Unifying, dynamic, inclusive: Corbyn sets out his stall

So Jeremy Corbyn, within 48 hours of taking up the mantle of leader of the Labour Party and of the official British Opposition, has named his first shadow cabinet. And, like all such decisions, it contains the usual mix of things to excite disappointment or to excite admiration.

The biggest disappointment is that of the five top jobs, not one has gone to a woman. It’s true that two of these are determined by election not appointment – his own and his deputy’s – but the other three, Shadow Chancellor, Shadow Foreign Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary, were in his gift.

One of these, perhaps the greatest, the finance post of Shadow Chancellor, he’s awarded to a close ally, the man who ran his campaign for the leadership, John McDonnell. The Labour Party has recent bitter experience of a leader at loggerheads with his Chancellor: Gordon Brown was famous for working constantly to replace Tony Blair.

In the end, then, there were only two posts that he could have handed out freely. He chose men for both. It might have been pleasing to see a woman in one of them. Well, we won’t, at least for now. He has at least been generous in both those appointments: Hilary Benn, who already held the Shadow Foreign Secretary, keeps the position under Corbyn; and as Shadow Home Secretary, he’s appointed his closest rival for the leadership, Andy Burnham.

He might well have shown more of such generosity, but a great many people from other currents in the Labour Party decided they simply would not serve in a Shadow Cabinet under him. So if there has been a failure of behaviour, it hasn’t been on his part, but on theirs. 

He has described the Shadow Cabinet he appointed as “unifying, dynamic and inclusive.” Clearly, he could only be as inclusive as far as people would accept inclusion. Equally, he can only unify those who don’t set out to divide; one can only hope that the sheer scale of his victory will silence serious rebellion, at least for long enough to see whether he can prove himself, and his team, sufficiently dynamic.

As well as including people who disagree with him, he has also displayed a readiness to carry into practice as leader a willingness to compromise, that he’d increasingly exhibited during the campaign to win the position. He has for instance appointed Maria Eagle Shadow Defence Secretary – always fun to see a woman taking on so traditionally macho a brief – though she disagrees with him fundamentally on scrapping Britain’s nuclear deterrent (so-called: it’s so small as to make it difficult to imagine which nation it might deter) and on leaving NATO.

In passing, it’s amusing that as well as Maria Eagle he has also appointed her twin sister Anna as Shadow Business Secretary. I’m not aware of any previous Shadow Cabinet or actual Cabinet that has contained a pair of twins.

A first? Twins in the Shadow Cabinet?
One of them's Maria Eagle and the other one's Anna

Corbyn has also agreed to campaign for Britain to stay in the European Union, a position he certainly does not enthusiastically endorse. Hilary Benn, as his Shadow Foreign Secretary, confirmed that there were no circumstances in which Labour would campaign for Britain to leave the EU. That’s another significant concession.

The measure of his approach was perhaps best summed up by Chris Bryant, who takes the role Shadow Leader of the House of Commons:

It’s going to be a bumpy ride. In the conversations that I’ve already had with Jeremy, though I disagree with him on lots and lots of different things, I have to say that he has been accommodating. It’s evident there’s going to be quite a bit of give and take and when I said, ‘look I will hold my views very strongly and passionately and will put them across, sometimes too aggressively,’ he said ‘you and me both, mate.’

A refreshing attitude. Though by no means a wholly unprecedented one. The man who filled the position of President of the United States more brilliantly than any other, Abraham Lincoln, took a not dissimilar position. He appointed to his cabinet the man who most commentators, not least himself, expected to win his party’s nomination for the White House, William Seward. Indeed, for a while, Seward tried to behave as the real power in government, until Lincoln explained to him, quietly and courteously but with unshakeable firmness, that he would hold ultimate authority and not his Secretary of State.

Lincoln and Seward were both moderates on the slavery question, wanting it to wither slowly rather than to abolish it immediately. But Lincoln appointed to another senior position in his cabinet, Treasury Secretary, Salmon Chase who was on the radical wing of his party.

