Torygeddon: the current political vacuum

Drew Milne from Cambridge Left Unity on the need for a social movement that goes beyond the Labour Party and electoral politics

Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour are running out of time to put together a viable challenge at the next general election, even if the next election comes as late as 2020. Electoral disappointment could quickly turn to widespread disaffection among Labour’s new members and Corbyn supporters. So while it is right to support the movement around Corbyn on many fronts, there’s a risk that the hopes raised by Corbyn’s leadership turn sour.

There are also clear strategic weaknesses. Corbyn’s approach to respecting the EU referendum result alienates almost everyone. His inability to take a political grip on the crisis of Brexit is now deep and serious.

The reluctance to address the collapse of Labour in Scotland and to respond to the politics of nationalism appears blinded by London perspectives. The awkward truth that ousting the Tories might require strategic alliances with the SNP and others parties, not least the Greens, but even the LibDems, appears not to have been thought through.

Corbyn looks unlikely to offer any substantive new thinking on constitutional reform, proportional representation and federalism. Corbyn’s policy proposals appear reactive rather than sustained or imaginative, perhaps because he has so few parliamentary colleagues he can trust.

Most fundamental of all, in what might be the last decade in which humankind can put the emergency break on the ecocidal juggernaut of capitalism, there’s no sign of the urgency of responding to climate change.

Amid a yawning vacuum of policy thinking, the electorate seem likely to be offered a bit more money for the NHS; a defense of secondary education against grammar schools; some modest public sector infrastructure investment; maybe a few bits of the rail network back under public control; and some gestures towards what Robin Cook naively called an ethical foreign policy. The need for pragmatic compromises with Labour traditions and existing Labour MPs may mean that Corbyn’s electoral manifesto ends up looking all too similar to Ed Miliband’s poor old tablet of stone.

Yes, the current government could still come apart over its  racist approach to managing UK capitalism. Yes, there will be political opportunities, notably in the twists and turns around how much of the UK leaves the EU. Political conditions can change very quickly. But with the historic loss of Scottish Labour MPs and boundary changes, any Labour Party imaginable will have to pull off a miracle to win the next general election.

Although he has been heroically calm in the face of sustained hostility, Corbyn could be forgiven for not having the energy to fight on beyond 2020 to a general election in 2025. By then it is hard to imagine the UK as anything but a sinking and fragmented island. Imagining Corbyn’s absence at some point in the future, there’s hardly a pool of talent among existing Labour MPs. New leaders could emerge to take forward the regrouping begun by Corbyn, but this is to put long term faith in what amounts to a cult of leadership.

The democratic processes of Labour’s internal machinations are far from encouraging. Lots of surprising things may happen, but it is hard to believe that Labour could win a general election in any form even by 2025. Torygeddon beckons.

With the world falling around our ears, with democracy and the very survival of the human environment in deep crisis, hoping that Corbyn can save the day risks becoming a structural delusion. Sacrificing all other political struggles in the hope that parliamentary electoral politics might come good at some point in the next ten years is also a strategy for despair.

The struggle for parliamentary representation needs extra-parliamentary insurgency more than ever. What can still be defended must be defended. The shift of political energy behind Corbyn coincides with a strange absence of protest around, for instance, the immediate crises in Syria and Turkey, along with a loss of direction in campaigns against austerity. There’s even a curious atmosphere in which no-one wants to rock the boat, for example by making radical feminist arguments against Labour’s traditional masculinity.

Rather than calling for new thinking, the struggles within Labour seem more likely to become demands for tribal loyalty. Beyond defending what can be defended, there is then an urgent need to articulate the necessity of revolutionary change. Both globally and in the UK, the arguments need to be made for the free movement of people, for the right to decent housing, for sustainable transport, for radical environmental policy and for fundamental new ecological restraints on ecocidal capitalism.

We need to build anti-capitalist global solidarity and we can’t wait ten years to do so.

Against which, there’s not much point hoping that promises to put a bit more money into the NHS and schools, maybe make the tax system a bit fairer, will play well enough with middle England to give English Labour a chance to run a government. Socialists are joining the Labour party in droves to fight the necessary struggles from within the Labour Party, but there’s a political vacuum opening up.

What is left of British socialism risks spending the next ten years struggling to radicalise a Labour party that has still, by and large, failed to recognise the need to become more than an electoral machine, as its rather shabby record in local government makes all too obvious.

Yet again, the historical conditions require Gramsci’s pessimism of the intellect, and some new optimism of the will, but this looks like the bleakest moment in British politics in a long time. It is scarcely possible to identify the political formations and social forces capable of organising the radical changes that are necessary, and such changes are necessary a lot sooner than, say, the election of a reformed social democratic Labour party some time around 2030.

Yes, the Labour Party is an important site of political struggle. Yes, the Labour Party needs to revitalize its values and core support. And yes, the Labour Party needs the support of socialists. But the fragmented forces of British socialism should not all be given up to the hope that the Labour Party might, just might, perhaps, finally be won over to a position that maybe resembles an old political project that is no longer relevant to the current crises of global capitalism.

More pressing is the need to develop a politics that can tackle capitalism, and can articulate the diversity of anti-capitalist struggles. The movement around Corbyn represents a historic opportunity, but socialists in Britain cannot afford to become so focused on electoral expedience that capitalism is allowed to burn, while canvassers and election agents fiddle their expenses.

Socialists both in and out of the Labour Party need a socialist critique of the limitations of Labour politics, and now more than ever. Aspects of such a critique – clarity of strategic arguments, models for concrete activism and solidarity in struggle – must in part be articulated from outside the internal struggles of the Labour Party.

Left Unity, along with other political groups weakened by the new focus on Corbyn’s Labour, notably the Greens, have a part to play in articulating anti-capitalist critique and in supporting struggles within the Labour Party. The Labour Party remains an important part of the Labour movement with a role in anti-capitalist politics. But it cannot be the only form of such politics, not least because it is a long way from becoming an anti-capitalist party.

The historic mistakes and new illusions of Labour Party reformism don’t offer a strategy for socialists. We need a plan that goes beyond hopes for some future regrouping of social and political forces when either Corbyn, or the movement around Corbyn, become exhausted. Placing too much hope in a leader who is obliged to compromise with hostile parliamentary colleagues can only encourage the fantasy that the radical solution lies in finding some new charismatic leader. The Labour Party needs a social movement that extends well beyond the Labour Party. Left Unity has a part to play in building that movement.