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POLICIES ARE NOT ENOUGH

I left the Labour Party in the 1990s. Once dropping Clause IV had been proposed and, worse, agreed by the party membership, there didn’t seem much point in staying. New Labour’s rudderless Labour Party won three elections and achieved much in health and living standards but unlike 1945 it did not establish a new settlement, redefining the terms of politics. Nor did it intend to. Jeremy Corbyn’s emergence as possible, then actual leader drew me back in.

Let’s not mince words. This was an electoral disaster.  There is very little comfort to be had either from the details or the broad sweep of the 2019 general election. Impotent venting on Twitter and elsewhere is pointless. This was a rout and the first thing we must do is acknowledge

1. Lack of professionalism

This aspect of Jeremy’s leadership drove me crazy. From the start there was a tendency to believe that the programme power alone would overcome opposition: communicating the message was neglected. I often prayed for an Alistair Campbell, a ruthless brute who would sort out the press. I know journalists who offered their services. They got nowhere.

2. Policy incoherence

I’m in the Labour Party because it stands for something. The manifesto policies were right and individually popular but clearly weren’t sold to the voters, above all to those who would have benefited most: the poor, Northern commuters and so on

3. Brexit

Whimpering about being unable to overcome Brexit is futile.  Labour made a pig’s breakfast of Brexit. Which dimwit thought we could take no position on this ahead of the promised referendum? Or a referendum in the first place? A potential prime minister cannot be agnostic on the one issue on which everyone has a view. It just fed the weak leadership concept.

4. Leadership

Jeremy was a poor leader. Unquestionably he had the power to rally members and (especially in 2017) crowds. But from his initial reluctance to stand, to start wearing suits, to make big policy speeches, he never embraced the necessary. Where were the personal attacks, especially after Johnson became prime minister? Ruthlessness and strength needed communicating to the voters. They didn’t think he even wanted the job.

5. Anti-Semitism

This largely invented issue was intended to wound Jeremy at his strongest point, his lifetime commitment to doing the right thing whatever the consequences. It was weaponised, quite deliberately, to damage him among the young.  A ruthless and committed leader would have seen and finessed this, robbing the Right (in or out of Labour) of its most powerful weapon.

6. Lack of colour

Labour fought a grey, grim campaign. Where was the flair? Where was the humour? Where was the variety of leaders giving the message? We should have been offered the impression of a competent and varied team who would form the Labour Cabinet. Too much rested on one pair of shoulders.

What now?

It may sound odd to say this so soon, but Johnson will stumble. Brexit is only feasible as self-harm. His grovelling to Trump will start to grate. Decentralisation won’t happen (as the Cummings call for new Whitehall recruits implicitly concedes). Australia shows us a newly-elected Right-wing leader undone by events. It can happen here. It did to John Major in 1992.

For Labour to retain the two components of its mass membership – the young plus the returning grizzled veterans – two things are required. First there must be an affirmation that Labour was right on the big issues of the day, above all on the need to shift from presuming market solutions are always best. Second a leader must be found who does not disdain communications.

We should have changed leaders last Autumn: a fresh face selling policy might have done the trick. We’ve missed that chance. I don’t know why the merits of a male leader are even under discussion. Labour can take the political initiative for the first time in months by announcing an all-women shortlist. We do it for candidates; why not for leader?

Run, Angela, Run!

Image result for angela rayner

Labour’s leadership choice must show we wish to return to power as soon as opportunity offers. One remarkable feature of the 2019 electoral map was the loyalty of Lancashire to Labour, not just cities but towns too. My belief is that Angela Rayner, a Greater Manchester MP, proved in the last Parliament that she has the skills voters look for in a prime minister. Her background qualifies her to speak for the dispossessed. She has shown her willingness to use catchy slogans. Choosing her will signal a rupture with London-centric policies. Let’s hope she won’t let false modesty get in her way.

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Uncategorized

Who in the world do we think we are?

My article in the Ham & High of 21 June featuring my new book Britain Explained.

WHO IN THE WORLD DO WE THINK WE ARE?

