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.

David Cameron: good at the art, however poor he is on the science

Politics is an art form and no science: it's all about presentation and hardly at all about substance.

David Cameron: good reason for self-satisfaction

Take the British government’s economic competence. According to the most recent findings, confidence in it has risen from 28% of the electorate to 40%. This seems to be based on just one piece of good news: growth last quarter was 0.6%, the level the last government achieved within a few quarters of the crash, and which it has taken this government three years to reproduce.

What else have they achieved?

• At the last election, the Conservatives fulminated that the previous, Labour, government had saddled the country with an unsustainable level of debt. So they’ve increased it (taking it from just under 80% of gross domestic product to 90%), but there’s no more talk of unsustainability.
• They also set out to slash the government’s deficit, and they have, by as much as a quarter though a lot less than they promised. To fail to meet their target, they’ve created conditions in which:
• As well as the mass unemployment level of two and a half million, about a million further people are on ‘zero-hour contracts’, ostensibly employed but with no guarantee of work or pay
• The disabled are under major attack, with benefit levels being reduced by a variety of subtle mechanisms and by deeming huge numbers as fit for work when they certainly aren’t: around 30 such people die each week

Average pay has been reduced further and faster than all but three other countries in the entire European Union

George Osborne, as Chancellor of the Exchequer responsible for this performance, staked his reputation at the last election on preserving the UK’s triple-A credit rating. He’s lost it. Entirely predictably, he has failed to resign.

In only one area has the government notched up a significant achievement: it has increased the number of people on seven-figure salaries (we have more such people in banking, for instance, than the rest of the EU together) and he has provided them with a tax reduction.

So it’s clever that, with such a track record, the government still enjoys such a glowing reputation. Clever, though not entirely unsurprising. With so many targets to hit, the Labour opposition has indulged in ‘deafeningly silence’, as a critic within the party, Graham Stringer, recently pointed out. So the Conservatives, and the government, have not been called to account for their performance.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives themselves have lost no time. They’ve had vans cruising round immigrant areas with ‘go home’ signs, in what is an obvious play for the racist vote. Brilliantly – and in their campaign manager, Lynton Crosby, they have a brilliant mind at work – they are now apologising to the immigrant communities and promising to consult them first, in future.

Why is this so clever? Because it gives them the opportunity to call off the campaign now that it has achieved its aim of attracting far right support from the party snapping at the Conservatives’ heels, the United Kingdom Independence Party, while at the same time offering an olive branch to immigrants amongst whom a recent poll showed the Tories have minimal support.

What was the Labour leadership’s response? Instead of denouncing the whole shameful charade, they decided to make a bid for the same votes. They had Chris Bryant, party spokesman on immigration, make a speech about the dangers immigration represents for British workers – in other words, they also played the racist card.

To compound this dereliction on principle, they then cocked up in the practice too. Bryant’s speech was leaked at the weekend, so that it became known that he was to denounce two major firms for using immigrant staff to undermine British labour. The companies hit back and Labour discovered that it had built its brief badly and got its information wrong. Instead of making a persuasive play for votes from the far right, Bryant therefore spent most of his time backtracking from what he’d been planning to say, defending why he’d intended to say it, and generally looking incompetent.

Presentation not principle, you see. And the Tories are getting increasingly good at it – artful, you might say – while the present Labour leadership is proving completely cackhanded. Against an appallingly under-achieving government, they’re failing to get the ball into an open goal, while constantly scoring own-goals against themselves.

I pray they may still pull off a victory in 2015, but on present form, it’ll be no thanks to any skill of theirs.