Lost Rebecca Long Bailey sounds divorced from reality

Can Corbynism survive without Corbynism? We have our fullest answer to that question in Rebecca Long Bailey’s opening pitch for the Labour leadership published in Tribune today. A few of its main threads illustrate not just how divorced Corbynism is from contemporary political culture but from a decent understanding of Labour party history.

“The election result was devastating,” she begins, “but with the climate crisis spiralling and the far-right on the march, we must regroup for the struggles ahead.” The Tory party has indeed reinvented itself, but not, as the over-worked language of twentieth century fascism would have it, into a party of jackbooted thugs committed to mass violence, but into a force driven by a neo-Gaullist take on social democracy – Johnson’s “boosterism” or levelling up.

Long Bailey’s diagnosis for the defeat is as follows: “Labour’s Green New Deal is the most ambitious agenda for tackling climate change of any major political party. And throughout the election it was tragically undersold.” She repeats the phrase “Green New Deal” four times throughout the piece. The phrase “Green New Deal” is borrowed from the American New Left – it is an abstraction and yet we are repeatedly told throughout the piece that the policy won “popularity” across the country, that it gained “huge support” in the election period.

In a piece for the Guardian published just before the New Year, she heralded a shift to “progressive patriotism”. It’s a well-worn theme in Western left-wing politics – in a broad sense, FDR, JFK, Clinton, Attlee, Foot can all be badged like that. The earlier piece was not well-received by Corbyn supporting commentators. That language, along with her use of the term “green industrial revolution,” which at least has some cultural resonance, has now been junked in favour of further abstraction, the “socialist vision”, “economic transformation”, delivered by a “courageous movement of millions.”

The section on Labour’s decline in Scotland is particularly bizarre. It claims that by “joining forces with David Cameron in the Better Together campaign in 2014” that Labour lost contact with “ordinary people.” The proximate reasons for Labour’s decline in Scotland are twofold – a series of chaotic and unambitious administrations at Holyrood in the early years of devolution and the introduction of PR in council elections which broke Labour’s near total control of local government in the post-war era. Since the Union in 1707, Scotland’s affairs have been run in large part by powerful town-based bureaucracies.

It seems that in any future independence referendum in Scotland, under a Long Bailey premiership, Labour would refuse to take part in a cross-party campaign to save the Union. That is an astonishing prospect given the substantial role Labour has had in the evolution of Scotland’s history – its management of the country’s extensive housing schemes after the war and its adoption of the Home Rule cause in the 1980s and 1990s which led to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament.

The Long Bailey Scottish policy – such as it is – suggests that the leading Corbynite contender for the party leadership has only the most cursory understanding of political history and the scale of the challenge facing Labour after Corbyn has finished with it. Unwittingly illustrating the point, Long Bailey finished the day saying in a TV interview that Corbyn’s leadership was “10 out of 10”.