Drill down into Britishness and what do you find? Is it from institutions like the BBC, the NHS or the OU? Or are we British because of common schooling experience and a love of Shakespeare? asks Hornsey author Martin Upham

aae_DSC_8378
Martin Upham author of Britain Explained

Who do you think you are?
It used to be so simple. I’m British, English, Catholic, Labour: you’re British, Scots, Jewish, Conservative; I’m from the country and support a county cricket team: you’re a football-obsessed urbanite.
In north London, such multiple identities are familiar, perhaps overlaid with film, stage or music interests, extended or shortened education, white- or blue-collar status, ethnicity, media selection, private or state schooling. All this apparently thrives side by side, but it creates a false sense of ease. The 2016 Brexit vote shocked many Ham&High readers. London might be capital of the UK but it is also capital of an England that views the world very differently.
I’ve taken a scalpel to identity in my new book Britain Explained. While writing I remembered the many young Americans I once taught as a study abroad director. They would spend a semester here, attracted by a hazy notion of ‘Britishness’. As strangers they noticed things we don’t: CCTV, an absence of identity cards, barristers in funny wigs. They also arrived thinking the NHS was just for the poor. The BBC – somehow public but not run by the government – baffled them. Much of their mental imagery drew on a past shaped by costume drama.
Britain Explained
You can learn from visitors. Drill down into Britishness and what do you find? Is it from institutions like the BBC, the NHS or the OU? Or are we British because of common schooling experience and a love of Shakespeare? Several politicians – and the Department of Education – have cast around for an umbrella ‘Britishness’ embracing all the nice positives: tolerance, mutual respect, multi-culturalism, the rule of law. The trouble is that a stretched fabric tears. That shocking referendum vote might mean a majority aren’t signed up to this official version of Britishness.
England’s ten other regions (a majority of two million English voters) were saying something when they voted Leave. Perhaps they saw it as a way to stop immigration. Perhaps they just got tired of being ignored. If so they have a point. There is a giant unfairness in the way the country is run. While Haringey Council is licking its lips about Crossrail 2 it takes four hours by train to reach Liverpool from Hull. This non-car owning Hornsey-dweller spends much of his life on the 41 bus. If I miss one there’s another just behind; bus-users in the shires can’t be so sure.
Some now suggest that older identities matter more. For a decade the Scots have been governed by a pro-independence party; while half of Northern Ireland seems more British than the British the other half isn’t British at all. This UK emerged with a British Empire, now long gone. Perhaps like the Empire it has had its day? A new state could emerge from England and Wales (maybe) and with London less of a First among Equals. This ‘rumpUK’ might allow individuals to fall back on self-identifiers and worry less about what we share.
Yet powerful common factors endure. Our political system may count votes in a peculiar way, but it survived the rumbustious 20th century. Our language is the one everyone else learns (while we never speak other peoples’). Almost all obey the law and even the most hardened racist loves a curry. What is valuable might yet be salvaged if London stopped elbowing its way to the front, if the arts, public transport and health resources were evenly distributed. The social care controversy might yet lead to a new national system to be proud of, as the NHS once was. And if centralising control freaks would just let go, a new national identity might emerge in which each had an equal stake.

Martin Upham lives in Hornsey.
Britain Explained, published by John Harper Publishing (£12.99), is available online from Waterstones and Blackwell’s and from Foyle’s, Waterstones Crouch End , Muswell Hill Books and all good bookshops.

 

 

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Arts Council England BBC Conservative Party England English history Eton Identity Ireland Labour Party NHS Oxbridge Scotland Uncategorized Wales Westminster

Britain Explained

My new book Britain Explained is published tomorrow by John Harper Publishing (see foot).  Completed on the eve of the general election it is an up to date guide to the UK on the eve of Brexit.  The defining institutions of the UK are identified and dispassionately probed: what are the Westminster System, the BBC, the NHS or the Arts Council? How do they shape the shifting national identities of the UK.

This is no patriotic puff. The divisions of this ‘United’ Kingdom are laid bare, be they political, national, social or cultural.  They aren’t just between the nations but within them: city and country, North and South, metropolitan and excluded.

