The History of Mr Crank

The slur ‘crank’ is enjoying something of a renaissance in these red-baiting times. The ‘crank left’ is a general term of abuse directed at those who don’t accept the increasingly shaky presuppositions of mainstream debate, with the advantage of course of not having to deal with their objections. Such weird people typically read ‘crank’ news websites, such as The Canary or Skwawkbox. Then there are ‘crankademics’, a wonderfully witty neologism trained at academics who insist on pointing out the painful lack of evidence justifying the purge of Labour party members in the name of anti-antisemitism.

There is something quintessentially English about the barb ‘crank’. It means an eccentric who is obsessed with the minutiae of a specific subject, a fixation ‘normal’, well-balanced people don’t share. In the U.S., such people might be called oddballs or weirdos but not cranks. In America ‘cranky’ is used to designate bad-tempered people but that is something different. Cranks aren’t necessarily cranky.

And ‘crank’ is unusually employed against the Left, in particular the anti-imperialist Left. To be sure there are ‘crank scientific theories’, such as that Covid-19 is caused by 5G phone masts, which originate with the Right. The vectors of strange Trumpian obsessions might be labelled cranks. But generally the Right is not assumed to be outside the pale of civilised, ‘normal’ debate in the way the ‘crank Left’ is.

As far I can tell, crank was first deployed to any great effect during the First World War. Conscientious Objectors were contemptuously derided as cranks and female pacifists shared the same fate. “I can’t stand cranks,” barks Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army when a member of his platoon confesses to have been a Conscientious Objector during the last war. “Imagine not wanting to fight … it isn’t normal.”

But the person who really forged an indelible link between cranks and the Left was George Orwell, ironically an unashamed radical socialist himself. “[T]here is the horrible – the really disquieting – prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together,” wrote Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier. “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”

Leaving aside the fact that undercover nudists and sex maniacs are not, as far as is known, overrepresented at Labour party meetings (nor, soon, will socialists it seems), there is the disquieting fact that some 1930s cranks – for example feminists – were clearly ahead of their time. Orwell also had a particular bugbear about vegetarians, and vegetarian options on menus. Yet anyone now branding feminists and vegetarians as cranks would themselves be open to the very same insult. Crankdom, as was noted long ago, is not a static concept.

A loyal Orwellian might retort that a being ahead of your time is scant consolation for being unelectable, or unpopular, during it. But it is also true if you accept the entire common sense corpus of your age, you end up not wanting to change anything for fear of stepping out of line. It’s also worth noting that a socialist Labour party, doubtless still replete with its fair share of cranks, won the 1945 election by a landslide.

Nonetheless, Orwell certainly started a trend and, since his time, left-wingers who strayed too far from the conventional wisdom of their epoch soon heard the epithet ‘crank’ ringing in their ears. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Britain could never shake the crank label. Gandhi was accused of “sheer crankiness” by right-wing historian Paul Johnson. More recently, in 2014, famed Conservative ‘moderate’ Kenneth Clarke urged Greeks not to elect the “cranky extremists” of Syriza. They didn’t listen, although presumably when the putatively left-wing Syriza utterly caved and implemented an even more ruthless austerity programme than the original, Tspiras and co. became normal adults.

Of course the most perfect crank of our age is undoubtedly Jeremy Corbyn. He had all the requisite qualities, personal and political. He was a resolute anti-imperialist and thought – erroneously actually – to be a pacifist. He also made jam, had a hobby of taking photos of manhole covers and possibly wore sandals on occasion.

Yet although he should have been an easy target, the British establishment had to strain every sinew to finally defeat him. He was subject to the most vicious and dishonest character assassination in British political history, relentlessly accused of being a spy, terrorist sympathiser and anti-Semite. Unbelievably, the campaign is still going on even after he was comprehensively defeated at the polls.

The enormous effort that needed to be expended, including within the Labour party, reveals, I think, two important things. One is that throughout the first two decades of the 21^st century, the cranks have been proven right on most important issues and the ‘sensibles’ wrong. The Iraq War was a terrible mistake, Iraq didn’t have – or claim to have – WMD and over two million Iraqis have subsequently died. The economic boom of the first years of the century was revealed to be built on sand, the bursting of which caused immense repercussions we have still living with. Austerity, supported at the time by all major political parties in Britain, but not the crank Left, was not only economically wrong-headed but imposed needless suffering on millions. Quantitative Easing – the main method of dealing with the old economic downturn and the new one – has merely increased inequality and augmented the wealth of the already wealthy. A strategy of confronting Covid-19 based on hoping it would quickly go away has prolonged the economic pain and resulted in innumerable excess deaths.