He never used Lyndon Johnson’s colourful expression concerning FBI Chief, J. Edgar Hoover, “it’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” That was his guiding principle. And it worked: Lincoln focused on the main issue in hand, the defeat of the rebellion in the South and restoration of the Union, but by doing so, he achieved not only that objective but also the final, complete abolition of slavery through the 13th amendment to the US Constitution.

I don’t know whether Corbyn can achieve greatness as Lincoln did, and I certainly hope he doesn’t share his fate. What I can say is that by giving way on such issues as Trident and the EU, he does give his party a far better chance of focusing on the key questions; developing an alternative economic policy to austerity, and taking the battle to the Tories. While in his Shadow Cabinet appointments, he’s done everything his adversaries will allow him to do to unify the party. As for dynamism, he's already shown he has plenty of that.

Incidentally, though there are only men in the five top jobs, there are more women than men in the Shadow Cabinet as a whole.

Is Corbyn going to reconnect Labour to its roots? Is that maybe a way back to government?

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader is nothing if not exciting.

Fraught with risk, maybe, but at least more dramatic, more inspirational than a victory for any of the other candidates would have been: as a journalist told the BBC, their performance throughout the campaign has been boring to the point of robotic.

Indeed, it seems to me that the only time they became less dull was when they attempted to move as far as they dared onto Corbyn territory, picking up challenges to government they had studiously avoided until they saw the traction they were winning inside the Labour Party: back in May, for instance, Andy Burnham was trying to shake a reputation as a left winger by claiming there were aspects of the Tory benefits cuts that he could support, whereas in August he was denouncing Tory moves on sanctions against benefits claimants as “brutal.”

Corbyn, by contrast, has never seemed robotic. Indeed, he comes across as straight, shunning the usual evasions and spin of the classic New Labour injection-moulded candidate. Indeed, the calm and highly effective way he handles hostile questions from journalists was what shook my sense that he couldn’t win the media battle, and started the process of bringing me round to support for him.

It’s no wonder he can mobilise Labour: he speaks for the most profoundly held principles of the party, and he does so with a voice of unwavering commitment and honesty. The issue for crtics in the media or outside the party, however, is whether he can win that kind of enthusiasm from a broader electorate, beyond the Labour Party. He’s out of touch with voters, they claim. They also suggest he may take Labour back to the disastrous period of the eighties, when Labour found itself exiled to the wilderness of perpetual opposition.

I take a less pessimistic view. Corbyn may be taking us back to the eighties, but perhaps more the 1880s than the 1980s. That might be the most constructive move we could make, reminding us of our roots and reconnecting with our fundamental principles. The 1880s were the time time when Keir Hardie, the first occupant of the post to which Corbyn has just been elected, leader of the Labour Party, started the process that would lead it eventually into government.

Did you hear the Gordon Brown BBC tribute to Hardie? it was an excellent piece of radio which I strongly recommend. It included this tribute:

Courage, it has been said, is the greatest quality of all, because upon courage all else depends. You can be eloquent, have wisdom, work very hard but to change things, you need courage to stand up for what you believe, and Hardie never flinched from an unpopular stand.

It seems to me that this is the kind of leader Corbyn is setting out to be: not afraid of taking on the difficult questions, the positions for which some would condemn him. Hardie ran into a deep groundswell of hostility when he opposed the First World War, at a time when even workers were gripped by war fever; Corbyn’s first action after winning the leadership was to attend a demonstration in favour of refugees, at a time when a significant majority of the British population seems to favour pulling up the drawbridges against foreign immigration.

Jeremy Corbyn: the new leader immediately attends a refugee rally

Brown also said of Hardie:

For me his legacy is this: a leader whose moral outrage against what was unjust never left him, but who knew that if he was to do anything about it, he needed to create a party of government.

