Why we should not be too happy about Dominic Cummings' departure from government

As Dominic Cummings carried his cardboard box out of Number 10 Downing Street, the gloating started. It came not just from the usual suspects, those who bemoaned the exit of the UK from the EU and his role in it. They were joined by some on the opposite side of the Brexit battle. Cue Bernhard Jenkins, Conservative MP, an arch Brexiteer, who celebrated Cumming’s exit from Downing Street during a BBC interview saying that (paraphrasing) things will hopefully get back to normal now. Interestingly he did not stop there and noted that, during Cumming’s reign, the Cabinet contained surprisingly few Brexiteers and he hoped that this would now be reversed. 

 

Dominic Cummings on his way out
YUI MOK/PA WIRE

This makes me think… did we get Cummings wrong? By we, I mean the ones on the ever so cosmopolitan, liberal, Europe loving side. Let’s take a step back and look at this from a wider angle. Cummings is often credited for his firm anti-European commitment. But what we may have overlooked with the Brexit battle indignation still red hot in our eyes, is that Cummings’ preference for Brexit was a means, not an end. Cummings had a keen eye for the discontent of substantial parts of the public with the establishment. We may question the validity of this term, but the millions of voters who turned out on the day of the referendum knew exactly what he was talking about. 

 

For anyone who lives in the North of England, that establishment, real or not, cuts across party lines. In fact, it combines positions as contrary as Labour in North West city councils and traditionally Conservative ones in Yorkshire and the Humber. Conservatives, rightly or wrongly, were loathed for their close contact with money and business, being seen as traditionally favouring those who already made it. Liberals, on the other hand, were perceived as hypocritical as those articulating the benefits of globalisation were often employed in white collar jobs, drawing on European money or benefiting from middle class council jobs with little impact on real lives. Just ask yourself: How many ‘development officers’ were funded by European Convergence funding (my own hand goes up!) and how little impact did they have on suffering communities beyond creating another cushy office job? 

 

Cummings’ strategy was to bundle those discontented voices and give them a purpose. We may disagree with the thrust of that purpose but the fact of the matter is that he achieved something many on all sides of the political spectrum had long called for: a revolution in democratic participation. People who never voted before used to ballot box to send a signal to politicians across the political spectrum to say they had enough. We may scoff at the simplicity of the political message. But the fact is that Cummings managed what others had long failed at. He revived moribund political life in the UK and drew people into the political debate as never before. 

 

I can hear the shrieks of horror. But at what cost! you may say. So? The fact is that we will all do better if our public debate has more voices in it, not fewer. Cummings has demonstrated to all of us the rewards of listening to the disadvantaged, the ones who stopped shouting for help long time ago. We may not like what we hear, but forcing us to listen to the ones in need is at the heart of a healthy political discourse. It is however, also challenging our misconceived democratic credentials that are often based on the exclusion of those we do not agree with. 

 

And so we return why we should not gloat about Cummings’ departure. His desire to make us listen to those we disagree with should be reason enough to us in the North West of England to regret his leaving. It may signal a retreat to the status quo ante. And that can only be bad for people living in a corner of England that receives a fraction of the investment that London gets. 

 

That’s why I worry when I hear Bernhard Jenkins and others, on the liberal side of politics, rejoicing that things will go back to normal now. Where I live, in Walton (Liverpool), this ‘normal’ has not served the people well. It is officially the most deprived constituency of England and Cummings was the first one to be interested enough to listen up. That does not make him a crusader for the dispossessed. But it makes him a champion of democracy. The irony! 

 

What welfare really means

The General Election has brought some of the welfare issues back into the spotlight. This may be because the Labour Party now has a leader who believes in the good of welfare.

I have often struggled to find good arguments why welfare should not be a universal entitlement. The argument for universal welfare (all the up to basic income) are very compelling. What's wrong with helping people who cannot help themselves? It surely must be their right to be supported in times of need.

Sometimes, it's worthwhile to go back to what others have written on the subject since nothing is new under the sun, least of all the debate about welfare. So I came across this passage in Michael Lipsky's seminal study of 'Street-Level Bureaucracy. Dilemmas of the individual in public services'.

'The ways in which street-level bureaucrats deliver benefits and sanctions structure and delimit people's lives and opportunities. These ways orient and provide the social (and political) context in which people act. Thus every extension of service benefits is accompanied by an extension of state influence and control over their lives.' (p.4)

Lipsky is no dyed in the wool Tory, he was an American political scientist who investigated the effects of public services on those who delivered them (the local staff) and those who received them.

The passage is so insightful because he does not opt for the usual perspective on welfare that we commonly adopt when debating public services, focusing on the support function of welfare payments to individual. Instead, he tries to see it as a form of control that is being exercised over people. This resonates with the messages that are often articulated from the extreme left about the injustices of the welfare system such as Ken Loach's recent film 'I, Daniel Blake' and his critique of the welfare sanction regime. Lipsky's conclusions are different to those of Loach. Whilst Loach wants every one to have unlimited welfare payments, Lipsky articulates the malign effect of welfare on welfare recipients themselves, as welfare payments start to structure their lives and determine the way the behave.