The role of ‘moderates’, of the sensible mainstream, in the 21^st century has mainly involved trying to plug holes in a dam that is springing leaks in so many places it is impossible to catch up.

The second revelation is that despite cranks residing on the farther reaches of acceptable debate, there is something inherently repellent about their main adversary, the professional politician. Politics is now a career, prepared for by a stint in student politics, followed by a sinecure in PR or the media and the obligatory role as a Spad (special advisor to a minister). It is its own world, sealed off from common experiences. As a result, most politicians, devoid of any ideas of their own, try to toady to what they perceive as public feeling without really understanding it. There is a desperate attempt to appear ordinary or normal, someone you’d want to go for a drink with. The most accomplished at this act – Boris Johnson for instance (who, it will be recalled, originally couldn’t decide whether to be pro or anti-Brexit) – are the most successful politicians.

By the contrast, conviction politicians – Thatcher or Corbyn – might appear obsessive, and thus strange. But because they see politics as fulfilling an ulterior purpose, rather than being something to be immersed in for its own sake, they come across as more human.

Yet, it has to be said there is some truth to Orwell’s accusation that the average socialist adherent is rather “out of touch with common humanity”. Partly this is due to the fact that socialists are intensely interested in politics and changing the world, passions which most people don’t share. But this trait is exacerbated by the fact that both the Corbyn movement in Britain and the Sanders equivalent in the U.S. were overwhelmingly political campaigns. They involved people signing up to organisations dedicated to changing the political sphere. Something they were incredibly successful in doing – in January 2018 the Labour party had 552,000 members.

However, they lacked an analogue in the economic sphere. They weren’t accompanied by a palpable rise in industrial unrest or trade union recruitment, features that invariably occurred in the past – for instance during the Great Depression – when left-wing movements started to take hold.

And, revealingly, the crank insult is rarely, if ever, applied to strikers or organised labour. This is not for reasons of timidity or acquiescence. Workers prepared to fight for their rights have been called ‘the enemy within’, work-shy, harbingers of mob rule or the naïve puppets of far left agitators. They are clearly seen as dangerous. But calling them ‘cranks’ just wouldn’t be taken seriously. And this, in a back-handed way, highlights the fatal flaw in Corbynism. It never overcame the Labour party’s fundamental weakness among private sector workers. And this, remember, was a party specifically founded to advance their interests. The 2019 electoral collapse had other, proximate causes – notably Brexit – but the exclusively ‘political’ character of the Corbyn surge was a major reason it was so ephermeral.

An alliance between the crank Left and a movement of alienated private sector workers would be some people’s worst nightmare.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If the public is wrong about nearly everything, why are they right about Corbyn?

According to polling, most British people – 58% in fact – think it was right that Jeremy Corbyn was suspended from the Labour party for saying the scale of the problem of antisemitism within it had been “dramatically overstated” by political opponents and the media.

This is despite the fact that it obviously was. The British people were told in all seriousness that Corbyn represented “an existential threat” to Jews in the UK, that Labour was a “cesspool” of antisemitism, that it was “institutionally racist” (which the EHRC specifically refuted), that Corbyn was leading an “antisemite army”, that the “soul of the nation” was at stake in the General Election, that if elected Corbyn would be the first antisemitic leader in the West since 1945, even that (courtesy of ‘respected’ conservative commentator, Simon Heffer) he was planning to “reopen Auschwitz”.

A search of eight newspapers revealed there to be nearly five and a half thousand articles on the subject of Corbyn, antisemitism and Labour between June 2015 and March 2019. And that’s discounting the voluminous coverage on broadcast and social media.

The truth, as Corbyn patiently relayed in interviews about the EHRC report, was in reality only 0.3% of Labour members had been accused of antisemitism. On average, however, the public believed 34% had. Exaggeration by a factor of 100*.

In fact, the two polling results are not remotely divergent. If you believe – in line with what you have been incessantly told by the media for the previous four years – that the Labour party is a nest of vicious bullying and racism (such that a third of Labour members have been accused of antisemitism) and that Jeremy Corbyn had allowed this to happen, probably out of his own hatred of Jews, then you’re likely to think it right that he is drummed out of the Labour party.

