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.

Jeremy Corbyn: just how left wing is his agenda?

In celebration of the election of Jeremy Corbyn, here’s a wild left-wing suggestion for an economic policy to replace Tory austerity.

Develop opportunities for new exports, investing where necessary in the appropriate industries. Whenever possible, look for investment from abroad to fund growth. To fill any skill gaps, or indeed gaps in the workforce generally, bring in immigrants to give us the depth we need (there’s no shortage of skilled workers ready to come over, from Syria and other troubled nations).

At the same time as looking for opportunities abroad, ensure that our domestic market remains buoyant by improving British wage levels. One way is to introduce Trade Union reforms, but not of the kind now being proposed, which would emasculate them further; on the contrary, they could be brought into management of industry itself, with a formally recognised role, perhaps through worker directors on boards, in setting company strategies.

The effect of that kind of measure would be not only to make the way we run our major corporations more democratic and equitable, it would also make sure that people on low incomes, who are more inclined to spend than to save, would have more purchasing power, keeping domestic demand lively and able to drive growth.

With the growth flowing from such measures, tax revenues would rise so that deficit reduction could happen with no need for the destructive cuts being made by the current government.

Wild left-wing dreams, without a hope of realisation?

Well, actually, there’s nothing wild or dream-like about them. Nothing left-wing even. These are the policies that Germany has been pursuing for years. Certainly under Angela Merkel who is approaching her ten years in office, but also under her predecessor Gerhard Schröder.The Social Democrat Schröder was particularly left wing; as for Merkel, she leads the conservative Christian Democrats.

Angela: dangerous left winger?

It would seem that Germany has more moderate, and above all more enlightened, Conservatives than Britain does. And their policies have worked. Germany recovered from the 2008 crash within two years. Germany has become once again the dominant economy of Europe, with the lowest youth unemployment of the continent.

So that only leaves three questions.

Firstly, given that this has worked so well for Germany, why are they so keen on austerity for others – in particular the Greeks?

Secondly, as these highly successful policies are being applied by a right-wing government, why do British conservatives denounce them as dangerously left wing?

And finally, why would Labour not rally behind Corbyn in following such an anti-austerity programme in Britain too?

I have no idea what the answer to the first question is. It would be good to see Merkel pressed to answer why Germany favours austerity for others.

The second question, about denouncing as left wing policies favoured elsewhere by Conservatives, is much easier. Adopting the kind of approach Germany has taken would involve some of the wealthiest people in Britain giving up a little. The right wing, and in particular the right-wing media, represent their views, and those views say that they will sacrifice nothing for the sake of the nation as a whole.

As for the third question, I have no idea why Labour should not back this kind of an anti-austerity approach. That’s something that Labour critics of Corbyn need to answer. And that any of us who feel it’s time to move away from austerity policies, need to keep asking.