The New British Left
Corbynism should have died a little past 3AM on the 13th of December, 2019. Jeremy Corbyn even delivered the eulogy himself at his general election count, declaring he would not lead the Labour Party into any future campaigns. “We will forever continue the cause for socialism, for social justice and for a society based on the needs of all,” he said. “Those ideas are eternal.” Set against the backdrop of a demolished Red Wall, it was less a battle cry than a death rattle.
From then on, the spectre of Socialism was exorcised from the party as Starmer and his closest circle waged an unforgiving brutal crusade to wrestle the apparatus of the party from his predecessor. Corbynites were de-selected and barred from running as candidates, even when they commanded full support of the local constituency party. In their absence, Blairites and any other obedient lapdogs groomed for power in focus group test labs in Whitehall were parachuted into safe seats, defenestrating faithful party members and entrenching themselves into the organs of power. Even Corbyn himself was removed in a public putsch that would’ve made Stalin blush from how unabashedly blatant it was. Starmer’s victory effectively banished Corbynism back to its primordial pre-2015 state — a disconnected mess in search of a cohering force, its adherents cowered and adrift.
A year into Keir Starmer’s government, however, and the spectre of Corbynism continues to haunt the British left. Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana announced, to much fanfare on social media, that she was resigning from Labour in order to set up a new party with the former opposition leader, alongside various other independent MPs, campaigners and activists, intertwining the disparate groups that represent British socialism in a new popular force. Citing the prime minister’s welfare reforms, which were tortuously voted through a few weeks ago, and his pro-Israeli tilt regarding the ongoing genocide in Palestine as their rally call, this new burgeoning movement hopes to now carve itself out a niche part in the fragmenting British political landscape. With 500,000 interested members and growing, this -as-of-yet-unnamed party aims to ecclipse the already established parties to become the largest in Britain.
It couldn’t have had come at a better time. Political conditions have never been more fertile for a left-wing insurgency than now. The Prime Minister may have passed his welfare bill, but even the staunchest ‘Starmerite’ would be hard-pressed to claim this as a success. Reforms which were intended to save £5 billion annually will now cost the Treasury up to £6 billion and No.10’s authority is in tatters following a large backbench rebellion which publicly exposed the fault lines in the Labour camp. Satiated with their first taste of victory, rebels will now find themselves more confident in challenging the prime minister’s authority, knowing they can pry concessions.
One would think having such a hard-line, Stalinist approach to party management would mean a government ultra-committed and last-focused on implementing a grand vision, a national project of renewal. But what’s it all for? What is the animating force behind Starmerism? There’s no purpose to any of it. It smacks of late-Soviet authoritarianism: repression more out of habit than belief, in the service of a dying regime nobody believes in. The Starmer-Reeves-Streeting Triumvirate staked its pitch on the ambiguous concept of growth, yet there is none. Bold reforms like overhauling planning regulations and streamlining the welfare state are now stuck in this weird limbo: chiseled down to a bare-bones state that offers nothing meaningful yet tangible enough that it still riles up its biggest detractors. All that is left is Plan C: juice the house market and deregulate the city. To summarise: a politically bankrupt vision.
It should come as no surprise then that Starmer is now less popular than Corbyn and Farage. While the two are still divisive to the wider electorate, they at least can boast of having convictions, standing by a set of principles that can galvanize their fanatical following; no one is inspired, let alone pleased with, sterile neoliberalism in its death throes.
Research from More in Common last month showed that half a dozen once-safe Labour seats in London are already poised to switch to a prospective Corbyn-led party. What’s more, even Keir Starmer would be vulnerable to losing his seat in Holborn and St Pancras. The old party loyalties are dead (or at least in the early stages of terminal decay), evidenced by extreme volatility in polling. At the start of last year, Labour was polling as high as 49%; after a year in power, that figure is now 23%. During the same period, Reform UK has risen from just 5% to 27%. Some polls have put Nigel Farage’s party as high as 34%, a larger proportion than Labour received at the last election. Within just 18 months, Labour and the Conservatives have gone from a combined 76% of the electorate to just 36%.
