What is socialism?

If you are on “the left” it is pretty much inevitable that you will describe yourself as a ‘socialist’. Which, by extension, means that you believe that society would be better arranged if it was run on socialist lines. So far, so good. But ask most socialists what they think of as socialism and the agreement soon stops.

R.N. Berki in his 1975 book Socialism ascribes to socialism tendencies which mark it out as different to other philosophical viewpoints. His words are worth repeating here:

“Socialism is the leading ideology of our age, in the first place, because in it we find in a richer and more balanced mixture than elsewhere the whole heritage of the past. In socialism the most important cultural, political, intellectual and ideological trends come together: socialism represents an aspiration to a future which is understood in terms of visions and prophecies enounced by thinkers belonging to all creeds, and believed by masses of ordinary people in all countries.”

In the UK and USA we have been subjected to a con trick since the 1980’s in which we have been told that socialism is, at best, a historical anomaly, at worst, some kind of totalitarian system that seeks to enslave people in a culture of mediocrity and blandness that would crush individual endeavour. The success of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders has shown that the trick failed. People, ordinary people, are still enthused by the socialist message which could not be further from the way in which it has been bastardised by the right-wing ideologues.

But our support for socialism is often more a vague commitment to something better than an indication of the type of society we aim to produce. As Robert Heilbroner in an article in Dissent magazine says, “Socialism .. becomes little more than a compass setting, an imagined landfall over the horizon, and no effort is made to discuss even the most basic characteristics that we would expect to be associated with a new chapter of human history.” Busy as we are dealing with the problems of capitalism, the very thought that there might be a better alternative can seem like the worst kind of utopian fantasy.

This reluctance to describe the future socialist society is not that surprising few of the classic socialist writers had much to say about what the future socialist society would actually look like. Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto discussed socialism as a society where, “we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Apart from a rather vague reference to “fishing in the afternoon” Marx spent no effort describing the future socialist society. The idea of “the free association” however points us to one of the main tenets of socialist belief. Through a different economic organisation of society people would associate as members of society (or human beings if you prefer) rather than as consumers. 

Rosa Luxemburg, the great German Socialist, and founder of the Spartacus League, elaborated only slightly on this idea describing socialism as a society where “workers are free and equal human beings who work for their own well-being and benefit.” What they are to be free from is private employers whose main function is to exploit them. Being equal means that the class distinctions which characterise a capitalist society are replaced by a system of social co-operation. 

But, what does this co-operation mean? I’ve always thought that we can see elements of this future socialist society in our daily lives. When a group of people come together to achieve a common goal and each person contributes what they are able to in order to achieve that goal we are foregrounding socialism. This happens when people come together to play sports, when people form social clubs, and even, commercially, in co-operative enterprises.  

Despite a widespread ideological belief that people are greedy the reality is that most people prefer co-operation over conflict.  Luxemburg makes precisely this point when she talks about the change that socialism will bring in the way people think. “We do not need, however, to wait perhaps a century or a decade until such a species of human beings develop.” Rather, she points out socialists are made in the process of everyday, but particularly revolutionary, struggle.

Adherents of capitalism tend to point out that it has been incredibly effective at increasing production and, as a result, the life chances of many people. As Marx and Engels note: “It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals” Some people take this to mean that capitalism is the end of human endeavour, but what Marx and Engels are pointing to is that capitalism was a stage in human development not the “end of history” to quote Fukuyama.

We are brought up to believe that capitalism was responsible for industrialisation. But what this fails to understand is that without the advances made by feudalism there would have been no capitalism. This is the basis of what Marx called the ‘materialist conception of history’, based on his understanding of Hegel’s dialectic. The language used hides what is actually a very simple point. Each stage of history contains within it the seeds of the next stage, much as the daffodil is contained within the bulb.  In the same way that a bulb is different from but contains the daffodil, so capitalism has laid the conditions for a transition to a different form of society. But, this then raises the questions: what will that society look like and what will survive from capitalism?

The debate was traditionally about the role of markets under socialism. A market is, strictly speaking, just a place to exchange goods. There does not necessarily have to be a medium of exchange, or what Marx called a “universal panderer”. But, we have come to think that all markets must be dominated by money, and by the profit motive. There is nothing inevitable or essential about the idea of buying cheap and selling dear. It is one way, but not the only way, to get goods and services from one person to another. 

As Robert Heilbroner notes: “The market resolves the problem of "efficiency," .. but it creates such problems as instability, unemployment, maldistribution, and social neglect of various kinds.” But here he is talking specifically about the capitalist, so-called “free market”. Socialism may retain markets but their aim would be to ensure a ‘fair’ distribution of the benefits of society whilst avoiding creating the problems Heilbroner identifies and which most socialists spend their time highlighting and fighting.