And therein lies the problem, the elephant in the room. Thanks to our atrocious media – a description that includes the supposedly liberal-left Guardian and the ‘impartial’ BBC – the British public is staggeringly misinformed. But few people, certainly not the politicians and media organisations who live by these misconceptions, will admit this.

In 2013, that noted far-left organisation, the Royal Statistical Society, pointed that out on a range of issues public perceptions are wildly out of kilter with reality. So much so that we are really talking about two separate countries – perceived UK and real UK.

To take one example, 58% of the public think crime is rising when in fact there were 53% fewer incidents in 2012 compared to 1995 (if you want an update crime fell by 9% between March 2019 and March 2020).

The perception of benefit fraud (24% of the ‘benefits bill’) is 34 times greater than the reality (0.7%). Teenage pregnancy rates are believed to be 25 times higher than they actually are. More people think foreign aid is the largest item of government expenditure than believe it to be either pensions or education despite the latter two being vastly greater.

On average the public thinks 31% of the population are immigrants when 13% actually are. The average estimate is that black and Asian people make up 30% of the population when in truth it is 11%. The most common belief is that 24% of the population are Muslim when it is really 5%. And so on.

Electorally speaking, there are undeniable pitfalls in bluntly telling the public that many of their most cherished beliefs are nonsense. But there are also obvious drawbacks – an amply demonstrated by the last Labour government – in meekly accepting the ‘reality’ presented by the mainstream media. The atrocity of the Work Capability Assessment was enshrined into law because the Blair and Brown governments not only swallowed, but actively propagated, the idea that millions of people on sickness benefits could find a job if only they were motivated enough. The abuse at Yarl’s Wood had its roots in the belief that Britain was being overrun by asylum seekers and immigrants, a dehumanization that has become a thousand times worse since. The lies behind the Iraq War became second nature to the government and were unremittingly amplified by an obedient media so that millions were shocked when Iraq didn’t turn out to have any WMD. The consequences of that duplicity are immense. It is estimated that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the illegal 2003 invasion.

When fiction becomes reality, and will not be admitted to be fiction even when conclusively demonstrated to be so, you have a huge problem.

Jeremy Corbyn attempted to tell the truth, rather than embroider myths, about each of the above issues. He also promised to confront billionaire, tax avoiding newspaper owners, not curry favour with them as previous Labour Prime Ministers had done.  As a result he was the victim of what two (marginal) commentators, Peter Oborne and David Hearst, have dubbed “a carefully planned and brutally executed political assassination”. His suspension for ‘downplaying’ antisemitism is merely the coup de grâce. 

Every British newspaper, with the exception of the Morning Star, avidly supported Corbyn’s suspension. So Keir Starmer’s “difficult” decision will find virtually unanimous support amongst the media and the political class. Attacking your own unreconstructed radicals – what Americans call “counter scheduling” – is seen as the tried and trusted way for a centre-left party to attain electoral credibility.

But even if this approach leads to success, which is highly questionable, the victory will be a Pyrrhic one. Accepting the media’s presentation of reality will so tightly hem in the freedom of action of a future Labour government that searing injustices like the ones outlined above are almost certain. And there will be no economic boom to soothe the sores with broadly egalitarian spending.

Reinstate Jeremy Corbyn and start telling, not repressing, the truth.

*The number of complaints of antisemitism differs according to when the start date is set.  According to the party in February 2019 it had received complaints of antisemitism concerning about 673 members since April 2018, about 0.1% of its membership. Or 300 times less than 34%.

Chasing Unicorns? Orwell, socialism and patriotism

“England has got to be true to herself”, a famous English socialist once wrote. “She is not being true to herself while the refugees who have sought our shores are penned up in concentration camps, and company directors work out subtle schemes to dodge their Excess Profits Tax”.

George Orwell typed these words in 1940, in the middle of the Blitz as German bombs were raining down. His short book, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, has subsequently become the ur-text of a patriotic vision of socialism. Corbynism, it is claimed, fatally lacked this essential ingredient of popularity – indeed stamping on any tendencies in this direction. This was a major reason why it crashed and burnt in the 2019 election. Socialism still – in Orwell’s phrase – has not “really touched the heart of the English people”.