While Reform has profited from disaffection on the Right, as well as from working-class voters angry about high levels of immigration, there is a fairly conspicuous gap in the political market. On the face of it, the Green Party should have been the obvious “Reform of the Left”. But the Greens have barely grown their support in the last 12 months, creeping from 7% at the general election to about 10% in polls now.
The only real surprise is how long it took for Corbynism 2.0 to get its act together: for all the shortcomings of the first version, the ideas that drove the movement have subsequently become common sense across an increasingly postliberal political spectrum. On all sides, it is now assumed that the purpose of the state is to protect a national community of producers from a parasitic globalism, and that social problems can be reduced to populist oppositions between the “many” and the “few”.
Corbyn’s much mocked post-election claim that he “won the argument” is, to an extent, true. He was, as it turns out, on the “right side of history” — albeit not, perhaps, in the way his supporters like to think.
Somewhat awkwardly, given the anti-capitalist pretensions of Corbynism, its history is that of capitalist development itself. After the 2008 crisis instigated the unravelling of neoliberalism, the consensus across global and political divides today seems to be that only a more state-driven economy — with greater barriers to the movement of goods and people — can keep the capitalist show on the road. In retrospect, it is clear that Corbynism was rubbing with the grain rather than against it.
As in 2015, any new party’s success depends on whether it is able to keep together the disparate, at times contradictory, elements of its support long enough to exploit the possibilities opened up by a rapidly fragmenting electoral system.
Despite some attempted historical revisionism from some of his supporters, Corbynism was never politically coherent. This spanned two sets of struggles straddling the financial crisis. From the pre-2008 period, vague liberal-Left anti-Iraq war and pro-Second Intifada sentiment combined with a sectarianism that was variously Leninist and, in certain localities, Islamist. Post-2008, meanwhile, saw a newer, younger Left opposed to austerity and welfare cuts led initially by the horizontalist likes of Occupy and the student movement, before being co-opted by the trade union machine in the Miliband era.
Corbyn remains a valuable asset to the British Left. Whereas other figureheads would have been too precise about their worldview to please the motley crew this movement assembled, his moralistic platitudes about peace and justice seemed to create a common, if vague, cause.
That does not mean there isn’t challenges ahead for this new British Left.
Labour’s Pasokification may have enabled the rise of the Corbynites, but Starmer’s triumph last year killed the idea that they were the Left’s best shot at winning power post-Blairism. This new movement is at once profoundly different from the giddy optimism which defined the early days of the Corbyn project, and a fruitless effort to recapture the magic of 2017.
The issue is that there is a very fragile potential coalition to hold together. It is set to include socially conservative Gaza independents with whom Corbyn sits in Parliament, Leninist organisers and operators with whom he has long surrounded himself, plus socially liberal young Leftists who likely feel the pull of the Green Party under a potential Zack Polanski leadership. In the intense social media heat of how views are aired and policed on the Left today — something Corbynism 1.0 did not have to reckon with in 2015 — even the magnetic pull of Palestine may not prevent this coalition from crumbling.
We’ve seen some of these electoral experiments before, from “Respect” to the “People’s Alliance of the Left”. They tend to be led by people who, despite seeing themselves as Trotsky-style strategic geniuses, draw upon little experience of political success and operate in a state of militant obscurity happily disconnected from public opinion. The legacy of Corbyn’s leadership of one of the country’s traditional parties of government, however, means the current provisional committee for a new party begins with a pool of existing MPs and muscle memory of steering a mass movement. Beyond this, precisely which social and political divides this iteration of Corbynism seeks to exploit is unclear. Without any capacity to convincingly call upon a “people” or “many” as its core constituency, the Left has little to say on the national stage other than “nobody likes us and we don’t care”.
For Corbyn, though, that could be enough: to play spoiler, rather than claim the spoils. Even his supporters acknowledge that, initially at least, he had no intention of winning the 2015 Labour leadership contest. His goal, then and now, was to change the parameters of mainstream Leftist debate, to end the party’s subjugation to New Labour and take it back towards its socialist roots. As mass politics crumbles (except possibly among the populist Right), the eking out of small victories in specific localities shaped by particular demographic dynamics could still make heavy political weather.