The Labour party is not best understood as an old-fashioned struggle of left and right. It is better to see Labour as a permanently unresolved engagement between competing traditions. The three most important of these traditions are ethical socialism, labourism and social democracy. The first emphasises the kind of person you wish to be, the second the kind of person you represent and the third the kind of thing you seek to win support to do.
Most Labour MPs of modern times are a mix of the second and third traditions, but it is no accident, as the more doctrinaire Marxists say, that Jeremy Corbyn’s roots are in the first and second traditions and not in the third. Social democracy’s priority is to fashion achievable compromises between capitalism and social justice. This places the emphasis on governing. But governing has never been Corbyn’s thing, as the last week has shown.
The social democratic tradition has dominated Labour for half a century and more. But Corbyn’s election overturns all that. It is a triumph for the ethical socialist tradition, especially in its “not in my name” urban left form, allied to a partially revived labourism. The social democrats lost because they forgot the enduring importance of ethos in the Labour party, especially in the aftermath of the Iraq war and the financial crash.
As a result Corbyn and his supporters, who care more about virtue than victory, have captured what is still, at Westminster at least, a predominantly social democratic party. The consequences are immense and few have got their heads around them properly yet. They are mostly bad, however, unless you are an ethical socialist; and one of the first and most dangerous of them concerns Labour’s future stance on a quintessential social democratic priority — the European Union (EU).
Throughout the leadership campaign, Corbyn flirted with the idea that, under him, Labour might not support continued EU membership in the UK’s forthcoming in-out referendum. That possibility terrified Labour’s social democrats, for whom EU membership is fundamental, but it aroused less passion among ethical socialist or labourist supporters, who tend to be more agnostic about Europe.
However, in his round of interviews on Wednesday evening Corbyn changed his tune. Now, he announced, he did not see the Labour party campaigning for British withdrawal in the referendum. So does that mean his position on the fundamentally important European issue — previously the source of so much unease in the party — is now definitively sorted? And what does this change imply for Corbyn’s approach to the rest of the slain social democratic tradition?
It suggests a hitherto extremely well-concealed streak of pragmatism in the seemingly ascetic Corbyn. Many of those who fretted most about Corbyn’s intentions on Europe have decided to take last week’s interviews as the new leader’s ‘yes’ to Europe. If they are correct, the accommodation with the pro-European majority among Labour MPs would be strikingly at odds with Corbyn’s long history of Euroscepticism and his lifetime membership of the old anti-EU socialism-in-one-country. It would therefore be a significant shift, not only because of the importance of the subject — an existential national issue that will dominate British politics for the next two years.
Either way, it was certainly a last-minute change of mind. As late as last Monday night, when he addressed Labour MPs at Westminster, Corbyn refused to rule out campaigning for withdrawal, putting him at odds with his newly-confirmed shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, who had committed himself to staying in the EU only hours beforehand.
So if Corbyn is indeed now committed to Europe, he stands accused either of deviousness for concealing the fact during the Labour leadership campaign, or of indecisiveness for giving such contradictory messages until Wednesday. Straight talk it wasn’t. There was wriggle room in Corbyn’s words: The commitment on Labour’s stance that he gave to the BBC may seem explicit. But he didn’t give an unequivocal endorsement of United Kingdom membership of the EU. he said the policy was a “developing” one, which could imply it will develop in a more Eurosceptic direction. And he repeated the line he took in the campaign about not allowing British Prime Minister David Cameron a blank cheque on the EU. In addition, the European issue could become seriously muddied at the Labour party conference in two weeks. That’s because the GMB union will move a motion that Labour “should not support a vote to remain in the EU” if Cameron gets EU employment and social rights removed or “scaled back” — an imprecise term — in his reform negotiations. Since Corbyn believes that conference should set Labour policy, he may argue that circumstances have changed if the GMB motion is carried. Reading between the lines, a Corbyn policy of remaining in the EU, while focusing on defending or strengthening workers’ rights, seems to be emerging. That wouldn’t be enough for Labour’s all-out pro-Europeans, who think the EU is about far more than employment rights. But it is a defensible enough position for a Labour leader. This would be embodied in a 2020 election manifesto pledge on strengthened rights, Corbyn told the BBC last week. Even so, no Labour party policy will bind the unions, which are already gradually shifting towards the EU exit option.
If big unions such as Unite and the GMB decide to back Brexit — as their forebears mainly did in the 1975 referendum — that may put pressure on union-sponsored Labour MPs to follow the union line rather than the party’s. MPs could thus face reselection battles before 2020, in which, their referendum stance could become an important issue.
If all that were to happen, then Corbyn may find himself formally in favour of staying in the EU while presiding over a party in which MPs were being punished for not campaigning to come out.
The European policy argument embodies the many problems now facing the Labour party. It will be the first of many, some of them surely much bloodier. Corbyn is in many ways a living and breathing embodiment of an argument put forward by the political scientist Henry Drucker in 1979. Drucker argued that Labour is a party animated more by a sense of collective ethos than by a commitment to a political programme.
It is, therefore, more comfortable as a party of opposition, sustained by a sense of betrayal, than as a party of government. That’s why Corbyn won and last week’s events bear Drucker out. But that conclusion offers little consolation for Labour’s stunned social democrats, whose tradition is now in the deepest jeopardy.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