It seems to me that Corbyn shares that sense of outrage, as every Labour member should. Now the test is to see whether he can enthuse enough of the electorate with that same passion for a fairer society and take Labour back into government.

We’ve had an exciting moment. And there are exciting times ahead.

Labour: the greatest fun for the greatest number

No one’s ever disappointed by the British Conservative Party. It always entirely fulfils expectations, which it has learned to set painfully low. So it generates indifference rather than enthusiasm, shrugs rather than frowns, murmurs of “whatever” rather than cries of “betrayal.”

People hope for much more from Labour. Expectations seem to range from ushering in the earthly paradise down to, at a minimum, ending poverty, eliminating nuclear weapons and teaching business executives a sense of community.

The Party is currently in a contest to elect a new leader, to replace underwhelming and soundly beaten Ed Miliband. And, inevitably, that has engendered disappointment.

The campaign is generally deemed stodgy, dull, uninspiring. Why, even David Cameron, minimally revered Conservative Prime Minister, has got in on the act, warning journalists that Labour seemed not to have learned a thing from its election defeat. It’s a view to be taken as seriously as one would expect, given the acumen he has shown, along with his concern for the good of the Labour Party.

The disappointment’s unfair. The contest has provided many edifying sights. For instance, after calling the 7 May General Election lamentably wrong, you might expect a period of humbled silence from the polling organisation. So it’s been a delight to see YouGov publishing its findings that Jeremy Corbyn, the veteran Left Winger, was set to win the election. By the way, he’s always often to as “veteran”: it seems that the word just means 66 years old, or possibly having been in parliament for 32 years.

Jeremy Corbyn:
Labour's way of spreading delight across the political spectrum

YouGov had Corbyn winning over Andy Burnham by 53% to 47%. Another poll, organisation unnamed (presumably because commissioned by one of the candidates), showing Corbyn winning over Yvette Cooper by 51% to 49%. So polls maintain the track record of consistency which is such a fine indication of reliability.

It’s the election itself, though, rather than polls that is giving the best value for money.

Basing myself mostly on what I can see happening in my local constituency Labour Party and the one next door – both firmly in the Corbyn camp – rather than on polls, a Corbyn win does feel likely to me. In which case it seems to me time for the public to recognise the service that Labour is providing: this is surely the result that brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number.

Most people in the Labour Party will be pleased if Corbyn wins. After all, he says what so many feel. In the past, certain policies that don’t stand a chance of winning majority support have been dropped – say nationalisation of many industries, thoroughly discredited by the experience of the fifties to the eighties: they cost a fortune and delivered lousy service. So instead we preferred to concentrate on the goals that measures such as nationalisation were intended to meet, like reducing poverty, setting out to achieve them by other means.

With Corbyn in charge, though, we could drop all such mealy-mouthed restraint. We can once more proclaim the post-World War 2 commitment to nationalisation, whether voters like it or not.

Moreover, those in the Labour Party who preferred a more “politician-like” response to events have to salute him too. Just a few days ago Corbyn wouldn’t rule out campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union; now he’s clarified his position and favours Britain staying in.

Isn’t that wonderful? Corbyn’s not above the “clarification” ploy, the standard means by which a politician realigns his views when he realises they aren’t popular. And the “won’t rule out” stance is an excellent preliminary to the ploy: it means “I’m keeping my options open until I work out which way the wind’s blowing.”

Clearly the veteran’s come of age. He may not be quite the Tony Blair yet, but he’s shown that he too can play the duplicitous game.

So Corbyn has everything to please the Labour Party, across the spectrum. And as for the Tories, a Corbyn will delight them. The Conservatives couldn’t possibly hope for an adversary preferable to Corbyn. They’ll pick out quotes from his speeches to turn him into a bogey man to frighten the timid back into their camp. They just have to hope he won’t clarify his position on renationalisation of industries.