Keir Starmer, on the other hand, is determined to avoid such a fate, wrapping the Labour party (literally) in the Union Jack and signalling a deep emotional attachment to the monarchy. He even ordered in his MPs to abstain on a bill authorising the security services to commit murder and torture without legal repercussion – for fear of appearing ‘patriotically’ suspect.

Don’t sing ‘Rule Britannia’

But the interesting thing about The Lion and the Unicorn is that the patriotism it pays homage to is not the same patriotism that the Labour party in 2020 is seeking to identify with. Starmer’s conference speech was trailed to the media as rebranding Labour as the party of “flag, forces and family”. Blue Labour, the Labour faction which heralds ‘conservative socialism’, is committed to the triad of “family, faith and flag”. There is a subtle difference if you look carefully.

However, Orwell explicitly rejects the idea that the patriotism of the English working class revolves around these cornerstones. Its patriotism is “profound” but “the working man’s heart does not leap when he sees a Union Jack”. Rather, there is an ingrained hatred of war, militarism and uniforms, and – outside of war – a widespread refusal to join the army even in times of mass unemployment. “So deep does this feeling go” writes Orwell, “that for a hundred years past the officers of the British Army, in peace time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty.”

In Orwell’s view, “all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff is done by small minorities”.

Of course, The Lion and the Unicorn was written nearly 80 years ago. Attitudes may have changed – witness the ubiquitous uniformed soldiers before kick-off at football matches and the pressure of conformity about poppy wearing. But Orwell made a crucial distinction between nationalism or jingoism and patriotism.

It is a similar story when it comes to religion or ‘faith’ as modern-day adherents like to call it. “The common people” says Orwell, are not puritanical and “without definite religious belief”. Though there is a “deep tinge” of Christian belief, in terms of organised religion, the Anglican Church is mainly the preserve of the landed gentry and the Nonconformist sects only appeal to minorities.

Defining patriotism

So what then is patriotism? According to Orwell, it is a purely defensive attitude and protective of a particular way of life. “It is bound up,” Orwell writes, “with solid breakfasts, gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes.”

Mercifully he soon becomes less misty-eyed and then makes an astute point about English culture which, I believe, is still true decades later. The English – despite the contentedly defeatist attitude of much of the liberal-left which sought salvation, oddly, in the neoliberal European Union – are not irredeemably conservative, capitalist or right-wing. This fatalistic stance should have been exploded by the 2017 election in which a left-wing Labour party gained nearly 42% of the vote in England. But there is, Orwell says, a definitive privateness about English life:

The liberty of the individual is still believed in, almost as in the nineteenth century. But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you.

Undeniably, this feeling can be used to fuel a seemingly endless housing boom – rooted in the comfort induced by seeing the value of the house you own continually rising and in viewing your home as a haven against the world. But it can also be – and would be by a serious Left – utilized in the opposite cause. In a country where millions have scant security as private tenants, and are being evicted as we speak, and where wealthy individuals and businesses buy up hundreds of flats and houses for no other purpose than renting them or selling them on, “the liberty to have a home of your own”, but not necessarily one you are free to sell, is the kind of aspiration the Left should champion. In Marxist terms, we live in a world where ‘use value’ (the function of a house or flat to provide security, stability and shelter) has become the slave of ‘exchange value’ (seeing them as simply ‘units’ to make money from). That is why Orwell could proclaim a fervent belief in the ‘liberty of the individual’ but also advocate (in the political programme that accompanies The Lion and the Unicorn) the abolition of private land ownership in urban areas – and see no contradiction between the two.

Orwell the Red

Indeed, what is striking about Orwell ‘patriotic socialism’ is that the socialism involved is of the deepest red. The second half of The Lion and the Unicorn is devoted to espousing an “English Revolution” that would set free “the native genius of the English people”. Railways, banks, major industries and land would all be nationalised (Orwell recommends allowing private ownership of land of up to 15 acres in rural areas, but as seen above, would completely abolish private land ownership – and thus landlordism – in town areas), incomes would be restricted to a ten to one variation, the House of Lords abolished and private schools flooded with state-aided pupils or simply closed. Orwell even envisages the stock market being torn down!

