The Political Quarterly

Corbynism: Social Democracy in a New Left

Garb
LEWIS BASSETT

Abstract
This article traces some of the rhetoric flowing from Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the
Labour Party to the New Left, a political and intellectual movement in the UK which rose
up to challenge the Stalinisation of socialism. These New Left lineages appear most clearly
in the value denoted by both movements toward extra-parliamentary politics. Indeed, the
work of the New Left intellectual Ralph Miliband considers this factor to be a criterion by
which we can assess the extent to which Corbyn’s party has surpassed the traditional
‘Labourist’ mould. By going beyond the movement’s early rhetoric, I show that it hasn’t.
Instead, I present evidence that Corbyn’s Labour is a deeply social democratic one. The
article offers an explanation for this assessment based on comparison of the contexts from
which both the New Left and Corbynism emerged, and outlines an analytical path for
future scholarship that emphasises continuity as well as change, and wards against ideo-
logical bias.
Keywords: Corbyn, Labour Party, New Left, Ralph Miliband, social movements, neoliberalism

ON 12 SEPTEMBER 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, the rel-
atively unknown backbench MP for Islington
North, was elected leader of the Labour
Party with 59.5 per cent of the vote. During
the campaign, as polls began to show a lead
for the life-long socialist and chair of Stop
the War Coalition, Establishment figures
from Labour’s recent past lined up to
denounce the left-wing candidate and deride
his supporters. Yet the appearance of these
New Labour figureheads—Gordon Brown,
Jack Straw, David Miliband, Alastair Camp-
bell and of course Blair, who told supporters
with their heart set on Corbyn to get a heart
bypass—seemed only to fan the flames of
Corbyn-mania. The ‘Blairite’ leadership can-
didate, Liz Kendall, claimed a mere 4.5 per
cent of the vote.
In his victory speech, Corbyn thanked
party bureaucrats and leading right-wing
Labour MPs, some of whom would go on to
launch a failed ‘coup’ against him the fol-
lowing year. And in a marked shift in
emphasis from Labour leaders of the past
three decades, Corbyn sang the praises of
the party’s affiliated trade unions (‘from
where we get our strength’) and paid tribute
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to the party’s active members. To an audi-
ence of which half were dazed, the other
enthralled, Corbyn announced that ‘we go
forward now as a movement and a party, big-
ger than we’ve ever been for a very, very
long time’.1 Showing he meant what he said,
later that afternoon the newly elected leader
of the Labour Party appeared on the plat-
form for a rally held in central London in
support of refugees.
New Left lineages of Corbynism
If the election of Neil Kinnock in 1983 repre-
sented a break with Labour’s postwar past
and its short left-wing interlude, then the
party had over a decade in which to adjust
its strategy before finally entering office in
1997. From the vantage of 2015, Labour’s
new leader was yet to undergo such prepa-
ration. At that point the political intentions
of Corbynism initially appeared to chime
with the traditions of the British New Left, a
narrative reinforced by Corbyn’s detractors
who very publicly expressed their anxiety
that the change in direction was an attempt
to drag the party back to its so-called
1
‘wilderness years’. The comparison between
Corbyn and the New Left would appear an
obvious one. From the late 1950s, socialists
in Britain, reacting in particular to the Soviet
invasion of Hungary, sought a third way
between western capitalism and actually
existing communism. In a context in which
the sun was finally setting on the British
Empire, notably with the crisis over the Suez
Canal, oppositional currents in the UK con-
verged under the sign of the New Left. In
politics, the New Left label surmises the
early appearance of anti-war, feminist, anti-
racist and to some extent green movements,
while a cast of socialist thinkers sought to
provide the pursuit of socialism in Britain
with intellectual ballast. In both politics and
thought, major strands of the New Left orb-
ited the Labour Party.
While Perry Anderson led a task force to
furnish the ‘peculiar’ tradition of British
socialism with the fundamentals of historical
materialism, largely by import of continental
Marxists under the auspices of the New Left
Review (NLR), Ralph Miliband’s work dis-
played a more practical flavour, lending its
relevance to activists who, like himself, con-
tinued to grapple with the disjuncture
between the politics of the Labour Party and
a commitment to socialism. Both the erudite
editorial board over at the NLR and Mili-
band, working at a distance from the jour-
nal, produced a body of work that sought to
explain the politics of what they called
‘Labourism’.