The answer, Lipsky makes clear, is not to grant street-level bureaucrats more or total control (i.e. universal benefit) but to reduce their influence over our lives. Welfare is not innocuous, he argues, it restricts us and exerts power and control over us. Providing less welfare to all of us in the end liberates us, it allows us to shape our own lives.

The Malaise of Labour

The date is set, the knives will be out shortly. Well, at least amongst Labour politicians. And those knives are of course not sharpened for Labour's attack on the Conservatives, but for a good fratricidal battle as only Labour can do it.

Barring a miracle of triple Trump proportions, May will be Prime Minister with a sizable majority in the House of Commons and will emerge strengthened from the June snap election with a decent mandate to negotiate a hard Brexit. The Lib Dems will make some minor amends for their previous nigh annihilation in 2015, and the Greens will tread water as they have ever since they were founded.

So, what about Labour? Isn't this the big test Corbyn's proponents and enemies talked about? Maybe this is the moment when he will have to resign following what in all likelyhood will be a defeat of 1983 magnitude?

Nothing could be further from the truth. When was the last time anybody heard Corbyn or anybody from his team speak of 'electoral tests'? The fact is that Corbyn does not think of politics as a battle of ideas to be decided by general elections. He does not attach any significance to elections at all. His is the 'long game' of the socialist revolution (no joke!) where elections are not the litmus test of governability for Labour.

The stuff of dreams - Corbyn and the socialist consciousness

In fact, if you listen carefully to McDonnell and others, what matters to the Corbyn team is not the victory at the ballot box but the development of a historical consciousness of the proletariat that will emerge as things go worse. In their (contorted) Marxist logic, the more successful the Conservatives will be, the more the country will sink into a 'deep crisis' that will help develop the 'revolutionary situation' which is necessary to establish socialism in Britain. (I recognise that there is an element of caricature in this picture, but only just!).

The sad dynamics of these illogical theoretical gymnastics of Corbyn are that they leave the UK without a strong reformist opposition with policy ideas that are grounded in real life and speak to people who are at the sharp end of Brexit and Conservative policies in education, health and the economy. Such a viable effective opposition will only emerge once Labour (and the moderate British centre left) will be able to re-appraise the enormous policy achievements of the Blair and Brown governments for a moderate Labour government and stop seeing the last time Labour was in power through the prism of Iraq. The answers of such a re-constructed moderate left will be different to those given by the two last giants of Labour policy but the thrust will be similar: engaging with real life issues, formulating reformist policies in education, health and a rebalancing of the economy.

Until now, all we have from Labour is 'school meals for all'.

Where did it all go wrong? The Labour Party after the second coming of the Messiah

As Labour MPs pick up the pieces after their battle with the left wing extremists led by their leader and his enforcer John McDonnell, it may be time to take stock and assess where to go from here.

The (second) election of Jeremy Corbyn (to his supporters, the second coming of the Messiah) demonstrates a deep shift in party politics. The question is whether this transformation of the Labour Party heralds a fundamental change in the attitudes of the wider electorate as well, signaling the long expected ‘move to the left’ once announced by Corbyn’s predecessor Ed Milliband.

There can be no doubt that societies in the developed world have undergone a significant alteration of the political radar since the economic crisis in 2008. What used to be an attitude to wealth and income inequality best described by Tony Blair as ‘relaxed’ made way to a vibrant debate on social justice. At the forefront of this debate is the issue of wage stagnation since the 1990s in the US and  as Thomas Piketty argued, the growing income inequality fuelled by rising income from assets.

Where the picture veers into the strange is when we look at the responses to the crisis by the individual parties. Centre right parties moved gradually to the centre and tried to develop policies to counter wage stagnation, broadly trusting in the power of the economy to lift everybody’s boat at some time.

The left of centre parties, many of which were in fact in power when the crisis hit, showed a staggering lack of ideas. Gordon Brown’s inaction at the moment of economic disaster was symptomatic. Tired of Brown’s dithering, his chancellor, Alistair Darling, had to take the reigns and protect the banking sector by bailing out some of the largest lenders. The next two years were largely wasted with inactivity by the Labour government. Not a single policy was launched by the Brown government to counter the growing wage gap. It was as if Labour politicians who had started their tenure in 1997 with so much gusto were frozen like rabbits caught in the headlights before the car bumps them off the road.

Following the 2010 election, the Conservatives continued to move into the centre with modest welfare reforms under George Osborne, the introduction of the national living wage and fiscal consolidation. The next five years are generally acknowledged to have been a wasted opportunity for the Labour Party. Under Ed Milliband’s leadership an endless number of policy reviews was conducted with very little outcome or impact. As the next election was nearing, Labour struggled to put a manifesto of pledges together that amounted to a coherent programme for government. Instead it opted for an oversized tombstone inscribed with several vacuous statements that prompted ridicule and laughter in the wider public.