However, it is interesting that despite Orwell’s intense anti-Communism, his economic beliefs do not seem vastly different in their fundamentals. Orwell defined himself explicitly as a “democratic socialist”, not a Communist, and clearly saw great danger in vesting political power in an all-seeing political party, but in economic terms, did not see any alternative to state socialism.  “From the moment that all productive goods have been declared the property of the State,” he writes, “the common people will feel, as they cannot feel now, that the State, is themselves.” Despite fighting in an anarchist/syndicalist revolution in Spain, and with a Trotskyist battalion, just four years previously Orwell seems to have imbibed none of their critique of state socialism, nor their advocacy – indeed living example of – workers’ control.

Nonetheless, by comparison with Orwellian socialism, Corbyn’s mellow social democracy appears – notwithstanding the hysteria it generated – quite tame. And Blue Labour, which might claim to be the inheritor in the Labour party of the Orwellian vision, seems oblivious to his decrying of the party’s “timid reformism”. In aligning with – at best tolerating – insipid centrist leaders like Starmer and Miliband there is an all too common wilful blindness to Orwell’s radical side.

Ashamed of their own country

But the incongruous thing – and probably a large reason Orwell is claimed by divergent political philosophies – is that he combines a frankly revolutionary socialism with unvarnished contempt for left-wing intellectuals. Orwell berates the “shallow leftism” of intellectuals and the “mechanically anti-British attitude” which was de rigueur on the radical left of the time. Much of the contempt stemmed from widespread left-wing support for Stalin and the Soviet Union. Orwell, by contrast, had seen Stalin’s inherent brutality – and well as his anti-revolutionary stance – at first hand during the Spanish Civil War. However, some of the critique transcends the circumstances of the time. In The Lion and the Unicorn and elsewhere (for example the essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’), Orwell develops the idea of “transferred nationalism” – taking all the emotions, affection and loyalty that might have been attached to your own country and simply directing them somewhere else – the Soviet Union, primarily, in his era. Despite its pretentions, this mental transference gets the protagonist no closer to “genuinely internationalist outlook”.

The same transference was in evidence during the EU referendum campaign and the endless negotiations that followed. Implicit in much of the liberal-left embrace of the Remain cause was the idea that virtually everything that made life bearable in England came from ‘civilised’ European influence, without which the country would descend into a corporate free-loading, racist hell-hole (ironically, in devoting most of their energies to taking down Jeremy Corbyn – and thus helping Boris Johnson – liberal Remainers ensured this vision would come to pass). The idea that a home-grown socialism was even possible was dismissively rejected as a contradiction in terms.

Thus, Europe (the institutions of the EU) became a purely benign endeavour, without conflict or desire, pitted against a country whose temporary, austerity-wreaking rulers (a trait they shared with the EU) were seen as representative of its eternal character. But genuine internationalism involves the recognition that all countries (including pan-governmental entities and repressed or colonised nations), have their own elites and plebeians, their own fractures between capital and labour, their own bigots and mobs, and their own interests which leaders will attempt to pursue.

Orwell, notwithstanding his unabashed patriotism, is aware of this. Thus, in his treatment of India (at the time part of the British Empire) he can recognise both that Britain, out of fear of trade competition and a desire to make rule easier, has artificially held back Indian development and that, partly as a consequence of British domination, the average Indian suffers most keenly at the hands of his fellow-countrymen. “The petty Indian capitalist exploits the town worker with the utmost ruthlessness,” notes Orwell, “the peasant lives from birth to death in the grip of the money-lender”. That kind of analysis seems strangely sophisticated today.

Return of the ‘drowsy years’

However, in one important way, Orwell’s essay is rooted in its own time; a time when Britain (and its Empire) seemed the only obstacle to the total domination of Nazi Germany. He likens Britain to a family with the wrong members in control – the dividend drawers, the landed class, the “functionless” owners of industry – who are holding back the intelligent and capable. The ruling class, in Orwell’s view, are not corrupt so much as “unteachable” and mired in self-deception. While Nazi Germany has the SS man, we have the rent collector.

War, said Orwell, was the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up long-term processes and brings previously unacknowledged realities to the surface. In the midst of the Blitz, the “drowsy years”, as Orwell encapsulated the 1930s, were well and truly over and it was possible, necessary actually, to become both revolutionary and realistic.

But now the dividend drawers, the owners of industry, the tax evaders are back, if they ever really went away. Rent is the (anti)-lifeblood of the economy. Students are cajoled into returning to halls of residence so that they can pay rent to the owners. The spectre of city centres devoid of commuters petrifies the owners of commercial and residential properties who see their rental streams drying up before their eyes. Hedge fund managers and bankers are exempted from quarantine regulations because of their alleged contribution to the economy. The company directors of Orwell’s time who try and dodge “Excess Profits Tax” have been superseded by a multi-trillion dollar tax avoidance industry orchestrated by banks and green-lighted by governments.