When we think of problems like poverty it is tempting to think of reforms that could alleviate this. We might, for example, argue for a minimum wage to bring everybody up to a “reasonable” standard of living. Socialists can spend a lot of time and energy arguing that government should regulate prices and wages. But, this sort of misunderstands the way capitalism works. Wages are fixed through a conflict of workers and employers. The problem with thinking that capitalist markets can be made to act in a way that is, essentially, socialist is that any progressive reforms are as easily withdrawn as they are conceded. We have the same battles over and over again, like a political version of Groundhog Day.

Socialist market has socialist values

Diane Elson, a socialist economist, argues that socialist markets are “markets which are socially organised so as to realise mutually agreed egalitarian  objectives,  respecting  the  need  to  care  for  people  and  for  the environment.” In other words, there may well be markets in a socialist society but they would be arranged on vastly different grounds to those that exist now. The market’s objectives would not be maximising profits and dividends for the few, but ensuring the well-being of the many.

If we consider the conditions in which socialism is likely to evolve, it is unlikely to be as a result of the election of a Labour government. As desirable as such an event may be the last time I checked socialist revolution was not an objective of the Labour Party. That election would be a symptom of a deeper crisis not its catalyst. Neither will those in revolutionary parties suddenly find themselves selling 30 million copies of Socialist Worker. Revolutions do not start because people read about them, but because the objective conditions create a revolutionary situation.

Revolutions occur when one class can no longer rule and another class is in a position to replace it. For Marx the class able to replace the bourgeoisie was the proletariat, more broadly the working class. It is worth noting here that class, in the Marxist sense, is very different from the way we now think of class. We tend to think of middle class as somebody who eats pasta that isn’t out of a tin, or lives in a house with two toilets. For Marx class was a structural relationship to what he called “the means of production”.

Let’s not dwell on the way in which we get to socialism, that is a discussion for a future post, but think about what it is we are moving toward. Production of goods would not be for profit but to benefit society. Decisions instead of being motivated by maximising advantage for one enterprise (regardless of the effect on other institutions or wider society) would be taken to increase the well-being of the community. People would no longer have most of their life chances determined by where, and to whom, they were born. Education would be available for all, and every child would have the opportunity to reach their full potential. There would inevitably, in such a society be a change in people’s attitudes.

That is not to say that socialism would solve all human conflict. If you have ever sat in a room with a group of socialists you will know that they have all the same foibles and personality traits of the rest of the population. Despite what some socialists might like to think they are not moral paragons always motivated by a higher creed. They can be egotistical, arrogant, insensitive and all the other personality traits of our age. However, socialists are also, on the whole, self-aware and open to discussion.

Women sparking the Russian Revolution 1917

The major change that socialism should bring is that whilst socialists are currently a minority, in the future they will be the majority. Instead of trying to survive day to day, do jobs that leave us stressed, and worry about whether we can afford necessities, in future the necessaries of life will be freely available so that nobody is starving, there will be no homelessness, the best healthcare will be available to all. People will contribute to this doing jobs they enjoy but with a genuine say in how their industries are run. Faced with an environmental crisis instead of hiding our heads in the sand or worrying that saving the planet will lose jobs, we will have a proper democratic conversation about what needs to be done and unleash the imagination of ordinary people working with experts to find solutions that are to everybody’s benefit.

If this sounds like utopian thinking it is because we are so unaccustomed to having a say in the way in which our lives are organised. This is hardly surprising for as Marx said in The German Ideology:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

This is obvious at one level. The ruling class, which we have come to call the elite, own the majority of the means by which the popular culture is disseminated. Even those of us who like to believe that we are wise to the ways of the mass media still have to exist in a society that is totally dominated by a set of ideas we come to believe are simply “common sense”.

One of the most pernicious tricks of the ruling class is to convince us that most people simply do not understand the complexity of social life and therefore need to be told what to do. Deprived of the life chances that those above us take for granted, many working class people come to, reluctantly in some cases, accept that those above us (often those pasta munching middle classes) know what is best both for us as individuals and for society more generally. This is simply not true.

I have on a couple of occasions been on jury service with people who were from a variety of backgrounds. What was striking, to me as somebody from a working class background with a penchant for wholewheat penne, was that not only did my co-jurors have any difficulty with the arguments but were able to operate at a high level of logical abstraction to reach what they considered a fair and just decision. It is a convenient myth that the majority of people are incapable of understanding complex arguments. I worked for The Open University for 25 years and met, literally, hundreds of students often from some of the most deprived areas in the UK. The majority of them graduated with degrees and went on to even greater achievements. I simply do not accept an argument that says that because your parents were rich and you speak with a plummy accent and know which fork to use for dessert that you are a better class of person or, more importantly, a more intelligent one.

To save the planet we need a socialist answer

The seeds of socialism are within our current social system. But, it is difficult to know where we are in the cycle. Whether capitalism is at its start, in the middle or reaching its nadir. What we do know is that for all its successes capitalism has created mass poverty, massive inequalities in life chances and exploitation on a scale never before imagined. It is also systematically destroying the very planet upon which we all depend for our survival. Socialism may not be the only, or inevitable, answer, but the questions asked by our current plight cannot be answered by capitalism. And, whilst socialism won’t be the result of a Labour victory or through people being convinced to become socialists, that work may well be essential in helping the World to navigate the transition to an entirely new way of existing.