And it’s a bargain at just £12.99 from your favourite online bookshop

 

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English history English radicalism Jeremy Corbyn Labour Party Owen Smith Uncategorized

An Ode to Owen Smith

In 1912, F.E. Smith condemned the Welsh Disestablishment Bill as ‘A Bill which has shocked the conscience of every Christian community in Europe.’  G.K. Chesterton’s famous Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom: An Ode punctured his ridiculous hypocrisy.  The BBC recently reported that Owen Smith praised Jeremy Corbyn for helping Labour “rediscover its radical roots” and would offer him the role of President to “speak for the party” to the wider membership. This awoke in me sentiments not unlike Chesterton’s, though my eloquence is less than his.

 

SO YOU’RE IN A GIVING VEIN,

ARE YOU SMITH?

WANT TO PUT YOUR OFFER PLAIN,

DO YOU SMITH?

SO WE’LL HAVE A PRESIDENCY FOR THE PARTY AND WE’LL THEN SEE

ALL THOSE MEMBERS WE’VE RECRUITED QUITE CONTENT TO BE UPROOTED,

WHILE YOU’LL BE THE REAL LEADER, OWEN SMITH.

 

YOU’D LIKE CORBYN TO PRESIDE,

WOULD YOU SMITH?

WHILE THE PARTY YOU WOULD GUIDE,

OWEN SMITH.

TO YIELD UP HIS LEADER’S POWER TO THE MP OF THE HOUR

WITH THE MEMBERSHIP THAT BACKED HIM RALLYING BEHIND WHO SACKED HIM

IS THAT PRACTICABLE THINKING?

REALLY, SMITH.

 

WHEN YOU TOOK BIG PHARMA’S SHILLIN’,

OWEN SMITH,

DID IT ENTER YOUR CAMPAIGN IN

PONTYPRIDD?

WAS THE VOTERS’ MAIN IMPRESSION YOU WOULD KEEP THE NHS ON

DID THEY WANT A COMPROMISER WHO’D BEEN HELPED ALONG BY PFIZER,

DID THEY KNOW JUST WHERE YOU STOOD, OWEN SMITH?

 

WHEN FOR TRIDENT THEY FOUND BILLIONS,

OWEN SMITH,

DID YOU THEN THINK OF THE MILLIONS,

TELL ME, SMITH,

WHO CAN’T FIND THE CASH FOR RENTING WHEN THE LANDLORD’S UNRELENTING,

AND WHO SEE NO COMMON SENSE IN THIS UNUSABLE ‘DEFENCE’.

DID YOU WEIGH THEM WHEN YOU VOTED, OWEN SMITH?

 

ARE THE MEMBERS IN YOUR THOUGHTS

OWEN SMITH?

CANVASSERS, RETIRING SORTS,

ARE THEY SMITH?

NOT REQUIRED TO GIVE THEIR VIEWS, WATCHING MPS HOG THE NEWS,

KEEPING SILENT, UNCOMPLAINING, PUSHING LEAFLETS WHILE IT’S RAINING

DO YOU REALLY WANT TO HEAR THEM, OWEN SMITH?

 

IS IT ONLY YOU THAT FEARS,

OWEN SMITH,

TORY POWER FOR MANY YEARS,

TELL ME SMITH?

IS IT YOU ALONE THAT WORRIES FOR THE POOR AND DISPOSSESSED?

ARE YOU SOLITARY IN YOUR WISH TO REPRESENT THE REST?

IS IT ONLY YOU CAN SAVE US, OWEN SMITH?

 

WHAT’S YOUR CAMPAIGN REALLY FOR,

OWEN SMITH?

IT’S HIGH TIME WE KNEW THE SCORE,

COME ON SMITH!

IS YOUR TALK OF ‘REVOLUTION’ JUST HISTORICAL ABLUTION?

IS THE MEANING OF YOUR FIGHT JUST TALKING LEFT WHILE ACTING RIGHT?

IF SO, YOU WON’T FIND MANY TAKERS,

CHUCK IT SMITH.

 

Martin Upham

 

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Tory splits matter

 

 Labour Briefing

My article from the May issue of Labour Briefing – just out!

