigrants and international institutions’ nationalism (with the stress on Put Britons First) was sold to working class people as bringing them something like what socialism used to promise – protection from market forces and the degradation of social life in working class non-metropolitan towns, and more government spending to boost jobs and government services with the money saved from not paying dues to the EU. A Big Lie, but an effective one.
Brexit united the right (and allowed it to make inroads into the left voter base) while it divided the left. This would have been the case no matter what position Labour adopted after the 2016 referendum. Labour campaigned for Remain. Most of its voters and a significantly larger percentage of its members were pro-Remain. Corbyn and his top allies were more critical of the EU for making left-wing economic policies in Britain difficult, but they still clearly preferred Remain to Brexit, and especially a Conservative government version of Brexit. As I will argue in the next point, Labour’s 2019 campaign strategy can only be explained as acting ‘as if’ the defining mood of the electorate was the opposite of what it was. Labour’s 2019 campaign position was a Labour negotiated customs union deal, and a second referendum, with Remain as the other option on the ballot.
This position satisfied almost none of the Leavers who were otherwise open to voting Labour. Perhaps it might have won at least enough support to save a few seats, if the position had been decided upon no later than say right after the 2017 election, and then Labour mobilized its full resources to explain the position tirelessly at local levels over the next two and one half years before the 2019 election. In the final analysis, Brexit was always going to hurt Labour, and benefit the Conservatives. But if they had read the political environment in a hard-headed way starting in 2016, and adopted and relentlessly promoted an option of their own, they might possibly have minimized the damage and achieved a weak Conservative minority or even Labour minority government. They did not do this. Instead they hesitated Hamlet-like to formulate a detailed position, and then campaigned in 2019 as if they could ignore Brexit, rather than take the Tory position head on.
If Labour Had Formulated a Detailed Proposal for a Labour Brexit Right After the 2017 Election and Patiently Explained it at a Grassroots Level They Might Have Made the Election Issue What Kind of Brexit Not Whether
Ell Smith of statsforlefties.blogspot.com shows clearly that Brexit was a decisive factor in deciding the election outcome: 52 of the 54 seats that Labour lost to the Conservatives were majority Leave voting seats; the Conservatives won 74% of Leave voters countrywide, while Labour won only 14% (a drop of 10% from 2017); 37% of those who voted Leave in 2016, yet still voted Labour in 2017, switched to a pro-Brexit party in 2019. But even that does not tell the whole story. As noted above, most Tory Remainers and some Liberal Democrat and anti-Corbyn Labour Remainers, advocated ‘tactical voting’, and actually voted Conservative. Almost everyone who supported Brexit voted Conservative (except for a few of them who voted for the regional parties), but middle and upper class Remainers divided mainly on left versus right lines, with many more interested in stopping Corbyn than in stopping Brexit.
Anti-Semitism Within the Labour Party
A brief note on the other racism issue, the charge that Corbyn was not just slow to expel members of his party for anti-semitism, but that he protected some people from such disciplinary action, and that he did so because he was an anti-semite. See the Wikipedia entry for “Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party” for plenty of facts to counter this simplistic and disingenuous defamation. But also see opposite viewpoint in Jonathan Freedland articles in Guardian, notably (1) Many Jews Want Boris Johnson Out. But How Can We Vote for Jeremy Corbyn? (November 9, 2019); and (2) The Roots of Labour’s Anti-Semitism Lie Deep within the Populist Left (July 12, 2019). Some people did express anti-semitic ideas in the Labour Party. It was right to raise the issue and to demand actions to combat it. Anti-semitism is rising sharply everywhere in society, as it always does when right-wing nationalism is rising. Jews in the Labour party genuinely experienced this all around them, and were angry to experience, or hear about, it in their own party. Corbyn and the leadership did respond, but warily because some of his opponents hid behind this issue to undermine Corbyn’s image as a morally principled person and anti-racism campaigner. Others were perceived, justly or not, as trying to pressure Corbyn to move away from his public support for Palestinian criticisms of the Israeli government.