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What next for Labour’s left?

There’s a scene in one of my favourite films, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where Sundance turns to Butch and says “We tried going straight, what next?”. For some strange reason the current state of the LabourParty has me thinking something similar. We tried the parliamentary road to socialism, what next?

In every generation there is what seems to be a defining moment. For the British left the miners strike (1984-85) was one such moment. Perhaps the poll tax riots were another. The Corbyn leadership was, undoubtedly, another.

Now, I have no idea who will win the leadership contest (I’ve tried Jonathan Ashworth but he hasn’t been told either!) But what I do know is that most CLP’s, including my own did not enthusiastically endorse Rebecca Long-Bailey or Richard Burgon for Deputy. Indeed, RLB got a reasonably impressive 164 nominations. Impressive until we consider that Keir Starmer (the man with the “suit and the hair”) got 374. Lisa Nandy got an unimpressive 72, but today we spare a thought for poor Emily Thornbury who was just 2 short of the required 33. (I’m kidding I still think Emily was a very poor candidate and I am none the wiser as to why she stood other than some sense of entitlement).

But the leadership nominations do not tell the whole story. They also have to be taken alongside the Deputy Leader nominations. In these there was only one winner and that was Angela Rayner, who describes herself as an ‘everyday socialist’ (no, I’ve no idea what it means, either) who secured 364 nominations. Although the other four candidates all secured the 33 nominations required to be on the ballot, their support among the CLPs was fairly low.

Dream ticket or left nightmare?

There is a story to be told here. Let’s see if we can unpack the figures a little. Of constituency parties backing Keir Starmer the majority (238) also backed Angela Rayner as Deputy. In some ways this makes perfect sense. Unlike Keir, Rayner remained loyal to Jeremy Corbyn throughout his leadership. She appeared on many platforms alongside him during the General Election. And, it would be churlish not to admit that she has done a very good job as Shadow Education Secretary. 

However, unlike her flat mate and good friend Rebecca, she never joined the Campaign Group of MPs. She describes herself as “soft left” a description which I personally find as useful as describing yourself as a marshmallow. These terms soft and hard left make us sound more like boiled eggs than political activists. But, what this has allowed her to do is present herself as a unity candidate. Somebody who can appeal to both sides of the party. This, of course, at a time when the right in their usual fatuous manner deny that they have actually split the party and make no apologies for their strategy of uniting the party by expelling those they disagree with.

So that pairing of Starmer and Rayner appeals to many constituency activists who consider themselves as left-wing but secretly loathe the way in which “their” party has been hijacked by swarms of members who not only don’t turn up for meetings, but don’t enjoy a good coffee morning the way they should either. We, by which I mean the post-2016 intake of Corbyn supporters, are treated politely enough if we do show up to meetings but for those who had been used to running a small party, were disruptive of life as normal. Often, of course, our history of left activism meant that we were better informed than these long standing members who just wanted to deal with local issues and not get sidetracked by Palestine etc., which to be honest rarely comes up on the doorstep at local elections.

Starmer-Rayner is a centrist pairing that will, mainly because of the deals Starmer has done to get on the ballot in the first place, be pulled to the right. But, should they win, I cannot believe that they will pull too far rightward immediately. What I would expect (and here I issue my standard “I don’t have a crystal ball” warning) is that the Shadow Cabinet would see the return of what my own MP described as “the best talent” by which she means the likes of Syria-bombing enthusiast Hilary Benn, welfare cut-supporting Yvette Cooper etc. Lisa Nandy would no doubt have a home as Shadow Minister for Having A Northern Accent, whilst Rebecca Long-Bailey might be offered a relatively minor role as Shadow Environment Secretary, if she is not frozen out altogether (a scenario which would lead to some frosty interactions in the Rayner-Long-Bailey flatshare, no doubt).

Over time the most left-leaning members of that Shadow cabinet would be marginalised as the right, who be under no illusions regard Starmer as their man, tighten their grip on all sections of the party. We can gauge the drift to the right by glancing briefly at the Deputy Leader nominations. Right-wing leaning CLPs would have chosen Ian Murray as Deputy in the same way left-wing CLPs will have chosen Richard Burgon. 59 CLP’s nominated Murray as Deputy. Not a single one of those CLPs nominated RLB as leader. The majority of the Murray supporting CLPs (51) see him as Deputy to Starmer. I repeat in case people are missing this point. Whatever public pronouncements Keir Starmer makes, and however left he may sound now, he owes a debt to the right with whom according to local activists, he always sides.