You’d need a heart of stone not to relish the Tory in-fighting as the referendum looms. It couldn’t happen to better people. It’s half a century since this jagged fissure over Europe reached the Conservative core. Now it colours attitudes on everything: the help-the-rich Budget, neglect of steel, even the murky monetary misdemeanours of Dodgy Dave.

The Conservatives are an old party with a ruthless power instinct, apparently unconcerned about ideas. Everything comes second to winning the power to enrich their class. A National Living Wage? Why not, if people spend it and boost profits? The important thing is to govern so that the right people are taking decisions. Why else did papa send one to Eton? Thus in normal times ideology is out and effortless superiority is in. They can sit back and enjoy Liberal splits over Home Rule (1880s), Ramsay MacDonald’s defection (1930s), the SDP (1980s), radiating calm while depicting opponents as a rabble.

But periodically free trade disputes shiver the entire structure. In the 1840s Disraeli rallied Tories against Robert Peel’s Corn Laws repeal, a protectionist triumph. Sixty years later the Tories themselves were free traders, but under Balfour, still split over ‘imperial preference’ (the new protectionism). In the 1930s Stanley Baldwin fought Tory press barons wanting ‘Empire Free Trade’. From the 1960s projected EEC entry destabilised Conservatives again. Edward Heath presented it as a free trade move, taking Britain in and campaigning to remain in the 1975 referendum. But party opinion chilled. The EU seemed an obstacle to Britain’s world trade – a barrier to free markets. By the 1980s, his successor Thatcher (a 1970s Yes campaigner) was Euro-hostile. Her followers wrecked John Major’s 1990s government.

By the 21st century Euro-scepticism had won. Dodgy Dave could never have become party leader as a Europhile: nobody could. Even as Prime Minister he has always been on the defensive over Europe, untrusted by his party. By 2013 he could only staunch Euro-hostility by promising a referendum on membership. He glibly thought he could present a few minor renegotiations as a reformed EU; worth staying in. Few Tories were deceived. Now we hear the old song, a fracture over the lethal free trade issue.

There are at most 100,000 Tories. Yet to appease this ageing sect of racists and Rotary Club members, Cameron plunged 65 million people into a referendum. What a falling off since Balfour declared he’d rather take the advice of his valet than listen to the Tory conference! But Conservatism was then a mass movement. Now its Prime Minister can’t face down his small, shrinking party. Is it over for the Tories?

That depends on a referendum that could go either way. If the UK votes Remain they will pay a high price. The constant attempts to rig the vote, the £9m leaflet to every household (before spending limits kick in) and bitter Cabinet exchanges have inflamed differences. When Ian Duncan Smith, scapegoated for benefit cuts, angrily resigned, Europe’s power to inflame pre-existing differences was evident. Cameron may assume unity will break out after the vote but Tory Euro-rebels will cry foul and demand another one. Plenty would like to give him the same treatment Thatcher had in 1990.

If the UK votes Leave, Cameron – the leading Remain campaigner – cannot remain Prime Minister. In the contest to succeed him the key question would be ‘which side were you on in the referendum?’. The link between Free Trade, the EU and economic policy would be exposed, as triumphant Euro-sceptics lay into the National Minimum Wage, pensions and holidays. Vote Leave is the prelude to rolling back half a century of employment rights progress and introducing an Americanised labour market. UKIP (already half the Tory size) will cheer them on. It would be all-out class war.

Labour isn’t like a football team that accepts elimination from the Cup to concentrate on the League. It must get stuck into Remain and push every voter to choose. This referendum will shape Britain’s future. Then, if a weakened Cameron survives, he faces a revived Labour that can emerge – after good Wales, Scotland and London results – as the country’s strongest political force. If he falls, Labour can force an early election while the Tories disintegrate, Major-style.