It’s hard to imagine what else Labour could do to please so many people, from its own ranks to those of the Tories, in one simple step. Indeed, the only ones who might not be pleased will be far-right UKIP: the radical right probably don’t want to see a radical leader emerge on the left, who might steal some of their thunder.

Still, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. I think if we’re doing the Conservatives a favour, that’s already enough in the way of cheering the right. UKIP can look after itself.

Labour: it's got to be Cooper or Burnham

The main mouthpiece of British high Toryism, the Daily Telegraph, is involving itself in a Labour Party election.

The Telegraph gets stuck into the Labour leadership election

This is made possible by the rules adopted for the election of a new leader to replace Ed Miliband. The old system gave massive weight to the voice of the Trade Unions, which is what gave us Ed Miliband in the first place. This time round every member of the party has exactly one vote (“one member one vote”, as the system is accurately if not imaginatively called).

To accommodate the many trade unionists who are Labour supporters but not Party members, a special category has been created which allows such people to register and, on payment of £3, take part in the election.

The Telegraph has decided to urge Tories to register themselves as Labour supporters and vote for the most left-leaning of the candidates, Jeremy Corbyn. This is because it has rightly decided that Corbyn would stand no chance of winning a general election. Indeed, the paper believes that as leader, he would bury the Party for good.

No one younger than their late forties will have been particularly aware of politics the last time the Labour Party elected a leader from the Left. This was Michael Foot, in the early eighties. Foot was one of the gentlest, most tolerant and most intelligent of leaders the Party has ever had. An expert on Jonathan Swift, he could be regularly seen in the British Library researching the author of Gulliver’s Travels, when he might have been in the House of Commons.

That gentle soul was crucified by the right-wing press. On one occasion he turned up for the annual ceremony commemorating British war dead in a duffle coat. He was mercilessly hounded in the media, as though what mattered in a potential British Prime Minister was his willingness to dress conventionally.

In 1983, Foot led the Party to crushing defeat by the Tories under Margaret Thatcher. The Party took fewer votes than at any other election since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, although there has been much heart searching about the disastrous election result earlier this year, the 1983 results were nearly 900,000 votes worse.

The depth of the disaster was due in large part to a massive, radically left-wing manifesto which has come to be known as the longest suicide note in history. It is a measure of the capacity for self-delusion of certain people on the far left – not I think Michael Foot, who was far more of a realist – that another veteran of that wing, Tony Benn, described the result as a major success for socialism.

Michael Foot and Tony Benn
Didn't work out so well as we might have liked

His argument was that never before had eight and a half million people voted for so strongly socialist a manifesto. To Benn it was apparently irrelevant that nearly 21 million had voted against, 13 million of them for the Tories. And as a result one of the most radical right wing governments we have seen was elected with a massive parliamentary majority.

The Daily Telegraph may be obnoxious and unprincipled, but it’s not stupid. It has realise that Jeremy Corbyn as leader would be as disastrous for Labour today as Michael Foot was 35 years ago. It’s a lesson Labour members need to bear in mind. Corbyn may be the choice of many activists, as Foot was. He does not appeal to the floating voters we need to attract back to us, any more than Foot did. To elect Corbyn is self-indulgent and it plays into the hands of the Telegraph and its ilk.

So who should we choose?

I recently listened to Liz Kendall, one of the other candidates, and heard her describe herself, unprompted, as a “fiscal conservative”. We have plenty of those in office at the moment, within the Conservative Party. It’s also beginning to feel as though across Europe, a movement is starting in reaction to the austerity politics such figures represent. In Greece, of course, in Spain too, in Scotland, even in Germany, where protestors have been taking to the streets against the behaviour of their own government towards the Greeks.

It also seems likely that austerity politics may begin to hurt wider sections of the British population who escaped relatively unscathed during the last five years. As they lose faith in the economic policies of the present government, it would seem unfortunate if all we could say to them was “the fiscal conservatism of this government has failed; now give our version of fiscal conservatism a try.”

That leaves only two candidates, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper. Both are former ministers, and therefore arguably damaged goods, tainted by their association with the Blair-Brown governments. They are also highly experienced, intelligent politicians. Do they have the courage to take the country in the direction it needs to go? I don’t know. But I do know there is no fifth candidate.

Cooper or Burnham may not be the most inspiring of choices. But neither would take us in the direction of the wilderness of 1983, or into the embrace of the very policies that are failing in the government we oppose.

Avoiding either of those alternatives strikes me as vital if we are to give Labour another chance. And the Telegraph the comeuppance it deserves.

Too soon to write off Labour. If we learn our lessons

There seem to be frequent reports at the moment of the death of the British Labour Party. I’m inclined to consider them greatly exaggerated.

Listening to a recent programme on the BBC – What’s Left, chaired by the Observer’s Andrew Rawnsley – I was amused to hear speakers declaring the 2015 results the worst for Labour since 1918. Two of the panel were Labour MPs, the rest journalists or academics. Even the MPs shared the doom-laden view.

It just feels way over the top to me. Certainly, it was a lamentable result. We were beaten, and still worse, we weren’t even able to prevent David Cameron and his Tories winning an overall majority – right up to polling day, the opinion polls were suggesting he would at most emerge as leader of the biggest single party in parliament, only able to cobble together a minority administration. Instead, he took a small but working majority.

So it was lousy. But the detail suggests things were less dire than the prophets of doom claim. Perhaps I should say, like to claim.

Labour’s share of the vote was actually up on 2010. By only 1.4%, it’s true, which is anaemic, but that was marginally more than the Tories managed – they only increased their share by 0.8%. That still left them 6.5% ahead of Labour, which is certainly a sound defeat, but hardly catastrophic.

The biggest failure of Labour was to protect its Scottish heartland. From 40 seats in Scotland, it feel to just 1. Hugely damaging. On the other hand, overall it lost only 24 seats – in other words, outside Scotland it added 15 seats to its tally. With Scotland still heading inexorably for independence, Labour was going to have to wean itself from its reliance on Scotland in any case. The fact that it has been able to increase its number of seats in England and Wales is a necessary step towards guaranteeing its long-term success.

And let’s not forget that Labour hadn’t put itself in the best possible position to win. Ed Miliband is principled, insightful and probably great company. But he’s virtually unelectable: he’s accident-prone, constantly making disastrous gaffes, and with his lieutenant Ed Balls, apparently unable ever to get off any fence. They would repeatedly dodge the hard questions, preferring to appear a little Tory to Tories, a little socialist to lefties, and convincing nobody.

Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Mary Creagh, Tristram Hunt, Liz Kendall
Will one of them turn Labour's fortunes round as the next leader?

Peter Mandelson rightly points out in today’s Observer that, under their leadership, they failed to answer such opportunistic policies as Chancellor George Osborne’s proposal to devolve more authority to local government in the North of England. That was a policy Labour should have adopted before the Tories, but it failed either to adopt it or to respond to it. The result? Losses to the Tories in the North, another heartland area, including Ed Balls’s own seat, and deep inroads by another adversary, the far-right UKIP.

If despite these self-inflicted handicaps, Labour could still improve its standing outside Scotland by fifteen seats, and marginally improve its popular vote, what could it do with a more effective, more dynamic and, above all, more assertive leadership?

It strikes me that this is no time to throw one’s arms up in despair and talk about defeat on a historically unprecedented scale. Instead it’s time to take stock sensibly of where we stand, without understating the scale of the debacle but also without ignoring the more reasons for encouragement. And make sure we never again saddle ourselves with leaders so hopelessly out of touch with the needs of the day.

Because if we shoot ourselves in the foot like that again, then we would indeed be in serious trouble.

Bad arguments about healthcare: if you can't stop them, at least give as good as you get

Marc de La Val had built an enviable reputation for complex cadio-thoracic operations on babies, at Great Ormond Street Hospital, the most prestigious children’s hospital in Britain. But then things started to go wrong. 

