The unrepentant Corbynite

There’s a story that US President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk, “the buck stops here”. It seems it isn’t entirely true. A friend gave him the sign and he put it up for a while, but later removed it. 

I don’t know whether getting rid of it was symbolic of anything.

The notion’s a good one, though. It says that ultimate responsibility for what an organisation does, in this case the US government, lies with the person at the top. They can claim credit for much that goes right but the counterpart is that they have to take the blame for most of what goes wrong.

Not so, it seems, within the Jeremy Corbyn faction of the Labour Party.

Corbyn facing his electoral debacle: getting ready to move into denial mode

You know those doomsday cults that regularly announce the ending of the world? They usually give a date for when it’s going to happen and even a time of day. Then it doesn’t happen (so far, at least) and they usually come up with some excuse for why it didn’t: another reading is possible of the relevant Biblical text, or maybe more than one date is possible and we’ve simply moved on from one of them to the next, or whatever.

Anything, at any rate, rather than admit they were talking cattle excrement.

What’s true of a religious cult is true, apparently, of this political one as well.

Corbynists have been assuring us for years that Corbyn was set for a win in the forthcoming general election, possibly even a big win, and the consequence would be a radical transformation of British society in a socialist direction. Those of us who were a little more sceptical were invited to go forth and multiply, and courteously described as red Tories or even – and I’m told by one of them that this is the most damning political insult available today – Blairites.

This is curious because, if the mission of the Labour Party is to speak for the voiceless in British society, to protect the interest of workers, of the unemployed, of the sick, the very young, the very old, the poorest and neediest, then Tony Blair actually did them some good. He did so by simple dint of actually getting into office, where he could lead a government that hugely improved the health service, for instance, and took a lot of children out of poverty.

Corbyn, on the other hand, by failing twice to win an election, has done no good for any of those people. Indeed, by gifting the Conservatives a victory in an election that was eminently winnable, positively helped to inflict more damage on them.

I say this, by the way, as a Labour Party member who did not back Blair to be leader and would certainly not back him now. I simply state facts: Blair achieved more for those Labour is intended to protect than Corbyn ever did or, now, ever will.

Still, facts apparently don’t need to stand in the way of a good argument. And Corbyn has assured us that he won the argument in the election campaign. Just not the election itself.

Make of that what you can.

Ah, well. There’s some satisfaction, I suppose, when things turn out as you expect. That’s true even if people live down to expectations rather than up to them.

I’ve listened to and read Corbynists for four years now. I’ve been told again and again that he’s hugely popular, as can be seen from the young people chanting “oh, Jeremy” at his rallies. I’ve seen carefully constructed arguments for optimism whose authors point to the numbers of young people, supposedly pro-Corbyn, registering to vote, while old people, often anti-Corbyn, leave the electoral register (for the cemetery); they point to the number of women who have seen their pension entitlement pushed back and can therefore be counted to rally to the Guru; they point to the popularity in the polls of individual policies proposed by Corbyn and ignore his massive unpopularity in those same polls.

Why, I’ve seen analyses even in the last few months, showing that all these factors point to an electoral win for Labour, even perhaps a landslide.

The fervour of Corbynists’ beliefs left me fully dreading their reaction to the long-predicted electoral debacle of 12 December. I sadly expected the worst of them: denial of any responsibility and a feverish pursuit of scapegoats to blame instead. 

Unfortunately, the unrepentant Corbynites have entirely lived down to my expectations of them. The buck, for them, certainly didn’t stop with the man at the top. It might have been more decent of them to show a little humility now that their doomed project has failed so dismally. They might have admitted their errors, if only to ensure that they don’t repeat them. They might have stopped talking down to the rest of us, as though events had fully vindicated their baseless beliefs instead of refuting them so comprehensively.

It would have been more decent. But it isn’t going to happen.

Lesson for Trump: why not try generosity? It actually pays

It’s ironic that generosity and opening up to others can sometimes be as beneficial to the nation offering the gifts as to those receiving them.

Truman and Trump
The Statesman and ... the Donald

The winter of 1946-7 was desperately hard, with some of the lowest temperatures on record. For Europe, devastated by war, that was catastrophic. For the vanquished, inevitably – Germany with much of its urban landscape reduced to rubble and huge numbers of homeless among the worst hit – but victors too were suffering, with Britain still having to cope with rationing and struggling to bear the burden of war debts far beyond its resources.

At that time, Britain was still trying to pretend it could play a world role (echoes of today). It had, for instance, forces still deployed in Greece and Palestine. But Clement Attlee’s government began to realise that it was going to have to take a more realistic view of the weight of its (unlike Theresa May’s) . It warned the United States that it would have to start scaling down some of its military commitments, including in Greece.

The reaction of the Truman administration then in power in Washington was astounding and exemplary.

For better or for worse, it decided that resistance to Soviet influence in Greece and Turkey had to be maintained, and that it would therefore shoulder the burden itself, to the tune of $400m.

