A post-fact fact - that Trotskyist, hard left throwback, Jeremy Corbyn, is nothing of the kind.
The plot to oust him as Labour party leader has
awakened memories of a past split in the Labour party – the one that created
the SDP in 1981 when a ‘gang
of four’ senior Labour politicians, accompanied by 27 MPs, broke away from
Labour to form the ‘centre-left’ and ‘moderate’ SDP.
According to press
reports, senior figures in both the Tory and Labour parties are considering
founding a new centrist grouping “in the mould of the Social Democratic party
(SDP)”, should Corbyn be re-elected as Labour leader.
The 172 Labour MPs who voted against Corbyn in the recent no
confidence motion have been likened to the SDP’s gang of four. “It
all hearkens back to 1981,” wrote one academic, “when four senior Labour
Party figures broke away to found their own centrist party, the SDP.”
But the problem with ‘hearkening
back to 1981’ as justification for a new centrist grouping in British
politics, is that the contemporary politician the SDP most resembles in its
economic outlook is actually … Jeremy
Corbyn. The elite consensus that governs British politics has moved so far to
the Right in the last three decades that the centrist SDP of the early ‘80s now
appears in retrospect as a radical leftist project (which, needless to say, it
was wasn’t).
The SDP’s high watermark was the general election of 1983
where it gained, in alliance with the Liberals, around a quarter of the vote.
The SDP
manifesto of that year is illuminating and comparisons with Corbyn abound:
The manifesto promised to increase public borrowing in order
to reverse a ‘catastrophic’ reduction in public investment and policies ‘which
will invest resources in the high-technology industries of the future’.
Corbyn wants to put ‘state investment centre stage’ and form a national investment bank to
target investment high tech industries and the public interest. Public
investment, which declined under New Labour, even turned negative for a year under the
Conservative/Lib Dem coalition.
The SDP was opposed to the privatisation of BT and British
Airways and pledged to make nationalised industries ‘properly responsible to
their consumers’.
Corbyn wants to
reverse a ‘generation of forced privatisation and
outsourcing’ which has led to
poorer quality services, ‘less transparency and less say for the public’.
The SDP thought the burden of the early ‘80s slump was ‘being
borne quite disproportionately’ by the unemployed and the poor. The party promised
to help the unemployed and the sick by increasing unemployment benefit,
sickness benefit and sick pay by 5%. It wanted to ‘raise the living standards
of the hardest-pressed families’.
Corbyn thinks the cost
of George Osborne’s economic failure is ‘being borne by some of the most
vulnerable in our society’. He has also said that benefit sanctions on the
unemployed and disabled are ‘barbaric and must be abolished’. He opposed the welfare cap.
The SDP promised an ‘Industrial Democracy Act’ creating
employee councils for all companies above 1,000 employees and directors jointly
elected by employees and shareholders.
Corbyn wants a debate
about ‘how wealth is created and how it should be shared’. He envisages a ‘genuinely
mixed economy of public and social enterprise, alongside a private sector with
a long-term private business commitment’.
The SDP’s priority was to reduce the gap between rich and
poor. It wanted to raise the National Insurance upper limit and reverse
increases in the higher tax bands. Corporation tax was, at the time, 50% (yes,
really) and the party promised to reduce it only for profit-sharing and share
ownership schemes.
Corbyn wants to tackle
the UK’s ‘grotesque’ levels of inequality, crack down on tax avoidance and ‘ask those with
income and wealth to spare to contribute a little more’. He advocates reducing
corporate tax subsidies and not cutting corporation tax (it has been cut from 28% in 2010 to 17% and George Osborne
wants to slash it further to 15%)
In some ways, Corbyn is to
the Right of the SDP. The SDP, for example, wanted ‘direct action’ to
create 100,000 jobs in ‘labour intensive social services’ and promised with
‘great determination’ to establish a further 250,000 jobs in a state programme
of housing and environmental improvement. Corbyn has said nothing about the government
directly creating jobs.
If you think this is a hopelessly biased, cherry selecting exercise, consider the words of economist Robert Skidelsky, a founder member of
the SDP. In a 2015 article, entitled Taking Corbynomics Seriously, Skidelsky, said Corbyn ‘should be
praised, not castigated’ for economic policies such as a National Investment
Bank and People’s quantitative easing. “Fiscal austerity has become such a staple of conventional wisdom in the
United Kingdom that anyone in public life who challenges it is written off as a
dangerous leftist. Jeremy Corbyn …. is the latest victim of this chorus of
disparagement.” he pointed out.
Corbyn
himself may be a Bennite, says Richard Seymour, author of Corbyn: The
Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, but Corbynism isn’t. “Nothing that Corbyn proposes,
bar his opposition to Trident, should in principle be disagreeable to old
right-wing social democrats,” he says. “For all that Labour MPs and pundits think they're staring at the abyss
of Marxist-Leninism, or crypto-Trotskyism, anyone not trapped in those
self-serving illusions can see that Corbyn is taking Labour gently and
moderately toward a form of retooled social democracy.”
The reason
most Labour MPs cannot see this is that they are not old fashioned right-wing
social democrats. New Labour, to which most of them still offer allegiance,
transcended old school Labour right-wingers such as John Smith and Roy
Hattersley to become an entirely new political current – one significantly to
the right of Old Labour’s moderate wing. And the support of Labour’s soft left
(what used to be called the Tribune group) was essential to this process.
Policies such as conflating the interests of business with what business wants,
cutting corporate taxation, punishing the unemployed and the sick for their
condition, supporting privatisation and an unerring fondness for expeditionary wars,
were breaks with Labour’s right-wing as much as its left. They comprised a new
political formation, the extreme centre.
New Labour
cannot countenance any backtracking for the same reason it cannot provide the elusive
‘effective opposition’ to the Conservatives. It is complicit in many of the injustices being perpetrated today. Thus Blairism is a
peculiarly barren political philosophy. Old right-wing social democracy at
least had some intellectual energy. ‘Moderate’ trade union leaders like Bill
Jordan supported basic income. Skidelsky, a former SDP member, is a
contemporary supporter of basic income. It’s no accident that Labour, under
Corbyn, is open to the idea of basic income. With occasional exceptions, New Labour just offers re-treads and clings to a failed orthodoxy for
dear life.
There are,
it should be pointed out, many things wrong with a 21st century
reformulation of the old SDP. Not least a reliance on public investment when
near-zero interest rates show there is scant appetite for any kind of
investment when the rewards are so meagre. A reformed capitalism may prove to
be just as much a failure as the economic orthodoxy. But ditching Corbyn, by
hook or by crook, will just see a blanket of mind-numbing conformity descend
over British politics. And last thing we need now is mind-numbing conformity.
