12.09.2019

No pacts, no coalitions

The willingness of the Labour leadership to bloc with Liberal Democrats, Scottish nationalists and Tory rebels is a mistake, argues Paul Demarty. It could easily presage a government of national unity.

Now that he has lost his parliamentary majority and Scotland’s highest civil court has ruled the prorogation of parliament to be illegal, Boris Johnson has five weeks to pull something out of his - or Dominic Cummings’ - hat. We have to assume that what he wanted all along was a general election fought on his issues and at his timing. Now he has nothing to show for it except a series of bruising defeats.

With contradictory speculation swirling around - the Supreme Court might uphold the Scottish judgement, dumping Northern Ireland and putting a customs border down the middle of the Irish Sea, the UK using its veto in Brussels to scupper an extension of article 50, parliament being recalled - it is important to take stock of what has happened since the coronation of Boris Johnson as Tory leader. There has been a shift in the tectonic plates of British politics. We know very well that the parliamentary arithmetic has, since the Tories’ disastrous showing in the 2017 election, been unable to shepherd any concrete plan for Brexit into law. Previously that was as much a matter of Brexit ultras gnashing their teeth as remainer sabotage, with Labour attempting to force a new general election. Now, however, the Brexit ultras control the Tory Party, the government and the prime minister. Simultaneously, there has come together a de facto cross-party bloc against a no-deal exit - which, finally, includes the Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party.

For the bourgeois establishment - at least, the remains of the pre-2016 bourgeois establishment - this is a very welcome result. Quite apart from its amelioration of the disarray that awful year bequeathed to them, it has always suited such people that Labour should be the party to carry the can for unpopular actions in the interests of the British state and its capitalist class; witness the way Ed Miliband and his Scottish subordinates were hung out to dry over the independence referendum back in 2014, for example. There is now - at the 11th hour - the opportunity to line everything up to spec.

The question is exactly how. On this, opinions vary. Ever more people are realising that parliamentary obstructionism alone has limited usefulness, and that what is posed is a government of some sort. The question is whether the leader of the opposition - who is on his best behaviour - is an acceptable prime minister in such a situation. Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat leader, jumped the gun in declaring that she would never support a Corbyn-led government, but she was outflanked to the left by Kenneth Clarke, who said openly that he would, albeit with deep reservations. The Daily Telegraph reported that Clarke’s sanguine attitude has penetrated the upper echelons of the City, with members of the financial elite waking up to the idea that a cornered Corbyn in number 10 is little to fear, compared to a plummeting pound, closed car plants and food and medical shortages provoked by Brexit, and the social upheaval that would inevitably follow.

However, that is hardly the majority opinion amongst the establishment. And if such a caretaker government could be arranged - almost certainly with someone other than Corbyn at its head - it would not be able to survive for long without calling an election; and at that point there is still the possibility of an electoral pact between Labour and other parties. We noted, last week, Paul Mason’s enthusiasm for a “popular front” of that sort, although Mystic Mason’s endorsement is, on his record of predictive power, hardly a good reason to go down the bookies.

In this paper, of course, we have been warning about the danger of a government of national unity for a good while, before it became fashionable; but we tended to do so on the basis that Jeremy Corbyn and people of his sort would not be invited: instead we would see the large, rightwing rump of the Parliamentary Labour Party united with - well, the sort of people we now see arrayed before us in what some journos are tediously calling “the rebel alliance”. There is, however, the possibility that, instead, the leader of the opposition will be approached to head such a government. This would be a far worse outcome. Better if the left is rudely carved out of a national government, then it will not be tainted by the resulting carnage and will have a free hand to purge the remains of the party apparat of the right. If, however, the foremost leader of the left heads a government with Ken Clarke as chancellor and Jo Swinson as foreign secretary, then we all know where the buck stops. Corbyn was just another one of them after all …

Corbyn and remain

The surprise of the situation is not, alas, that Corbyn has allowed himself to be manoeuvred into this trap, but that he resisted it, partially, for so long.

