Labour is far more radical now than it was in the 1970s

The old arguments won’t win the battle against Corbyn and Mcdonnell’s grand collectivist vision

John Mcdonnell has fond memories of the Eighties. Even as his nemesis, the Thatcher she-devil herself, was destroying Britain, he recalls watching his children roller-skate around the wood-panelled rooms of the Greater London Council, where he rose to become Ken Livingstone’s deputy. “It was exhilarating,” he said through a mist of nostalgia at an offshoot of the Labour conference in Liverpool this week.

The event took its title from a pamphlet published in 1979, just after Labour’s socialist revolution had foundered on the rocks of financial reality, called “In and Against the State”. Written by a hard-left but thoughtful group of socialists, it argued that the reason why Labour had lost support was that the state it expanded had become a domineering presence in people’s lives, rather than a vehicle for their liberation. People “experienced the state as contradictory, oppressive, frustrating,” they wrote, and the more a person depended upon public benefits or employment, the worse their experience. Being devoted socialists, they put this down to the nature of “the capitalist state”.

The lesson, for Mr Mcdonnell, was that the real fight would not end with Labour winning power. “Once you’re in there, you have to then be against the way it’s operating,” he told the wideeyed audience at “The World Transformed”, a radical side conference linked to the hard-left Corbynista group, Momentum. Alongside ideological fellow travellers, Mark Serwotka of the PCS Union and Leftie activist Hilary Wainwright, all the speakers urged their audience to prepare for battle. Labour needed “radicalism in every community and every workplace, [to] maintain radicalism at the top by maintaining pressure from the bottom,” said Mr Serwotka. Labour must “open up national government at every level,” said Mr Mcdonnell.

This is Labour’s real agenda and the connecting thread between all of its policy announcements. It is also a clue that what we have seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg, because this utopian vision relies on a total transformation of state and economy. Forget its 10 per cent worker ownership plan. In reality, Mr Mcdonnell wants to hand ownership of all private businesses to employees and replace management with voting. He wants all housing owned by the local community, all decisions about public services taken by those who rely on them. He wants every state building opened for use by the public. He wants the supreme demos to vote on whether to retaliate in the event of a nuclear strike on Britain.

To bring about this revolution, Mr Mcdonnell would like nothing better than to take power at a moment of total chaos, as he said explicitly in his conference speech: “The greater the mess we inherit, the more radical we have to be. The greater the need for change, the greater the opportunity we have to create that change.”

As with any radical vision, it’s worth considering if there is anything of value in it – and there is something. The state is a deadening presence, and perhaps it doesn’t always have to be. There is a demoralising quality to the GP’S waiting room, a feeling of impotence when stuck on a train as the nationalised signalling system fails and, for council tenants, a sense of powerlessness when mould fills up the insides of badly designed, state-built concrete tower blocks. And this is why Margaret Thatcher’s programme of selling council houses was so popular. Individual ownership meant liberation from the incompetence of council landlords. Home ownership should be at the heart of Tory policy.

Our institutions, meanwhile, do need drastic reform. The NHS should be making use of its vast data trove to develop algorithmic screening and more efficient service provision. It should allow for apps that enable people to get quick and easy medical advice (as health secretary Matt Hancock argued recently). Police should use crime recording systems that let individuals feed in information to help spot trouble before it spreads. Courts should make public proceedings easily accessible online. Rather than relying on a hugely bureaucratic planning system, new housing projects should be based on data about what works. The point, though, is that none of this involves some phoney new ownership scheme or the right to turn up to six-hour meetings to debate the finer points of hospital design with local busybodies. It involves efficient use of technology – most of which is happening fastest in the private sector.

The problem with Labour’s plans is that for all the ideological commitment to local democracy, they still come with a big dose of collectivist coercion. Take one of Jeremy Corbyn’s flagship policy announcements from this week: a huge expansion of onshore wind farms. These sites might now be quite price efficient, but they are noisy as hell and therefore unpleasant to live near. Few ideas could be better calculated to make people feel that they are not in control of their living environment.

This, and the mass expropriation needed to make Labour’s ideas a reality, gives the lie to Mr Mcdonnell’s great vision of people power. His Labour believes in decentralisation of power to ordinary people only as long as they do exactly what Labour wants. That is, they agree to have their house owned by “the community”. They agree to pay much higher taxes. They agree to publish newspapers that argue only for the upsides of immigration and transgender rights. Labour’s particular blindness, and therefore its ideological bigotry, comes from the idea that a true diffusion of power to the people will inevitably promote socialist ideas and collectivist thinking.

Nothing better demonstrates this supreme cognitive dissonance than the lines of Mr Corbyn’s speech in which he talked about Britain’s political atmosphere. Online abuse of political opponents had to stop, he declared: “We need to foster a much greater culture of tolerance.” Divisive politics are counter-productive, because “our movement has achieved nothing when divided. The only winners have been the rich and the party of the rich: the Conservatives”. The enemy, you see, is not your fellow socialist. It’s the Tories and the 13.6 million “rich” people who voted for them.

When those same Tories argue that the failures of the Seventies resulted from fiscal incontinence or unfettered union power, the argument simply glances off. It wasn’t the socialist state that collapsed, Labour argues, but the “capitalist state”. Against this ideological dodge, it is no good deploying the same idea that won the debate 40 years ago. Mr Corbyn’s Labour is a new beast. Until the Right understands that, it cannot possibly win the argument.

What we have heard so far is just the start. Their utopian vision relies on a total transformation of state and economy