 

 

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Henrik Ibsen, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Norway, Russia, Richard Rogers opera Uncategorized

UPRIGHT MALES

Tatyana, a young country girl of obscure family given to romantic dreaming, falls suddenly for Yevgeny, an older, more worldly neighbour. Impulsively, she sends him a passionate declaration of love. Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (1879) – inspired by a verse novel of Pushkin – pivots on his response to the letter, delivered in person later that day. To Tatyana’s growing dismay, Onegin condescends. He is flattered by her proposal: if he were to fall in love with anyone it would be her! But, he loftily explains, his heart is hardened against emotions. He cannot love her, except perhaps as a brother (!). It is as well that he, a man of honour, was the letter’s recipient; another, less scrupulous, might have taken advantage. The music suggests he may have meant this kindly but Tatyana wants a lover not a moral advisor. She is left despairing and humiliated.

Eugene Onegin

Alfred Allmers, ‘landed proprietor and man of letters’, comes back from a long holiday hiking in Norway’s mountains. We quickly learn from Rita Allmers how long he has neglected her emotionally and physically. Now, on his return, he goes one further. He has not written the book he went away to write but has found a new purpose to his life, he tells her. From now on he will devote himself entirely to their crippled son Eyolf. The appalled Rita, whom Alfred has been avoiding, knows this is a mortal threat to her happiness. In this autumn’s wonderful Almeida production she opens her dress to reveal her breasts in an unavailing attempt to stir the stodgy Alfred. Director Richard Eyre’s dramatic coup de theatre is justified by the text of Ibsen’s Little Eyolf (1894): we later learn that the boy’s injury derives from a cradle injury while the neglectful couple were making love. Eyolf, desperate for companionship among local boys swimming on the beach, later drowns.

 

Just desserts?

The scornful Onegin receives his quittance. He quarrels with his best friend Lensky, whose fiancée he has casually romanced. Too stiff – as ever – to appease the outraged Lensky he kills him in a duel. Now he must flee for years of empty womanising in exile. On his return he goes to a ball attended by his distant and distinguished relative Prince Gremin. Gremin has lately married and the startled Onegin discovers his bride to be Tatyana herself. Thrown into confusion and violent desire, he takes the first opportunity to declare his love. But Tatyana reminds him of his scornful treatment of her younger self. Her eventual rejection of him is no tit-for-tat: she is tempted by Onegin’s passionate outburst. Yet she knows Gremin genuinely loves her whereas Onegin spurned his chance long ago. In faint echo of the sad musings of her mother that open the opera, she chooses duty over passion and remains faithful. Onegin’s motives are ambiguous. Tchaikovsky leaves us to decide whether he is animated by true love or envy of Tatyana’s newly-elevated status. But it is he who ends the opera in despair.

Rita Allmers comes close to seeing her son as a rival (how mercilessly Ibsen observes mothers and sons). Yet Eyolf’s death by drowning leads to no physical reunion with her husband. They stay together not through mutual desire but to fulfil a social obligation by caring for the poor children of the village. Thus public duty trumps private desire, at least on Rita’s part. Onegin (and later Tatyana) stifle private desire with private obligation. True romantic love is represented by Lensky who is besotted by Olga, Tatyana’s older sister. In killing Lensky, Onegin kills romantic love too. Duty and love are poor bedfellows.

The Allmers once consummated their love but something – perhaps the birth of little Eyolf, perhaps Alfred’s unholy interest in his step-sister – has soured it. Onegin’s stolid treatment of Tatyana means they can never enjoy each other. Lensky’s death robs him of Olga: his haunting lament for lost life and love is rhapsodically sung by the fine young tenor Michael Fabiano. In the Royal Opera House’s unjustly criticised production – one of Kaspar Holten’s last before he leaves in 2017 – Onegin’s loveless philandering is depicted through dance. The fine ROH chorus and orchestra under Semyon Bychkov excel here, as throughout.

Onegin, lacking self-knowledge, must return home to learn why his life is empty. In the title role Dmitri Hvorostovsky does not have the best tunes. How can there be rhapsody for a man who puts romance second? Tchaikovsky’s opera is a threnody to unacted desires: better murder an infant in its cradle than cherish one of those. Ibsen’s great play suggests that the Allmers, albeit indirectly, might have done just that. Eyolf dies in any case.  Little Eyolf is concentrated in time and place; Eugene Onegin spans the vastness of Russia. The play is taut, economically written, concentrated; the opera is languorous, romantic and lush. But both express the folly of the morally upright. In ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ Richard Rodgers wrote tunefully of a man who ‘horizontally speaking (is) at his very best’. Alfred and Yevgeny, prig and snob, are vertical men who kill the thing they love.

