Labour Leaders' Debates

Jeremy Corbyn's presence in the contest for Labour Leader has already had some beneficial effects. It has exploded the myths about Labour losing the election because of being too left-wing, and that Labour could not win with a clear, more radical programme; it has shown just how joined at the hip the other contenders are; and it has shown how ridiculous and inadequate Labour's current rules for electing the Leader now are.

In the Newsnight debate last night, on almost every occasion, it was Corbyn who got the loudest most enthusiastic applause for what he had to say, which stood out in contrast to the bland vacuousness of the meaningless statements by the other candidates.  Of course, the usual Tory and Blairite suspects, when they came to comment on that fact later, tried to brush it aside by saying that, well of course, Corbyn could do that, because he can say whatever he likes, because he knows he will not be elected.

They don't seem to have understood the implications of what they were saying.  Firstly, this was not a hand picked audience of Left-wing socialists, favourable to Corbyn's views, or even an audience of Labour supporters.  It was an audience of people drawn from a range of views, many of them Tories. Yet, even amongst this cross-section of the population, it was Corbyn's views that were popular.  That was illustrated both in the discussion with candidates, and in the post debate interviews that Newsnight did with the audience.

In the actual debate, many members of the audience picked up, on what was very quickly obvious to all of us, which is that Liz Kendall, in search of votes, had simply tried to harness what she saw as the right-wing, nationalist, populist vote.  She threw herself behind UKIP's proposal for the introduction of an Australian style points based system of immigration controls, as well as advocating the Tories' proposals for effectively ending the free movement of labour, by preventing migrants from obtaining benefits for the taxes they have paid, for four years.  She tried to justify this by saying, if you went to Spain or some other EU country, British people would not expect to be able to immediately claim benefits.  But, of course, you can!  That is the point of the reciprocal arrangements that Britain long ago negotiated with other EU states.  It is supposed to be part of the rationale of having a single market!

If you migrate to Spain, and lose your job, you claim unemployment benefit the same as anyone else living there.  If you go to work in Spain, you pay into their national insurance scheme, and get the same benefits for healthcare and so on, as anyone else living in Spain.  In fact, even if you are not living in Spain, and you are taken ill, you use your European Health Insurance Card (EHIC), which gives you the same right to healthcare, for up to five years, that every other citizen of that country is entitled to receive.  How on Earth else could you build a rational single market, with the same rights for all of its inhabitants?

In fact, a number of questions to Kendall from the audience, made exactly this point that what she was saying was indistinguishable from the Tories and UKIP nationalism.  She seems to have misunderstood why Labour lost votes to UKIP in some places, confusing it with a conscious, right-wing nationalist ideology by those potential Labour voters.  It wasn't, as others have pointed out, in the past, and as some of those audience comments demonstrates, such as the fireman, who was opposed to the cuts he had witnessed, could not, on that basis, vote Tory, but found Labour's failure to oppose the cuts disappointing, and who had therefore, voted UKIP as a protest.  From the view of a politician, its inexplicable, why someone, who is a potential Labour voter, should vote for UKIP, as a party to the right of the Tories, if they really wanted a more left-wing solution, but, in reality, quite understandable, when spelled out.

And Kendall's reactionary nationalism spilled out later.  When asked whether they would stand down and allow another election in 2018, if it appeared that they were hampering a Labour victory, Andy Burnham said yes, and stated that "the party comes first".  Kendall chirped up like a good Little Englander "the country comes first"!  At a time when the country is facing an EU referendum, stoked by reactionary nationalists in the Tory Party, UKIP and the Tory media, which could see British workers isolated and marginalised from their European counterparts, leading to a period of nationalistic reaction, and a driving down of workers rights and living standards, in Britain, and when those same nationalistic sentiments have been stoked, by those same forces, to drive a wedge between workers in England and Scotland, the last thing workers need, is a Labour Party, led by someone who proposes such reactionary nationalist sentiments.

For workers and for a workers party, like the Labour Party, it is reactionary nonsense, for someone like Kendall to suggest that it is the country that comes first!  If we are to put forward a progressive position in the EU referendum, to counter the reactionary nationalism of the Tories, it can only be based upon a programme that seeks to promote the aspirations of workers, be they "British", "French", "German" or any other nationality of worker.  It has to demonstrate that such aspirations can only be met on the basis of those principles that the Labour Party was built upon, and that Kendall claims to want to defend, the principle of the shared outlook, interests and aspirations of workers wherever they live, and the principle that their aspirations can only be met, their interests only defended on the basis of those other principles upon which Labour was founded of co-operation between workers, and their solidarity with each other.  It does not flow from those Tory ideals that Kendall seems to be promoting, of individualistic self-interest, of promoting the interests of "country" (which means in reality promoting the interests of those who rule the country - the small minority of capitalists, not the vast majority of workers) and which are  in direct opposition to the principles upon which the Labour Party - and the Co-operative Movement - was founded.

Burnham is right in that. To put forward a progressive programme that meets the aspirations of the vast majority of British people - the working-class - the Party must come first, as a party that represents the interests and aspirations of that vast majority against the interests of the minority of capitalists who would seek to frustrate those aspirations.  But, it must come first only in the context of a workers party that stretches across Europe, and seeks to further their interests, whatever their nationality, rather than seeking to pretend that the interests of British workers could ever truly be furthered without simultaneously furthering the interests of all workers across Europe.