Thus, in a sense, Jeremy Corbyn’s election to leader was actually the first proper response of the Labour Party to the economic crisis and its related problems such as wage stagnation and income inequality. And this is where the story assumes surreal proportions. Instead of embarking on a profound reassessment of Labour policies and a wider debate on how to tackle social injustice under conditions of low productivity, how to address the disappearance of low skilled jobs and the rise of the professional classes under conditions of a fiscal straightjacket that is likely to continue for the next decade, Labour members opted for a type of unrestrained sloganism, a simplistic populist left wing version of Donald Trump. The most notorious aspect of this move to populism is the striking absence of any hard thinking about policies, the slavish adherence to abstract slogans, and a determination not to let reality impinge on the simplistic worldview those slogans purport.

An important side effect of this return to the 1970s is that Corbyn’s ideas show little traction with the working class voters he pretends to represent. As so often before, the proletariat appears to refuse to play along with the Marxist leaders. Corbyn acolytes appear to be mainly young middle class voters who should have little investment in a Marxist worldview that assigns to them a diminishing political role as the proletariat ‘gains class consciousness’. But then, as so often, paradoxes abound in English Socialism, once led by an aristocrat, Tony Benn, who virulently campaigned against the very educational standards he benefited from.

Where does that leave the political landscape in England? Labour’s move to the extreme left may just open up some electoral space for moderate social democrats and liberals. LibDem’s leader Tim Farron seems to sense that when he appealed to disenchanted moderate Labour voters to join the Liberal Democrats. It is customary in the British media to write off the LibDems but the party still has a significant number of councillors and some parliamentary representation (at Westminster and in Cardiff), more than other fringe parties such as the Greens and UKIP. Councillors are usually the knights in shining armour when it comes to trudging through the English rain to deliver leaflets to potential voters or placing calls to the ‘pledged voters’ to go to the polling booths. So, the LibDems are electorally in a better position than the Greens and UKIP.

The biggest threat to Conservative rule is however amy come from inside the Tories themselves, through a prime minister who ditches the moderate compassionate Conservatism that served David Cameron so well in the last 6 years. Part of the reason why Labour shifted to the extreme left was that the Conservatives firmly occupied the centre ground with progressive policies once popular under Labour, such as national minimum wage, welfare reform and the academy programme. The biggest mistake Theresa May could do is to vacate this centre ground and encourage moderate Labour politicians to formulate their own policies. Let’s hope she is a closet Cameroonian.

The moral tyranny of the free market

As the Labour Party battles out who will lead them into the next election defeat, it becomes clear that the dominant theme in the party is now one of 'nationalisation' of industries and services. Both candidates advocate taking the railways into national ownership, a call more easily made than done, as the recent Observer editorial argued.

Those were the times - Nationalisation in 1947

In a space best characterised as an echo-chamber, the rank and file of the Labour Party are competing for the most extremist positions, underpinned by what Hannah Arendt once called the 'emancipation from reality'.

However, the more interesting question is why leftists have such a visceral hatred for the market in the first place. Marx himself was by no means disinclined to let market forces do their work in the inevitable demise of the capitalist order. And Lenin himself used the free market in the brief New Economic Policy period to improve people's material lives following the deprivations of the Russian Civil War. So, why do socialists a la Corbyn have such as dislike for free markets?

Much of this appears to do less with where Corbyn and others want to take the country than with where they have been. Corbyn seems to cherish the old nationalised railways exactly because the image of British Railway branded carriages criss-crossing the country offers the certainties of old times. His and his supporters' desire to nationalise industries are motivated more by the past than any exciting vision of the country's future.

A second reason may however be a fundamental misunderstanding of the moral nature of the free market. When asked about the role of private providers in the NHS Corbyn reliably talks about profit in healthcare (conveniently denying the fact the GPs are running business as well which need to make a profit too). Corbyn does not seem to understand that profit is not the only, and often not the main motivator for people to set up businesses. The main reason why people become self-employed is because it gives them the opportunity to shape their own destiny and be in control of their lives.

Running a business is thus a fundamental manifestation of personal freedom. As people establish businesses they exercise a right which is tied up with personal responsibilities, such as making and keeping mutual promises and entering contracts. Running a business thus has a moral side as people operate in a contractual sphere which imposes civic obligations on them which in turn allows them to disclose their moral commitment to civil society. The recent focus on those who have tried to escape their contractual commitments (Philip Green e tutti quanti) only reinforces this point as they are the exception to the norm.

It is this moral aspect of economic activity that Corbyn and his left wing comrades refuse to acknowledge when they argue in favour of nationalising industries. Where such a policy would lead is clear for everyone with only a cursory knowledge of the sophisticated discussions amongst Marxists and Revisionists since the 1880s. Or, alternatively, if once prefers the Soviet Russian debate, one may look it up in Trotzky's critique of Stalinism. Nationalising an industry only achieves one thing. It puts the 'means of production' into the hands of a bureaucratic elite whilst removing the notion of personal responsibility for success and failure of economic activity from everyone. Where everyone owns everything, no one feels responsible, and the result is usually a steady but inevitable decline. Anyone remember British Leyland?

