The great Corbyn and McDonnell socialist swindle
“Leaps! Breaks in Gradualness. Leaps! Leaps!” (Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic, Collected Works, volume 38 p.123)
It is a rare occasion when the BBC’s Question Time programme produces a defining moment that spotlights and illuminates a key dividing line of British politics. Despite the best efforts of the veteran host David Dimbleby, the show has become too shouty and full of partisan point-scoring. To blame is the determination of parts of the audience seeking to make a splash. This has produced in all but the most monomaniacal panellists a resulting fear of being booed, which means good people will say whatever nonsense it takes to get out of the studio and to the bar alive. Question Time’s calmer radio counterpart – Any Questions on BBC Radio 4 – is presented by David’s brother, Jonathan Dimbleby. The audience that gathers in a hall for radio is robust but inherently tends to be more polite. A better discussion ensues.
On Thursday evening, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Emily “Lady Nugee” Thornberry was a guest on the shouty TV show and was asked a simple but brilliant question by an audience member. Could she provide an example of a country in which the economic policies of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Chancellor John McDonnell have been successful?
Thornberry is rarely lost for words. She has words, lots of them, for almost every occasion. This time a look of mild panic formed on her face and she began to burble.
“I would suggest that actually the Labour party is a social democratic party pretty much from the centre of Europe. And if you look at European economic policies throughout… successful economies where they invest in infrastructure, where they invest in safety nets.”
Yes, that was a fair description of the Labour party until Jeremy Corbyn took it over in September 2015. Until then it was in the respectable social democratic tradition, that is it accepted the need for a market mechanism and supported a mixed economic model (as all parties in the centre-left and centre-right mainstream do to varying degrees) with the proceeds of regulated capitalism paying for public services and redistribution. Under Tony Blair and New Labour this mainstream position won three general elections. The far-left Corbyn and McDonnell rejected all that every step of the way. Thornberry surely understands this crucial distinction between social democracy, which accepts parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, and the far left with its roots in a Marxist analysis and a belief in street politics, upheaval to smash the system (and heads) when it gets the chance, in pursuit of the final and supposedly blissful state of socialist perfection.
Answer the name of a single successful Corbynite country, demanded Dimbleby.
“Germany,” she said. “Sweden.”
Luckily for Thornberry, at that point the show was over and the credits rolled before she could be challenged. To describe Germany since the Second World War as an example of McDonnell and Corbyn’s socialist creed in action is – how can I phrase this politely? – completely taking the piss.
Germany has been run by Angela Merkel, a conservative, since 2005. Its forward-looking deregulatory and welfare reforms (Agenda 2010) were delivered by Gerhard Schröder, a mainstream Chancellor from the SPD. Schröder’s administration was about as far removed from the economics of Jeremy Corbyn as Richard Burgon MP, a member of the Labour shadow cabinet, is distant from Albert Einstein. Although it is true that the Germans have long prized industrial investment, and long-term ownership and worker involvement, they have a market economy. That can be traced not only to the wondrous post-1945 revival rooted in American aid, but also to the innovative policies of Ludwig Erhard, an anti-Nazi who was heroic in ending post-War price controls and as minister for the economy liberating the economy of West Germany while the McDonnell and Corbyn types in East Germany imposed tyranny and economic disaster.
Prosperous Sweden too is hardly Corbynite. The then fashionable word socialism was used a lot by the left during their long welfarist/modernist run in charge, but underneath the rhetoric a lot of successful businesses were encouraged and given the room to thrive. It kept a mixed economy and the rule of law. Subsequent governments introduced reforms, although they could always go further in an economically liberal direction.
Anyway, the British far left that McDonnell and Corbyn – Bennites – embody spent decades saying that European social democracy was a dead end, a diversion from the true socialism they have always believed will be achieved through exploiting crises and moving cleverly in steps and then great leaps as Lenin described it.
Yet somehow, the “fair for all” fantasy, of the far left McDonnell and his adherents recast as soothing “Scandi” centrists, seems to have conned an astonishing number of people in contemporary Britain, probably thanks to the cleverness of McDonnell and several of the people around Corbyn who have read their Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and accordingly know how to proceed to exploit rising anger.
In Tim Ross and Tom McTague’s Betting the House, the thrilling new account of the 2017 general election, published this week, there is a perceptive analysis of Corbyn and his closest supporters. Corbyn himself has not changed his mind about much in 50 plus years, it seems. It is not, the authors conclude, so much that he is particularly developed ideologically or affixed to particular policies – or not in the intense way John McDonnell is – more that he regards himself in terms of a superior morality and, as he sees it, obvious virtue. This resonates, particularly with many emotionally attuned youngsters who are intensely sensitive to notions of identity politics and the difficulties of locating empathy in the fragmented age of the internet.