A formal commitment to campaigning for remain in 2015 was more or less the first concession drilled out of him by the Labour right, but neither they nor the liberal establishment trusted him then, nor trust him now, to really throw his weight behind it. There is at least some truth there. Corbyn comes historically from the wing of the Labour left under the influence of ‘official communism’, and therefore Euroscepticism. Someone like Seumas Milne or Andrew Murray was hardly going to have an overnight conversion to the benefits of the single market and the Lisbon treaty.

More than that, however, there was a particular political strategy at work. The people who were to become the Corbyn inner circle, in the last of their years in the wilderness had been criticising the Labour leadership for its timidity. No end of polling evidence was adduced to the effect that austerity was very unpopular, and various Keynesian/social democratic policies were popular; even ‘Red’ Ed Miliband had seemed incapable of anything but the most feeble gestures leftwards - not that this moderation seemed to win him any favours (remember the days when a temporary freeze in energy prices was decried as the return of ‘1970s-style socialism’ in the yellow press?).

This outlook survived the Labour left’s transition to the commanding heights of the party’s Victoria Street HQ: the strategy was to put all emphasis on ending austerity and using the levers of government to revive British industry and a working class battered by decades of neoliberal punishment. From this point of view, the Europe question was a divisive distraction, and no more effort was put into the remain campaign than it merited. Though the Brexiteers’ victory seemed to place Corbyn’s office under immediate threat, with rightwing Labour MPs furious at his lack of interest and contribution to the national disaster, it became clear - with the seeing off of the chicken coup and then the spectacular turnaround in Labour’s fortunes in the 2017 general election - that Corbyn’s caginess about the question was an astute electoral calculation. It was infinitely better to have fought against a tactically inept Tory campaign on bread and butter issues than to have done so on a commitment to remainism (or to its ill-fitting disguise, the second referendum).

Polly Toynbee, the Guardianista ghoul, attributes Corbyn’s shift to discreet participation in the anti-Brexit front in part to the “absence of his strategy chief, Seumas Milne, on a prolonged holiday” (September 9); so much the better for Milne if he really was resisting the charms of a parliamentary alliance with the Liberal Democrats, nationalists and ‘Spreadsheet’ Phil Hammond. But we do not believe in coincidences, and particularly as concerns the timing of holidays of ‘strategy chiefs’ during acute political crises. Whatever the truth of the matter, that alliance is the dead-end result of precisely the orthodox Labour left strategy Milne and co represent. For the Corbyn we now have, with the commitments he happens to have made, a sudden transformation into a sensible, bridge-building statesman makes a sick kind of sense.

With the Labour leadership now sucked into horse-trading over governments of national unity, or caretaker governments, or electoral pacts, the danger is that Boris Johnson and his Tories will, whenever it is called, fight a ‘people versus the Westminster elite’ general election and perhaps even emerge with a clear majority. That would be a prelude not just to a trade pact with the United States and chlorinated chicken. No, what Cummings has in mind is a bonfire of regulations, thrashing the civil service, pushing back the powers of parliament, the destruction of what remains of the welfare state and the glorious birth of a British version of Singapore. He imagines himself the genius who fashions Boris Johnson into a Bonaparte or a Bismarck who sweeps away all opposition before him.

Corbyn’s cautious negotiation of the Brexit issue up to now was therefore half the right idea - it at least addressed the reality, to which Lexiteers and left remainers alike are oblivious, that both sides of the Brexit dispute were poisonous dead-ends in which a left Labour leadership was liable to come to grief. It turns out, however, that simply ignoring the issue does not work forever. The congenitally nationalistic and economistic world view of left Labourism was ill-equipped to tackle the question of Britain in Europe, whose subtleties now reach deep into arguments about what can be meaningfully named by the word ‘democracy’.

For our part, we need only restate the needs of the hour. In the name of working class political independence, the left must resist all attempts to corral Labour into a national government, however short-lived, and reject both the fantasy nationalism of Brexit and the fake internationalism of the remainers - built on the debt bondage of the Greek masses, desperate African refugees and countless other victims. The focus at home must turn to the irrevocable transformation of Labour, and in Europe as a whole to cross-border action and organisation of the workers’ movement, as a modest first step towards the socialist transformation of the continent.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk