Gerald Kaufman leaves. And is Jeremy Corbyn preparing a backhanded tribute?

Gerald Kaufman, who has just died aged 86, at least fulfilled his wish of remaining an MP until the end of his life. He represented a tough Manchester constituency, today called Gorton, steadily increasing his majorities by dint of being an excellent local MP, until it reached over 24,097 votes at the latest General Election.

Gerald Kaufman 21 June 1930-26 February 2017
Acerbic, awkward, accurate

He had a way of getting up people's noses, certainly irritating those in power, including in power in his own party. That prevented him ever reaching Cabinet rank. He made his mark in other ways, though. In one that appealed to me, he was highly critical of the Israeli government despite being a Jew, precisely as I am.

But the statement of his I most like was his description of the 1983 Labour manifesto as “the longest suicide note in history”. The manifesto, written when Labour was led by Michael Foot and his deputy Tony Benn, was a long and indigestible statement of policies which appealed to few in the electorate.

At the 1983 general election, the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher increased their number of MPs by 38 while Labour lost 52. The Conservatives, who had held a comfortable majority of 44 seats, emerged with a landslide of 144 seats, despite losing 700,000 votes.

It was Labour’s worst result since 1918, though I rather suspect we’re heading towards setting a new record at the next election.

Back then, Tony Benn, deputy leader of the Labour Party and flag carrier for the radical left, was proud of the manifesto. It was, he felt, the first truly socialist manifesto the Party had fought on and, the implication seemed to be, if Labour kept working to such manifestos, in the long run voters would rally to its appeal. The party would be returned to government and radical change would follow.

In the meantime, we had a Thatcher government with a massive majority. There was certainly radical change but not, I hope, of the kind Benn had intended.

Benn saw the policies as appealing. Kaufman saw them as a suicide note. Even when Labour finally returned to power, under Blair, it pursued policies heavily marked by Thatcher’s influence. The toxins she spread affect us still.

So I’m inclined to think that Kaufman assessed things considerably more accurately than Benn did.

In the statement issued about his death, his family pointed out that Kaufman “never believed that policies, however attractive, meant anything without the power to act on them”. That strikes me as a view it’s difficult to deny. So it’s interesting to see how Jeremy Corbyn has reacted to the latest crushing defeat suffered by Labour, when it lost a by-election in the Copeland seat.

He’s asked for more time to prepare – some appealing policies.

This begs two questions. The first is why he hasn’t been able to get his policies in place in the last eighteen months: he has a staff, he has advisers. The second is still more fundamental: why does he believe that a party’s appeal is based on its policies? In 1983, they had plenty of policies. Loads of the blasted things. To the point of tedium. The problem was that voters simply couldn’t see Michael Foot as Prime Minister.

Just as, today, only a tiny minority of the electorate see Corbyn as a potential Prime Minister.

Ah, well. Perhaps Corbyn’s working on a kind of backhanded tribute to Kaufman: another long-winded litany of fine policies no one will read and everyone will mock. Just like Benn.

In fact, he may be crafting another fine suicide note. Not just for Labour, of course. Again, it’ll be for all of us.

Corbyn notches up just the kind of achievement we expected of him

There isn’t generally anything much that’s epochal about a parliamentary by-election in Britain.

Each returns a single Member of Parliament out of 650, so it’s most unlikely to bring down a government or even have a significant impact on the balance of power between parties. However, they tend to attract a great deal of attention because they can be straws in the wind, indicators of the way politics is trending.

There were two in England yesterday, in Labour-held constituencies. In both cases they were caused by the resignation of the incumbents, to pursue other careers (one as director of a museum, the other as a PR executive in the nuclear industry). This may seem strange – giving up a political career – but you have to remember that most politicians would like to get into government. His supporters treat Jeremy Corbyn, the present Labour leader, with almost religious fervour, and hold fast to a faith (a form of belief not requiring support from evidence), that he will in time be elected prime minister. People whose career depends on that happening, however, take a rather more jaundiced view and it’s less surprising than one might think, that they seek advancement elsewhere.

