Heroes and Villains

In his recent short essay, What was Corbynism?, Will Davies noted that the moral cause that swept the backbench MP to the leadership of the Labour party was a reaction to the instrumental moralising of David Cameron and George Osborne: "The aftermath of the financial crisis witnessed a resurgent politics of guilt, in which authority derived from its capacity to mete out punishment to those who had allegedly had it too good. ... Devastating cuts to the welfare budget and to local government (which is responsible for so much of what holds society together, via social care and children’s services) were notionally justified on a nonsensical macroeconomic pretext that they would generate growth and balanced budgets, but morally and psychologically justified on the basis that someone needed to suffer." The war on welfare was not just an article of faith for the Tories, it was a cynical diversion at a time when QE was cushioning the wealth of asset-holders. As Davies continues, "The point is that, several years before an unlikely figure from the Stop The War coalition became Leader of the Opposition, austerity had already been waged as a moralistic program based around a logic of innocence, guilt and punishment, overlayed on to a financialised economy divided ... according to a logic of assets and debt."

Had Labour's interim leader, Harriet Harman, taken a moral stand over benefit cuts in 2015, then it is likely that the leadership election would have seen a "soft left" candidate, such as the second-placed Andy Burnham, win handsomely. Though the membership clearly wanted the party to be more leftwing in general, and Corbyn enjoyed a sympathetic regard because of his historic radicalism, it was ethics rather than politics that fuelled his victory in the contest. Labour lost sight of its historic purpose as the voice of the dispossesed and the disadvantaged - and this was as much due to the Parliamentary Party's longstanding pusillanimity as the ideological dérapage of the New Labour years - with the result that one of the few sincere international socialists in its ranks became its conscience. One way of understanding how a largely unchanged membership could vote first for Corbyn and then for Starmer is to recognise that in 2015 they had little choice if they didn't want to compromise their core beliefs about what Labour stood for. Unlike the PLP, the opportunistic perpetuation of the party was not enough.

This moral dimension is salient at the moment because of Rishi Sunak's recent Spending Review. In the midst of the pandemic, the Conservative government finds itself unable to target its usual cast of the disreputable. The unemployed, who are forecast to number 2.6 million by the middle of next year, cannot be beasted as workshy or inadequate when jobs are disappearing through no fault of their own. Similarly, "skivers" will remain a redundant insult as long as the furlough scheme continues. That the £20 a week uplift to Universal Credit is due to end at the same time, next April, is obviously not a coincidence, while the ending of the grace period on benefit capping is already underway. This explains why the groups singled out by the Chancellor in his statement for punitive treatment are those who are deemed to at least have jobs and therefore less cause for complaint, hence public sector workers (with doctors, nurses and those on the lowest pay exempted) are expected to bear a real-terms pay reduction despite their efforts on the "frontline". Likewise, foreign aid can be slashed because the recipients have made no sacrifices for the nation and are popularly seen as queue-jumpers for limited charity. 

This last move is particularly vicious and has presumably been chosen (thereby breaking a manifesto pledge) in order to provide rightwing newspapers and the reactionary base with some red meat at a time when domestic villains are in short supply. As foreign aid is set as a share of GDP, maintaining it at 0.7% would represent a real-terms cut anyway because the economy has contracted by an estimated 11.3%. The additional "saving", estimated at £5 billion over the coming year, is negligible in terms of both the current deficit and accumulated debt. Public sector net borrowing for 2020-21 is forecast to be £394 billion while total debt will be north of £2 trillion. The popularity of this move is not a reflection of a lack of charity among Britons, who have mostly elevated Marcus Rashford to hero status for his campaigning for extended school meals, though the excuse that "We should spend it on our own people" often comes from those most insistent that domestic welfare should be trimmed as well. Rather it reflects a desire to export the punishment Davies talks of and not have to witness the consequences. It is an act of moral cowardice in which a majority of the population are implicated.

