Corbyn, or socialism in words

First, a short cautionary tale for our times.

The top man in an organisation appoints a friend as a senior executive. She proves a most loyal supporter, if far less kind to the other employees, fiercely driving them to accept her rigid discipline, and rewarding them far less than they probably deserve, and certainly need. He awards her a 15% salary increase, putting her on nearly four times the median household salary in Britain, while she limits everyone else to 2.2%.

That’s not just less than a sixth of what she got, it’s less than the rate of inflation (measured by the way retail prices are going), so it’s effectively a pay cut.

It’s the story of Britain over the near-decade of austerity: real wages fell year after year until 2016, since when they have flatlined. Meanwhile, the number of millionaires is rising, and the total fortune they hold keeps going up. Those least able to absorb the pain of austerity are paying the price, while a self-serving elite makes sure it’s well protected from its worst effects.

Real value of wages over the near decade of austerity
from Full Fact

That’s Tory Britain for you.

That’s what Labour exists to combat, and never so energetically than when the Left is in charge. So with Corbyn as leader, we would expect the fight to be waged all the more intensely.

Except that the cautionary tale I started with wasn’t about the Tories. That was the Labour Party. The top man is Jeremy Corbyn. The tough operator he appointed and then rewarded with a 15% increase is his chief of staff, Karie Murphy. Speaking to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, one staff member said of her:

It’s got to the stage where people are afraid to speak up as individuals, because when you do you get sent to Siberia. When an individual has that much power in an organisation, it’s a concern.

Guardian photo of Corbyn with his Chief of Staff, Karie Murphy
Apparently a dangerous woman to challenge

All the worst aspects of a bullying, top-down, private-sector organisation, in fact.

Now when I first posted on this subject, a Corbyn supporter replied to me to point out that decisions on pay weren’t in the leader’s gift. My first response is that this is a standard Corbynist copout: anything good that happens is all down to the revered leader; anything bad is somebody else’s fault.

My second response is that Corbyn is constantly promising a fairer, more equitable, ultimately more socialist distribution of the resources of society. That’s going to take a huge effort from a Labour government (assuming Corbyn can get into government at all, which is by no means a foregone conclusion): convincing parliament to pass the necessary legislation; working with a lot of public and private-sector organisations to ensure not just the letter but the spirit of the measure is applied; convincing many reluctant if not frankly hostile groups to accept the principle on which it’s based.

If Corbyn can’t even get them accepted within his own organisation, the Labour Party, what possible hope is there of his achieving anything in society in general?

But there is another and far more worrying implication of this story.

Does Corbyn really mean what he says? There is a conviction on the far Left, as on the far Right, that anything they say must be correct simply because they say it. Corbyn claims he is a socialist, so what he says, and what he does, is socialism. Consequently he can apply a deeply iniquitous and thoroughly right-wing wages policy, and it’s socialist because it is he who is behind it.

Might that not be exactly what he does if he ever gets into Number 10? Let himself be convinced that a wrong-headed approach to wages must be the Labour way, because he incarnates Labour values? His track record rather suggests that this is just what he’s doing inside the Labour Party, after all.

Or, to put it in simpler terms, if he can’t even implement socialist values within his own party, why should anyone trust him be a socialist for the nation?