The Labour leadership, including John Lansman (who is Jewish), the leader of Momentum, manager of both of Corbyn’s leadership campaign, and key advisor on political tactics, now recognize that they were too slow to disentangle all this and implement the necessary correctives. Google the five-minute 2018 video of Lansman being interviewed by the Guardian’s Owen Jones on this subject. Labour had adopted a thorough policy for both discipline and education on anti-semitism issues by mid 2018, but by then Corbyn and Labour had lost the confidence of many, perhaps most, Jews in and outside of the party (although not of many prominent left-wing Jews and left Jewish organizations in and outside the party).
REASON #4: WRONG CAMPAIGN STRATEGY AND TACTICS
Labour had to overcome two factors that the Conservatives based their campaign upon, the perception of Corbyn as a weak leader and the popularity of the idea expressed by the slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’. They failed to do either. They also had to explain what electing a Labour government would mean in improving the lives of voters. They also failed at this. Before making a case for why these efforts failed, despite the hard work of tens of thousands of volunteers over the six-week campaign, let me state the obvious caveat. It is not possible to know all the many facts about the political situation that the Labour campaign leaders had to take into account, day to day and week to week during the campaign, or in the years before it. It is very easy to criticize from afar, and even more so after the election is over. I do not pretend to know better than the many people inside the campaign. Nevertheless, the critique that follows is presented as if I was in a position to get specific about the precise tactics Labour should have pursued. My goal is to do so to make concrete what my more general point is: although the campaign leadership undoubtedly understood full well what the political situation was, the campaign tactics they actually deployed were entirely inconsistent with this understanding.
Labour Had to Counter Corbyn’s Negative Image and Expose the Big Lie of ‘Get Brexit Done to Free Up Money to Bring Back Jobs and Fix the NHS’ Plus Offer a Coherent Set of Policies to Make Lives Better — They Failed on All Counts
What then was the political environment within which the 2019 British election campaign took place? A right-wing racist nationalism was on the rise in Britain, as it was in so many other countries. This was by far the predominant trend, and defined the basic parameters of the political environment at the time of the election. Parts of the population were also trending leftward towards greater disillusionment with neoliberal capitalism, but that trend was weaker and more unevenly distributed across social groups. Even leftward-trending voters had been long ago conditioned to expect that the pie of benefits that they could legitimately expect to receive from government was shrinking – and that there was ever greater competition with others to get something for themselves. Those moving right tended to believe ‘I have something to lose’, both those who had actually lost already and those with relatively privileged situations. As a result, it was a ‘fear and threat’ and ‘more for them means less for me’ election, not a ‘hope and change’ and ‘we can expand the pie so there is enough for everyone’ one.
(I don’t want to overstate how far along Britain was in the trend to racist and authoritarian nationalism. Because it is an island, it has had far fewer refugees from war zones in the Moslem Middle East and Western Africa. The Right has therefore had to give more space to the threat produced by the right of mostly white Christians from other EU countries to freedom of movement, which is more difficult to whip up hysteria and scapegoating about. Nevertheless, racist nationalism and shrinking expectations predominated in defining the 2019 political environment.)
Does this mean that what Tony Blair implied was correct, that Labour should have campaigned as ultra-patriotic liberals who want to cut back spending and reduce taxes and privatize and be harsher on the undeserving poor and join foreign wars, and do all this more humanely than the real Conservatives, whatever that might mean message-wise and policy-wise? No. Blair, like Hillary Clinton, still doesn’t fully accept that right-wing populist leaders like Boris Johnson and Trump build up most of their support by making ‘big government centrists’ and the ‘condescending liberal professionals’ their immediate target. This is partly for the simple reason that Blairite type social democrat governments both seem to be implementing similar policies to right-wing governments, often are, and anyway try to blur differences to appear moderate during elections. In the British election, the highlighted technocratic liberal target was the Brussels bureaucracy of the EU.
Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton Still Don’t Get It — Right-Wing Populists Get Elected in Part by Making Condescending Liberal Professionals and Big Government Centrists Their Immediate Target
On social media (and in the mainstream in the USA) this ‘liberal establishment’ is labelled as ‘the left’, as somehow aligned with the ‘far left’ or actually part of it, and therefore not just political opponents but the enemy, to be eliminated from the body politic. Liberals and social democrats are the immediate target because they still have significant power in both public and private institutions. They need to be either intimidated into appeasement or purged from power first, before the Right can unleash its full attack on less powerful groups. And of course the real establishment, that is mostly conservative at best, wants to deflect the anger from the failures of the system they control onto liberal middle and upper middle class scapegoats, not just foreigners and poor people. Yes, parties and candidates who are openly left will be attacked even harder than those who present as moderates, but the latter cannot avoid being attacked as agents of the (far) left and/or the technocratic liberal establishment. The proof of this is that moderate social democratic parties in Greece (PASOK, opening the door to Syriza), France, Australia, Italy, Germany, Austria, Netherlands and other countries have seen their voter support collapse or decline sharply. It is a global phenomenon, with global as well as domestic causes.