The 'heart' of Corbyn and Farage

Political strategists like using metaphors when discussing politics. The 'heart of Labour' is all the vogue at the moment. The purpose of metaphors is to signal apparently agreed and shared meaning. The trouble with metaphors is that most are probably nothing more than cognitive crutches, dissipating in thin air under close scrutiny. The 'heartlands' of a political party is another one much used these days, suggesting the ability of a party to draw on rock solid support, conjuring up voters who trot to the ballot boxes like sheep, eager to put their cross in the foreordained box.

If the recent elections have demonstrated anything it is that the time of 'heartlands' of political party support is well and truly over in Britain. Where once the mighty Labour Party dominated, the landscape of political allegiances appears fractured and uncertain. Behind this picture of fragmentation of political loyalty however lurk familiar patterns for those who care to look closely.

Take UKIP's rise in Wales and in the North of England, in Labour 'heartlands'. Previously inconceivable, UKIP, articulating a xenophobic and isolationist agenda, attracts significant number of Labour voters despite Labour's professed principles of solidarity, internationalism and economic equality. It seems that what binds Labour's working class support and UKIP's message together is not commitment to progressivism but notions of social order (or bemoaning the loss thereof) and socio-economic entitlements. The foe of Labour's and UKIP's voters is, so it seems, the assumed or imminent loss of control and of old certainties. In this respect, to be controversial, Jeremy Corbyn does not differ much from Nigel Farage. His windmill is societal change, brought about through socio-economic dislocation (capitalism) whilst Farage's windmill is immigration (European or otherwise). The irony is however that both party leaders battle this threat of impending change in their country with metaphors that belong to the past.

Back to the Future - Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn on 1 May 2016
(Foto: AFP/Justin Tallis)

For Farage it is the vision of a bucolic English countryside, cleansed of foreign influences (whatever that may mean in a country that embraced migration for centuries). For Corbyn it is a country that conforms to the description of Marxist class struggle, with a disenfranchised working class pitted against a greedy capitalist elite (naturally wearing a top hat and waistcoat).

The latest elections however have shown that both Farage and Corbyn's versions of what is going on in Britain are largely fantasies based on flawed interpretations of reality. That is why Corbyn's speeches sound so hollow: struggling to meaningfully connect with reality. To be clear, this does not bother Corbyn, as his worldview had not been formed by looking at the facts in the first place. His mind, just like Farage's, appears to move effortlessly solely within the certainties of theoretical constructs, such as  antagonism between workers and capitalists. His thought, untrammelled by reality checks, appears to be buttressed by the logics of socialist wordplays.

For Farage it is 'the other' that is at the centre of social and cultural transformations that is to be feared. Remove 'the other', Europe or immigrants, and things will fall into place again. What neither Corbyn nor Farage would like to do at any rate is to embrace change in order to shape the future. For both, politics is about a return to a past that offer certainties.

Yet, for politicians without any interest in shaping the future, policies are irrelevant. That's why neither Farage nor Corbyn ever formulate anything beyond slogans. To articulate policies requires them to think about how to actively shape the future. Corbyn's and Farage's basic attitudes remain defensive, with a strong retrograde impetus. This speaks of a de-spiriting lack of aspiration on their parts, something that defines their 'heart'.

The Trident trap

In his book The Conservative Heart, Arthur Brooks writes that those politicians win who 'scramble the categories'. What he meant is that political parties are perceived to be strong or weak in certain policy areas. To set out to reiterate their strengths is unlikely to add any new converts to their cause.

Conservatives are thought to be competent in running the economy and reducing a budget deficit. Labour politicians may be seen to be compassionate and concerned with social justice. The trick to win elections is not to focus on your strengths, Brooks argues, but to stray onto your opponent's field and steal their arguments.

The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn is moving further from this advice by the day. Whilst under Blair the party consciously placed their tanks on the lawn of the Conservative Party, under the present leader the party is withdrawing rapidly into its comfort zone. Part of this started under Miliband already. But Corbyn and his comrades are going even further. They are not just deliberately negating any policy aspirations in traditional Conservative areas such as the economy, but Corbyn also pushes issues that are of little importance to the wider public.

Political scientists call this the low salience trap. Members of all political parties are animated by certain issues that have symbolic significance for them and sustain their mobilisation strategies as the elections get close. The Conservatives have Europe, the left wing of Labour has Trident and NATO membership. The problem is that none of these issues have much currency amongst the wider public. Whilst they agitate a small minority of party members, the issues have so-called low salience amongst the electorate as a whole. Winning elections is predicated on reaching out from their own narrow party membership base to non-typical supporters and rehearsing topics that fail to captivate the wider electorate's imagination is unlikely to achieve that.

In essence, effective party leaders do not cultivate issues that have totemic meaning within the narrow membership base but actively seek out to neutralise these topics. Corbyn may currently enjoy the support of most of this members. But staying within the comfort zone of left wing activism is unlikely to produce electoral success.