Richard Burgon who is undoubtedly the most left-wing MP standing was a popular choice only with CLPs that had RLB for leader. 66 CLPs went for a Long-Bailey-Burgon partnership. Whilst only 10 CLPs who nominated Starmer also nominated Burgon. Richard Burgon, along with Dawn Butler, was prepared to stare down the Board of Deputies and their anti-democratic, and possibly illegal, pledges. He has been an excellent Shadow Justice Minister, and is unwavering in his support for Jeremy Corbyn. He is also Secretary of the Campaign Group, a healthier group now than it was in 2015. In my opinion, over the last couple of years his public persona has improved and he no longer sounds as if he is a barrister in a court room whenever he speaks.

In truth, the Deputy Leadership contest is between Angela Rayner, Richard Burgon and Dawn Butler. Neither Ian Murray nor Rosena Alin-Khan have the profile of these three, all of whom have benefited from holding Shadow Cabinet posts under Jeremy Corbyn. All have been loyal enough not to have alienated the vast majority of members who remain from what we might call the Corbyn era (is three years long enough to qualify for an era?)

Even if Starmer was to emerge as leader (and that is the ‘what next’ scenario), Richard Burgon as Deputy would mean that we maintain a strong, uncompromising  socialist voice at the top of the party. With the backing of the other 32 members of the Campaign Group, and perhaps with decent personal relationships with at least some Shadow Cabinet members, he could even be in a position to hold a beacon for the kind of politics many of us joined to support. On his own, he cannot stop a drift to the right which is starting to feel somewhat inevitable, but he will continue to be a strong left voice in the Shadow Cabinet.

Whist the rightward shift in the party is by no means a done deal things are looking ominous. The left’s dominance in key positions is coming under attack at every level of the party. It is not just leader and deputy that is up for grabs but also NEC positions with left favourite Jo Bird having been removed from the list now reinstated following what looks to have been a vexatious complaint. Labour First (the right wing of the party who worked so hard to ensure a Tory victory in December) have swept the board in the selections for candidates for the London Assembly. This is not a good sign for the left and is seen by some as a predictor of the results of other elections to be announced on April 4^th. Though it should be pointed out that these results are constituency level and only a small fraction of the electorate.

Clearly, I would prefer Rebecca Long-Bailey to win the leadership contest. Like many on the left I remain concerned at her tendency to compromise on issues which we see as principles not just policies. I also worry that she is, at times, a little naïve and too trusting of a hostile media. To be fair, if Keir Starmer wins (and I do think it is a two-horse race, so I’ve probably just handed victory to Lisa Nandy) he will find the tsunami of hostile media something he will struggle to contain.

As members, and particularly as members who see the Labour Party as a place for promoting socialist ideals, there is a real dilemma facing us. Many of us had been outside the Party until the Corbyn era because, frankly, we could see little advantage of being inside. Some toyed with, or joined, other left-wing parties (there is one for every occasion) or had engaged in community politics, or contented ourselves with fighting trade union battles. Many, I suspect, did little more than rant at the TV (dirty work but somebody has got to do it). But Corbyn galvanised us, and in return we discovered a new home, new comrades and new ways of engaging. Do we walk away from that home at the first sign of trouble? Do we put ourselves outside of mainstream parliamentary politics by joining a fringe group with no influence? Do we find other ways of ‘doing politics’?

This is not resigning from the party!

I keep reading people who claim to be left-wing publicly declaring that they are resigning their membership. Of course, what they mean is cancel their direct debit, but I guess we all like to feel that we are important. By the way, tearing up your membership card means you have a mess to dispose of, but in terms of leaving the party it is entirely symbolic. Others are publicly (in private discussion groups) speculating about a mass resignation and the setting up of an alternate party of the left. As far as I know not a single sitting MP has so far supported such a move. Others are talking about leaving the party and concentrating on community/trade union politics. Not to dampen anybody’s enthusiasm for such moves but none of them are likely to produce the outcome people want, if that outcome is a left-wing government.

If a largish number of people on the left of the political spectrum (and we really need to discuss what that means, but that’s for another post) leave the Labour Party, what would the consequences be for the party? The fact is that none of those suggesting leaving command the support of more than a few hundred people. Even Momentum, the largest grouping on the left these days, could probably count their activist base in a couple of thousand. In truth, most people on the left, organised or not, are not about to leave the party to set up an electorally insignificant new party.

Which leaves us with a choice. Stay and continue to put up resistance, no matter how token, to the rightward shift. Or, leave and watch the Labour Party repeat the mistakes of the past, but without any means of trying to remedy those mistakes. I realise that some people will argue that staying will have the same outcome as the second option here and they may well be right, but whether you think that all three leadership candidates are the same (they are not) or that a Starmer (or more unlikely) a Nandy win would leave us marginalised, until the direction of the party is set in stone it does not seem to me that voluntary exile is, yet, the correct choice.

That said, there is an elephant in the room, and it needs to be addressed. The left has made massive mistakes in the past three years. And, we are now paying the price for those errors. When Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership it was a shock, not just to the right, but to the left who supported him. Let’s be honest we are like Cardiff City football fans, we expect to lose, we are conditioned to defeat, we don’t have victory in our DNA. For that matter, for all their bluster, nor do the right. It is only their insufferable arrogance and middle class confidence that convinces them (and us) otherwise. The Labour Party has historically lost far more elections than it has won. Pockets of success can’t hide this. They are the Everton FC of politics, if you like (apologies to those with no interest in football, but just google them).

