Corbyn backs down in nationalisation row af ter donor backlash
JEREMY Corbyn was last night forced to deny he wanted to bring back Labour’s historic commitment to the public ownership of industry following a fierce backlash from donors and Blairites.
The veteran Left-winger suggested in an interview that he was interested in reviving Clause IV of the party’s constitution – committing it to ‘common ownership of the means of production’. The clause was scrapped two decades ago during Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ rebranding drive.
Liz Kendall, the Blairite candidate in the l eadership race, i mmediately described Mr Corbyn’s suggestion as a ‘ throwback’. Yvette Cooper also piled in, saying Britain did not need a return to the past.
Meanwhile Labour’s biggest individual donors pledged to stop giving money if Mr Corbyn became leader – leaving the party almost entirely dependent on trade unions.
Getting rid of Clause IV was a key moment in Mr Blair’s leadership, helping to convince voters that the party could be trusted again after the wilderness years of the 1980s.
But in an interview with the Inde- pendent on Sunday, Mr Corbyn suggested he could consider bringing it back as part of a commitment to return some ‘necessary things’ to public ownership.
‘I think we should talk about what the objectives of the party are, whether that’s restoring Clause IV as it was originally written or a different one,’ he said. ‘We shouldn’t shy away from public participation, public investment in industry and public control of the railways.’
Such a move – which could cost the taxpayer billions in compensa- tion – would be every bit as symbolic as Mr Blair’s original decision, marking a final break with the New Labour era.
Mr Corbyn later said that while he believed in public ownership of the railways he had never favoured the ‘remote nationalised model’ that prevailed in the post-war era.
‘Public control should mean just that,’ he said. ‘We should have passengers, workers and government co-operatively running the railways to ensure they are run in our interests and not for private profit.’ Fol- lowing the criticism, his spokesman also said: ‘Jeremy is not saying he wants to return to Clause IV. He says we need some discussion about public ownership objectives for the 21st century.’
However Miss Kendall – the leadership challenger seen as being the closest to Mr Blair’s policies – condemned the idea as a return to the failed theories of Left-wingers such as the late Tony Benn. ‘This shows there is nothing new about Mr Corbyn’s politics,’ she said. ‘It is just Bennism reheated, a throwback.’ Miss Cooper, another of Mr Corbyn’s three rivals, said: ‘The economy needs innovation, not a return to the days of British Leyland. Labour needs ideas for the future, not to turn back the clock.’
A string of Labour donors also said that they would withdraw their funding if Mr Corbyn wins the leadership battle. Richard Brindle, who gave £100,000 under Ed Miliband, ruled out donating should Mr Corbyn win, calling his policies ‘economically illiterate’.
ON the second Sunday in June 1983, three days after Labour’s general election handbagging, the party’s far Left gathered for a post-mortem. The meeting was held at the Brixton flat of journalist and activist Chris Mullin, later an MP and minister in the Blair government.
It was attended by a who’s who of the Bennites: Tony Benn himself, newly defenestrated by the voters of Bristol South East, Audrey Wise, Michael Meacher, Ken Livingstone and others. Reg Race, who later had the distinction of losing Benn’s Chesterfield seat to the Lib Dems on the latter’s retiral in 2001, was in the chair.
Also in the room was a Leylandii-bearded councillor in his mid-30s, one of the few new Labour MPs to have been elected amid the carnage: the member f or Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn.
It might be thought that the mood would have been one of contrition, even remorse. After all, this bunch had more than played their part in delivering electoral annihilation – they had been handmaidens to Labour’s worst result since 1918, putting the hated Thatcher back in with a gigantic majority of 144.
Under Michael Foot, the party had veered sharply to the Left. In response, centrist grandees Roy Jenkins and David Owen had walked away to set up the SDP. Shortly afterwards, Benn had challenged the moderate Denis Healey for the deputy leadership, only a year after the latter had been elected unopposed to the post.
Extremism
Benn was beaten, but the vicious ideological battle left deep internal wounds. The 1983 manifesto – famously known as ‘the longest suicide note in history’ – included calls for unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Economic Community and the re-nationalisation of privatised industries.
In a post- defeat report to the NEC, Healey argued that the election had been lost by a party that ‘had acquired a highly unfavourable public image, based on disunity, extremism, crankiness and general unfitness to govern’. In other words, it was the far Left wot dun it.
The people had spoken, the b******s. But the Bennites had no intention of listening. As they sat around Mullin’s flat, Corbyn argued that ‘there was great incompetence in the party machine; the leaflets put out were ‘absolutely bland c***’.