What then could Labour have done differently in the 2019 election? Two things. First, counter the Tory narrow and endlessly repeated mantra of ‘Get Brexit Done’ with an equally focussed slogan and messaging of ‘Only a Labour Brexit Really Gets It Done’. Do not fantasize that you can change the subject with a manifesto that claims to be a radical revival of socialism, but is actually a laundry list of modest reforms that sound expensive. Second, go negative and go on the offensive in both social media and public messaging, to expose Boris Johnson and the hard right ultra neoliberal and ultra free trade (turn London into Singapore, accept greater dependence on the USA as the price of leaving the EU single market) takeover of the Conservative party, that was hiding behind their Little England rhetoric on Brexit. Make Them (and their Hidden Real Project) the issue, not yourself. And when they go low, distinguish yourself from them by being factually accurate, but go lower, go harder, go even more negative in exposing who the real powers behind their throne are, whose interests they really represent.
Even in ‘normal’ times, governments defeat themselves because enough people become disaffected with their record of misdeeds, and opposition parties pose as capable of providing different policies, especially on those misdeed issues, as a competent Government in Waiting. Johnson was allowed to pose as an outsider who ruffled the feathers of the stuffed shirts in Brussels and his own party. He was even allowed to get away with repeating the same lie that won the Leave vote, that leaving the EU would free up money to spend billions on the NHS and on declining regions outside London. He was a new-style ‘One Nation’ Tory standing up against all these establishments. Labour had to tie Johnson to the nine years of Tory government in which he was twice a cabinet minister (and closely tied, including when Mayor of London). They needed a secondary slogan, something like ‘Nine Years of Boris is Enough’ (you can come up with a better one) to hammer this home. He should have been forced to defend that 9 year record every day, on one specific after another that various parts of the electorate saw as misdeeds (just as Theresa May was, and it cost her the election in 2017).
Labour Might Just Might Have Blocked a Conservative Majority if they had Run on Two Slogans — ‘Only a Labour Brexit Really Gets it Done’ and ‘Nine Years of Boris is Enough’
Why ‘Only a Labour Brexit Really Gets It Done’? Isn’t this a betrayal of the Remain stance of a majority of Labour voters and the overwhelming majority of the half a million Labour Party members? Brexit united the Right and divided the Left. There was no stand on Brexit that could change that completely, let alone overcome the major advantage that it gave the Conservatives going into the election. There were really only two possible positions to take after the 2016 referendum. Both start with the clear stand that Labour supports a close alignment with Europe, and prefers to be in a reformed EU that is less insistent on neoliberal economic policies. That is the bedrock principle.
Option one is to try as hard as possible in Parliament to get the Tories to negotiate a Brexit leading to a maximally close alignment with the EU (while retaining control over immigration etc). Declare this to be a Labour Brexit that respects the outcome of the referendum, addresses many of the concerns that led to the result, and – very importantly given the need to counter the ‘do anything, just get it over with’ sentiment that the Conservatives first created with their bad faith negotiations with the EU and then exploited – can be over in one year because there is no need to spend many years to negotiate a long list of separate economic treaties with the EU, USA, China, Russia etc. When the Conservatives fail to do this, run the 2019 election on a series of specific contrasts between the Labour Brexit and the hard right Boris Brexit, not on being for or against Brexit as such, or on both sides at the same time. Position one would not call for a second referendum if Labour won the election. The new government, majority or minority, would simply negotiate a Labour Brexit and get it accepted by Parliament. The option one stance might well include that Labour could seek a Rejoin referendum in the future, but categorically not in that five year mandate, not until after winning a second mandate on a platform that said they might entertain a Rejoin referendum, if the terms and circumstances were right.