Corbyn’s victory did three things simultaneously. It surprised his supporters, it shocked his detractors in the Party (particularly in the PLP), and it came without any adequate preparation which was a necessary condition of prolonging the project. That is not in anyway a criticism of Corbyn, who in all honesty never expected to win either. It’s also no criticism of Momentum’s thousands of recruits but enthusiasm alone was never going to be enough to carry an entire movement. Particularly in the face of the hostility faced by that movement on all sides. Just ask Napoleon about taking on Russia. Okay, you can’t ask him, but the problem of fighting a war on too many fronts is that you tend to lose.

My own take on this as I’ve probably said before is that the left who had dreamed of taking control of the party for years were ill prepared when it actually happened. Indeed, we had a leader and a majority on the NEC, but the party bureaucracy was essentially unchanged. We retreated to our politics-as-usual mode of fighting the right for control of CLPs, of the NEC and of conference delegates. And, for a couple of years it seemed we were all-conquering. Meanwhile, the right plotted and schemed to bring this to an end. The General Election in 2017 was supposed to be their chance as Corbyn had shown himself to have a harder exterior than they had anticipated when he faced down the coup and the second leadership challenge.

As literally thousands of new recruits flooded into the party the existing left, used to numbering themselves in single digits in most constituencies, were overwhelmed. All they could offer was more meetings, endless canvassing and little else. The problem was that most of the new members were imbued with bags of enthusiasm but in many cases no prior political activity and no deeper understanding of politics than a desire to “get the Tories out” and to have a “socialist” government without necessarily being able to define exactly what they meant by socialism. Again, this is not criticism and I am sure there were constituencies where new members were nurtured, that new recruits to a diminishing movement have been found and that events like The World Transformed have educated and widened the experience of many.

Going forward whatever is left of the left inside the party has to work as a party within a party. Not by having a shadow structure or organisation, but by organising to push for policies that can transform, or at least reform, society. We need to ensure that nobody on the left or potentially on the left feels isolated or marginalised. We need to come outside the warm cocoon of our cliques and be open to new members. Even more than open we have to positively nurture new members. That means doing more than sending them an invite to meetings which may appear alien and even irrelevant, but by contacting them and giving them a “friend” to attend with.

And, those meetings. We are probably going to find it difficult to change the nature of official party meetings. Let’s be honest you have to be a certain type of person to ‘enjoy’ a branch meeting, but meetings organised by the left don’t have to replicate those structures. To be fair, the most enjoyable meetings I have attended since my return to the Labour Party have been the local Momentum meetings, which tend to have a political focus rather than be obsessed with organisational matters. Though even these can spend inordinate amounts of time obsessing over the many positions which are available for the committee-minded.

If we are to regain the ascendancy in the party the left activist base has to develop strong links with the Campaign Group of MPs. Not, as they might think, because as MPs they have unique insight into socialist politics, but because as a minority group in Parliament they need to extend their influence beyond parliament where they can have little impact. Knowledge is always a two-way process but developing theory and strategy should be too. In the Corbyn era too many decisions have been taken by MPs with little recourse to the members, and too many members are passively waiting to be told what they should do, rather than working with others to develop collective responses.

Whoever wins the leadership, the past three months have exposed real weaknesses on the left. They have also revealed our collective strengths. From utter despair on December 13^thto a renewed energy and refusal to be bullied out of a party we feel is ours as much as anybody’s. Grassroots organisations working for greater democracy in the party, such as Labour Left Alliance, have continued to grow and organise and much of their organisation is done online in a bottom-up way in which comrades are free to disagree with one another but debate is conducted to arrive at collective understanding not to score political points off opponents. Well, in the main.

In another of my favourite films a group of slaves fight the tyranny of those who assume their superiority and declare that they would prefer to die fighting than live on their knees. Although, they are beaten, by the very act of rebellion they give inspiration to others. When asked to give up their leader the remaining warriors stand, as one, to defend him. You perhaps recognise the film, the visual cue gives it away. So it is time for every person on the left in the Labour Party to stand up, even as our leaders are being, metaphorically, crucified and declare “I am Spartacus. I am Corbyn. I am socialism.” It starts by voting for Rebecca Long-Bailey as Leader and Richard Burgon as Deputy. And, Jo Bird for the NEC. And, only after we know the outcome of those contests can we really decide “what next?”


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Do the leadership (hustings) hustle

There is no doubt that the leadership election currently taking place is crucial for the future direction of the party. Despite repeated calls for unity an unnamed source reportedly told the Huffington Post that 50 MPs would quit if Rebecca Long-Bailey wins. For some, incentive enough to vote for her. The fact is though that the right of the party are calling for unity only as a means of silencing the left. They believe that they are on the verge of seizing control of the party from a left that is demoralised and divided. On both counts they may well be right.