First the good news. Labour held on to the constituency in Stoke, even if with a small reduction in its vote share. What makes the victory particularly important is that Labour stopped the bigoted, hard right party UKIP winning a seat from another party for the first time: currently UKIP has one MP, but only because he defected from the Tories and hung on to the seat at the last general election (the other defector was defeated). UKIP, which is the British equivalent of the populist authoritarian that propelled Trump to power, may be losing steam: as well as failing in Stoke, it moved backwards in the other by-election, in the Copeland constituency.

There voters delivered another lesson. Corbyn has always been presented as a great mould-breaker, overthrowing political conventions that stifle the electorate and prevent progress. And Copeland certainly is mould-breaking.

Corbyn points the way to a mould-breaking result
If not quite the kind of result his supporters promised us

The boring convention is that governing parties lose by-elections. This is particularly true in seats held by the opposition: the general rule is that the opposition party increases its vote and can point to the win as evidence of surging support, giving it hope of replacing the government at the next general election.

Well, Corbyn’s certainly broken with that tedious convention. Copeland saw the governing party, in this case the Conservatives, win a by-election in an opposition-held seat for the first time since1982. Even the 1982 by-election, in Mitcham and Morden, was special: it was provoked by a Labour MP who had defected to a newly-formed Social Democratic Party and decided to go back to his constituents to see if they would re-elect him under his new colours. It turns out they wouldn’t. As Labour ran against him, the centre-left vote was split and the Tories won.

In Copeland, Labour fought a well-organised campaign with a good candidate, without a defector from its own ranks standing against it, and still lost. It’s a remarkable achievement.

The 1982 loss was a harbinger of the massive defeat Labour would suffer in the 1983 general election. It was at that time led by Michael Foot, a remarkably likeable man, of breath-taking intellectual capacity and firm commitment to principle. Sadly, he wasn’t seen as a potential prime minister by many electors and they gave Labour the fewest seats it had won since the particularly disastrous election of 1935.

Corbyn isn’t quite a Michael Foot. He’s a nice old man who’s nursed a London seat for 30 years in more or less unbroken obscurity. He likes to present himself as principled like Foot, but many of us suspect that he’s not telling us his real views on key political issues such as Brexit. There has to be at least a suspicion that he can’t rival Foot’s honesty.

What he does have in common with Foot is that few electors see him as a potential prime minister (apart, of course, from his fervent supporters). Indeed, the Guardian reported that, as the defeated Labour candidate left the Copeland count, a passerby shouted “Sack Corbyn”. He’s by no means alone in feeling that way, suggesting that Corbyn is well on the way to doing at least as badly as Foot in 1983.

Labour had held Copeland since 1935. Labour’s now lost it on Corbyn’s watch. 

That may be mould-breaking. Or it may just be mouldy.

The Corbyn controversy, or have we learned anything from last time Labour put its Foot in it?

Let’s wind the clock back to 1981. Specifically, to 25 January. This is the day when four former Labour cabinet members, known as the Gang of Four, announced a long-feared move to split the party.

Shirley Williams, David Owen, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers set up the Council for Social Democracy because they felt that Labour had lurched too far to the left. It had adopted policies of unilateral nuclear disarmament and departure from the European Economic Community (forerunner of the European Union). It had also elected a left-wing leader, Michael Foot.

Insofar as one can like anyone without meeting him personally, I liked Foot. I agreed with most of his views, but I also felt a personal link to him: I was in the second year of doctoral studies on an eighteenth-century writer and thinker, and Foot was a respected authority on one of the greatest eighteenth-century writers and thinkers, Jonathan Swift. He even did his research in the North Library of the British Library, still in those days housed within the British Museum building, as I did.

The Gang of Four, getting ready to split the Labour Party

The Gang of Four was, however, more worried still by the veteran left winger Tony Been, seen as exercising a baleful influence on the Party.