Option two would be the same as the first, except that it would call for a second referendum after negotiating a Labour Brexit, with Remain on the ballot. The slogan would be the same as for option one. In practice this would be, and would appear to voters to be, a People’s Vote, a ’Let’s do the referendum again and hope for a Remain result this time’ position. The only difference between this and the position that Labour actually ended up adopting is that it would be adopted as early as possible, no later than after the June 2017 election, ideally exactly then, when Corbyn was at the peak of his authority and power within the party. Any position that Labour might have taken, including my two options, would be nuanced and complicated. Any progressive position would have to be. Compared to the Trumpian Simple Solution to a Complex Problem message that the Johnson Tories had to get across, any Labour position would take a lot of time and a lot of resources to patiently explain. That would have to be done well before an election.
Labour Should Have Attacked the Tories Relentlessly for Being Undemocratic and the Vehicle for Elitist Interests — And They Had to Get Across That They Were the Opposite by Promising No Second Referendum During Its Mandate
I would have strongly favoured option one. Why? Many reasons that have to do with what I think the real political situation was. First, option one gave Labour by far and away the best chance of winning the election, or preventing the Tories from winning a majority. Second, those who wanted Labour to call for a second referendum (before implementing Brexit) were wrong to think that a rerun would change the outcome to Remain. Third, if Remain did win, it would be by a very small margin. Regardless of the outcome, Labour would pay a heavy price for not respecting democracy. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats would not pay the same price. Unfair, but reality. After all, Corbyn paid the biggest price for allegedly being a secret Leaver whose lukewarm campaigning supposedly caused Leave to win in 2016. Fourth, the only way to draw contrasts with the Conservatives and other parties on Labour’s socialist ideas (and get those working class and other people who might respond positively to them to even perceive them through the distracting fog caused by Brexit) is to have a decisive and readily understood position for a Labour Brexit. Right-wing populist and racist nationalism is a project by one wing of the upper class to legitimate their rule when the failures of capitalism are delegitimating their system, or at least their neoliberal policies. Fair is foul, and foul is fair, through the fog and misty air. Brexit was a distracting fog to hide a lurch to the right in the Conservative party (and to further facilitate it after Brexit). A successful Labour Brexit would beat that back.
Why do I think these four things? Because despite the fact that many businesses, not least those in Britain’s crucial financial sector, will be significantly disadvantaged by Brexit, it is absolutely clear that the overall business class is not willing to do anything to prevent the Conservatives from implementing it. If it was a Labour government, especially a Corbyn led left-leaning one, that was pushing Brexit, they would pull all the usual levers to create a crisis of confidence in the economy (bet against the currency, announce moving of companies and head offices resulting in the loss of a large number of jobs, make overt threats and warnings about impending economic collapse etc) to prevent it. They could make speeches and give platforms to other celebrities and dignitaries to win people to Remain. They could have funded pro-Remain groups to run social media and regular media stories and ads against Brexit over the more than three years since the first referendum, in order to change public opinion. But doing all this would in practice require a more or less frontal attack on the Conservative party, and its lurch to the right. It might even risk the Conservatives losing the 2019 election. It was a Conservative government doing Brexit, and blocking Corbyn was more important to big business than blocking Brexit.
The bottom line is that the capitalist class did next to nothing to oppose the Conservatives on Brexit and to promote Remain. As a result, the pro-Brexit forces had near total domination in both social media and mainstream media over more than three years to fan fears and perceptions of threats. Ditto the non-stop smear job on the ‘unpatriotic’ Corbyn. Labour could not change the fact that Brexit crowded out all other issues in the 2019 election. Almost all of the 48% of the electorate who voted Leave were still pro-Brexit, and more importantly were much more likely to make their stance on Brexit determine who they would vote for than Remain voters were. If the Blairites and the Liberal Democrats had succeeded in forcing a People’s Vote before the 2019 election, Leave would very likely have won again, or barely lost. Either way the Labour Left would pay the biggest price for imposing the second referendum.