As the contest hots up the leadership contenders have been busy giving interviews and appearing at hustings around the country. I attended the hustings in Cardiff a couple of weeks ago. Before I went I had pretty much decided that the best chance of maintaining a radical agenda would be to vote for Rebecca Long-Bailey who, despite some failings, is the candidate with the best left credentials. Nonetheless, as I had never attended a leadership hustings previously and I was keen to see the candidates in the flesh I turned up on a cold Sunday morning to see whether anybody could convince me that the party’s fortunes would be safer in their hands than RLB’s (to use the shorthand).

I do agree with Lisa Nandy (and Jess Philips) who said that the format was awful. There were around 300 of us in a room, others watching online, for a series of questions which each candidate had 40 seconds to answer. This meant there was no actual debate and on many questions all four pretty much agreed with each other. The selection of the questions seemed aimed at avoiding controversy, and yes we were in Cardiff but rather less on devolution would have allowed a wider debate around the variety of topics that members would surely have submitted. I watched somebody write a question on ‘involvement of foreign powers in Labour policy’ (what could he have meant?); and my partner submitted a question on justice for WASPI women. Neither were asked.

There was only one candidate who entirely failed to impress me and that was Emily Thornbury. She appeared desperate and for some reason reminded me of Anne Widdicombe, the Strictly contestant everybody knew was rubbish but kept in the contest because she was entertaining. Although she got one or two laughs, I was amazed that somebody who had occupied a front bench role during the past three years appeared to blame the election result entirely on the manifesto, although could not name a single policy she would actually drop. Most of her answers were about her. Bizarrely she claimed that she was uniquely placed to take on Boris Johnson because she had shadowed him as Shadow Foreign Secretary.

She was the only candidate who raised anti-Semitism as an issue, a move that misjudged the mood of members. I for one am sick of senior members of the party accusing members who have years of anti-racist activity under their belts of anti-Semitism. But equally as a senior member of the party for the past three years surely she cannot avoid criticism if indeed she is right that the party has failed to tackle the issue. In truth, of course, we have the most robust anti-Semitism procedures of any party in Europe, but that would never prevent our critics from saying we had not done enough. (For a good review of the “crisis” I would recommend reading Jonathan Cook.)

Lisa Nandy has since launched a new policy on anti-Semitism which she promoted by claiming “"One of the most shameful things I’ve ever seen was a group of Jewish women MPs at a parliamentary Labour party meeting begging the leadership to take seriously the need to adopt an internationally adopted definition of antisemitism.” What she doesn’t mention is that group of Jewish women MPs included Luciana Berger and Joan Ryan both of whom defected from the party (and one of whom was captured on video discussing money with an Israeli spy) and Margaret Hodge who compiled a dossier of people she wanted expelled the majority of whom were not even members of the party. The so-called internationally agreed definition has been heavily criticised including by Kenneth Stern who wrote: “Fifteen years ago, as the American Jewish Committee’s antisemitism expert, I was the lead drafter of what was then called the “working definition of antisemitism”. But starting in 2010, rightwing Jewish groups took the “working definition”, which had some examples about Israel, and decided to weaponize it..”

I found it odd the number of times that the word unity was used by both Keir Starmer and Lisa Nandy, both of whom believed so much in unity they joined a plot whose express aim was to break Jeremy Corbyn as a man. They can’t have it both ways. This Damascene conversion to unity sounds pretty hollow, especially coming from Nandy who was unswerving in her failure to support the leader, the manifesto or members since 2016.

I have to confess that Nandy does come across rather well. She has a nice line in humour and, of course, represents Wigan which she seems to think gives her unique insight into the thoughts of working class northerners. Indeed, all four candidates made much of their humble backgrounds to the point where I almost expected Keir Starmer to say “I was born in a cupboard box” and for Emily Thornbury to retort “A cupboard box? Luxury. I lived in a shoe box until I was 35.” 

Indeed, so keen were the candidates to convince us that they could empathise with the working class you have to wonder where people get the idea that the party is led by people with both feet firmly in the middle class. Perhaps given their humble beginnings we should sing the praises of a social system that has allowed such upward mobility.

The only issue on which there was genuine disagreement was when RLB raised open selection characterised by Lisa Nandy as “wanting to get rid of Labour MP’s rather than Tory one’s.” It’s rather curious that all four candidates went out of their way to talk about involving the members, no longer being Westminster-centric and democratising the party “from the bottom up” as Keir Starmer put it. But only one of them was prepared to let the members have a say in who represents them. No sitting MP in a safe seat will ever be challenged, it seems. That’s a bottom up democratic reform too far apparently.

Trainee barristers for Starmer outside the hustings

Although the mood of the room seemed to be pro-Starmer, it was open selection that received the first spontaneous, speech interrupting applause. I do think MPs and the party bureaucracy are out of step with the members on this and it is a policy only one candidate is promising to deliver. If anybody but RLB wins my guess is that open selection will be off the agenda for the foreseeable future. Protecting sitting MPs job security is far more important, it seems, than democratising the party.

On other policies it was clear that RLB was rather more likely to defend the 2019 manifesto than the others. Both Thornbury and Starmer were part of a front bench that supported the manifesto but both said they wanted to jettison some of it. There is some ambiguity here because the only specific policy (and it wasn’t actually in the manifesto) mentioned was free broadband which apparently is the worst idea ever. But the criticism of this was accompanied by an accusation that Labour was not trusted. As one Wigan resident allegedly told Lisa Nandy “It’s our money, how are you going to pay for it.” Whether this is true the implication is that the only way to win votes is to promise to do nothing. A successful strategy adopted by Blair in 1997, but in very different circumstances.

Emily Thornbury claimed that although there was nothing in the manifesto with which she fundamentally disagreed what was needed were 5 pledges. She has clearly forgotten the Ed Stone, and also rather naively for somebody who is “political to my core” seems to believe that if all we did was promise to do whatever the Tories were planning that the media would not present Labour as profligate. All Labour politicians are caught in the trap of wanting to sound radical on the one hand, whilst on the other avoiding saying anything that will bring the wrath of the media down on them. The answer is usually to avoid the radicalism. Jeremy was clearly of a different mould. 

Keir Starmer wanted us to believe that there was not a single issue that lost the election. He may well be right, but if he really wants us to believe that he is leadership material he could start by having the honesty to admit that it was a policy he pushed through conference that was responsible for losing 54 of the 60 lost seats. There may have been other factors but to fail to acknowledge the role of Brexit is encouraging the delusion that the only reason we lost was Jeremy Corbyn’s personal character. To be fair, none of the candidates felt it appropriate to put the knife into Corbyn personally, although Thornbury had already told one interviewer he was a 0/10 leader for failing to win the General Election as if the entire blame was to be his, and not shared collectively.

The elephant in the room, and this is also the case at many CLP nomination meetings, is the role of the mass media. The unspoken assumption is that Jeremy Corbyn received a bad press due to a failure on his part. The right of the party begun their lessons for the rest of us, by declaring that “you cannot just blame the media” and “we have to move on from Brexit”. But, by disallowing these from consideration we are left entirely unable to learn and thus to actually move on. Ignoring the role of the media in elections is akin to ignoring the role of weapons in war whilst trying to understand how so many people died. 

Labour has always faced a hostile media from Michael Foot’s “donkey jacket” at the Cenotaph, Neil Kinnocks cringeworthy fall in the Brighton sea, Gordon Brown’s run in with a bigot to Ed Miliband’s apparent inability to eat a bacon sandwich, but the level of vitriol unleashed on Jeremy Corbyn and which seeped into popular consciousness has been systematically analysed by academics as beyond compare. 

The real reason the right want us to ignore the media is because any meaningful analysis would surely find that many of the hostile stories were emanating from those now calling for unity. And, even if they weren’t responsible for the origins of the stories right-wing MPs were more than happy to amplify them.

Avoiding the role of the media is naïve. The Labour Party needs a strategy to overcome the media bias. For the right, and many people on the left seem to be buying into this, all that is necessary to do is to have the blandest leader possible who 

will stand for very little and the endorsement of The Sun is sure to follow. If Keir Starmer is elected I will be taking bets on how long before his Trotskyist past or his record of defending “terrorists” as a lawyer is all over the front pages. The important point about counteracting the media is that they are not impartial observers, they are, and I don’t really like this word but I can’t think of a more appropriate one, the enemy.

It is clear that Lisa Nandy is the most enthusiastic endorser of what is best described as a return to Blairism. As I pointed out last week this would be a return to a politics that lost voters and seats and essentially squandered a majority to appease a Tory press baron with whom Blair had clearly struck a Faustian pact. At the hustings she was the only candidate not to unequivocally support public ownership, probably on the basis that we must be seen as the party of business if we are to win. Nandy has since gone further. On last night’s Newsnight debate she said “We cannot go around promising to nationalise everything or scrap tuition fees.”

Keir Starmer is the bland, everybody’s friend, candidate treading a delicate balancing act between keeping the support of left members and satisfying his backers who are overwhelmingly on the right. He was the candidate who walked through the hall prior to the hustings saying “good morning” to members. It was not his hustings performance which damns him but the fact that not only has he signed 10 pledges presented by an outside group, but in keeping with those pledges promised to outsource our disciplinary procedures to an “independent” body. His emphasis on ensuring the ‘complainant’ is satisfied means that the ex-barrister, human rights advocate and Director of Public Prosecutions seems willing to turn justice on its head for a party he intends to lead and make the assumption of guilt prior to investigation with the onus on the accused to prove they did nothing. That so many people on the left of the party are going to endorse him because they think he is more electable than the other candidates shows how fragile the left is, and how the desire to win trumps all, but especially principles and rationality.

