BY DEBRA KEEFER RAMAGE
Quite early on Saturday, Sept. 12, in fact before it even was Sept. 12 here, the ballot counters in the British Labour Party leadership election announced that “outsider” Jeremy Corbyn was the decisive first ballot winner. He won with just under 60% of the votes, which is a landslide of almost unprecedented proportion. Former PM Tony Blair’s initial win of the leadership in 1994 was with a majority of 57% and was considered huge.
In the past few days, since his ascension to leader, Corbyn’s main task under the unwritten UK constitution has been to form a shadow cabinet. This creates a “government in waiting,” which would become the actual Cabinet if in a General Election (next scheduled for 2020, but they are not carved in stone like our presidential elections) the Labour Party won a majority of the votes and the Queen, or her successor, asks Corbyn to “form a government.” So it is sort of it “forming a government” but it’s the government in opposition; it doesn’t actually govern. There are other things that can lead to a change in government, but that’s the usual way it happens.
This is where an elected Leader is tested to see if he can be a real leader. Like the national media, the mainstream Labour leadership was in a quandary; no, that’s too mild, they were also in a panic. Labour MPs, especially those already in the previous Leader’s shadow cabinet, who are opposed to Corbyn’s policies (or presumed policies) can deal him a blow by refusing to serve, but this is only effective if they all do it. And they can’t really confer on that, not least because they all lie to each other when personal ambition is at stake. And all this takes place in front of a childish, venal and febrile media, which makes major headlines out of almost nothing. The right-wing Telegraph, for instance, portrayed the process at Corbyn’s office as “desperate chaos.” Despite all that, he formed a creditable cabinet, the first ever with a majority of women, and with a Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer (the guy who does the budgets, suggests tax changes) who is even farther to the left than himself.
The other major hurdle was his first “PMQs.” This is a ritual few Americans understand, but it’s basically an event each Wednesday while Parliament is sitting, wherein a combination debate and press conference is staged in the form of a Q&A session with the Prime Minister. (It’s sort of like Jeopardy, in which you must answer in the form of a question.) The media showed numerous pictures of the awful yet amusing sight of Corbyn, in his best suit and tie sitting on the front benches! You would have thought he had transformed himself into a swan or something. The other big news event was where he didn’t join in singing the national anthem (“God Save the Queen”—he is known as a staunch anti-royalist), which led the Guardian’s priceless political cartoonist, Steve Bell, to pen a beautiful cartoon of the scene, with one angry person on the dais shouting “Show the Queen your tonsils, traitor!”
On the more serious side, of course most of the debate, both in the UK and abroad, is on Corbyn’s likely economic policies and whether they are good for the middle class and the poor and will lead to recovery, or bad for the economy as a whole. And this has become a debate on what is and is not mainstream economics, a debate which very quickly devolved into a series of ad hominems on both sides. Prior to the election, a group of 40 academics paid for a full-page ad in the Observer to state that the Tory’s austerity policies were the real extremism, and that Corbyn’s views are basic Keynesian theory, which has never been discredited or disproven and is in fact supported by the IMF (International Monetary Fund). Just before the election, a group of 55 academics, all economists, unlike the previous group, published a letter in the Financial Times (not paid for) to state that whatever you think of Corbyn, these “useful” economists were his mouthpieces and they were lying about what mainstream economic theory is. The only problem is, there are about 5,000 to 10,000 academic economists in the UK, and neither of these small groups really represents them. But the first group was right about Keynesian theory.
So, the UK is having a grand old time with the novelty of an actually existing socialist leading their one-time socialist Labour party, but a socialist government there is very far from a sure thing. Corbyn could be ousted before the next general election, or Tony Blair and his chorus could be right and a Labour Party led by Corbyn will never get anywhere near a majority. But what does this mean to us here on our side of the Atlantic? We should pay very close attention to what transpires in the UK. Already, Chris Hedges has come out with an article “Where is our Jeremy Corbyn?” which I found quite amusing, because in the UK, the Obama win in 2008 spawned scores of “Where is our Obama?” articles. And Chris, Corbyn is never going to be elected Prime Minister, because it doesn’t work that way, so we can’t really have a Corbyn, any more than the UK can have an Obama.
More germaine are the lessons that the Bernie Sanders campaign, while it is in the Democratic party nomination phase, can learn from how Corbyn’s party leadership plays out. The important thing for us, I think, is to start naming things for what they are. Just as the media needs to start calling refugees “refugees” instead of “migrants,” here in the U.S. we should call the policies that slash funding for human services and privatize prisons and destroy public schools and neglect the infrastructure and allow destruction of the commons for profit “austerity,” because that’s what it is. This nomenclature will tie us closer to Europe in political analysis, and besides, “neoliberal” just doesn’t sound mean enough. And then Bernie Sanders himself can take a cue from Jeremy Corbyn in one important way. Unlike Corbyn, Sanders has been criticized (quite rightly) for not speaking to the connections between the corporate austerity agenda and the extreme militarism of the U.S. in foreign policy and domestic policing. If Corbyn is able to survive as leader while urging withdrawal from NATO and unilateral disarmament for the UK, Sanders will need to be pressed even harder about his views on foreign policy and defense, which are still far too hawkish for a true progressive, let alone someone who claims the mantle of democratic socialist.
