by Richard Scorer
Liverpool, Saturday evening: 1100 people cram into the Adelphi ballroom to hear Jeremy Corbyn. My political identification is old Labour right, and I’m probably voting for Liz Kendall, but my Scouse in-laws are Corbyn supporters and invited me along. It was a good opportunity to see what a Labour party led by Corbyn might look like.
First, the warm up acts, starting with the Liverpool Socialist Singers. The compere jokingly asked if anyone present wanted to sing the national anthem. This having elicited the intended booing, we were all invited to join in singing the Internationale. An interesting choice, I thought. The Internationale, not The Red Flag; at this rally, even traditional English socialism is seen as too tame . Then we moved on to the speakers. The quality of oratory was high, the content unrepentedly hard left. The leader of the Bakers Union called for a general strike: wild applause. Paula from Unison quoted Blair’s “heart transplant” comment. Her answer to Blair: “my arse”. It was amusing, and Paula was a powerful speaker.
Then Jeremy himself. He comes across as palpably decent, but with a touch of naivety, just like Tony Benn (who, you’ll remember, got through an entire interview with Ali G without realising that he was a fictional character). His themes were anti-austerity, anti-welfare bill and anti-war.
Austerity was never quite defined. I think in Corbyn’s mind it means any cut in public expenditure, unless it’s cutting spending on something he sees as bad, like defence. Corbyn sort of implied his economic programme has been costed: subject to bit more work by the guys in his policy team, the abolition of tuition fees would be fully paid for by an 0.2% increase in corporation tax. But really, he doesn’t think that costing a programme is necessary, because you can borrow more: “debt is now only 80% of GDP. Under the Attlee government it was 250% of GDP. And they still increased public spending, and so can we”.
We finished with questions from the audience. One speaker wanted to know whether Corbyn, in abolishing tuition fees, would also write off the debts of all past students who had had to pay them. Corbyn was happy to confirm that he would.
My wife wanted to ask Corbyn whether abolishing tuition fees , a policy which targets resources on the 40% most successful members of society, is actually the best expenditure priority compared to , say, spending on early intervention or better apprenticeships for those who don’t go to university. But there seemed little point , because the answer was predictable: in Corbynland you don’t have to make difficult policy choices, you can have everything.
Then Tony Mulhearn, leading member of Militant and president of Liverpool District Labour Party in the early 1980s, but expelled by Kinnock 30 years ago , addressed the meeting . He felt he was getting his party back. It was time to revive the old clause 4.
There wasn’t much discussion about the electoral strategy of a Corbyn led Labour party, but talking to his supporters, on this subject they seem to divide into 3 camps. A sizeable number seem to acknowledge that Corbyn has no hope of ever winning a general election , but “Labour is going to lose anyway, so we might as well go down fighting for our principles”. You can’t persuade this group that the severity of any defeat might affect how long it takes us to return to government.
A second group believe that Corbyn’s policies are so obviously right, and so manifestly appealing to the electorate , that it is inconceivable that he could ever lose. This group pray in aid the success of Syriza and Podemos. When you point out that Greece and Spain have 25% unemployment – the equivalent of 7 million unemployed in the UK- and thus might be rather more fertile ground for Marxism than here – they tend to get tetchy. One told me that as a middle class lawyer, I clearly didn’t understand the depth of poverty and despair in the UK.
Many of Corbyn’s supporters argue that it would be “suicidal” to chase Tory votes; the answer is to win the votes of people who didn’t bother to vote last time- starvelings who just need to be roused from their slumbers. It’s impossible to persuade this group that they might have a rather romantic view of non voters . They aren’t interested in knowing how many non-voters live in seats already held by Labour. They aren’t interested in hearing that Australia , where voting is compulsory, has a Tory government. They aren’t interested in the fact that non-voters don’t, on the whole, actually vote.
But my strongest impression? To coin Yvette Cooper’s phrase, the atmosphere of the Corbyn campaign is “strikingly retro”. Corbyn is no Yanis Varoufakis or Paul Mason, conjuring up a novel economic theory or fascinated by the social potential of new technology. Corbyn’s is the leftism of the 1970s and 1980s. A long section of his speech was a paen to Eric Heffer, and it’s clear that Corbyn is most comfortable refighting the battles of those decades, and the ideas associated with them, like Benn’s siege economy. It simply hasn’t occurred to him that the ability of governments to run up debt might now be more compromised by capital flows in a globalised economy.
Seeing the turnout in Liverpool , and the energy of his campaign , I have no difficulty believing that Corbyn may well win the leadership. We’ll then have a leader and a coterie around him who believe in unrepentant fiscal profligacy and want to sing the Internationale in public. Jeremy Corbyn is probably a lovely man, but if this happens, as a party that hopes to govern, and needs to win votes in Nuneaton, we’re going to be in a really , really bad place.
Richard Scorer is a former Labour PPC