There’s much to admire in Benn. However, I don’t go with the personality cult that’s developed around him. Unlike most Labour left wingers, he’d had experience in government, not always to his honour. As Secretary of State for Energy, he had ordered three new nuclear power stations, one of them – Sizewell B – using the US Westinghouse Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) technology.

Later he would write in the Guardian, “I am strongly opposed to nuclear weapons and civil nuclear power.” Earlier in the same article, he talked of, “Sir Jack Rampton, my permanent secretary, who seemed to be as keen as [Dr Walter] Marshall [of the Atomic Energy Authority and an adviser to Benn] on the adoption of the PWR.” This kind of rationalisation strikes me as self-serving – “I was pressurised into making a lousy decision by bad advice” – as well as feeble – “I may be a clarion voice of the left, but when I have to defend my position against pressure, I cave.” 

Hardly the stuff of which we want Labour politicians to be made. However, back then, the Gang of Four was deeply apprehensive of him.

In March 1981, they launched the Social Democratic Party. In the end, just 28 Labour MPs joined them, and one Tory, and they were badly hammered at the 1983 General Election: only six SDP MPs were returned. Indeed, even their alliance with the then Liberal Party only managed to win 23 seats overall. However, that poor result at parliamentary level belied a far better performance in the popular vote: the SDP-Liberal Alliance took 7,780,949 vote, just 675,985 behind Labour.

Labour fought that election on probably the most left-wing manifesto it had ever adopted. But the result saw it lose 9.3% of its popular support and 52 MPs. The Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher, assisted by the split vote against them, won by a landslide, with a majority of 144 seats, despite a 700,000 drop in their vote.

Tony Benn came up with a glorious reaction to that catastrophic Labour defeat. He described the debacle as “a triumph for socialism.” I still can’t believe he said that. Two or three such triumphs and Labour would guarantee Tory government for a couple of generations.

Benn reckoned that 8,456,934 Labour voters had voted for a socialist manifesto. I suppose positive spin can be a good thing, but that struck me as a trifle over the top, given that the party had registered its worst performance since 1918. Labour MP Gerald Kaufmann seemed closer to the truth when he described the massive, turgid and indigestible manifesto, as “the longest suicide note in history.”

Benn’s mistake was no doubt down to a view, still held by many, that policies actually matter when it comes to winning elections. Aaron Banks, the leading Brexit and UKIP backer, reckoned the recent referendum win was down to the principle that “facts don’t matter”. Remain campaigners only put forward facts, but the Leave side appealed to emotions. The same is true when it comes to perception and policy in general elections. It doesn’t matter what policies you promise to pursue, if your leader isn’t seen as a potential Prime Minister. Far too few voters saw Foot as a PM, and the SDP-Liberal Alliance gave them another choice. The result was a catastrophic defeat of the Labour Party (or “triumph of socialism”, of course, if you like the Benn point of view.)

Aldous Huxley once pointed out that the only lesson to learn from history is that no one learns any lessons from history.

Let’s run the clock forward again, to today. Have we learned any lessons?

Once more, the Bennite wing of the Labour Party is in the ascendancy, in the movement known as Momentum (momentum, by the way, is something that keeps you moving forward, but doesn’t unfortunately distinguish between whether you’re heading for sunlit uplands or straight over a cliff.)

Once more, we have a leader who is kind, decent, honest, principled and from the Left of the Party. He may not be an authority on Swift. But he is, just like Foot, not someone many see as a potential Prime Minister.

It’s been reported that there are once more moves afoot to launch a new grouping, bringing together the right of the Labour Party with more liberal Conservatives. And once more Shirley Williams has emerged to talk about cross-party collaboration. Even the issue she has chosen to highlight is a throwback to the controversy of the early eighties: Europe again, following the Brexit vote.

Despite that experience, we seem to be lining ourselves up to make all the same mistakes. As Einstein almost certainly didn’t say, to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, is the definition of insanity. We may be heading for another period of lunacy.

What were the results last time?

Fourteen more years of highly painful Tory rule. The first seven of them under Thatcher. To whom Theresa May is a worthy and effective successor.

We’ve been warned.

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.