Did Corbynism pull Labour Party backward?

Sankar Ray

Brexit is over with the stunning defeat of Jeremy Corbyn, specially to those who were very optimistic about Corbyn’s walk-in to 10 Downing Street, the seat of the British Prime Minister. A pseudo-erudite in the Indian media even wrote that the ‘Bojo’ was too unpopular to retain his premiership, although a global leader in market research Ipsos Mori in a pre-poll survey – commissioned by Evening Standard - three weeks before the polling predicted that Boris Johnson held  a 12-point lead over the opposition Labour Party, narrowing from two weeks ago with  Conservatives  vote share remaining unchanged at 44 per cent against Labour’s 32 p.c.

With the British official Left’s defeat against Brexit screeching to a halt, Lexit- a term coined by Michael Wilkinson, associate professor of law, London School of Economics for the Corbyn manifesto – retreats. Wilkinson interpreted Corbyn manifesto as a German liberal ideology that has been dominating the European Union. He thought, while fraying as a movement, it opened up prospects for the Left to reconnect with democratic socialism as a combat against right wing populism and its authoritarian propensity. Optimist about what he termed as an anti-thesis to ‘caricature of popular sovereignty’ and ‘a Left-wing project of democratic socialism and internationalism that does not shy from exiting the EU if necessary.’ But skepticism maneuverer the academic after 12 December 2019. “The disconnect between the Labour party and working-class voters of course reflects a decline taking place not over months, or years, but decades. It has no easy fix. But the irony is that within the Labour party, Corbyn was almost uniquely placed to put his weight behind a  Lexit agenda’ his lifelong Euroscepticism giving him a credibility that was simply never utilised, undermined when he decided to campaign for Remain in 2016 and effectively abandoned through further concessions to the Remainers both inside and outside the party. The tragedy, in short, is that Corbyn, and many of those around him, have gone down fighting for a cause they didn’t believe in”.

Corbyn and his close followers appeared to have misread the 40-p.c. vote share of the Labour Party and failed to note that it was a feat, beyond expectation. Instead, the electorate was imagined to imbibe a socialist platform with the promise to overturn the Brexit referendum. But reality – like history – at times what Hegel called ‘a slaughter house’ with poll share plummeting to 32 p.c. The LSE professor, deeply sympathetic to Corbyn path, rightly says, “If this spells the official end of Corbyn, in truth, ‘Corbynism’ needs a critical scan to check if Labour Leave voters had little option save defecting to the Tories or the Brexit Party or to simply abstain. What is at stake now is ‘the dominant post-war ideology – the new German ideology. This must first be decoded in order to be transcended’, Wilkinson genuinely suggested.

Corbyn’s defeat is historic of the left by any reckoning. First, it means a ‘near-total failure of leadership on the left either to prepare for Brexit, or less excusably, after the referendum, to take advantage of the opportunity that it provided’ and it happened on a terrain ‘primed by the electorate against political and economic elites, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a rupture from the status quo’ The setback was all the more extraordinary  given decadal financial crisis that engulfs the whole of  Europe where a ‘ slow-motion collapse of social democratic parties attached to EU-style centrism’ is a deterrent for radical probabilities.

At the same time,  social democracy, the only hope against the comatose official Marxism (essentially Leninism sans Marxian temper), the ‘ideology’ of  Twentieth Century socialism that collapsed for its refuge in totalitarian statism that Marx vehemently warned against is  facing an unprecedentedly complex crisis of class concept as the ‘ Lexit position’ might have alienated ‘a new core of the young, urban, cosmopolitan Labour support- reflected in the ‘electoral arithmetic, which suggests that a position to respect the referendum could have cost some seats to the Lib Dems, but would have saved far more from the Tories’.   

Labour Party’s influence began waning since the end-1990s. Between 1997 and 2015, almost four million votes were shifted from the party when the total population went up by seven million. Many voters were disillusioned by neoliberal consensus politics and turned apolitical.

Lee Jones, reader in international politics at Queen Mary University of London and a co-founder of The Full Brexit network made significant observations on Corbyn who might performed conspicuously better had he ‘properly understood Brexit as a pivot for democratic transformation, rather than a distraction from his anti-austerity agenda. He might have supported grassroots deselection campaigns rather than cutting off Momentum at the knees. He could have developed a positive, socialist platform for Brexit, to win over metropolitan voters”.

But social democracy cannot evaporate for ever at least. And finally, Corbyn’s Eurosceptism is politically correct but tactically wrong. He or his fellow travellers have to put forward once again on foresighted tactical digits.  

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Frontier
Dec 25, 2019