Professional politicians are killing modern politics. Consider this transformation. As new Tory opposition leader in 1975, Margaret Thatcher once interrupted a fellow Tory during a policy discussion by removing a copy of Friedrich von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty from her briefcase and thumping it on the table. “This,” she said firmly, “is what we believe.” Thatcher won a landslide victory in 1983 against one of Labour’s more extreme leaders, Michael Foot, who had propelled the party to the left. Thatcher’s legacy was to drag the Labour opposition to the centre-right, and from there Tony Blair won as many elections as Thatcher.
Fast forward. Labour has an even more radical left-wing leader, an unapologetic socialist in Jeremy Corbyn. His legacy already as Opposition Leader has been to shift British Prime Minister Theresa May and her Tory government to the left, where it now sits in political and philosophical disarray. And Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell brandished a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book at the dispatch box last year and started reading from it. McDonnell, an “unapologetic Marxist” in a sensible business suit, could be a greater political threat than the naive Corbyn.
So how did we get from Hayek to Mao in less than 50 years? That’s what Tom Switzer, the new head of the Centre for Independent Studies, asked last week while hosting Eamonn Butler, an economist, co-founder and director of Britain’s free-market think tank, the Adam Smith Institute.
The short answer is that the Tories are the unwitting architects of Corbyn’s socialist revolution. Butler made the obvious point that in the modern era, there are more professional politicians than ever. Gone are people with real-world experience. And when politicians haven’t had a real job, it’s no surprise that they’re disconnected from what matters most to the voting public. In this vacuum, straight-talking Corbyn and Trump make sense.
Corbyn’s rise is the flip side of Donald Trump storming the White House after Democrats helped create the Trump phenomenon. When professional politicians, both Democrat and Republican, ignored, underestimated and mocked Trump as a political threat, the same politicians signalled they were also ignoring, and in some cases mocking, the concerns of Trump supporters.
It’s the same with Corbyn. The Tories paid little attention to the obscure, irrelevant old socialist who sat quietly on Westminster’s backbench for more than 30 years, except to laugh at him as potential Labour leader. Only 36 of the 232 Labour MPs voted for Corbyn when leadership was decided in 2015. No one is laughing now, and all eyes are on Corbyn since he humiliated the Tories into minority government at the election last June.
May has become Corbyn’s most effective enabler. The British Prime Minister is the dour, awkward managerialist to Corbyn, the energetic, confident and straight-talking socialist. Not for nothing, May has been compared to her Labour predecessor and Temazepam Man, Gordon Brown. When some students once asked him what his favourite food was, Brown droned on in indecision: “Traditional things, like steak and all that. I love spaghetti bolognese, and carbonara and all these things. I like Chinese food, I like Indian food. I like English food, British food … and French … I like almost anything.” The kids had tuned out by the time he mentioned carbonara.
May is the same. No cut through. No real sense of what she believes in. Trying to look more human last week on ITV’s This Morning! May gabbed on about the critical need for a review of university tuition fees. Meanwhile Corbyn promises to get rid of tuition fees. Tories can’t possibly outbid Corbyn, but at least try a passionate rebuttal, pointing out that no fees are a boon for the rich and a hit to every low-income taxpayer. Instead, May sat quietly, brow furrowed, mumbling about being determined to jolly-well get on with her job.
In the face of Corbyn’s promise to renationalise public utilities, Tory Environment Secretary Michael Gove issued a stern warning last month that water companies must start to behave “in a responsible fashion” or face regulation. Sounding like Hans Blix in Team America wagging a finger at the North Korean dictator and threatening to write him a very angry letter, the Tories are putting voters to sleep with their brand of managerialism. Meanwhile Corbyn is attracting more and more Corbynistas with his own brand of folksy socialism.
Last year, the party of Thatcher couldn’t even launch a spirited defence of Uber, its 40,000 drivers and 3.5 million users of its app, which is disrupting the London cab monopoly. Instead, Labour mayor Sadiq Khan has been bringing Uber to heel.
It’s not enough for the Tories to counter Corbyn’s crazy socialist policies, be it rent control or renationalisation, by alluding to the disasters of the 1970s when his most ardent supporters were born in the 90s. Corbyn is resonating because Tories can’t rebut his policies with enough courage and conviction, and because his critics have cried wolf too many times.
The May government is right that Corbyn’s policies will be disastrous for the British economy. So was Bobby Vedral, the London-based Goldman Sachs partner who recently said: “If we have Corbyn, we have Cuba without the sun.” But most Tories and almost every corporate head honcho said a vote for Brexit would cause immediate economic ruin, and now Brexit is official government policy and the economy is fine.
Corbyn’s socialist revolution is getting another boost from the Tory obsession with the politics of smear. Just as Trump’s pussy-grabbing braggadocio didn’t stop his rise, Corbyn’s fondness for fellow international socialists from Hamas to Hezbollah isn’t repelling support for Labour. Hence this question from a chap in the audience of BBC’s Question Time last week: “When will the right-wing media and the Tories realise that lies and smears against Jeremy Corbyn no longer work?”
The answer came from a young activist on the panel who was described as a fan of “luxury communism”, which presumably is a socialist who doesn’t like to share her caviar. But she was right to point out that the Tories have given up on answering the economic and social issues, and now they’re going low.
Both Trump and Corbyn have attracted ridiculous slurs, with each affront only cementing their popularity with supporters. It lets both men point to a media monolith that is out to get them. Recent claims by Corbyn’s opponents that he sold secrets to communist spies during the Cold War, accusing him of “betraying his country”, comparing him with Kim Philby, a proven traitor, are backfiring. The May government looks desperate and Corbyn has another chance to promise that change is coming, this time pointing the finger at billionaire press barons.
The rise of this radical socialist is bad news for Australia. Bill Shorten may be the poor man’s Corbyn, but Labor is steadily ahead in the polls here because even Shorten’s opportunistic brand of class-war politics is resonating more than blancmange managerialism from the Turnbull government. And come the revolution, it will take at least a decade for people feel the full, dismal results of left-wing leaders who have taken power. By then, maybe, there will be an electable centre-right politician enamoured with Hayek.
janeta@bigpond.net.au
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