For Miliband, the crucible of this concept
was the party’s ‘dogmatic’ commitment to
parliamentary politics. This represented
Labour’s fatal flaw, as underlined by Mili-
band’s famous writings on the capitalist
state. Here, in Miliband’s view, every cook
can govern, yet the problem in doing so
under capitalism was ‘all but inevitable that
recruits from the subordinate classes . . .
become part of the class which continues to
dominate it’.2 Labour’s commitment to par-
liamentarism hence drew ‘potentially opposi-
tional social forces and political institutions
into a form of democratic politics that left
elected governments subject to the con-
straints of a conservative state apparatus and
a well-entrenched business and financial
class, and left their electorate subject to
2 LEWIS BASSETT
The Political Quarterly © The Author 2019. The Political Quarterly © The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2019
heavy ideological pressure from schools,
churches and the media’.3 Miliband was res-
olute that the electoral road to socialism
required bold governments supported by
extra-parliamentary movements.
Despite typically Marxist claims of univer-
sality, the development of Miliband’s
thought should be seen as deeply wedded to
the period in which he lived. The central
message of his work reflected what the left
in Labour saw as a disappointing period for
the party in office during the latter half of
the 1960s. In 1974, Labour returned to gov-
ernment, fired up by a socialist manifesto
that commanded significant support among
the party’s members and unions, but with
near complete dismissal from Labour’s Cabi-
net. The exception, of course, was the pipe-
wielding MP for Bristol South, Tony Benn, a
man defined by his sincere and deeply moral
commitment to socialism, and widely consid-
ered to be one of Corbyn’s mentors. To a
backdrop of intense working class militancy,
rising inflation and falling investment, iso-
lated at the Department of Industry and
unable to implement Labour’s radical mani-
festo, Benn turned outward to support
worker-led, ‘bottom-up’ initiatives to save,
and at times attempt to transform, industrial
firms whose economic fate pointed towards
the scrap heap. In a pamphlet written in the
late 1970s, Labour’s current Shadow Chan-
cellor, John McDonnell, and a group of other
socialists, extrapolated the ethos of Benn’s
approach to his ministerial role as the strat-
egy of working ‘in and against the state’.
Indeed, from 1981–1983 Labour’s control of
the Greater London Council (GLC) under the
leadership of Ken Livingstone pursued such
an approach. ‘We wanted to go into the state
and open it up in order to transform peo-
ple’s lives’, McDonnell, who ran the GLC’s
budget under Livingstone, explained at a
public event earlier this year. ‘It meant that
Londoners themselves were taking control;
what we saw was an emerging social move-
ment’. As Benn had welcomed committees
of shop stewards to the Department of
Industry, the GLC opened its doors to acti-
vists in the capital, lending in particular its
support to cultural interventions that pro-
moted municipal socialism, sexual liberation
and anti-racism—all of which were labelled
by Conservatives and the popular press as a
mark of the ‘loony left’.
Corbyn and Momentum
So much, then, is comparable to the ‘people
power’ ideology of Corbynism. Writing for
the Observer the day after the leadership elec-
tion, Corbyn described his victory as ‘an
unequivocal mandate for change from a
democratic upsurge that has already become
a social movement’.4 And again the follow-
ing year, to cite another of many examples,
the Labour leader told those assembled at a
rally ‘we are a social movement and we will
only win the next general election because
we are that movement’.5
Over 100,000 people joined the Labour
Party during Corbyn’s first leadership bid,
with a further 50,000 signing up shortly after
the results were announced (the party’s cur-
rent membership stands at over half a mil-
lion). Crowds followed the MP for Islington
North everywhere along the campaign trail.
In August, Corbyn told a large rally in
Manchester that 13,000 people had volun-
teered for his campaign, having delivered
the same message earlier that day to crowds
of supporters in Derby and Sheffield. For
Leo Panitch, Hilary Wainwright and a cast
of other New Left descendants, the cam-
paign unearthed the dilemmas and possibili-
ties of parliamentary socialism that had long
been put to rest. In a book that brilliantly
documents Corbyn’s rise, Alex Nunns
remarked that ‘the rallies, the social media
buzz, the burst of young people suddenly
appearing on the scene—this looked like
movement politics.’6 But was it?
