UnHerd: Can Keir Starmer rescue Labour?

Keir Starmer was victorious because he was the best candidate to take Labour to at least some sort of electoral respectability. His campaign was planned, professional and aimed at Labour members exhausted by repeated defeats. That, for now, is enough to give him a mandate that will last beyond the exceptional politics of the coronavirus crisis. His actions in the first few days of his leadership are already indicating that this professionalism maybe the hallmark of a new era. In this he has been helped by the weakness and division of his opponents within the party. [...]

This failure was compounded in the election for deputy leader. Since 2015 the left has unified around single candidates and slates to win elections. Not his time. It was split between support for Angela Rayner, nominated by Momentum, and Richard Burgon, supported by McDonnell. Rayner won her victory; Burgon was beaten into third place. [...]

What will Keir Starmer do and how quickly? Historically, Labour leaders focus on two aspects of leadership: management and policy. Neil Kinnock was the example of a leader who used the party machine to attack Labour’s internal dissenters and show the electorate it was serious. It was his courage in the Eighties that paved the way for New Labour in the Nineties. He brought in new, younger management of the party, most notably in the form of Peter Mandelson as Director of Communications in 1985, but also promoted young new MPs such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and most of the future New Labour government. [...]

The first item will be cleaning up anti-Semitism. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has been summoning evidence from a wide range of Labour members to get into the history of this mess, going back to when Corbyn was elected leader in 2015. There are pending legal as well as political consequences. Labour has to show not just contrition for the past; it has to reveal its managerial and political failures and then prove that it has a defined route to ensure they are never repeated. Action has to happen immediately and be visible.

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TLDR News: Johnson's 'Power Grab': The Cabinet Reshuffle Explained

Yesterday Number 10 announced some pretty major changes to the makeup of Johnson's Cabinet with the most significant change coming in the form of Javid's resignation. The former Chancellor of the Exchequer was replaced by Rishi Sunak, a chancellor some speculate will be more loyal to Johnson and Cumming's plans. Is this a standard reshuffle or an attempt by Johnson the gain greater control over Number 11.

Politico: The Labour civil war has already started

The Labour left was not scrabbling to save the blushes of Corbyn. Rather, it was seeking to frame the inevitable battle for the soul of the party in its own terms. For decades, the left longed to hold the levers of power in Labour, and it will not release its grip without a fight.

Blaming the historic drubbing on anything other than the left-wing leader and his policy platform was a no-brainer. The Labour left needed a scapegoat, and Brexit, an obvious factor in the defeat but far from the whole story, was it.

After the 2017 election, in which Corbyn deprived Theresa May of a majority, many critics of the leader in the centre and centre-right of the party sucked up their differences and put on a united front. Despite splits over Brexit deepening the rifts in the shadows, Corbynism became a vast umbrella under which various factions could sit, claiming to be represented by the squirming, triangulating positions the Labour leader settled on over different issues. [...]

The difficulty for the contestants is that Labour is an unpredictable beast. The 500,000-strong membership, many of whom joined the party in 2015 specifically to elect Corbyn into the top job, is pro-EU, pro-left and pro-Corbyn.

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The Guardian Politics Weekly: A bad week for Boris Johnson

It appears that Boris Johnson has been taking tips from the Theresa May electioneering handbook, as this week he lurched from one PR disaster to another.

Last Friday police were called to the flat Johnson shares with his partner, Carrie Symonds, and since then Johnson has been on the back foot: dodging reporters, avoiding TV debates, and saying strange things about building toy buses.

Could the wheels be coming off Boris’s cardboard bus?

Rafael Behr is joined to discuss by the Observer’s Michael Savage, Katy Balls from the Spectator and Tom Kibasi from the Institute for Public Policy Research.

Also this week: the next prime minister will be decided by 160,000 Conservative party members. We ask Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, who they are and what is known about them.

Labour’s shadow cabinet met on Tuesday to resolve their second referendum conundrum once and for all. But didn’t. What’s stopping them?

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The Guardian: The new left economics: how a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism

There is a dawning recognition that a new kind of economy is needed: fairer, more inclusive, less exploitative, less destructive of society and the planet. “We’re in a time when people are much more open to radical economic ideas,” says Michael Jacobs, a former prime ministerial adviser to Gordon Brown. “The voters have revolted against neoliberalism. The international economic institutions – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund – are recognising its downsides.” Meanwhile, the 2008 financial crisis and the previously unthinkable government interventions that halted it have discredited two central neoliberal orthodoxies: that capitalism cannot fail, and that governments cannot step in to change how the economy works. [...]

The new leftwing economics wants to see the redistribution of economic power, so that it is held by everyone – just as political power is held by everyone in a healthy democracy. This redistribution of power could involve employees taking ownership of part of every company; or local politicians reshaping their city’s economy to favour local, ethical businesses over large corporations; or national politicians making co-operatives a capitalist norm. [...]