Jeremy Corbyn - no thinker, no debater, no organiser

In any free society, politics is about formulating choices for the electorate. Those choices are critical in informing a public debate. To have choices, however, opposition politicians need to articulate policies that offer clear alternatives to social and economic decisions put forward by the government. Thus, opposition parties require strong leaders with particular skills in public debate. At the end of the day, politics is about shaping and influencing a public discussion about the things that matter to people. Ed Miliband failed to convince the British electorate of the cogency of his narrative. Yet, whilst he often looked awkward in interviews, he had in fact launched a whole raft of policy reviews which fed into his party's manifesto in 2015.

Jeremy Corbyn's leadership has been nothing short of disastrous so far, but his supporters have been very vocal (if not always exhibiting the required civility on social media) and he is clearly settling into his role as leader of the opposition. Regardless of what people say about his strange beliefs in socialism (flashback: that's the thing that was wholeheartedly rejected by the people in Eastern Europe in 1989 after a thorough 40 year plus first hand experience of it), the main stumbling bloc for Labour is not Corbyn's whacky beliefs, sometimes bordering on conspiracy theories, but his lack of skills that are necessary to be effective in the public debate of any free society. In fact, his debating skills are so poor that he appears to have decided not to engage in any public debates with opponents anymore. His response mode in television interviews is wooden and gaff prone. Even friends of Corbyn say that they have never seen him discussing anything, even in private. The recent debate on airstrikes in Syria showed why he is wary of engaging in public discussions. His response to the Prime Minister at the dispatch box was so poor that news programmes struggled to find any section for their evening news bulletins worthy of broadcast. Most TV programmes focused instead on the passionate and articulate reply of the Caroline Lucas, the only Green Party member of parliament.

The second domain of critical importance to any opposition party is to develop a list of policy choices that speak to the country's priorities and shape the public's choices and preferences. So far, under Corbyn's leadership, the country has drawn a blank in this category as well. There has been a stunning silence from the Corbyn team on issues such as economic policy, transport policy, devolution or even gender equality. I only mention devolution because it is shaping up to be of key importance in England with the devolution of powers to Manchester, Cornwall and Sheffield (including their NHS and social care budget) and the upcoming elections in Wales and Scotland in May 2016. It seems that the Corbyn team is still trapped in a London bubble dominated by issues that matter to an urban well-to-do elite, whilst digging up some random ideas about state ownership and the evil character of bankers. All this does not appear to add up to a coherent policy programme that may improve people's lives.

The last aspect in which Corbyn scores poorly is building cross-party alliances for practical campaigns. His largely ineffective backbench existence of more than 30 years contrasts badly with the extraordinary activism of MPs such as Stella Creasy who, when coming to parliament in 2010, started instantly to build a strong cross-party campaign against loan sharks. Creasy reached out to the media and, ultimately, forced the issue onto the government agenda. In contrast, for more than three decades of sitting on the green benches, Corbyn has not once managed to organise a campaign that captured anybody's imagination. He appears to have been busy nurturing his prejudices about 'the capitalist system' whilst cultivating an image of a 'man of principle'. It is his ineffectiveness as a politician to create alliances that should worry Labour Party members.

And if Corbyn fails to either effectively influence the public debate or develop policies relevant to practical issues, Labour will find itself increasingly marginalised and without any answer to the Conservative transformation of British society.

The banality of JC's ideology

After about a week of revelations about sympathies with terrorist groups and motorbike rides in East Germany we know a lot more about the new leader of the Labour Party. Looking over the evidence assembled before us the depressing thought emerges that there is not much to know in the first place. It seems that JC, as he is fondly called by his supporters, has lived the 'normal' life of an eternal back bencher in Parliament, nurturing his pet dislikes and cultivating the image of himself as the moral, if slightly ineffectual, conscience of the party.

Love under the Red Flag - Dianne Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn in happier times
Image: The Times

If this public image of the new leader appears to be rather two dimensional, what about his policies? So far, we know that JC and his team want to build Jerusalem by introducing socialism to the green and pleasant land. The details of how this is to be achieved are still sketchy but some policies have come to light. There is the re-nationalisation of the railways (until 2030) and the opening of the coal mines. Nationalising the banks also appears to be somewhere at the top of the list, although it may have escaped their notice that two of the banks were de facto nationalised already, so hardly a radical tool in the socialist arsenal.

Apparently, making the Bank of England independent of political influence is also something the Jeremy Corbyn team deeply resents, depriving the British government of the convenience to print money when things do not work out as planned (no pun intended). Bringing the Bank of England back into the control of the all knowing treasury officials should take care of the evil scourge of low inflation and low interest rates. Never mind that most British people may take a different view on that.

Looking at the list of early policy announcement one is struck by how little of what is so close to the heart of the new leader actually matters to people's lives. How does the re-opening of the coal mines help with providing better child care? What does the re-nationalisation of the railways mean for the crisis of social care and how to provide good quality dementia care in the communities?