Benn, who recounts the story in his diaries, mused on how to secure a victory at the next election with socialist policies. They argued about whom their faction should support as Foot’s replacement. Neil Kinnock was ‘repellent’. Benn was an option, but didn’t have a seat. Wise suggested the ex-communist Eric Heffer for leader and Meacher for deputy, saying: ‘I would rather lose with a candidate we have confidence in.’
And that’s what they did. Kinnock won at a canter, setting in train a process of moderation that would eventually lead to Tony Blair’s three thumping victories. You might think there are some pretty obvious lessons here – about the cul- de- sac of ideological purity, the dead end of socialist self-indulgence, the brick wall of public opinion. About basic electability.
But more than 30 years on, the Left has changed not a jot. It has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. In its arrogant, hardwired refusal to compromise with the electorate, i t continues to condemn Labour to defeat, opposition and irrelevance. There is only one possible verdict: it betrays the very people it claims to represent.
It’s not all bad. Permanent opposition means its daft ideas rarely need trouble the rest of us. The socialists huddle together, ranting and chanting and marching in their lapel badges and alternative headgear. They devour the rhetoric of the Guardian’s highly-paid class-war hypocrites. They ‘boycott’ Israel and Starbucks. They are never less than hilarious.
Corbyn is so of this tribe he could be hand-scripted by Ken Loach. He seems never to have met a protest march or a doomed romantic cause he didn’t like. His prospectus in the Labour leadership contest is basically 1983 all over again.
He would kick out all private providers f rom the NHS, reinstitute a grimly monolithic state education system, scrap tuition fees, introduce rent controls, renationalise the railways and the energy companies, and reopen coal mines. He even wants to bring back Clause 4.
He is if anything even nuttier on foreign policy. He would withdraw Britain from Nato, cut defence spending and scrap Trident. He has described Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘friends’, and had, to put it mildly, an interesting relationship with Sinn Fein during the IRA’s most active years. He invited Gerry Adams into the Commons in 1984, a fortnight after the Brighton bombing. He appears to believe Blair should be tried for war crimes.
This is the politics of the real, dug-in Hard Left: the beard knows best, whether it belongs to Marx or Lenin or Castro or Corbyn. It offers a return to a Britain that didn’t work properly in the first place; to big government that sits like a spider at the centre of a web in which the rest of us are rolled like flies; to a bureaucracy that stamps down on the freedom and innovation that are the motors of progress; to a conspiratorial mindset and disdain for one’s own country. A fundamental misunderstanding of human nature has always been its greatest, and thankfully fatal, flaw.
Yet the crowds flock to Corbyn’s rallies, a mix of the undeveloped young and their underdeveloped elders. If the latter are there for some of that old-time religion, the former seem to believe their hero offers an exciting and radical vision of the future. Nothing could be further from the truth.
There isn’t anything modern, or brave, or p progressive in the Corbyn agenda. It is a withdrawal from the world, a cowardly shying away from risk and complexity, a retreat into comfort-blanket platitudes.
One rally-goer puts it much as did Audrey Wise all those years ago: ‘I don’t think it’s anything to do with the next election. It’s not what politics is about. Our parliamentary system is about opposition as much as it’s about the party in power. Even if it means the Tories stay in.’
Better to lose with a candidate you have confidence in.
The Britain of 2015 is barely recognisable to that of 1983. Corbyn and his istas are wilfully blind to the unprecedented economic and social advances brought about by capitalism, open markets and liberal democracy. They are just as blind to the rap sheet of socialist policies wherever they have been adopted around the world, almost always accompanied by a hefty dose of state authoritarianism under the whip of some sweaty, uniformed demagogue.
Idealistic
Most people are today vastly better off than their equivalents of three decades ago. In that time, the fundamental building blocks of our economy have changed, and the very idea of wide- scale central planning should be anathema. Modern society is individualistic but also loosely collaborative – the last thing we need is some Chavez wannabe telling us how to live, and what we can and can’t have.
Corbyn doesn’t even represent a particularly new phenomenon. He is surfing the same wave of anti- establishment sentiment that has led to the rise of the SNP, the Greens, Ukip and their equivalents across the developed world.
These movements paint in broad brushstrokes, offering idealistic, simplistic ‘solutions’ to problems that are, in reality, insoluble and therefore require careful, applied husbandry. Populism has always been the curse of politics in tricky times. It has never been the answer. It doesn’t end well.
For all these reasons and more, this leadership contest is no longer about whether the party wins or loses in 2020, or whether Andy is a bit less uninspiring than Yvette, or whether Liz is secretly a Tory. It is now about one thing only – saving Labour from the Far Left, the most malign political force in our country.
The problems we face around poverty, inequality and global uncertainty cannot be conquered by a dose of electoral nihilism. Britain cannot be diverted into a fruitless and energy-sapping debate about ideas that should never have made it out of the last century. Don’t be so bloody stupid, people. Corbyn must not win.