And yet, outside McDonnell’s circle and the transatlantic radical left, the new economics has gone largely unnoticed – or been casually derided. The black holes of Brexit and the Tory leadership contest are partly responsible, sucking attention away from everything else. But so is the radical nature of the new economics itself. Transforming or ending capitalism as we know it – the new economists differ as to which is the goal – is a difficult idea for most British politicians and journalists to take on board. After half a century accepting the economic status quo, they associate any leftwing alternatives to it either with out-of-date postwar social democracy – aka “the 70s” – or with leftwing authoritarianism, with present-day Venezuela or the Soviet Union. [...]

Contrary to his usual portrayal as a statist ogre, McDonnell believes there are limits to how far the left can increase taxes and government spending. In his view, many voters are unwilling, or simply unable, to pay much more tax – especially when living standards are squeezed, as now. He also believes that central government has lost authority: it is seen as simultaneously too weak, short of money thanks to austerity; and too strong – too intrusive and domineering towards citizens. Instead of relying on the state to create a better society, one of McDonnell’s close allies argues, leftwing governments, at both the municipal and national level, “have to get into changing how capitalism works”. [...]

Yet the problem for the left with settling for “a different capitalism”, however temporarily, is that it may simply enable capitalism to regroup, and then resume its Darwinian progress. Arguably this is exactly what happened in Britain during the last century. After the politically explosive economic slump of the 1930s – the precursor to today’s crisis of capitalism – during the postwar years many business leaders seemed to accept the need for a more egalitarian economy, and developed close relationships with Labour politicians. But once the economy and society had been stabilised, and rightwingers such as Thatcher started making a seductive case for a return to raw capitalism, the businessmen switched sides.

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Politico: UK worse off under all Brexit scenarios

The government analysis was echoed later in the day by a separate report from the Bank of England, which warned economic output in the U.K. could drop by as much as 8 percent if Britain drops out of the EU without a deal in place, compared to expectations had the U.K. stayed in. That compares to a 6.25 drop during the 2008 financial crisis. [...]

Brexit-supporting MPs were also quick to dismiss the Bank’s analysis, recalling its (so far incorrect) pre-referendum warning that a Leave vote could result in a recession — a prediction that was linked by Brexiteers to an anti-Brexit campaign by the David Cameron government that they branded “Project Fear.” [...]

Likewise, the opposition Labour Party was quick to attack the government. John McDonnell, the Labour party’s shadow chancellor, said: “The Bank has confirmed what other independent reports this week have been telling us: a no-deal Brexit could be even worse than the financial crisis of 10 years ago, and the country would be much worse under Theresa May’s deal. Instead of plowing on with this discredited deal the government should set new priorities that would protect jobs and the economy.”[...]

Regionally, the northeast of England would be the hardest hit economically in a no-deal or Canada-style free-trade agreement scenario, according to the document. Under no deal, the region’s growth would be more than 10 points lower than it would have been inside the EU.

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UnHerd: How Corbyn captured the middle class

This generated a centre-Left politics which pitched itself largely to the middle classes – with a nod to the poor through policies such as increased social security payments. When Tony Blair boasted in 1997 that under New Labour Britain would retain the toughest anti-trade union laws in the western world, he was consigning Labour’s hitherto electoral base to the dustbin of history. [...]

But the Corbyn project is also a response to changing electoral realities. During the Blair years, the centre-Left fashioned a rod for its own back by hanging everything on electoral expediency. Thus, when the compromisers of the third-way stopped winning elections after the financial crisis, their project was an empty husk. If Labour was going to lose anyway – and the centre-Left has been doing that just about everywhere of late – then better, surely, to lose on its own terms and with policies activists actually believe in. [...]

Where continuity with New Labour remains, though, is in Corbynism’s pitch to the middle classes. Indeed, the Left that is in the ascendance in Britain is marked by a combination of hard-Left rhetoric and centre-Left policies that – on paper at least – would benefit the middle classes. In this sense Corbynism is an inversion of a central New Labour principle. Blair and New Labour sought to appease the Daily Mail in public, while pushing redistributory policies via stealth. In contrast, Corbynism scares the hell out of the Right-wing newspapers while pursuing – in public at least – a fairly orthodox social democratic agenda.  [...]

To be sure, Labour’s tentative economic agenda for Britain appears to be brimming with interesting ideas and initiatives. It is just not socialist in any recognisable sense. The current fetish for nationalisation among Labour activists, for example, is not matched by a radical party platform. Labour is pledging to renationalise just a handful of key services – the railways, the postal service, water and electricity.