The outright treachery that frightened Orwell has been replaced by ordinary corruption. The reverence for the impartiality of the law even if it is unjust, which Orwell believed characterised England, now pales before the staging of show trials of those who embarrass the rulers of the world. The “right to exploit others for profit” is deemed sacrosanct while a bill allowing MI5 agents to murder British citizens with impunity is waived through the House of Commons with the connivance of the Labour party. The drowsy years are back with a vengeance and nothing seems likely to jolt us back into attentiveness.

It's only Marxist if the Labour Party does it

Reports that Chancellor Rishi Sunak is ‘considering’ raising corporation tax from 19 to 24% are fascinating not least because of what they say about our mainstream media.

Because no-one in the MSM seems to have noticed that even mooting such an idea completely contradicts the foundations of Tory economics.

Sunak, it is alleged, is mulling increasing corporation tax by 5 percentage points in order to boost revenue by £12 billion. But the crux of Conservative economic thinking going back decades is that the way to increase the tax yield is actually to cut rates on the wealthy and big business.

This conviction underlay George Osborne’s decision to reduce the top rate of tax from 50 to 45p in 2013. And it undergirded Tory minister David Lidington’s 2017 assertion that corporate tax yield has been ‘shooting up’ since tax levels started plummeting precipitously after the coalition took office.

The theory, as most things seem to in British politics, comes from America. In 1974 – so the story goes – economist Arthur Laffer met Dick Chaney in a Washington bar and drew a diagram on a napkin showing that increasing tax rates beyond a certain levels causes tax revenues to decline, not increase. Apparently, high tax rates compel the wealthy to work less or evade taxes (which obviously the government is absolutely powerless to prevent).

Though the napkin itself did not survive, in the next decade when Ronald Reagan was president, the ‘Laffer Curve’ justified swingeing cuts in personal taxes for the rich and seemingly endless reductions in corporate tax rates.

And the ethereal napkin, despite its empirical emptiness, has continued to guide the policy of western (in fact most) governments. Just four years ago, Theresa May was proposing a corporate tax rate of 17% and was prepared to go even lower to attain the most ‘competitive’ rate in the G20.

Up to now, however. If the theory is correct Sunak should be advocating further tax reductions precisely in order to increase revenue. But instead he’s arguing for a tax rise, in the process damning the entire theory as completely wrong-headed.

Before this latest leak, cracks were already showing. In the last election campaign, Boris Johnson committed to delaying May’s corporation tax cuts in order to fund the NHS, which is utterly nonsensical is you believe, as Johnson did, that cutting corporate tax increases the tax yield. But Sunak’s musings, even if they are not acted upon, drive the proverbial coach and horses through Conservative economics.

But it won’t be just the Conservative party that will be affected. At the last election, as we know, Marxist Anti-Christ Jeremy Corbyn – who proposed raising corporate tax to 26% (2 points is all the difference between sensible economics and wealth devouring Stalinist madness) – was banished to the outer darkness by all that is holy. The new model Labour party has bought into the idea that he lost because he was ‘too left-wing’. Indeed, Blairism and Brownism were conspicuous by their unquestioning acceptance of the precepts of the Conservative economics and the private good/public bad dogma.

But now the Conservative party itself seems to be rejecting some of those very precepts. So what is the Labour party to do?  Shadow Chancellor Annaliese Dodds, who recently mooted a wealth tax only to find herself out on a limb, is surrounded by convinced Blairites in the shadow Treasury team. Bridget Phillipson, Pat Mcfadden and Wes Streeting would have great difficulty – probably more difficulty than Conservatives who have a pragmatic side – in backing corporate tax rises. Indeed Phillipson can’t even commit to abolishing hospital parking charges for NHS workers.

   
It may be that the Sunak story is all wind and no substance. Some of us still remember Theresa May’s ‘burning injustices’, her call for responsible capitalism and proposal for workers on company boards, the sum total of which, in the fullness of time, was the banning of toilet charges at mainline train stations. But even if Conservative corporate tax rises turn out to be oxymoronic, the mere fact that they were put ‘out there’ and not denied is incredibly significant.