The always fascinating David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, recently told the BBC what happened:

‘A cluster of his babies died when he was doing these really difficult operations for transpositions of great arteries, and then he actually wrote a paper about how he stopped and retrained and changed the way he did the operation, and after that he was very successful, but he had this real blip, this real cluster of failures, and he nearly gave up...’

Spiegelhalter: well worth listening to

Spielgelhalter maintains that it was careful analysis of the data that showed that de Laval hadn’t just been unlucky, that there really did seem to be something going wrong with his surgeries, something he had to fix.

That was one surgeon. Outstanding, a practitioner to seek out, then dangerous, a surgeon to avoid, and then outstanding again.

And no doubt many of the other surgeons at GOSH were achieving excellent results, even at that time. When de Laval was struggling, the department might well have been fine overall. It was only he who was having bad outcomes.

But sometimes it isn’t just individuals. Whole departments can be in trouble. I worked at one time with the Bristol Royal Infirmary, when there were terrible problems in paediatric cardiac surgery that led to a major scandal and the closure of the department; but much of the rest of the hospital was performing more than adequately.

In fact, I’ve spent 30 years working with healthcare information, and if it’s taught me anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as good or bad hospitals; there are often good or bad departments in hospitals; more often still, there are good or bad practitioners within departments within hospitals; and as de Laval’s case shows, there can be good and bad moments in the career of an individual surgeon within a department within a hospital.

So I look on with wry displeasure when I see yet another scandal about bad hospitals in England. A report has just been published into fourteen hospitals that were giving cause for concern. It had been extensively leaked before publication, and we were softened up for hearing of 13,000 avoidable deaths across the 14; we were told that heads would have to roll.

In fact, the report was much more intelligent than that. It identified failings and errors that needed correcting, but it pointed out that these hospitals were already correcting many of them. In addition, the heads that could be made to roll were in many cases new people in post for a relatively short time, brought in to put right what had gone wrong under predecessors who had resigned or been forced out.

But that didn’t stop Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, making a real meal of the report – and, in particular, using it as a stick to beat his opposite number, Andy Burnham. He’s an unusual opposition spokesman, Burnham, in that he had been Health Secretary at the end of the previous government: most shadow ministers can’t be attacked for their own track record in the post, because they don’t have one. Burnham can.

And Hunt went for the gullet. The problems at these hospitals had arisen under the previous government and so they were Burnham’s responsibility. He should take the blame, resign his position and slink off into obscurity.

Burnham fortunately wasn’t having any of it. For instance, in connection with one of the hospitals, Basildon and Thurrock, he pointed out it was one ‘on which I placed a warning before the last Election. The news that this hospital has cut 345 nursing job from its front-line workforce should be greeted with real alarm.’

In other words, the present government has had three years to fix the problem. Instead it’s pursued policies that have led to serious cuts in staffing levels. That’s likely to have made the problem far worse.

Hard to see how Burnham’s to blame.

These exchanges do prove one thing, though. However inappropriate it may be to try to judge the quality of an entire hospital, it’s a brilliant way of turning healthcare into a political football between the major parties. And there are serious electoral points to be made from doing so.

Moreover, the attitude that says that heads have to roll is likely to be particularly out of place, as de Laval’s story shows. Sometimes, the people responsible for poor performance are actually excellent practitioners, they’re as devastated as anyone over the failures, and they only need the opportunity to improve again. But calling for retribution is much more effective with voters.

So it’ll go on happening. The mere fact that the argument is based on flawed premises doesn’t make it less effective politically. Which means the recriminations will go on being hurled.

Pretty miserable stuff. Which leaves me with only one consolation: at least Burnham gave as good as he got.

Not before time. This is a government that specialises in handing out low blows, few lower than trying to blame problems it’s failed to address on a man who's been out of office for three years. It was good to see him hitting back. 

It’s been one-way traffic for far too long.