Far more to the point, it chose to use the newly appointed Secretary of State George C. Marshal, who chaired the chiefs of staff during World War 2, to investigate the state of the economies throughout Europe and to come to their assistance. This was the start of Marshall Aid. It came to over $12bn, corresponding to ten times that amount today.

Much of the money went to the erstwhile and newly-defeated enemy, Germany.

As Truman put it, “We are the first great nation to feed and support the conquered. We are the first great nation to create independent republics from conquered territory: Cuba and the Philippines. Our neighbours are not afraid of us. Their borders have no forts, no soldiers, no tanks, no big guns lined up.”

We’d have to question just how relaxed countries near the US truly felt. The giant to their North had shown itself perfectly prepared to flex its muscles and use its force to have its way, and they must have been a great deal more suspicious than Truman’s sanguine words suggest. Even so, it was an extraordinary act, to fund a defeated foe instead of taking from it. After all, at the conclusion of the First World War, well within living memory of most adults at the time, an intolerable burden of reparations had been imposed on Germany. That had undoubtedly been a contributing factor to the renewed world war twenty years later.

Marshall aid was an admirable and unprecedented act that deserves congratulations for that fact alone.

It was remarkable for far more than that, though. By allowing Europe to emerge from its ruins, and helping Germany, in particular, become prosperous and successful again, the US guaranteed itself good trading partners from which it too would benefit. It ensured that its presence and influence in the old Continent would remain as strong as ever, at least in the Western areas. Overall, it gave a huge stimulus to the world economy from which all nations, including the US, profited.

Generosity and strategic vision went hand in hand.

Now roll forward 70 years.

Faced with undoubtedly significant economic problems, Donald Trump has decided to use not generosity to advance his cause, but isolationism. He has decided not to try to win the support and trust of neighbouring nations, specifically Mexico, but to wall them off. Where Truman had boasted that Mexicans had needed no fortresses against the US, Trump will build a wall against them.

Trump plans to make Mexico pay for the wall, by taxing imports into the US. In reality, this means that US importers will pay for it. Even so, it will do great damage to Mexico. Far from making it a wealthy and successful nation he is, therefore, taking steps that will undermine its economy and weaken it as a trading partner.

He’s threatening similar action against other nations, notably Germany.

His is the opposite view to Truman’s. He wants walls, not openness. He wants trade barriers, not free business. He wants to take money, not offer it.

Marshall aid was astonishingly successful, stimulating the sustained boom of the post-war years.

It seems obvious that the opposite policy will have precisely the opposite effect.

But then, Trump probably doesn’t waste too much time learning stuff from history. Not even that of his own lifetime.

Grim anniversary, of exceptional terrorism. By the West.

This is an excellent time to pause and think about terrorism.

We in the democracies rightly fear terrorism and want to do everything we can to prevent further terrorist outrages. We’d like to get into a position where no one any longer resorts to terrorism, because they realise that it cannot succeed and will always be defeated.

Sadly, however, our own nations are responsible for one of the worst ever acts of terrorism the world has seen. It was carried out with impunity – none of those responsible was ever made to answer for it – and it proved successful, which might rather encourage than discourage others down that route.

We’re at the seventieth anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945. It had a population of perhaps 350,000 at the time. Between 100,000 and 150,000 died, the vast majority civilians.

The A-bomb dome in Hiroshima
Stark and poignant memorial to a horrifying act of war

The deliberate killing of civilians for political ends is pretty much the textbook definition of terrorism.

Of course, the defenders of the decision to drop the bomb argue that they were not intending to kill civilians. There were indeed military targets in the city. But that’s a bit of a sophism. If you use the most massively destructive weapon ever developed against a city of a third of a million people, you know you’re going to kill a lot of them. If you were trying to take out Field Marshal Shunroku Hata, who was stationed at Hiroshima, and perhaps his general staff, would you really need to destroy 70% of the city’s buildings and so much of the population?

Hata, by the way, didn’t die in the bombing.

In any case, the way military authorities in the democracies described this kind of action – the same terms were used for the bombing of German cities – was that they were designed to break the spirit of the civilian population. The idea was that with that spirit gone, the enemy nations would have to give up the fight. 

Isn’t that a bit of a giveaway? It sounds terribly like the kind of objective a terrorist movement might set itself.

President Truman, despite being one of the better holders of the position, declared on the occasion of the Nagasaki bombing, three days later: “I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb ... It is an awful responsibility which has come to us ... We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”

So we have appeals to divine justification for our use of a terrifying weapon.

What’s more, its use succeeded. Most authorities agree that the bombing of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki brought the war to a rapid close. Churchill believed that the bombing saved a million American lives and half that number of British ones. He was estimating casualties on the basis of having to invade the main Japanese islands, but many who claim that there were other ways to win the war without using the bomb or invading, estimate that the resulting Japanese casualties would have been still worse.

So the message is clear. If you’re powerful enough and can be sufficiently devastating in your action, you can get away with terrorism. You can achieve your aims by it. And, what’s more, God might even be on your side.

Not the best message to put out there. Not one that’s doing us much good today.