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Outdoor Swimming Uncategorized Winter Solstice

How to mark the Winter Solstice

Once again the admirable Fusion-run Park Road Pools and Fitness has come up trumps. Many feared that last year’s all-winter swimming in Hornsey’s Olympic length lido was a one-off, but not so. Every morning in N8 there is an opportunity to relish open-air swimming in a dependable temperature range from 18-21 degrees. No stinging eyes, no sweats from excess humidity, no blaring muzak, no overcrowding. Instead the calm experience of rhythmic strokes outdoors in this warmest of Autumns. Even on the Winter Solstice you can get your daily Vitamin D.

steamy lido

 

Julius Caesar misplaced the date of the Winter Solstice believing the sun  reborn on 25 December. But we now know that today is the true day. This year – so far – we have none of the traditional shivering described by Spenser in The Faerie Queene:

‘Lastly, came Winter cloathed all in frize,

Chattering his teeth for cold that did him chill..’

But for all that today does mark the furthest reach of the planet and I had to celebrate it as I did in 2014.  Then as now, a steady breast stroke for 500m in the open air on the shortest day of the year is the best way to salute the birth of a new year.

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English history English radicalism Jeremy Corbyn Labour History Uncategorized

Attacks on Labour are nothing new

My article from the new issue of Labour Briefing

Here We Go Again

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Uncategorized

GIVE ME STRENGTH!

Yvette has ‘the strength to win’.  She wants a ‘strong Labour Party’ that will ‘make us stronger’.  She knows this cause she comes from a family of ‘strong women’.  After all ‘we’re stronger when we stand together’ and ‘we need strong opposition’. The way back for Labour is to ‘build stronger public finances’. Her backers confirm this is true: Yvette has ‘Labour values and strength’, they tell me, ‘knowledge, experience and strength’.  Thank God she’s not like that Jeremy, with his ‘old solutions to old problems, not new answers to the problems of today’.

Yvette doesn’t like Tom, but Tom is strong too. We have his own word for it when he promises ‘a strong voice for you’. The visionary look and cleft chin eradicate all doubt. You might shoot the sheriff, but I wouldn’t point your weapon at the deputy, not while Tom’s around.

At the local level things are different.  Here it’s more about smiles. Take Tessa. ‘She’s a star’, a nice man who once delivered the post tells me, ‘She is Labour’s Kylie – everyone loves her and she only needs a first name’.

O I almost forgot Christian.  He’s a bit like Jeremy really. In fact what with their bikes and lack of ties they do seem rather similar. I don’t know if they are strong men or not.  Perhaps I should worry about this because no-one has written to tell me they are? The trouble is, they will keep going on about their policies when really all I’m looking for is a cheery smile with a hint of inner strength from people who understand all these things so much better than me.

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My letter to the London Review of Books on the Labour Leadership contest

The 27 August 2015 number of the London Review of Books published an alarming article from David Runciman (reproduced at foot). I have sent the following response.

Dear Editor,

Strip away the persiflage in David Runciman’s piece (‘Short Cuts’, 27 August) and you are left with an assertion that Jeremy Corbyn cannot lead Labour at all – let alone back to power. Established parties are not led by the likes of him. His supporters wrongly see their approaching vote as a way to express themselves and it is no excuse that they know exactly what they are doing.

Labour is hardly a thriving enterprise. Much polling evidence suggests 2015 voters did not know what it stood for (sometime appending the deadly phrase ‘any more’). Until Corbyn electrified a dismal contest Labour’s identity remained a lost cause. Now overdue policy shifts are being advocated from a position of authority. Runciman acknowledges Corbyn’s policies are ‘popular with a surprisingly wide swathe of the public’, but expects the message to be muffled by a divided PLP and Shadow Cabinet. That distinguished body has Chris Leslie as its Shadow Chancellor. Corbyn is an unassuming man but it does not follow that he cannot lead a powerful opposition from an unpromising electoral position, wrong-foot Cameron at PMQs or handle the press lobby. Campbell-Bannerman and Attlee, who both led powerful but fractious teams back to power from the wilderness, were likewise underestimated.

