by Jonathan Todd
“Emotional landscapes. They puzzle me. The riddle gets solved and you push me up to this state of emergency. How beautiful to be!”
As the UK confronted emergency in the Scottish referendum, I played the Bjork song Jóga obsessively. There is something in the urgency of Bjork’s voice and the tune’s texture that felt of last September’s zeitgeist. And it was beautiful to be in Trafalgar Square at the Better Together rally when Bob Geldof reminded us:
“Before there was a United Nations, before there was a United States, before there was a united anything, there was a United Kingdom.”
It spoke of all that we have been, all that we could be, and all that Alex Salmond would disregard. Hope rooted in pride, resisting Salmond’s insistence that there was nothing to be proud of.
Now Jeremy Corbyn has pushed my party – Labour – to its own emergency. His geography teacher style, like Salmond’s cheeky chap routine, has a cut through of authenticity amid our over spun times. They proffer simple solutions to complex problems, swallowed by demoralised peoples – Scotland under Tory government, Labour after defeat.
They – or at least their supporters – tell people like me that Labour is not our party. That we are “red Tories”, unfaithful socialists, and collaborators in the misery that they would resolve.
“Jeremy offers hope,” I was told by a caller from his campaign. “What,” I didn’t quip, “of Tory government till at least 2025?” Not only would this have been pointlessly confrontational, it would have been an argument rooted in pragmatism alone, which is now inadequate.
UK breakup would precede a decade of turmoil around public debt, pensions, currency, the EU, NATO and much else that makes chilly rationality turn. Excessive dependency upon this rationality’s power caused Better Together to crawl over the line. Emotion was ceded to Yes, as it has been by the Labour right to Corbyn. It was only recovered in flickers by Better Together, such as at the Trafalgar Square rally.
There is no Trafalgar Square for the right. No Geldof. No flag waving. Only Tony Blair making a speech to Progress. Then being dismissed by a trade union leader as a “virus”, language straight from the cybernat vocabulary.
No one, not even Blair, who, as Corbyn now does, campaigned for a publicly owned railway during his 1994 victory, has attempted what Liz Kendall now valiantly attempts, to win the Labour leadership as a Blairite. Gordon Brown did not then run against Blair because there was at the time, if not later, unity across the right and a recognition that the right pulled together or withered apart.
Blair speaks to the more metropolitan Progress crowd, as former Brownites work through more provincial vehicles, like Labour First. Blairite/Brownite; Progress/Labour First; metropolitan/provincial. At one minute to midnight, as the Corbynites bang on the door, the right might rediscover that more unites than divides us.
Whether it is via the second preferences of the Blairite Kendall going to the Brownite Cooper, or some other means, the right condemns itself to perpetual rule by the soft left (Ed Miliband and arguably Andy Burnham) and/or the far left (Corbyn) – and, thus, Tory government – unless we can find some means of uniting, as pro-unionists finally did in Trafalgar Square.
That Trafalgar Square gathering derived from the ingredient that the right requires alongside unity: organisation. The likes of Dan Snow and Tom Holland deserve eternal congratulation for the quick fire organisation that created the Trafalgar Square crowd.
The organisation that the right now needs is much more than Blair preaching to the converted at Progress. It must reach across old divides – Blairite and Brownite – and newer ones – Blue Labour and liberal Labour – to secure as big a tent as possible on Labour terrain. This is what the Corbynites do. Their tent expands, those who decline it are shunned, their confidence shifts Labour’s centre of gravity leftwards. The right should go home or achieve comparable organisation.
Unity and organisation, while vital and necessary for the right’s renewal, are not sufficient. Hope is also required.
Corbyn’s hope does not take seriously the electorate’s verdict in May, and is, therefore, false. It is, though, churlish to deny that he has brought hope to party members. The right needs to take the party seriously and give hope to these same people.
Unadulterated rationality – whether in the form of the right highlighting Corbyn’s implausibility as prime minister or Better Together querying what currency would be used in Scotland following UK breakup – can induce fear but not hope. More than unity, more than organisation, more than anything else, the right needs the emotive force of hope. Geldof sparked this into Better Together’s bloodless rationality. The right awaits our Geldof.
Mere pragmatism is no longer pragmatic. Corbyn’s old tunes contain as many bum notes as ever. But the right still needs new tunes. To be sung with Geldof gusto. Corbyn has told us his “truth”, to paraphrase Bevan, the right must now retell ours. Which must be much more than, “Corbyn can’t be PM”. That’s who he is but not who we are. We are an emotional landscape, which re-charted would reveal a beautiful hope.
Jonathan Todd is Deputy Editor of Labour Uncut
Tags: Better Together, Jeremy Corbyn, Jonathan Todd, Labour leadership election, Labour right
What the Labour right should do now……
Maybe they should take a look at the Welsh Labour utopia and see what “clear red water” represents.
https://mrorigamidotorg.wordpress.com/2015/08/03/how-to-waste-6-billion-a-story-of-wales-in-europe/
“Welsh Labour has presented a distinctively Welsh policy agenda, in tune with the egalitarian, collectivist values of the Welsh people.”….Quote by Jeremy Corbyn (July 2015)
I hear lots of fear mongering from the author but nothing in the way of solutions to Labour’s present predicament.
Also, it is a strange type of solace that Mr.Todd finds from his memories of last years Better Together Trafalgar Square rally. It is accepted by all including Labour’s 40 ex Scottish MPs that it was Labour’s involvement with BT that did it for them at the GE.
Labour might have saved the union for now, but at what cost?