The vacuity of JC's 'policies' does not lie in their left leaning drift but their shocking ignorance of the issues that matter to people up and down the country. It's the banality of his ideological positions in the context of modern society that reinforces the impression of a man who appears to have fought hard to protect his own little bubble from any undue influence of reality. And now he is in a position to make his party just as irrelevant as he has been for more than three decades in parliament. Three cheers to that!

The banality of principles

Jeremy Corbyn has been called a principled man time and again by his supporters. Principled he may be, but do these principles mean anything? Here are some quotes from his victory speech in London yesterday. Tick if you are in agreement with him. 

 'a decent and better society for all'

 'let's fight for social justice'

 'let's be a force for change in the world'

 'let's be a force for humanity in the world'

 'let's be a force for peace in the world'

 'we are one world'

Looking over this list of principles, I challenge you to find two dozen Tories who would not have ticked every single one of them. As someone once wryly noted, politics is about answering the question who gets what and when. That involves compromising the principles you hold dear. Corbyn has so far (and his political career spans more than 30 years) managed to avoid answering that very question of politics. Let's see if his leadership will rise above the banalities he has plied himself and his supporters with for more than three decades. 

Draft of Jeremy Corbyn's victory speech found!

It was clearly high time for JC (that's Jeremy Corbyn, not Jesus Christ... not yet anyway) to write a first draft of a speech for the victory parade, errmmm, victory celebration on Saturday. Somehow it was left on the Central Line and we publish it here. Please remember this is only a draft and some details may still be subject to change...

'Comrades!!!!

(loud chants of 'Jeez we can!', note to myself: ask for front row to be staffed with supporters in red t-shirts with pictures of Marx, Lenin and Corbyn in profile)

Greetings to you all! Greetings also to our friends here today from Syriza and Podemos! We are with you, comrades, in your fight against the finance capitalists of the US and Germany, and reality! All the way!

Comrades! This is the day we have been waiting for! Some of you have been waiting a bit longer like me, others have just joined us recently! But the waiting is over now!

People of future generations will remember this day as a historical turning point, when social justice returned to the dispossessed! There have been some concerns that under my fuehrership, errrmm, leadership, the Labour Party will become a chapter of the Trotskyist Socialist Party. I say.... perhaps! But Labour is a big tent with many people of different persuasion.

And, here and now, I will make a clear commitment to those on the right of the party. I will guarantee that you can stay! Yes, you can be part of Labour! Malicious rumours about purges are utterly untrue and concocted by our enemies within and without the party. Obviously there will have to be a period of re-education for some of you. I think re-connecting with the proletarian masses will be best. Perhaps a placement in the many factories all across our beautiful country shall be appropriate. Or some time in the mines that we are going to re-open in Yorkshire and Wales! (chants: 'Re-educate! Re-educate!' and 'Send them to the mines!')

Now, dear comrades. Let me also address some opinions voiced in the bourgeois press that I have not paid sufficient attention to the economic realities of our days. I say: nothing could be further from the truth! As the enthusiasm of all of you show, we are fed up with poverty and destitution! Down with the exploitation of workers! Think of the starving children of unionised train drivers in the privatised railways. Living on £48,000 pounds a year. That is a disgrace! Whilst the greedy capitalist barons of the city live it up with champagne! Never again!

That brings me to the last point of real importance. Nothing is more urgent than constitutional reform, I say! The House of Lords is an anachronism of Stalinist proportions. (note to myself: check this metaphor... something seems odd about this). We do not need an unelected upper house! Once the factionalism in bourgeois society is banished to the dustbin of history, we will be able to co-opt our carefully selected members of the glorious Socialist Party straight into the House of Commons. Away with the antagonism and strife of democratic elections! We are all workers now!

Comrades, before I go away and take my first long distance call from the our dear friend Vladimir, let me re-assure you! Things will never be the same! Honesty and discipline will be the watchwords of my first term as a leader until 2045.  (note: remove voting records from House of Commons library)

Now, let us all rise and sing the International... and let the small minded and the rich be in no doubt: NO PASERAN!

The perception gap

It must have been about four years ago on the campaign trail in Wales that I decided not to become a politician. I had stood for local election and Welsh Assembly elections before as so-called paper candidate and I was (and still am) fascinated by politics, even though not particularly enamoured of the glad handing that politicians have to do. It was not the contact with ordinary folk on the doorsteps when canvassing that made me decide against a political career. It was the conversations with fellow campaigners.

My view of politics has always been shaped by what politicians say and do in the public eye. Coming from a country where coalition government is the norm, I always liked the idea of compromise and consensus. The politician's craft, as I saw it, was to bring about change by forging robust majorities around a policy, embarking on the hard slog of bending your principles and beliefs to make them fit reality.

Yet, compared to politicians, campaigners are a lucky bunch. They have the privilege of articulating (and sticking to) ostensibly 'true' and 'logical' political positions, oblivious of the straightjacket of political reality.

Party volunteers also tend to be the 'purest' in belief and outlook. Who else would come out on a cold and miserable rainy January day to push party political leaflets through letter boxes of strangers? You have to be fired up by something for that level of commitment. Consensus and compromise may not be top campaign motivators.