Big Business Interests Are Hurt by Brexit Yet They Did Virtually Nothing to Oppose It — That Would Have Required Opposing the Conservative Party and Its Lurch to the Right that Brexit Both Masked and Accelerated
What about the issue of Corbyn’s perceived incompetence? Corbyn, like Bernie Sanders was one thing to his youthful supporters (and older left social movement people) who were attracted (back) into electoral party politics by his authenticity, moral passion for justice, speaking truth to power and walking the talk over decades despite pressure to ‘sell out’ for personal power. He was someone else altogether to those for whom getting into power personally and as a party was the main consideration. They regarded him as too far left for them to get elected with him as leader. They also felt that his actual individual qualities, and/or the persona created for him in the media, would prevent them from winning power. More than a few of them were also upset with the prospect of Corbyn winning power for a Labour party that would actually act as a left-wing government, less allied with the USA and the West, and less committed to capitalism.
What were the problematic personal qualities that Corbyn shares with Sanders? He is not an especially good speaker, although he can inspire supporters when not filtered through TV, when he is speaking at a local rally or meeting. He is not a sexy male (think Justin Trudeau, but also for some people apparently a younger Tony Blair and a younger Donald Trump) in the sense of arousing desire in either women or men. He does not even hide his ordinary body with smart suits or makeup as most ordinary looking politicians and celebrities do, but instead dresses like a slob, a perpetual graduate student. Corbyn does not ‘dress for success’; he is resolutely ordinary, like the guy next door or your slobby husband that you are bored with. He does not compensate for lack of pure sexiness and style by being charismatic. (Charisma, according to Max Weber, is the sense of having supernatural magical power to get things for people when they are doubting their ability to get them for themselves. People see someone as charismatic when they are looking for a Saviour who will lead them to the Promised Land of their private fantasies, desires and dreams. Charismatic leaders are willing to break all the rules and create new ones. They offer the promise that those very limits of circumstances and institutions and conventions or rules that appear to make realizing one’s desires impossible can be broken and transcended by the super-natural powers of the Leader. Trump is charismatic to his devotees, as are Duterte and Erdogan and Bolsonaro, and any number of other people who are actually mediocre but have created a charismatic persona.) Finally, he is the absolute opposite of the Strong Masculine Male, that men are insecure about failing to be themselves, and most women want as either Ideal Partner or Substitute Daddy. Corbyn’s public persona is that of a Soft Male, a pacifist and a vegan whose hobby is gardening.
Mediocre Individuals like Boris Johnson Create a ‘Strong Male’ Persona and Are Deemed ‘Fit to Rule’ — Corbyn Failed to Impose His Leadership on a Hostile Caucus and Was Seen as Weak
Most political leaders actually lack the qualities just listed. They are simply much better at masking their electoral politics relevant deficiencies. Corbyn might have succeeded as a leader had he not also lacked other crucial qualities. Put simply, he did not come across a Strong Leader who possessed the qualities that most people feel are necessary in a leader. He had done poorly in his last year of school and was thereby deemed to be unintelligent. He was not clever-sounding or humorous or quick on his feet. He was sometimes stilted and defensive in TV interviews and more righteous than quick-witted in Parliament (it did not matter that what he said was often substantively much more relevant to people’s lives than what his opponents said, or that he was well briefed on the issues – he was earnest and unexciting, with very few quotable quips or quotes). The entire Labour leadership and campaign team seemed to be cumbersome and slow-moving in responding to the shape-shifting zigs and zags of the Conservatives, who were always moving quickly, always attacking, always telling new lies and half-truths and slanders. This reinforced the impression of Corbyn as weak and inept at leading his side in a battle between rival political teams.
Corbyn also looked weak because he never united, or imposed his will on, his caucus of MPs. Many of them never stopped trying to undermine his leadership. Most refused to serve in his shadow cabinet. Many rarely spoke for him in the media and regularly spoke against him, including in off the record briefings to journalists. In the final analysis, too many voters believed that Corbyn was not educated or intelligent enough, not experienced enough in being a boss in business or a high-achieving professional, not enough of an alpha male to take charge of a government and capably steer a country through troubled waters. Corbyn was therefore seen as a weak leader. Boris Johnson, the mendacious clown who was always ill-prepared , who is regarded by so many of the people who worked with him in his previous posts as a lightweight, as a not really that competent fool except in political maneuvering and in creating an entertaining persona, was seen as a Strong Leader. Born into wealth, a product of Eton and Oxford, he was simply assumed to be fit to rule, while Corbyn was not. Like females competing with males, Corbyn had to be twice as good as Johnson in order to be seen as half as capable of being the leader or boss. Corbyn had to prove himself against preconceptions, while Johnson only had to avoid being fully exposed as a fraud. Corbyn’s leadership qualities were not strong enough.