It was in this vein that activists who
sought to connect Corbyn’s Labour to the
extra-parliamentary politics of social move-
ments converged upon Momentum, the
group set up to continue the legacy of the
leadership campaign. In its infancy, the
organisation was caught between the com-
peting visions of a group drawn into Labour
by Corbyn’s campaign and Jon Lansman, a
veteran activist of the Campaign for Labour
Party Democracy and a former aide to Tony
Benn. Emma Rees, a schoolteacher turned
full-time Momentum activist, explained to
me that for the volunteers, ‘the whole fram-
ing of Jeremy’s campaign was a new kind of
CORBYNISM: SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
© The Author 2019. The Political Quarterly © The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2019
politics, creative and coming from the bot-
tom up. It might sound na€ıve now, but it
was what people wanted.’ Likewise, in an
article for Renewal, Rees along with Adam
Klug and James Schneider, wrote ‘we need
more than Corbyn as leader. We need to
build grassroots power now: the ability for
ordinary people to influence and change the
world in their interests, through their own
institutions’.7
Lansman, however, had from the outset of
Corbyn’s leadership campaign sought to
build an organisation that would help the
Labour left win internal party elections and
push for constitutional rule changes that
would move the party’s centre of power
away from its MPs and towards its affiliated
trade unions and membership. Initially,
Lansman’s ambition was to gather in the
region of 5,000 new contacts for this pur-
pose. Yet by September 2015, that list had
grown to well over 100,000.
Looking back, four years since its launch,
Momentum has fallen short of building
‘people powered politics’ in the way
described by Rees and co. However,
Momentum has been successful in its other
endeavours: winning the left’s battles in
party conferences and ballots; dramatically
outperforming the social media campaigns
of both Labour and the Conservatives in
the 2017 general election; and using new
techniques, imported from the Bernie San-
ders’ campaign, to revolutionise Labour’s
ground war and mobilise the party’s mass
membership. So why, despite the enthusi-
asm and the best intentions, has this been
the case?
Notwithstanding the support that Corbyn
registered among members and unions, his
leadership was for its first two years little
more than a spot-lit enclave, surrounded on
three sides: in Labour’s bureaucracy, in Par-
liament, including of course among Labour
MPs, and in the media. Having limited
resources, Momentum turned to these three
fronts. Bureaucratic battles took place via
internal ballots for control over the party’s
governance structures, including conference
votes and elections for the party’s various
committees, and in which Momentum so far
always played a decisive role. Behind the
scenes, the organisation has provided a plat-
form from which trusted volunteers and staff
IN A NEW LEFT GARB 3
The Political Quarterly
have entered the party’s payroll. Where
Labour’s bureaucracy failed to utilise the full
force of the party’s expanded membership
for the general election, Momentum filled
the gaps. According to Rees, the group’s My
Nearest Marginal app had 10,000 activists
sign up to knock on 1.2 million doors on
polling day.
In the case of Corbyn’s parliamentary
detractors, Momentum has provided a meet-
ing point for activists along with contact
data from which to build the left’s forces at
the local level, resulting, for example, in
votes of no confidence for a clutch of MPs,
including four who jumped the Labour ship
to establish Change UK. At party confer-
ences, Momentum has successfully cam-
paigned to lower the percentage of MPs and
MEPs required to nominate a leadership can-
didate from 15 to 10 per cent, thereby
increasing the chances of a left-wing con-
tender in future contests. In 2018 the group
worked with the affiliated trade union Unite,
whose policy conference called for sitting
Labour MPs to face an open selection ballot
before each general election. Momentum and
Unite’s representatives on the party’s
National Executive Committee (NEC) won
support for a compromise to lower the num-
ber of votes from local party branches
required to trigger such a contest. Finally,
the group’s reach on social media has been
impressive, particularly during the general
election where, according to the Momen-
tum’s own figures, their video output gained
a total 23 million views from some 12.7 mil-
lion unique users.
From New Left to new
Labourism?
Momentum’s development underlines Mili-
band’s wariness of the Labour Party’s capac-
ity to co-opt working class ‘resistance’ and
incorporate it into the workings of the ‘bour-
geoise state’. Such integrating tendencies
have been on display in the movement’s
long march through the party institutions;
rather than form an extra-parliamentary
force, Momentum has instead gone some
way to reverse the hollowing out of Labour
(and perhaps parliamentary democracy in
general) that has occurred since the mid-
4 LEWIS BASSETT
The Political Quarterly © The Author 2019. The Political Quarterly © The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2019
1980s. While far from a majority of Labour’s
pro-Corbyn members play an active role in
the party at the branch level, a critical mass
of new recruits has challenged the monopoly
of the old guard, advanced new ideas (suc-
cessful grassroots policy motions at party
conference have included, for example, bal-
lots for estates facing ‘redevelopment’) and
refreshed tactics. For more passive new
members, whose participation was encour-
aged by each party leader since Kinnock as a
counterweight to left-wing activists, Momen-
tum has mobilised their support in a way
that has helped rebalance Labour as a plural-
istic and ‘contentious alliance’ between its
three sources of constitutional power: mem-
bers, trade unions and MPs. In 2017, for
example, Momentum helped ensure three
additional seats for members and one for
trade unions on the party’s NEC, making the
body more genuinely polyarchal.
