An Elephant in the Room

It’s a national sport in political journalism to tell the Labour Party what to do. And you don’t have to be a Westminster insider to see that the Corbyn project is fracturing. Perhaps an old-school purge of deviationist elements might help? That seems to be the advice of Guardian columnist Dawn Foster.

Let’s start with Tom Watson, ‘the deputy leader of the Labour party and a lifelong professional wrecker, who has made it his official duty to complain weekly to the Sunday papers, without suggesting any concrete proposals for how to bring the party forward.’ Foster writes that if Watson ‘had any guts, he would quit the party and try to prove that his ideas have electoral traction. Yet, as he has probably discovered, it is hard to come up with bold and original ideas that benefit the electorate and prove popular with voters: it is far easier to stay in a party, wrecking it week by week, hoping to terminally undermine the leader and then inherit the ruins.’

I never liked Tom Watson, he always seemed to me a standard machine blowhard of the Labour right, but this attack on him I think says more about Foster herself than Watson. There is a political narrative that is coming together in hard left circles. I’ll try and summarise it here.

1) The Corbyn Labour Party is not perfect. It’s been weak on many issues and we will continue to hold the leadership to account on them.

2) But – in a two party system Corbyn’s Labour offers the only real alternative to Tory neoliberalism. Millions of suffering people all over the country need a Corbyn led Labour government for that reason.

3) There are people on the liberal left who have become obsessed with metropolitan issues like Brexit. By breaking from Corbyn’s Labour, campaigning for People’s Vote, setting up third parties etc they risk splitting the opposition and will guarantee Tory rule for ever.

4) The liberals, remainers etc don’t understand the consequences of austerity in this country because they are all part of the metropolitan elite. By the same token, people in working class communities don’t care about Brexit etc they only want a socialist government. For their sake we need to make that happen.

As Foster writes:

Watson’s wing of the party is convinced there is a huge untapped reserve of voters who share their precise politics, but exactly where these voters live remains to be seen. I travel extensively around the country, and the only time I meet these people are in TV and radio studios. The electoral failure of the Independent Group/Change UK (or whatever the handful of remaining ex-Labour and Tory MPs now call themselves) should be a warning to the Labour right, but their self-confidence is far greater than their analytical ability.

But in Foster’s article, she makes a couple of big assumptions:

Centrist thinking is focused on two false premises. The first is that the 2012 London Olympic ceremony represented an idyllic high-point of culture and unity in the UK, rather than occurring amid the brutal onslaught of austerity, with food bank use growing and the bedroom tax ruining lives. The second is that the UK became divided by Brexit and the 2016 vote, rather than it being a symptom of long-term problems: the decline of industry and the public sector begun by Margaret Thatcher and continued by Tony Blair and David Cameron; vast inequality of opportunity, wealth and health; and the number of people being routinely ignored in a system with a huge democratic and electoral deficit.

No doubt there is a foolish nostalgia on the remain left for the rule of George Osborne. But some of us ‘centrists’ remember the coalition years well, thank you. It is because we have seen poverty, immiseration and totally avoidable suffering that characterised the 2010s, it is because we have these formative experiences and unalterable memories that we voted against and campaigned against Brexit. Some of us aren’t comfortable or stupid enough to believe the lies that everything will be better or fine. I hope it doesn’t turn out that way but at the moment our future post Brexit looks like neoliberalism on rocket fuel.

And Brexit, really, is not the main issue here. Not even close.

Foster complains that Tom Watson ‘was rending his garments at the fact that former Labour members have released confidential material to the media, despite signing legal agreements not to do so: this is the same Watson who campaigned against hacking victims having emails and other data illegally intercepted.’

This is a sly and careful sentence, that’s worth looking at. You can start by clicking the link in Foster’s sentence – it’s a report from the Guardian’s Andrew Sparrow. Sparrow is following up a scoop from the Times, which revealed that Labour is threatening its own former staff with legal action for ‘wanton disregard’ of NDAs. (The law firm involved is that tribune of the left-behind: Carter Ruck.)

Why the harsh response? Could it be that the leadership is concerned about a forthcoming BBC documentary into the party’s culture of antisemitism, which follows the launch of a formal investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Forget the juxtaposition of individual NDA breaches with phone hacking (are we really, here, comparing like with like?) Listen to what you’re not being told. The narrative of Remainer wreckers etc doesn’t have an explanation for the far more significant problem with the party under its current stewardship: and that many of us would oppose and fear a Corbyn led Labour government for that reason. I don’t think a Corbyn led Labour government would be antisemitic in the 20th century totalitarian sense of that word, but I do think there would be a May style ‘hostile environment’ policy – against Jews, and probably against anyone else deemed suspicious.

I know that there are potential Labour voters who have ‘priced in’ the darkness of the leadership. But I think that there are fewer of them with each passing year. I am not sure that Labour’s current brand of toxic racism and half-arsed welfare policies are the electoral draw that Dawn Foster believes. Who knows whether Labour will win power though. It certainly doesn’t deserve to.