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 21st 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 21st 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.