Its because of the infection of this reactionary nationalism in the labour movement, that we need not just our own separate campaign for a "Yes" vote in the EU referendum, distinguished from anything that Cameron and the Tories put forward, but one that is also clearly demarcated from the kind of bureaucratic internationalism, based upon national diplomacy, that characterises social democracy. We need  "A Socialist Campaign For Europe", much like the Socialist Campaign for A Labour Victory, of 1979 that I and Jeremy Corbyn, and many others were part of, that fought for a Labour victory on the basis of a campaign that was clearly demarcated, by its socialist programme, from the campaign being conducted by Callaghan.

Socialists can have no truck with the Tories idea that Britain should withdraw from Europe, unless it provides them with agreement on a set of reactionary, nationalistic demands they are setting in front of other EU members.  Those demands, to their last comma, are reactionary, and in direct opposition to the interests of workers be they British, or any other nationality.  Why would socialists want to tie themselves to a campaign to stay in Europe, only on the basis such reactionary demands were conceded?  But, Labour has also put forward its own slightly watered down set of conservative, nationalistic demands that are also against the interests of European workers, such as their proposals to limit free movement, by placing restrictions on benefits and so on.

We need a socialist campaign for Europe that would tie in with the struggle of the Greek workers against austerity, that would link arms with workers across Europe, and those parties like Syriza and Podemos that are putting forward the kind of mild social-democratic policies that Labour, in the past, would have endorsed.  But, precisely for that reason, such a socialist campaign for Europe must go beyond the social democratic outlook of parties like Syriza.  It must put forward a programme not just against austerity, but one that provides a real, immediately practical alternative, based upon the development and extension of directly owned and controlled workers property, via the creation of a Europe wide Co-operative Federation, and the mobilisation of workers pension funds to enable them to immediately take over the most important and strategic business; we must propose the implementation of consistent democracy across the EU, including the convocation of a European Constitutional Convention to formulate a democratic constitution for the EU based upon a defence of the rights of the vast majority of its citizens, rather than as present the interests of capital; we need equal rights for all citizens across the EU, with pensions and benefits paid out of a central state budget, into which also all taxes and social insurance contributions should be made; we need a common Minimum Wage across all of the EU, and common workers rights in respect of employment; we need all states to be members of the Euro, with fiscal transfers from a single state used to provide investment in those regions where economic conditions lag behind the more developed areas and so on.

On last night's performance Kendall seems to have put herself out of the running.  The audience twigged her politics straight away, and were not impressed.  As many pointed out afterwards, the problem with Labour for a long time has been that it has been barely distinguishable from the Tories, and Kendall reduces the distinction even further.  But, apart from that her performance itself was rather unconfident and floundering, no doubt shaken by the fact that her comments received no positive response, whilst it was Corbyn's comments that were provoking the most applause.  That must have shaken her world view shaped by the Westminster bubble and the Tory media.  By comparison, Ed Miliband came over as a tower of power, so if he was considered a liability because of not having the right leadership qualities, Kendall must be a non-starter.

That same world view promoted by the Tory media, found another manifestation yesterday, on the Daily Politics, in the odious form of Toby Young, who rushed into the studios, wheezing like an old steam train about to expire, just to let everyone know that he had paid his £3, so as to be able to cast his vote for Corbyn in the leadership election.  He had done so, as a Tory, he said, to illustrate the lunacy for Labour of Corbyn even being on the ballot paper.  What, it really, showed, of course, is the lunacy of Labour's current election system, whereby a Tory like Young, can get to have a vote in who Labour's candidates should be!

But, it appears that Young and the Tories are so convinced by their own propaganda that they could not possibly conceive of a world in which Labour's election fortunes have actually been so lacklustre, because they were seen as not radical enough, rather than being too radical.  The world of 1945, 1964 and 1974 when Labour won elections with programmes more like those today put forward by Syriza or Podemos, either does not exist for them or else only exists in some other country like the past.  The reality, that in the early 1980's, a left-wing Labour Party, under Michael Foot, was standing at well over 50% in the opinion polls, certainly does not exist for the Tories, or for the Blairites.

But, it appears that Young and the Tories have even shorter memories.  They demonised Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP, similarly for having such radical policies at the May election, and yet promoted a vote for them, on the same kind of basis that they would be rejected by the people for those same ideas.  In considering their support for Corbyn in the hope that he would be the best leader from the Tory perspective, they should bear in mind what happened with their similar support for the SNP in Scotland!  In fact, one of last night's audience asked the question of what each of the leader's thought they had in common with Sturgeon, that would be beneficial.

The Tories, the Tory media, and the Blairites continue to promote the narrative that Labour lost in 2010, because they had wrecked the economy, and that they lost in 2015, because they refused to admit that truth, and so appeared to left-wing.  They are being aided in that by the unseemly scrabble by all the candidates, other than Corbyn, to present themselves as inheritors of Blair.  The same narrative presents 2015, as some kind of epic defeat.  But, it clearly was not.

The government majority went from around 80 under the Liberal-Tory government, to just 12 under the current government.  From that perspective alone Labour is in a much stronger position.  Labour's position only looks weaker, because of the loss of seats to the SNP, a loss which hardly fits the idea of a Labour loss due to being too left or radical.  In fact, Labour gained seats in England, not lost them.  They increased their vote in England by a much greater proportion than the Tories. Moreover, analysis has shown that had a more radical Labour programme been put forward, that gave a clearer vision than that put forward, which prevented votes going to the Greens, and other marginal left-wing parties, as well as retaining those Labour voters who voted UKIP as a protest at that same lack of a radical alternative to austerity, mentioned above then in a string of marginals Labour would have won, and that would have been enough to prevent the Tories getting any majority at all.

Corbyn's presence in the competition, is already making it impossible to simply present the Tory/Blairite narrative without it coming into stark contrast with the reality that was seen in the audience reactions of last night, however, much the Tory media try to spin it.