LESSONS WE CAN LEARN FROM THE CORBYN EXPERIENCE
Could Corbyn have won? The narrow answer to that question is no. A minority Corbyn government that enacted something like a Labour Brexit maybe. The only long odds chance for a Corbyn majority government was if Labour adopted the option one position on Brexit just described above just after the June 2017 election (when Corbyn was at his peak of authority and could have imposed it). They would then have had to devote major resources to explaining it (accompanied by a realistically limited set of priority socialist reforms that nevertheless were exemplars of a coherent longer term vision). And they would have had to plan and execute a sustained ‘negative’ campaign of exposes of the people and interests behind the Conservative lurch to the right hidden behind their Brexit position (including a take down of Johnson as a supposedly capable strong leader).
Corbyn’s Defeat Shows that Electoral Politics Operates by Different ‘Rules of the Game’ From Protest Politics — But Staying Invested in Electing Progressives is Crucial to Overall Left Success
What are general lessons for the overall Left in Britain and elsewhere?
(1) Guardian journalist Gary Younge wrote after the election defeat that progressives should remember that electoral parties were only part of a much wider Left. We should not put so many hopes and dreams into waiting for a genuinely left-wing government to get elected. Younge wrote that the conspiracy theories that Blairites promoted about the Labour party having been taken over from the outside by “far leftists” from the “protest movements”, who turned the party into a protest movement, were wrong. Protesters did not take over Labour’s electoral machine. It was far more the case that the electoral machine took over the energies and talents of people who might be better spending their time in protesting, or other grass roots organizing.
Younge is right to remind us that the Left is much more than an electoral party. But it would be wrong to conclude that the left should put less time into electoral politics. One of the key findings in study after study of left movements is that who is in control of various parts of the state apparatus (legislatures, executives, courts, police, armed forces, civil servants and government employees in all the many public agencies) matters a great deal. Electing a progressive government, not necessarily a radical one (which is extremely rare) but even just an establishment liberal one (like the election of Kennedy in the US in 1960), raises expectations about leftward changes being possible. That helps social movements and all types of organizing. Having as many progressives as possible in every part of the state apparatus, and minimizing the most reactionary people in key posts everywhere, can at least reduce the extent to which the state is used against popular movements. Elected left-leaning governments can place progressives in those positions, or promote people already there.
(2) Should the British Left stay invested in the Labour Party? Should it create a Movement party like Podemos in Spain instead? Based on the previous point, the answer for leftists in Britain is to stay with Labour, at least as long as the left that Corbyn attracted into the party as individual members is allowed to significantly influence the nature of the party (this was made possible by the Miliband reforms that gave the membership on paper at least some leverage over the MPs and party machine in selecting the leader , adopting policy and selecting local candidates). Longer term, and in general elsewhere, the left should aim to build a Movement party. These parties can only be effective, can only actually win lots of seats, if there is a strong enough Proportional Representation voting system. Where PR does not yet exist, it should be a priority to fight for it.
Whether building a left within a social-democratic party (not a Trotskyist-style entrist left of revolutionaries, but something like the Corbynite one, left-wing people who believe that left-wing change can be achieved electorally) or creating a Movement party, the lesson here is that the left should aim to win real political power as a Radical Flank. It is critically important for at least some people to be placed on a platform of elected office where they can express the ideology and programme of the Left in ways that the general public can actually hear it. Electing a party to make the revolution is a pipe dream. But getting left-wingers elected to be the voice of the overall Left from inside the formal liberal democratic system is doable, and extremely important.
Corbyn’s Defeat Shows that Strong and Capable Individual Leaders are Indispensable to Left Electoral Success — Yes Strong Leaders Can Threaten Bottom-Up Democracy But Protest Movements Cannot Do Without Effective Individual Leaders Either
(3) I argued above that the Labour party should have adopted a position of “Only Labour Brexit Can Really Get It Done” as part of a ‘Brexit now and hopefully Rejoin the EU later’ stance. Isn’t that being opportunist in order to get elected? Isn’t it ‘selling out’ like all politicians do? No, it is not. No more than crafting our slogans and demands in a specific protest campaign is opportunistic, if that crafting is directed at winning as much ground as we can realistically win, with the mobilization of the largest possible numbers of people, in that place at that time. Electoral politics and protest politics are distinct fields or arenas of struggle for power and change. There are literally thousands of other such fields where the left needs to sustain struggles to transform power relations and win actual policy changes – in schools, in workplaces, in professions, in neighbourhoods and towns and cities, within all the parts of the state enumerated above, in the mass media, even within senior managements of private corporations, within specific social movements advocating for specific social groups or issues. Each of these fields of potential struggle is a different game with different goals and rules.