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Politico: Cuba on the Thames

Corbyn’s fate greatly depends on the unfolding Brexit drama, expected to climax in the coming weeks as the U.K. pushes for a deal before its scheduled exit in March 2019. But the impact of a Corbyn government, should he assume the reins of power, could be much more significant.

While the prospect of a Corbyn government would likely make post-Brexit trade relations with Europe more straightforward in the short term, predictions of a socialist London have already set alarm bells ringing in Washington, according to U.S. officials asked to draw up memos for the State Department in case of another snap election this year. [...]

Corbyn promised a Britain in which the rich would be more heavily taxed, utilities and the railways would be nationalized, the government would invest in 400,000 jobs focused on tackling climate change, and large companies would be forced to give workers stakes of up to 10 percent and pay annual dividends to staff. He signaled Labour would end British backing for Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen, immediately recognize a Palestinian state, and tilt firmly away from the U.S. as a key ally.[...]

In 2015, during Corbyn’s first conference, lobbyists were conspicuously thin on the ground, uncertain of how to influence the most socialist Labour leadership in modern history. This year, BP, Google, Visa, Bombardier and Fujitsu were all represented with stands at the conference floor. PwC, Hitachi, Novartis and Cisco all hosted or co-hosted fringe events, and numerous others sent lobbyists keen to fix up meetings with members of a potential government-in-waiting.

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New Statesman: Corbynism 2.0: the radical ideas shaping Labour’s future

In recent years, however, the left has rediscovered the politics of futurism. Books such as Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future, Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists and Peter Frase’s Four Futures argue that technological advancements could render much work unnecessary and liberate humans – sustained by a state-funded universal basic income (UBI) – to pursue a new kind of freedom. Aaron Bastani’s forthcoming Fully Automated Luxury Communism (January 2019) will occupy similar terrain: “What if, rather than having no sense of the future, history hadn’t really begun?” But Labour’s swiftly assembled 2017 manifesto, For the Many, Not the Few, was largely unreflective of such thought. It made no mention of UBI, automation or a shorter working week. Though the manifesto’s headline proposals – the renationalisation of water, energy and rail services, the abolition of university tuition fees and higher taxes on top earners and corporations – were overwhelmingly popular, they were redolent of postwar social democracy.  [...]

A credible left should embrace what one could call incremental utopianism: progressive reforms situated within a radical framework. Alex Williams, the co-author of Inventing the Future (one of the defining texts of Corbynism), told me that the next Labour manifesto should promise a four-day working week. “It aligns with the history of the labour movement. Until the 1930s, cutting working hours was a key demand as well as increasing wages.” [...]

Increased investment in technology, as well as a higher minimum wage to raise the cost of labour, would accelerate automation and make a four-day week conceivable. A recent trial by the New Zealand trust manager Perpetual Guardian proved so successful – higher productivity, reduced stress – that the firm is considering making it permanent. On 10 September, Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), declared that “in this century we can win a four-day working week”. More than 1.4 million people work seven days a week, with 3.3 million working more than 45 hours a week, a TUC study found. [...]

Though overwhelmingly supported by the party membership, Corbyn has no more than 20 committed ideological followers among the parliamentary party. The project is heavily reliant on hard-working and trusted media performers such as McDonnell and the shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry (though a vanguard of activist commentators such as Owen Jones, Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar, Aaron Bastani and Michael Walker, and former Corbyn aide Matt Zarb-Cousin adds ballast).

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Social Europe: The Three Mistakes Of Centrism

But doesn’t Corbyn’s victory mean that the UK today needs centrists, because we have not just got a Conservative government, which has morphed into UKIP, but also an opposition led by the hard left? Here is Philip Stephens attacking the Labour leadership peddling snake oil populism of the left variety. If you search my blog you will see that I normally think Stephens gets things right, but I think there are three major problems with this diagnosis of where we are. [...]

But why wasn’t the 2017 manifesto like 1983, given the current Labour leadership? The answer leads us to the second mistake many centrists make: to imagine that any leader from the hard left can impose their will on a soft left parliamentary party. Stephens mentions this, but it is far more central than he suggests. Labour will be extremely lucky to get an overall majority at the next election, and even if they do there are plenty of MPs that will happily vote against their government the moment that Corbyn and McDonnell overstep the centre left mark. Give them 20 years and it is possible to imagine that they might be able to create a PLP more in their image, but they do not have 20 years and those who follow will be from a different generation with different reference points.

There is a third mistake which is in some ways the most important. I cannot beat Anthony Barnett’s way of expressing it: if all you want to do is stop Brexit and Trump and go back to what you regard as normal, you miss that what was normal led to Brexit and Trump. It all goes back to austerity. Even if you like aspects of neoliberalism, as centrists surely do, what happened with austerity and the scapegoating of immigrants is what I describe as neoliberal overreach. It was overreach not just because it was wrong and immensely destructive, but it laid the grounds for Brexit.

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