There is one little cameo moment that rather sums up Starmer. Toward the end of what, if I am honest, was turning into a pretty tedious event, the candidates were asked, in true Good Morning Britain trivia fashion, to tell us something personal. Rebecca Long-Bailey spoke about how her 7-year old son did not want her to be Labour leader because he wanted her to be a teacher in his primary school. It was a nice moment that went down well with the audience. Starmer watched this and immediately said “I have two 4-year olds who don’t want me to be leader”. Perhaps this was what he always intended to say, but it had all the charm of the person at a party who watching the guests being entertained by somebody insists on saying “I’ve got a funny story too..” and then hasn’t.

More telling perhaps was the moment candidates were asked about relationships with their own CLP’s. Both Nandy and Thornbury claimed to have great relationships “just ask them”, as if their CLPs were out in force in South Wales on a Sunday morning. But Keir’s answer was more illuminating, and at the time, inspiring or so I thought. He told how he had excellent relations with his CLP and the initiatives they took to involve new members. It was a good answer, so I was disappointed to read an interview with Labour List editor Sienna Rodgers, a member of his CLP who said in an interview reported in Camden New Journal “He’s not left wing. I find it genuinely unbelievable and a huge failing of the ‘Labour left’, that people are actually swirling this narrative of ‘he really wants to be more left wing secretly but he’s being held back as he builds this kind of broad coalition’. I think that’s absolutely laughable.”

Labour List Editor, Sienna Rodgers

She added: “You only need to look at what he’s like in his own constituency Labour Party to know that he’s on the right of the party.” Asked what faction she thought he would be most connected to, she said: “I don’t think he belongs to any of them, it’s even a bit unfair to say he’s with the ‘right’ of the party, I just think that’s the way he has behaved. I think he is apolitical, I think he lacks politics and that’s the reason why members should be a bit wary.”

A couple of days later an open letter from members of Keir’s CLP started circulating on social media. A group of members wrote: “Time and time again, as left-leaning members we have been subjected to hostility and abuse, a symptom of the chronic factionalism in our CLP. Those that are close to Keir Starmer, rather than welcome involvement from the left, have actively prevented it.” They ended with this plea: “Therefore any socialist thinking about supporting Keir Starmer should think again and instead support a candidate that welcomes and supports socialist policies and encourages the active involvement of socialist members!”

Quite a different story to the one I was impressed by at the hustings. Far from being a CLP I would like to be part of, it turns out it would be more likely I would be bullied and marginalised.  If you are on the left, especially if you are desperate for a Labour victory, you might be tempted to vote for a candidate who you have been convinced has the best chance of success. But, the problem with such an approach is that a candidate who wants to appeal to the left and right will inevitably find themselves sacrificing the left to appease the right. Lisa Nandy describes herself as “left-wing” but so does Jess Philips. She is, in reality, the continuity-Blair candidate who will pursue so-called ‘sensible’ policies to build an electoral coalition with mythical Tory-voting Labour voters. There is no doubt at all that she will close down criticism of Israel and support a purge of anybody who wants to defend the Palestinian people.

Keir Starmer may appear to be different from Nandy but in reality the only difference is that to quote Sienna Rodgers “Everything about Keir’s trajectory is calculated”. He does not appear to have any strong convictions, and certainly has not put his hands up and admitted that backing a second referendum, which he pushed through conference, was a large part of why Labour did not win in December. He is surrounded entirely by people on the right of the party, including Matt Pound, a member of Labour First the right-wing group set up by Luke Akehurst with the sole intention of ensuring Jetemy Corbyn did not become PM; and Ben Nunn who had previously been a lobbyist for a private healthcare company. He was nominated by a who’s who of anti-Corbynistas including: Hilary Benn, Ben Bradshaw, Yvette Cooper, Richard Corbett, Thangam Debbonaire, Marsha de Cordova, Angela Eagle, Maria Eagle, Andrew Gwynne and Seema Malhotra, all of whom, along with one Keir Starmer, tried to depose Jeremy Corbyn soon after he became leader. 

Perhaps none of these MPs expect anything for nominating Keir. Perhaps they are all terribly sorry that they created the conditions which made Labour’s electoral chances so much worse than they might have been. But perhaps, and more plausibly, deals have been struck. Benn, Cooper, Eagle et al have been promised promotion to the Shadow Front Bench. Perhaps they expect to have much greater influence over future policy. Perhaps they think that it is high time all this left-wing nonsense was brought to a close. Perhaps like their ally Margaret Hodge they are of the opinion that ““the manifesto was one of the most reactionary documents I had seen.”

Who knows? But this much I do know. There is only one candidate for leader not distancing themselves from our manifesto, or our leader. There is only one candidate who seems to believe that socialism can be popular. And, crucially, there is only one candidate who believes that members should have a say in which candidate they give up their time and effort to campaign for. That is why, despite keeping an open mind (okay perhaps not that open) Rebecca Long-Bailey will get my vote for leader.

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