All this conspires to something we are currently witnessing, the Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump phenomenon. Times like these, when parties are essentially looking inward to select their candidate in primaries, are the play ground of the party faithful, those campaigners fired up to take on their opponents on the other side of the political spectrum. It's also a time (and the only time in the political cycle) when the chorus of purist political posturing may sound convincing to the few who listen.

The cruel reality of modern politics is however that party political campaigners are a small bunch of people, and that the conventional laws of human attitudinal behaviour still apply once the circus of party political navel gazing is over. The electorate, here as in the US, has opinions and views that conform to the shape of a bell curve, with the large majority of people clustered around the centre of politics. It's this iron law of the normal attitudinal distribution amongst voters that will come down like a ton of bricks on the Corbyns and Trumps of this world once they stop talking to their supporters and have to face the wider public.

On 'principled' politics

The political scientist Samuel Finer once noticed a simple truth about French political parties. Their names were inversely related to their actual position on the political spectrum. The 'Radical Party' was nothing like radical and the Socialist Party was anything but socialist.

I was reminded of this observation when listening to supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, the Jesus Christ superstar of the New Left in the UK. The tenor of their answer when asked why they support Corbyn is that he is a man of principles, standing up for what he believes in.

The implication is that the other candidates (and politicians in general) are not principled and that this makes for bad politics. I disagree. Politics is the art of the possible and good politicians are those that can jettison their principles at the right moment. So why are Corbyn's supporters so enamoured with 'principled politics'?

I believe there are two aspects of modern politics that have always been difficult to accept for the wider public. The first one is pluralism and diversity of opinions, the second is the notion of the public good as a result of bargaining or negotiation between collective interests.

The first aspect is underpinned by the popular belief that everybody must have the same views as me. Political psychologists call this confirmation bias and it manifests itself in the way we select which TV News we listen to just as much as who we choose as our friends. We prefer having our own opinions validated by others. And, saturated by views similar to our own, we start to believe that there are only people like us in the world. Dianne Abbott's support for Jeremy Corbyn is a good example. Only a few weeks ago she still believed that Corbyn could never win an election. Having attended (too many?) meetings of his supporters she is now adamant that he will sweep to victory in 2020.

Incidentally, the issue of a pluralist society containing a range of diverse views does not bother anybody of socialist conviction. Those on the extreme left have a simple retort to those disagreeing with them. Dissenters are simply mistaken and taken in by bourgeois propaganda, espousing a 'false consciousness'.

The second, more complex, issue is the fact that in a society with differing views and interests, any consensus about the public good is inevitably a result of negotiation and bargaining, with painful compromises for all sides. This is anathema for purists of the political process. They deplore principles being the bargaining tools in the political process. As uncomfortable as this may sound to any advocate of principled politics, this second aspect of modern politics flows naturally from the first, if you throw in the only principle that cannot be jettisoned in any modern society: the freedom to make up your own mind and to express it in public. This is why, to Corbyn's supporters, confirmation bias, plurality of opinions and negotiations are non-sensical. For them, freedom to think differently is just an awkward logical error on the way to a future where we naturally all think the same. So when Corbyn's supporters praise his principled stance, what they actually rail against is the freedom to have your own mind.

The dizzy heights of public ownership

In the winter of 2007, in a bout of hopeless nostalgia for socialist times I decided to spend my New Years Eve high up in the clouds above Berlin. Well, not that high, 290 metres to be exact, in the Television Tower of East Berlin.

By chance, I ended up sitting next to a former manager of the East German Socialist Planning Agency. The Agency was responsible to project the number of consumer goods needed, everything ranging from car tyres to toilet paper (there was only one kind, of the grey and rough variety). Planning periods ranged from 1 year (the short term plans) to five years. The projections would then be passed on to the Ministry of Economic Affairs which instructed East German factories to produce the relevant number of goods.

I remember distinctly that, despite this being almost 20 years after the collapse of socialism, my neighbour at the dining table was remarkably upbeat about the future prospects of socialist planning. The reason it had all failed the last time, he argued, was because they (at the Planning Agency) had not yet had computers with sufficient calculating capacity. This was likely to be different soon as computer capacity would become so large that you could plan the needs of millions of people at any point in time. At that moment, people would finally see the light and socialism would come back.

I was recently reminded of this slightly unhinged reminiscing with a former party comrade in Berlin's television tower when I heard Jeremy Corbyn suggest that most of the UK's problems would be solved once the railways, utilities and pretty much anything else would be taken into public ownership.

What really astounded me however was not that he advocated what had failed before. Rather, of all people, Corbyn did not seem to have read much Trostky. Having turned his back on Stalinism in Soviet Russia, Trostky produced a stinging critique of public ownership arguing, in essence, that where everybody owns everything, no one owns anything, leaving a small party political clique (or union nomenklatura) in charge.

Sometimes I wonder why socialists keep climbing the same dizzy heights of economic planning time and again. But then perhaps, the view from up high might be very comforting. Everything looks small from there, as if we can move things around according to the plans we have for them.