Political science texts portray party members as unduly ideological and unrepresentative. Blair disarmed them, ruling by referendum as he narrowed the span of legitimate debate and impoverished Labour’s ambition. The Party became defined against its own history, frightened to advocate rational policy. In 13 years it didn’t even achieve public control of the railways – a vote-winner with commuters in Southern target constituencies if ever there was. Has anyone at all complained about Boris Johnson’s quiet municipalisation of private rail lines in rural and suburban Essex, stuffed with seats Labour must win?

The Scottish government disproved New Labour’s thesis by governing from the Centre-left. Despite a referendum defeat, SNP membership exploded, presaging an electoral landslide. Just the prospect of a Corbyn victory has galvanised Labour. Of course its UK-wide task is greater than the SNP’s. But Labour has five years to transmute enthusiasm into votes; Nicola Sturgeon had eight months. This willingness of the once unaligned, jaded or cynical – many of them young – to explore established parties rather than insurgents has unnerved many, Runciman among them. His plea for Labour to do ‘a bit of fixing’ must be the first call for ballot-rigging you have ever carried. I hope it will be the last.

Yours Sincerely,

Short Cuts

David Runciman

It’s easy to confuse democracy with democracy. Having a party’s members elect its leader is clearly more democratic than leaving the decision up to MPs or union bosses. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for democracy. When the Tories first moved to a one-member-one-vote system in 2001, they plumped for Iain Duncan Smith over Kenneth Clarke. The result was that Britain had a weak and ineffectual parliamentary opposition at the most hubristic phase of Tony Blair’s premiership, during the run-up to the Iraq War. The situation was only remedied two years later when the parliamentary Conservative Party effectively staged a coup, installing Michael Howard as the sole candidate without consulting the membership. In 2007, Lib Dem members chose Nick Clegg over Chris Huhne as their leader by the narrowest of margins. Given that Huhne was to end up in jail in 2013 you might think this was the wise choice. But none of the voters (bar two) could have known Huhne’s vulnerability on that score. By choosing Clegg they went with a comfortable politician under whose leadership the party would be chewed up and spat out by the Tories, rather than with a more rebarbative one who might have kept them at arm’s length – and his party alive. It’s hard to argue that British democracy is better off as a result.

Now the Labour Party, putting the decision entirely in the hands of its members for the first time, may elect Jeremy Corbyn. It’s tempting to see this as another IDS moment. But it’s something more than that. The election of IDS was wishful, whereas this looks much more wilful. Deluded Tory members seemed genuinely to believe that Duncan Smith was a widely appealing politician whose virtues, so apparent to them, needed only to be brought to the attention of the general public to win them over. Corbyn’s supporters are under few illusions that he fits the mould of a mainstream party leader. They know he’s at best an acquired taste and unlikely to be the man to win back voters lost to the Tories in the key marginals. A recent YouGov poll found that barely a quarter of Labour members believed that understanding how to win an election was one of the key qualities needed in a Labour leader (62 per cent wanted him or her to be ‘in touch with the concerns of ordinary people’). Corbynites realise that they are not playing the game by the rulebook. They don’t care.

One way to understand this is as a manifestation of what political scientists call the expressive, as opposed to the instrumental, theory of voting. If voting is instrumental then it’s presumed that voters are primarily motivated by the results they hope to achieve: leaders and parties who can deliver real benefits. If it’s expressive then voters are more interested in signalling who they are and what they value. The case for expressive voting is partly driven by the thought that instrumental voting is a waste of time, since in any significant election no one’s vote ever decides the outcome (if your candidate wins or loses it is always by more than one vote, making your contribution incidental). But it also seems to chime with the world of social media and online communication, where self-expression rules and echo chambers proliferate. The internet is much more effective as a vehicle for expressing disgust with mainstream politics than it is for organising pragmatic reconfigurations of it. Corbyn might be a reminder of the 1980s in some of his policy prescriptions, but his is still very much a candidacy of the internet age.