At the same time, the reintegration of
workers within a system of ‘democratic capi-
talism’ represents the more radical side of
Corbynist policies where the model is Swe-
den, not Cuba. Labour’s proposals for ‘inclu-
sive ownership funds’ will require
companies in the UK with over 250 employ-
ees to transfer annually at least 1 per cent of
ownership to a worker-managed fund, hav-
ing the same voting rights as shareholders,
for a period of ten years. Likewise, the
party’s proposal for a national development
bank includes a governance structure with
representation from trade unions, business,
government ministers and civil servants.
Plans for public ownership of rail, mail,
energy and water propose to reverse unpop-
ular privatisations rather than stake out new
ground. Here too, the Shadow Chancellor
has sought to find ‘new models’ of public
ownership capable of integrating the priori-
ties of consumers, alongside those of work-
ers and the state. In sum, it would seem a
great irony of our present moment that it
falls to the perspective of Ralph Miliband,
whose work, steeped in Marxism, encour-
ages us to read Corbynism as such a deeply
social democratic affair.
Periodising crisis
One fruitful way to understand the disjunc-
ture between the ideology and practice of
Corbynism is to deepen our understanding
of the current crisis of neoliberalism (from
which Corbynism has emerged), particularly
in comparison with the crisis afflicting post-
war capitalist democracies from the late
1960s (and from which emerged the New
Left). Lacking the space for a more elaborate
account I offer six condensed points.
First, the left in Britain was locked out of
the apexes of state power for the duration of
the crisis afflicting postwar welfare capital-
ism. In 1974, Labour stood on a radical man-
ifesto that promised a ‘fundamental and
irreversible shift in the balance of power and
wealth in favour of working people and
their families’, including a programme of
extensive nationalisation—and won. Yet Har-
old Wilson and a majority of his cabinet
made clear that, in office, this programme
would come to naught, hence Benn’s isola-
tion. Moreover, well into the 1980s, women,
LGBT+ communities and people of colour
could find themselves dismissed or
demeaned within the party, as in other
spheres of life, prompting extra party sec-
tions and organising. Today, Corbyn and his
allies have gained relative control over the
leadership and the bureaucracy, with consti-
tutional changes that may eventually shift
the balance in his favour among MPs. At the
same time, Labour, like other institutions,
has been relatively well prised open by
movements based on gender, sexuality and
race (on the former, Corbyn has shown
himself to be comfortable with self-ID, for
example).
Second, as a consequence of neoliberalism,
rebuilding state capacity features high on the
list of the left’s priorities and forms a key
part of its contemporary appeal. When once
McDonnell and his colleagues spoke of the
welfare state as a patriarchal apparatus that
inhibited social solidarity, subsequent dec-
ades have eroded postwar social democracy,
putting the left on the defensive and generat-
ing working class demands for more not less
state intervention.
Third, relatedly, in the current conjuncture
the hegemony of the parliamentary system
remains stable. Owing to the previous point,
movements like Corbynism which appeared
after the 2007 banking crisis have sought to
capture, rather than ‘smash’ or ‘subvert’, the
modern liberal state and in the process these
CORBYNISM: SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
© The Author 2019. The Political Quarterly © The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2019
movements have channelled contentious pol-
itics into parliamentary channels. By compar-
ison, although in the UK the 1970s lacked a
coherent anti-systemic movement, the
intense level of strikes, including wildcat
strikes, the organisation of shop stewards,
student movements, the peace movement
and so on, would appear to exhibit a
greater likelihood of such a radical threat
developing.
Fourth, compared to its postwar peak in
the mid-1970s, trade union power has been
virtually eradicated in Britain, where the
past ten years have seen some of the lowest
numbers of working days lost to strikes on
record. Moreover, there is a firm realisation
(among Corbyn supporting trade union lead-
ers in particular) that to reverse this trend
will require the levers of the state. The state
can dramatically tip the playing field in
favour of trade unions in at least three ways:
by making working (and rental) contracts
less precarious; by overturning regressive
trade union legislation; and by investing in
industry, including in an expanded public
sector.
Fifth, the virtual disappearance of Bri-
tain’s industrial working class disentangles
another fatal flaw of parliamentary social-
ism famously outlined by Adam Prze-
worski.8 Rather than having to balance
between the contradictory demands of an
organised industrial proletariat and a prop-
erty owning middle class, neoliberalism has,
in this sense, been a great leveller, by lower-
ing material standards and bargaining
power across the board. To support trade
unionism in the current context in which
workers’ demands are not at odds with the
‘national interest’—that is, where inequality
is widely considered to be a constraint upon
economic growth—departs from the accusa-
tions of corporatism that were levelled at
the workers’ movement at its postwar peak
of militancy.
Finally, sixth, looking at things from the
other side of the class divide, there appears
a growing consensus among representatives
of capitalist firms and establishment econo-
mists that the commitment to anti-inflation-
ary policies forged in the mid-1970s is not
working. Austerity, as research by the Inter-
national Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
IN A NEW LEFT GARB 5
The Political Quarterly
Development (OECD) has pointed out, is
hindering growth. Since the crisis, interest
rates have been held at historic lows, while
£435 billion has been pumped into banks in
the form of quantitative easing; yet neither
has yielded an upswing in growth. Indeed,
Britain’s recovery from the ‘great recession’
has been the slowest on record. Former
World Bank, Clinton and Obama official,
Larry Summers, once confidently champi-
oned the self-regulating powers of financial
markets, yet today he seems less sure. Since
2013, Summers has popularised the concept
of ‘secular stagnation’, describing the
dilemma facing OECD economies today as
‘the achievement of fairly ordinary growth
with extraordinary policy and financial con-
ditions’.9 Persistently low inflation, despite
the commitment to low interest rates, has left
monetarists scratching their heads much in
the same way that mainstream Keynesian
theory struggled to explain stagflation.
Moreover, the low base rate has left policy
makers with nothing in their monetarist
toolkit to turn to in the event of a future
recession. As Stefan Eich and Adam Tooze
write, ‘we are in a weird and inverted world.
The result [of the crisis] has been a collapse
of the anti-inflationary consensus assembled
in the late 1970s’.10
As Prime Minister in 1976, James Cal-
laghan famously told the Labour Party con-
ference that the option for Keynesian
reflation no longer existed; today we may
say that it does. The consequence of this shift
in the left’s overarching political opportunity
structure is that economic policies that can
secure non-zero sum returns to both capital-
ists and workers, such as that proposed by
Labour’s £250 billion stimulus programme
(itself enabled by low rates), are today theo-
retically possible and form a major part of
the rationalisation for Corbynomics by some
of its key architects.
Corbynism is engaged in the making of a
coalition between disorganised, popular
classes: both younger voters who face a pre-
carious job market and limited scope for
owning their own homes, and postindus-
trial workers whose memory is of a period
in which capitalism seemed to work. At the
same time, these groups are thought to be
correspondent with elite demands for poli-
cies that can return the economy to
6 LEWIS BASSETT
The Political Quarterly © The Author 2019. The Political Quarterly © The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2019
sustainable growth (this much is of course
reflected in Labour’s current Brexit ‘fudge’).
Taking a clear-sighted view, Labour’s ambi-
tion today is for a renewed social contract.
The party’s primary means of reform is con-
sensual and hence parliamentary, rather
than via the independent, antagonistic,
power of social movements. Unlike the
1970s, Labour’s strategic options are limited
by the impact of neoliberalism, particularly
in regard to the strength of the workers’
movement. Yet also unlike the 1970s, the
basic outlines of Keynesian principles are
theoretically tenable. Whether Labour can
win government and sustain a reformist
course on this basis is not the concern here.
What I am outlining, however, is Corbyn’s
strategic rationale.
Social democracy for new times?
If all this is true, why is it that commentators
still frequently label Corbyn ‘hard left’? It is
unsurprising that journalistic debate has
adopted this cliche, yet a number of aca-
demics have also followed suit. Several
scholars have allowed ideology—their own,
and sometimes their subject’s—to get in the
way of analysis. Rather than an outmoded
aberration in an otherwise moderate party,
serious commentary has failed to highlight,
and explain, many of the continuities within
Labour, and so point out the current areas of
divergence.