Labour's race for 2025 (sic)

The calculations of most political observers about Labour's electoral chances in 2020 focus on seats, Scottish Nationalists and political dynamics. Yet, there is also a broad consensus that, at the last election, the party had the wrong leader. Anybody who carefully listened to Diane Abbott on This Week any time before May 2015 knew it. Miliband was never going to be prime minister (Abbott always put it diplomatically: 'he might win'). The fact is that the gut feeling of moderate centrist floating voters (of which Abbott is none, yet I am indeed) is often right. Ed Miliband never looked like a prime minister in waiting and everybody knew it from the moment he looked flustered (and haplessly) around on stage as his victory was announced.

This 'gut feeling test' does not just work for the Labour Party. It goes for Conservative candidates as well. Michael Gove just won't be living in Number 10, no matter how radical he is in the various jobs he will hold in the next 5 years.

Much has to do with fluency of delivery in front of cameras and rhetorical discipline (both things easy to credit Gove with) but there is also stature and self-belief. Take all of these things together, and you have a credible prime minister in waiting.

This brings me to the four leadership contenders of the Labour Party who are currently slugging it out at hustings. Anybody of moderate central political views will see the same: four candidates with the calibre of leading the party in opposition but none to lead them to power in 2020.

First there is Liz Kendall, who still lacks the rhetorical fluency of Tony Blair and his polished media performances. Then there is Yvette Cooper who will probably make a suitably ruthless party leader (though with an unappealing hairstyle). Next there is Andy Burnham who would be clobbered with his dire role in the Staffordshire NHS scandal every time he would appear at the dispatch box (I also find his looks slightly creepy). And finally there is Jeremy Corbyn who probably would induce laughter on all benches if he ever makes it to the dispatch box at all (does he have a duffel coat for the celebrations at Cenotaph?).

The most interesting feature of this leadership campaign is who stayed away. Labour has credible candidates indeed, yet they have decided not to put themselves forward. There is of course Chuka Umunna who probably still needs some time to clean out some skeletons from his cupboards before he can safely stand. I would not be surprised if his girlfriend quietly fades from view over the next years.

And then there is Tristam Hunt, probably the strongest candidate for prime minister in waiting at some time in the future. He is also the most dangerous opponent for the Conservatives, given his background and already polished media performances. What he lacks (and that may have played an important role in his decision not to stand) is a top front bench job in a difficult portfolio like defence, health or foreign affairs.

There is of course no guarantee that either of them will ever have the chance to put their names forward after 2020. As George Osborne is doing a Merkel and moves the Conservatives to the centre, the Labour Party's reflex is to seek solace in the socialist nirvana of unmitigated nostalgia. But once the Coopers, Burnhams and Corbyns had their stab at failure, the Labour Party will be able to look for a credible candidate. At that time, people like Umunna and Hunt should be ready.

Summer games (not quite Olympic)

If anything, the recent spat in the Labour Party demonstrates once again its genuine altruism. As the great British public are getting ready to be bored by endless traffic jams and scorching summer heat on the beaches of Kent, the Labour Party provides us all with an entertaining spectacle worthy of Shakespeare. On one side, behold the modernisers, ready to pounce on anyone who dares to mention past ghosts still haunting the party (who are now jet-setting and sporting deep tans), on the other side, see the undead of the stalinist union sympathisers who smell a chance to hijack the party machinery for the ultimate battle to bring socialist nirvana to the (uninformed) masses. 

To any bystander however this spectacle resembles more shadow boxing than an actual debate about the future of the party. In the very centre of any party husting is the glaring black hole of ideas, right or left wing, or at least the stubborn unwillingness of either side to articulate any policies. That suits the incarnation of the stalinist undead from Islington who is trying to pass himself off as the older version of the Greek PM Tsipras, with some modest success. Corbyn, like any ideologue, revels in bland 'statements of principle' which offer instant appeal but have little to do with politics, the art of the compromise. 

The centre ground does not look much more attractive with a former PPS and Cambridge graduate trotting out the line that he is 'from Liverpool' which, he believes, gives him the 'common touch'. Then there is Yvette Cooper, who is mainly driven by an unfathomable ambition to be leader without ever quite revealing why she would want the top job. My best guess is that she does this as a kind of ego-trip to revenge the defeat of her husband. But that's only a hunch taken from the only comment of hers that made headlines so far, which was that she cried when Ed Balls lost his seat. Lucky those with supreme motives like her. 

And then there is Liz Kendall, which strikes everyone as a pale version of Tony Blair (pun very much intended). Her main characteristic appears to be that she lacks Blair's charisma and his way of connecting with people, or formulating any simple sentence that hits home, for that matter. Something she will undoubtedly learn in the next five years, even if not at the dispatch box opposite David Cameron. 

So, there we are, the sorry spectacle of the Labour Party selection process. I propose that we should talk about the really important things in life again. How about a national debate on whether we should put the clocks back for summer TWO hours instead of one? We always talk about this. Let's not be diverted by the small matter of the Labour Party making itself comfortable in eternal opposition.