Thus Corbynim is a self-justifying and virtuous feeling, a feeling that there could be smashed avocado on sourdough for everyone if just, y’know… fairness. For a recent example of this phenomenon listen to the singer Paloma Faith talk about her politics on BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour this week. She hailed her mother as her hero and emphasised the importance of kindness and listening to others, before hailing the talented but remorselessly pious Owen Jones, who with his dander up in pursuit of the non-righteous comes across as mighty intolerant. Owen Jones is now working his way back into favour with the leadership as a modern day “Squealer” from Animal Farm, fluidly interpreting and communicating whatever the centre decides is today’s truth. Paloma Faith said she is not up on individual policies but she loves Owen Jones and he wants what is best for the masses. Of course he does…
The other key figures are quite different from Saint Jeremy. They are far cleverer and properly strategic. Seumas Milne is a Winchester-educated journalist of the far-left turned strategy and communications chief for the Labour leader. Milne is a true Scargillite (Arthur Scargill, miners strike) who on questions such as Al-Qaeda and the supposed successes of Comrade Stalin has committed more outrages in print than anyone in the history of the Guardian, which is quite an achievement. The comment pages when he ran them on the Guardian were never dull, though. Anti-Western and pro-Russian, Milne is even more than McDonnell the real brains.
Between them, he and McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, have perfected the transmission of the soothing “this is just going to be a bit like Sweden with slightly higher taxes” pitch that was there first in the manifesto, drafted by Andrew Fisher. It is a classic far left con updated, game theory for Marxists with a technological twist. Exploit opportunities; embed in institutions; use useful idiots; upend the traditional media and outwit it on social media via the power of mass movements; take power when you can; look stern in the resulting emergency and say that because of the emergency, and perhaps because of some establishment plots you have uncovered, the people need defending from the enemies of the people, whoever it is that week. A version of this happens every time – every single time – the Marxists get into power.
The essential insight of the core Corbynite leadership group is rooted in the analysis of the Leninists, the true originals, who despite being small in number ended up by a combination of evil genius and luck controlling Russia and creating the Soviet tyranny.
At the top of this piece is a quote from Lenin. “Leaps! Breaks in Gradualness. Leaps! Leaps!”
I chose it because that quote also stands at the top of one of the most revealing pieces by Andrew Murray, a key Corbynite thinker. Murray is a former chair of the anti-Western Stop The War coalition and a trade unionist fixer who only left the Communist Party in late 2016, after which he was, terrifyingly, drafted in to play a leading role behind the scenes for Corbyn in the Labour election effort this year.
What does he want? Murray wrote this in October 2015:
“A Corbyn Labour Party is by no means the alchemist’s stone which turns the base metal of parliamentary reformism into the gold of socialist revolution. But there is no doubt that it creates the opportunity to rebuild the confidence and fighting strength of the Labour Party. Imagine a Labour leader who applauds striking workers – as he did at his TUC Congress speech three days after his election – rather than one who snipes at them? Who appears at demonstrations of solidarity with refugees rather than cowering at the advice of spin-doctors? These are baby steps. But they are steps that can consolidate and strengthen a mass popular movement of struggle which can weigh in the balance alongside a Labour majority in 2020, and against the elite and their military associates. There seems to be no other prospect of a strategy for overturning the capitalist system. It is uncertain, of course, but such is the way of leaps.”
Such is the way of leaps, preceded by “baby steps” to overturning the capitalist system, the imperfect but most productive and free system that offers property rights, economic opportunity, innovation through competition, supermarkets, airlines, plentiful clothes and other consumer goods.
Britain’s general election of June was – to the leadership’s surprise – a truly great leap for the far left , and they are looking amid the current Tory turmoil for the next chance to leap towards overturning the capitalist system while pretending they offer merely a Britain a bit more like Germany and Sweden.
Perhaps, perhaps, their moment will either pass or if voters let them in to control the machinery of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and all the rest, at that point the institutions of the British state – all damaged by Iraq, Libya and scandal – will prove wonderfully resilient. Don’t bet your house, if you have one, on it, or on the moderates in Labour, probably deselected, being in a position to stop it either. A government has huge power even by executive order from Downing Street if it understands how to use it.
What then? If that band of Marxist desperadoes that hijacked the real Labour party does ever get power and the circumstances present the opportunity for the next leap, where do you think it will be to? If you believe the suggested answer McDonnell, Milne and Murray will put on the desk of Prime Minister Corbyn is the Germany of the Mittlestand or Scandi sophistication then you need your head examined.