I was at the rally too & it was lovely but it came too late to have any effect on The Referendum & the ensuing tsunami of Nationalism. Your approach is the right one but again, far too late to have any effect. Did you notice the surge of CLP nominations in the few days before they closed, Corbyns lead increased massively , to about 10%/40CLPs. Cooper nearly caught up with Burnham, in line with the latest poll that put him 3rd.
I know there are 6 weeks of this interminable campaign to go but the moderates have already lost. What you have to decide is what to do after September 12th.
What the Labour right should do now…
Some possibilities.
1) Look for another party.
2) Learn some economics that works in the real world with proven results. ie NOT austerity economics.
3) Move slightly to the left.
4) Re-engage with the Labour Party as a whole and recognise that it isn’t quite what it might have been assumed to be.
I rather hate to be churlish but the Irishman Geldof doesn’t seem to know his history. The Act of Union of 1707 created the state of Great Britain. It was only the Act of Union of 1800 (or 1801 if you prefer) that created the United Kingdom by bringing Ireland into the Union and as everyone knows by that time the United States was already in existence (if still in nappies).
What should you do?
Forget about organisational shenanigans. This is a battle of ideas. So deal with the problems faced by people outside the Westminster bubble: explain why austerity, as favoured by the LP’s Right, is such a good policy.
But be warned, you’ll be up against any number of heavy-weight economists (Krugman, Stiglitz etc.) and Corbyn, one of very few heavy-weight politicians on the Labour benches.
Want to know why Corbyn is so popular? It’s because he’s a thinking politician. It’s because he is providing complex solutions to complex challenges.
Blue labour, who have a Backer in Rod liddle, who supported Bunham in 2010′ and Labour firsts, Peter Wheeler who backed Burnham then too, of course most Labour first/Blue labour backed Ed Miliband in 2010′ but there’s more to the right of the party than Progress.
I was looking again at the surge of CLP nominations in the last week, of the last 90 nominations, 50 were for Corbyn. Thats a huge shift from the pattern earlier, it suggests to me that The Left have won the argument.
The only democratic alternatives are to stay & be loyal or leave.
What they should do is join the Conservatives as they are clearly in the wrong party.
CORBYN FOR No.10 !!!
There should be no Right-wingers in a Left-wing Socialist party
I’m with Landless Peasant. Corbyn’s my man, he’s exactly the leader I want the Labour Party to have.
One small issue the comrades might choose to consider: I don’t vote Labour and would be perfectly happy to see the party in Opposition for at least the next two Parliaments. I just think Comrade Jeremy is the man to make it happen.
Andy Burnham is calling for the Nationalisation of the Railways.
Andy Burnham is calling for the Nationalisation of the Railways.
No he isn’t – it’s more bingo-speak.
He clarified his position “that his policy is not immediate compulsory renationalisation, merely letting the public sector bid when franchises expire”
And being as 90% expire before 2020 and won’t be up again until 2030 then it’s unlikely he’ll ever have to honour even that.
http://order-order.com/2015/08/05/burnham-train-derails-renationalisation-spin-unravelled/#:wx3jpWfvPdy0nA
Ok so now apparently it is not the centre left or centrist Labour folk,now officially the “right” ……. walks away and puts kettle on! : -)
A majority of CLP’s; all of the major trade unions; hundreds of councilors; and now so many new members that the definition of supporter is changed and a purge is taking place before ballot papers are sent out.
I am not asking that you simply accept this as a lost cause because at least you are asking for a battle of idea’s rather thn resorting to the usual tactic of scurrilous attacks, but there is and always was a center ground, it’s called the LibDems.
The trouble is that the caring tories who have a heart and feel sorry when they have to impliment cuts that hurt the poor are tories nonetheless. However, they know that without the support of organised Labour they’d do nothing but sell their soul in coalitions
A majority of CLP’s; all of the major trade unions; hundreds of councilors; and now so many new members that the definition of supporter is changed and a purge is taking place before ballot papers are sent out.
Do you not get the message?
I am not asking that you simply accept this as a lost cause because at least you are asking for a battle of idea’s rather than resorting to the usual tactic of scurrilous attacks, but there is and always was a center ground, it’s currently called the LibDems, why not go there?
The trouble is that the caring tories who have a heart and feel sorry when they have to impliment cuts that hurt the poor are tories nonetheless. Liberal Reformists in the good times, supporters of austerity in the bad.
However, they know that without the support of organised Labour they’d do nothing but sell their soul in coalitions or wring their hands on the sidelines.
The solution, win the Labour Party for the right wing and smuggle in a tory agenda. This is why this self same battle has surfaced ever since the inception of the a Labour Party as worthies on the right try to control the workers, for their own good of course else heaven knows what crazy policies they’d adopt.
Don’t like what they are saying? Take power from conference. Don’t like the unions stance? Change the method of selecting a leader. [Add methods to taste here].
If you think the membership are making such a mistake then let us get on with it and you go where your heart belongs.
But I think this is unlikely. The idealogues will never leave us to our own devices as we might just challenge the status quo, and they have no end of careerist chancers to support the endeavours of people like Lord sainsbury, first the SDP and then Progress.
I realise that this is nieve but I wish that the opposition were honest. Unfortunately, when you are in a minority deception is your safest tool else you’ll end up like Liz Kendall, alone on the fringe or dreaming of a unifying idea as the author above does. On the other hand say nothing (Cooper) or pretend you’re from the left (Burnham) and you might win and once in power do what you want anyway.
Corbyn supporters remember that if he wins this is just the beginning. They will try to destroy Corbyn, for the good of the Labour Party of course, but it won’t be pleasant. Hold faith, hold hope and persuade the unaligned workers and then we have a chance.