Atop the failure of the Labour left in the
early 1980s and the collapse of the postwar
consensus, New Left authors around the
journal Marxism Today helped to pave the
way for what would become New Labour.
The argument advanced by Martin Jacques
and Stuart Hall, among others, was that
Labour had to get with the ‘new times’. Jac-
ques and Hall social democratised a New
Left critique of Labour (here owing a debt to
Lenin as well as Gramsci) that the party was
incapable of building support beyond its
trade union base. The problem had become
acute in the ‘new times’ since the long march
of workers had been halted; trade unions
were in decline, along with industry, while
culturally, the party’s base of support was
considered a relic of the past and a barrier to
the growth of new social movements, partic-
ularly feminism. That language poured into
a report on the Labour-union link, led by
Blair in 1993. In it, unions were presented as
‘sectional, male, industrially irrelevant, con-
servative and old-fashioned . . . dominating
the party and acting as rigid obstacles to
modernisation.’11
The 158 women elected as MPs in 1997
testified to Labour’s newness and was
crowned by Blair and his supporters as an
historic achievement. This was despite the
fact that reforms which secured the increase
in female candidates were initiated by acti-
vists on the left of the party and delivered
with the help of trade unions which were
indeed facing a growing proportion of
women among their membership. When the
rule change that required a number of all-
women shortlists for MP selections came into
place in 1993, the procedure was attacked in
much the same language as Livingstone’s
GLC. Under pressure from a reactionary
campaign, Blair considered abandoning the
policy before a court case in 1995 brought by
two male party members found the practice
illegal. The law was changed to restore posi-
tive action in 2002.12
Male, pale, unionised workers are by no
means the beginning and end of Corbyn’s
support. Despite Momentum relegating the
task of building a social movement in order
to pursue more typical parliamentary objec-
tives, Corbyn’s Labour has attracted a
diverse group of activists and a youthful
base of voters. McDonnell in particular
appears capable of addressing a trade
union delegation in the morning, climate
strikers over lunch and a representative
from the Confederation of British Industry
at tea time—his message to each is that
austerity, deregulation and inequality has
been a failure.
Corbyn’s anti-austerity agenda in fact pro-
poses to restore a New Labour-like balance
in tax and spend. The 2017 manifesto pro-
mised to reverse cuts in spending and public
sector pay, reinstate the education mainte-
nance allowance, raise maternity and pater-
nity pay and lift the minimum wage. The
single biggest increase in taxation proposed
in 2017 would have seen corporation tax rise
to a level below its New Labour average.
McDonnell’s ‘fiscal credibility rule’ is based
on the same principle as Brown’s ‘golden’
one; the former merely institutes the
CORBYNISM: SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
© The Author 2019. The Political Quarterly © The Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2019
divergence from the latter that occurred in
response to the crisis.
Perhaps New Labour just lost its way?
Despite initially greeting recession with fiscal
stimulus (mainly via a temporary cut to
VAT), entering the 2010 general election as
the spectre of sovereign default loomed over
Europe, Alistair Darling promised voters dee-
per cuts in public spending than achieved by
Thatcher. Later, in 2015, leadership hopefuls
Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall apologised
for Labour’s public spending (39 per cent of
GDP on entering office rising to just 40 per
cent on the eve of the crisis), and all the can-
didates, other than Corbyn, accepted the need
for austerity. While the mainstream of the
party ignored survey data that showed broad
support among voters for alternatives to rais-
ing taxes and cutting public spending, it fell
to the ‘hard left’ to point one out.
Where Corbynism goes beyond simply tax
and spend is in proposing a class consensus
for new, new times. Accompanying its plans
for fiscal stimulus, Labour seeks democrati-
cally to ‘re-embed’ non-market forces (work-
ers, consumers and public values—especially
green ones) in the reproduction of social life:
reversing privatisations, ending the private
finance initiative (PFI), curbing the NHS’s
internal market and restoring workers’
rights. There is not a drop of evidence, how-
ever, that Corbyn’s party seeks to erase pri-
vate ownership, competition or the profit
motive. The original wording of Clause IV of
Labour’s constitution—‘to secure for the
workers . . . the means of production, distri-
bution and exchange’—has not been resur-
rected. In this regard, the movement is more
post-neoliberal than radical.
Notes
1 ‘Labour leadership: Jeremy Corbyn full victory
speech’, BBC News, 12 September 2015;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-
34233529/labour-leadership-jeremy-corbyn-full-
victory-speech (accessed 14 July 2019).
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