As I have written in several earlier posts, the left should learn from the example of Billy Graham evangelicals and the neoliberals of the Mont Pelerin Society. They each created a national and international level center of leadership that constantly researched and developed new extensions and refinements of a core ideology and programme of change. They then actively promoted the proliferation of as many organizations of all kinds that shared in the broad outlines of this ideology and programme enough to consider themselves part of a single overall Movement (many already existed). Critically, all those organizations were free to interpret and apply those ideas as they saw fit.
But they were applying shared ideas that defined their core unity and allowed very diverse people and groups to work with and support one another. All fields of struggle, all parts of the left, must make reference to a single overarching Movement, a single overarching Left, that is always plural and divided, always made up of differing interests and clashing ideas, but is still working to achieve enough unity to act together, to support one another in our respective fields of struggle, when it counts. If we do so, because we do so, we will be able to recognize that leftists in different fields have to operate with different rules of the game in order to win their specific game. The different fields are autonomous, even though leftists should always work to align them, and should debate with one another across the different fields of action about the best goals and strategies and tactics to pursue. All of this to say, leftists who are leading electoral parties have to be allowed to be free to interpret and apply the overall Left ideology and programme in order to win their game. It will always require compromises and zigs and zags.
(4) One of the rules of the electoral field game is that the perception of your top leader, and of the overall set of leaders, matters a lot. You cannot win without a clearly defined top leader and set of other leaders. They have to actually be, and appear to voters to be, strong, decisive, authoritative, intelligent, capable, a captain of the ship who will steer us through troubled waters, someone we can count on, believe in, trust to keep us safe and free and prospering. This fact runs counter to the current idea about leadership in many social movements and protest campaigns.
Neither Electoral Parties Nor Extra-Parliamentary Movements Can Be Too Far Ahead of the Thinking of Potential Supporters — Both Require some Variant of a Broad Progressive Coalition with a Left Flank that Actually Leads
(5) Jeremy Corbyn was demonized by the Blairites and the media and the Conservatives as “too far left”, largely because of actions and stands that he took on issues where the supposedly left party (Labour) failed to challenge British or other country imperialistic misdeeds, and it was left to extraparliamentary movements to do so. Does this mean that left electoral parties can only go so far left, not even as far left as movements calling for a united Ireland or an end to Israeli apartheid? The answer of course depends on what the issue you are ‘too far left’ on is. But my guess is that the basic answer is yes. That is why I think the main lesson is the need to create a political presence in parliamentary politics (with seats and hopefully ministers in governments), but to realize that this will inevitably most of the time be a radical flank, a genuine left within a wider coalition of progressives and not-so-progressive establishment liberals.
Having said this, it is not a matter that the extraparliamentary left is always further left than left governments (a large proportion of social movements are very moderate indeed on issues of capitalism and imperialism). Nor is there some theorem that the more left you go on the continuum, the closer your position is to the best one to actually grasp the complexity of the problem, and to have the best ideas for solving it. Protest movements operate with fewer constraints insofar as they do not have to persuade a large minority of voters, but only much smaller minorities (in the short run). Extraparliamentary movements do not have to actually implement any of the policies that they criticze governments for not implementing. They do not have to deal with the resulting punishments meted out by the USA or other countries for challenging their misdeeds. They do not have to deal with the complexities that make even the most clearcut issues of right and wrong policies complicated to resolve on the level of practical detail.
So the other half of the conclusion that the left needs to seek a radical flank presence, in order that it can present more full-throated critiques and alternatives than it would if it accepted being silent in order to get a Lesser Evil Blairite government elected, is that the extraparliamentary left needs to recognize that it does not possess the truth, certainly not on the level of practical implementation. We need lefts operating in all the arenas, all the fields of struggle. They have different constraints, and they have different strengths to contribute to an overall process of societal debate and change.