Nonetheless, there is something unpersuasive about the idea that voting is simply a way of striking an attitude. Casting a ballot is an odd way to signal anything to anyone, given that no one is actually watching you do it. Most voters do seem to want their personal contribution to make a difference and believe that it can. I’m not convinced that support for Corbyn is just gesture politics. As well as being the era of self-expression this is also the era of disruption. Yes, a Corbyn victory would mean going against all the conventional wisdom about how to win an election. But conventional wisdom is a devalued currency these days. Whole industries that believed the world was a certain way have found the rug pulled out from under them. Things that seemed impossible become inevitable with barely time to pass through a phase of being merely improbable (and if Corbyn does win his campaign will conform to that pattern – a few weeks ago he was a 100/1 outsider; as I write this he has just been installed as the bookmakers’ favourite). A few years ago Uber didn’t exist. Now it’s taking over the world. Not playing the game by the rulebook can pay off in the most dramatic and unexpected ways. Why should political parties be immune to this expanded range of possibilities? The shake-up is happening across Europe. Why not here?

If I’m right that this is part of what lies behind the Corbyn surge, then his supporters are making a mistake. The Labour Party is not a start-up. Disruption is almost certainly not what it needs. Indeed, disruption is more likely to destroy it than to revitalise it. The job for which Corbyn is standing has many different facets, of which the most important remains leading his party’s MPs in Parliament. This is the bit of the job it is nearly impossible to imagine him doing successfully. It is not just that the parliamentary party is liable to be both split and demoralised by his election. He also lacks the experience. Corbyn at PMQs? Corbyn handling the press lobby? Corbyn managing the shadow cabinet? To see these as relics of the old way of doing politics is to mistake the range of policy possibilities for the range of institutional ones. It may well be true that much of what Corbyn stands for – including a fairer tax system, greater public ownership of key services and more support for the low-paid – is popular with a surprisingly wide swathe of the public. But it won’t make any difference if the news never gets beyond a divided and dysfunctional parliamentary party. Voters don’t elect parties that are split. Those rules are not going to change.

In this respect, the examples of Syriza and Podemos are a distraction. Both those parties are start-ups. Britain may well be crying out for new political parties (especially in Scotland) and the thought of someone like Corbyn at the head of one makes sense, though under Britain’s first-past-the-post system it might not make much difference. But that isn’t what he’s offering. His popularity has been compared to the baffling levels of support currently being enjoyed by Donald Trump in the fight for the Republican presidential nomination. That too is probably a reflection of the fact that voters are no longer content to take at face value the limited range of acceptable options presented to them. But Trump’s case is also very different. The length of the US contest means there is plenty of time for the old rules to reassert themselves. And when that happens, Trump has the option of running as an independent, which is what a disruptor would do (though the likely consequence is that he would help usher Hillary into the White House). Corbyn is an intransigent independent trying to take over an established player. It rarely works in politics, just as it rarely works in business. You don’t disrupt corporate behemoths like IBM from the inside. You have to break away.

There is still time for the Corbyn bubble to burst. The opinion polling that has him far ahead is more likely to be expressive than the casting of ballots will be. Polling in previous Labour leadership elections has shown a tendency to overstate support for the more radical candidates (the final YouGov poll of party members in 2010 had Ed Miliband winning by 4 per cent when in fact his brother, David, won that section of the electorate by nearly 9 per cent). If Corbyn does win, there is talk of a swift coup to replace him, but the Labour Party is not the Conservative Party and kneejerk anti-democratic moves are a much harder sell. Ed Miliband must take some of the blame for where the party finds itself. Even Syriza, we now discover, had some contingency plans for exiting the euro. Miliband seems to have done nothing to prepare for defeat, presumably on the grounds that it would damage morale. When it happened he simply walked away. Michael Howard stayed on in 2005 to ensure that the election of his successor could be steered in his preferred direction. Miliband was probably too damaged by the scale of his failure to do that (and who knows what his preferred direction would be), but he could have done more to try to ensure a better range of options than the party is currently faced with: unsustainable inspiration or uninspired continuity. It pains me to say it, but if ever an election needed a bit of fixing it was this one.

31 July