To everyone but his fans Jeremy Corbyn’s policies look like economic madness

Matthew d'Ancona27 September 2018
WEST END FINAL

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First, a public service announcement: do not underestimate the popular traction of Jeremy Corbyn’s attack today on what he called “the whole edifice of greed-is-good, deregulated financial capitalism”.

The sentiment is scarcely new: it was commonplace long before the crash of 2008, whose continuing impact, a decade on, was one of the core themes of the Labour leader’s conference speech in Liverpool. Indeed, in the 31 years since Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko, in the movie Wall Street, declared that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good”, the aphorism has been endlessly quoted to capture the intrinsic wickedness of so-called “neo-liberalism”.

This resilient outrage does not alter the no-less-stubborn fact that financial services remain the engine of the British economy, that liberated enterprise is still its best hope, and that the fiscal conservatism of the past eight years was a necessary response to the soaring deficit.

Yet what Corbyn grasps is that Donald Trump’s success is not accidental: in a world in which fact is increasingly overshadowed by feeling, a banal slogan — “Make America Great Again” — can get you surprisingly far. It would be a mistake to dismiss the extent of Corbyn’s potential appeal to those who have been bruised by austerity, resent what they see as the widening gap between a tiny elite of the super-rich and ordinary people struggling to pay the bills, and look ahead with foreboding to the economic prospects of post-Brexit Britain.

Statistics and graphs are of no use in the battle to address these fears. Corbyn’s political opponents must come up with a better story, a better narrative, than he has.

Matthew d'Ancona

Notice, too, that the Labour leader sought to neutralise the charge that he would simply turn the clock back by embracing green technology, including solar panels on thousands of roofs, 13,500 onshore and offshore wind turbines, and a plan for renewable energy that “would make Britain the only developed country outside Scandinavia to be on track to meet our climate change obligations”.

This is appealing as far as it goes, though it amounts to little more than a series of benign environmental pledges that have been made, in various forms, by countless politicians with mixed results. What matters is the specious modernity in which Corbyn sought to wrap himself today by morphing from 1970s red to 21st-century green: having reverted to old-fashioned socialism, Labour needs all the help it can get not to resemble the political Amish.

Corbyn, quite rightly, assumes that he must be ready for another general election at any time. Theresa May’s Government resembles a tottering Jenga tower that — buffeted by the cross-winds of Brexit and the leadership ambitions of her rivals — may crash down at any moment. This could indeed be Labour’s last conference before Corbyn gets his second and (one assumes) final shot at the top job.

On the basis of his performance in Liverpool, the inescapable conclusion is that he is simply not up to the task. True, he has a grip upon his party that even the iron-willed stage managers of the New Labour era must envy. The veneration of the rank-and-file is undiminished — indeed, it has, if anything, become more impassioned as a reflex response to the alleged smears of the “mainstream media”. Again, like Trump, Corbyn has reframed all criticism as slander and used it to shore up his political base.

"Like Trump, Corbyn has reframed all criticism as slander and used it to shore up his political base"

Yet, instead of using his unchallenged strength within the tribal walls to reach beyond them, he has, on the contrary, become less flexible, more ideologically limited, sharper in his response to scrutiny. Witness, for instance, his captious refusal to say in a Channel 4 News interview yesterday whether he regretted having worked for the Iran-backed Press TV — even though he was asked the question four times.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine a senior politician less suited to the cut-and-thrust of daily life in No 10. Often hailed as a conviction politician, Corbyn uses his conviction as a firewall against debate rather than as a navigational tool.

He rarely budges: it was left to Sir Keir Starmer to say — in a declaration not included in the official text of his speech — that “Remain” had not been ruled out as an option in a prospective second referendum on Brexit. A wise leader would have insisted on doing this himself: to show that he had watched the shambles of the negotiations, heeded his party members and modified his position. But — as ever — doctrine prevailed: in this case, Corbyn’s essential hostility to the EU. Instead, the moment was Starmer’s.

In Liverpool it has also been embarrassingly clear that, having gone through the motions of addressing Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis , Corbyn still feels no great sympathy for the hurt sensibilities of Jewish people. No party leader who really wished to repair the damage would be happily photographed with an activist who asks, “Holocaust: yes or no?” — as Corbyn was with Miko Peled on Monday.

What does Corbyn offer? A programme of renationalisation, schemes to force larger companies to give up to 10 per cent of their shares to employees, and sprees of Keynesian spending that would unstitch Britain’s hard-won economic stability. Such a strategy would gravely imperil the very prosperity that is needed to fund the public services that Labour claims are its priority. It is economic populism, not economic policy.

In the 1960 US presidential race Richard Nixon’s opponents asked: “Would you buy a used car from this man?” Corbyn leaves Liverpool in unchallenged command of his party. But he has done nothing to persuade the rest of us why we should take him up on his offer of a used ideology.

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