U.K.: Corbyn's Labour is a party without a point, led by a rebel with a cause

What Jeremy Corbyn needs, beyond a spin-doctor and a mini-break, is to surround himself with thinkers; being ‘against the cuts’ is not an idea

 

Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of Britain’s opposition Labour party. Photograph: Reuters/Reuters



New Times indeed. After the non-story of the non-singing, we see Jeremy Corbyn calmly asking David Cameron questions that the public emailed in: a good enough, if ultimately unsustainable, tactic. No one died, though the odd Blairite corpse may have twitched slightly. He kept his nerve, and good on him. After two days of tetchiness, the public saw the much-discussed decency. Some will have been surprised to see he is not an actual terrorist.

Suzanne Moore

Those who support him see this as politics of hope. Those who don’t see only the politics of delusion. I still feel that he is on a zero-hours contract and knows it. But we all enjoy the bursting of the Westminster bubble and the fact that those “in the know” are currently flummoxed. The chaos is thrilling but it is not however to be mistaken for radicalism.

At the core of Corbyn’s “new politics” is his own very old certainty. His views have not changed in 30 years. Some call this principle, a kind of stubbornness the hard left admire. I call it conservatism, and I think it’s a problem.

For Corbyn, the unspun unmoderniser, to lead an extra-parliamentary movement inside parliament, he needs to be intellectually deft. Leaders have to embody modernity, to represent who we think we are. Politics is about pragmatism, but it is also about ideas; there has to be an intellectual underpinning. Retro paternalism, whether from him or Farage, cannot be the future. Even getting into the present would be good. You cannot give the guys the top jobs and say they are not the top jobs, any more than you can bypass the traditional media for social media. Who is advising him? Ex-devotees of Russell Brand? Corbyn and his acolytes may worship Chomsky and bang on about the evil mainstream media, they may actually believe that everything bad emanates from the US, they may go to Cuba and not notice that it’s a police state full of sex workers, but they are going to have to get with the programme.

We have left the 80s and shifts in culture, media and technology have happened.Paul Mason has written brilliantly about the implications of all this but the way to power is basic: communication.

If you want to mobilise, for instance, Facebook has a bigger reach than Twitter. If you want to get to young women, then it is Instagram. If you want to know the most shared sites on most social media, I am sorry to disappoint but they remain the content generators: Mail Online, Buzzfeed and the Guardian. Most people get their news from TV, and if we learned anything from the last election it was that social media gets it wrong and good reporting gets it right. Yet when Jon Cruddas cited research about why people had not voted Labour, it was roundly condemned for asking leading questions.

This approach cannot be replaced by not asking any questions, or always returning to a statist answer. I note the thoughtful theorist Jeremy Gilbert wants to reclaim the media by forcing “all media providers over a certain size to become self-governing trusts within three years”. Wow. If this is serious, it is pushing in the opposite direction to what most people say they want. Less state interference. Over and over, what “ordinary people” like and choose to do and buy is somehow despicable to parts of the left.

This old left can’t deal with the new questions posed by Europe, still less with the ongoing question of an English parliament. I have sat with Corbynites talking about when “we win back Scotland”. This is not hope but self-deception on a massive scale.

A left economic analysis has to chime with culture as it is lived. I mentionedNew Times, which was a 1988 analysis by Marxism Today, for which I worked. It pulled together all the different strands that created Thatcherism: the new economic conditions, the politics of identity, postmodernism, post-Fordism. To challenge Thatcher, it was important to understand her intellectual programme. The same is true of this government. Being “against the cuts” is not an idea. This fear of ideas is crippling for the left.

What we did not understand then was that there would be a way of creating wealth without producing anything: “financialisation”, as it is called. After 2008, deficits soared; but the fiscal crisis and this urgent need for austerity is, as Paul Krugman tells us, “nonsense”. The problem is this nonsense narrative has been accepted to such an extent that it has hollowed out the Labour party.

This is how we ended up with a party without a point led by a rebel with a cause. This is why, when Varoufakis flies in, everyone swoons, because he has an intellectually coherent theory of how to oppose that narrative even if the practice is in doubt.

What Corbyn needs, beyond obviously a spin doctor and a mini-break, is to surround himself with thinkers. Gosh, some of them may even be female. For he is the exact opposite of the movement he needs to build: young , flexible and networked. He is its temporary caretaker. Sorry, but hating the media, the Tories and austerity are not policies. They are feelings. Thinking, actually thinking anew, is the challenge.

Guardian