(6) A very obvious conclusion from the Brexit election and the continuing success of the far right Republicans in the USA is that the left needs to figure out how to do its own version of negative campaigning. As Clausewitz said, war is politics by other means. Elections are ideally non-violent (actually the exception more than the rule world-wide, and increasingly an exception in the rich countries too) but they are struggles for legitimated power between groups with conflicting interests. They are literally battles that, when the intensity of the conflicts between social groups grows sharper, morph into actual wars. We all know this when we look at history, or other countries, but we sometimes act as if it doesn’t apply in our own oh-so-civilized country. My point is that the Right is already fighting a real war, and the left is still singing Cumbyah, and boasting about how high it is going when they go low.
We Should Study Right-wing Negative Campaigning and How to Counter It — But the Key is for the Left to Always Be on the Offensive So That Our Vision of the Future Sets the Agenda
Let me be clear. It is the right that is prospering from the increasing level of violence and the predominance of negative campaigning in liberal democratic states. The negative campaigning of Dominic Cummings and Cambridge Analytica and others in Britain and the Republicans in the USA has as its conscious object, and visible result, the grinding down of open democratic debate and popular checks on the rule of the wealthy and powerful, who rule in the private corporations and other private social hierarchies. They are driving us to less and less liberal democracy, and are on the road to fascism and major international wars.
Right-wing negative campaigning is built on a simple basic recipe. Respond to the slightest progressive idea or social critique with emotional appeals to God and Country and Family and Law and Order that are stated in aggressive ways so that they are attacks, and what they are saying then becomes the issue, and crowds out whatever the progressives were saying (and reality is turned upside down so that the Oppressors become the alleged Victims). They are blunt, and often crude, appeals to narrow self-interest and negative ‘fear, greed, hate and threat’ emotions (both often bundled in scapegoating the foreigner and the racialized Other). When any of this is pointed out, they attack even harder, and they complement it with a mixture of Big Lies and Ad Hominem Slander and WhatAboutism that reduces to ‘Change the subject’, ‘Get them on the back foot’ and, for the masses looking on, Distract, Distract, Distract.
Left-wing negative campaigning has to be grounded in the values and goals of greatly increased Liberty and Equality and Democracy that we seek. The goal is to open up more and more space for genuine debate between different views in more and more arenas. For this reason, our negative campaigning has to be subordinate to, and serve, our ‘positive alternatives and arguments’ campaigning. But our negative campaigns also have to be uncompromisingly sharp exposes of the organized interests and people that lie behind the right-wing parties. They need to be grounded in well-researched fact, but they also need to be argued and explained. This can only be done over relatively long periods of time, hence mostly before elections and then only drawn upon and simplified during elections. Negative campaigning must also be fully knowledgeable of human psychology. It must be hard-hitting emotionally (including being humorous and satirizing and ridiculing but that kind of critique is mostly for the already, or almost already, converted – at best it softens people up for sharper expose). It must appeal to our good-side emotions mostly, of indignity at injustice and desire for justice and a loving community etc, but it must also be willing to express anger and even some hate for injustices and unjust social arrangements and for specific exploiters and oppressors.
Left-wing Negative Campaigning is Mostly Exposing the Right’s False Claims to Serve the Popular Interest and Making the Contrast with the Values and Interests Championed by the Left
Our negative campaigning also has to unmask and counter right-wing negative campaigning. We need to do serious studies of exactly what the Republicans have done in the USA and Cambridge Analytica and Cummings et al have done in Britain. We need to see what worked for them and what did not work and why. And then we need to design antidotes to their poisons, to defang them. If we fail to do this, it is entirely predictable that they will escalate social and political chaos and confusion, and then wait for economic or military or other crises to provide a pretext for further steps towards dictatorship and war.
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party lost the December 12 2019 British federal election. The main reasons were Brexit and the perceived qualities of Corbyn as a leader, and as a hate figure that personified certain political stances that were to the left of permissable opinions in mainstream media and political parties. There is a lot to learn from this defeat. Let us hope that we actually learn the right lessons, especially the ones that oblige us to change our own ideas and practices a bit, and apply them. Hasta la Victoria Siempre.