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed severe shortcomings in the state's resilience and capacity, and has particularly highlighted the damaging effect of austerity on local authorities over the last decade. Though more money has been provided for the extraordinary measures demanded by the pandemic, there is little sign that the government either intends to redress the last ten years of counterproductive underfunding or to alter its preference for outsourcing and private sector profit-making over public sector provision, despite the clearly greater competence of the latter in areas such as track and trace and the almost comical levels of incompetence and corruption revealed in the awarding of contracts for PPE and other pandemic-related products and services. The idea that there won't be a return to austerity, or indeed that austerity ever actually ended, is not supported by current policy. We are currently in a phoney war where the government cannot launch its austerity campaign for want of suitably contemptible opponents. Efforts were made to fill the temporary absence with the press focus on "Covidiots" earlier in the year, and more recently in ministerial statements that sought to pin the blame for the second wave on the public, but these have been undermined by confused regulations and perceived unfairness over local lockdowns.

The political right has always needed enemies within, but the intensity of the hatred of selected scapegoats is a relatively new development, and one that increasingly extends to the liberal centre. In a 2016 New Left Review essay, Davies describes the history of applied Neoliberalism in three phases. The initial period of 1979-89 was defined by its "combative opposition to socialism, whose destruction, both internationally and domestically, provided its animating telos". Despite failing in its public objectives to reduce unemployment ("Labour isn't working") and increase productivity ("Let managers manage"), it clearly succeeded in its core objective of marginalising socialism. The normative neoliberalism of the second phase, which spanned 1989-2008, was engaged in the "remaking of subjectivity around the ideal of enterprise", with competition (both real and artificial) employed as a means to discover best practice and ensure fairness. To this end, centre-left parties found themselves more in tune with the times because of both their greater willingness to pursue managerial and technocratic approaches to governance and their tolerance for increased public expenditure. Inequality was legitimised on the grounds of both efficiency and fairness. When neoliberal governance was shown to be hollow by the banking crisis, inequality once more became salient in political discourse.

The third phase, which Davies styles punitive neoliberalism, is still ongoing and is characterised by the focus on debt, which is held up both as a failure of government in the preceding phases and as a personal shortcoming, hence the utility of daft analogies between government spending and households or credit cards. "Under punitive neoliberalism, economic dependency and moral failure become entangled in the form of debt, producing a melancholic condition in which governments and societies unleash hatred and violence upon members of their own populations". Again, this is not simply an irrational spasm but an emergent process whose purpose is to divert society from the need to acknowledge the failure of neoliberalism to save capitalism by making it either fairer or more efficient. As Davies puts it, "One way of interpreting the apparently senseless violence of punitive neoliberalism is as a strategy for the circumvention of crisis and, at the same time, an avoidance of critique". 

In this context, the recent examples of cronyism and waste, and the disregard for public opinion over the subsequent revelations, are as telling as the Prime Minister's decision that far from being sacked for bullying, the Home Secretary should be held up as an example to us all, a heroine battling the Civil Service's ingrained misogyny and racism. In the eyes of liberal opinion, this is more evidence of Johnson's lack of virtue and the Conservatives' unwillingness to be bound by the norms that they insist should be observed by others. But this critique ignores that the Tories' defence of their actions actually rests on the arguments of combative and normative neoliberalism: that the free market must be prioritised over the state, even if that means tolerating abuse at the margin; and that coercive management is acceptable if it produces positive outcomes. As we (hopefully) come out of the pandemic next year, we can expect Tory rhetoric to return to the identification of society's villains in advance of a new round of rebranded austerity. Until then, if you want your punitive neoliberalism fix, you'll have to make do with the Labour party's war on its own membership.

Bloc Party

The report that the Republicans gained votes among ethnic minorities during the recent US Presidential election should remind us that the right are not oblivious to, or in denial about, demographic change. And, that whatever their reactionary instincts, they will attempt to shore up their support by accommodating that change. The most famous historic example of this is the way in which the political right appealed to women after female suffrage was finally achieved, fearing that the "gentler sex" would be attracted to socialism and less supportive of the military, by an emphasis on stability and security in the context of "family values". One reason why the Republicans shifted in recent decades to the "angry white dude" vote, with emblematic issues such as gun rights and the "culture war", is that religion and abortion have started to lose their valence as vote motivators for both men and women. Another reason is that the Republicans have been losing support among male voters and have been thrashing about for a response. In many ways, Donald Trump was an experiment, the results of which actually point to the potential to build on a growing conservative base among ethnic minorities.

In the case of Britain, the political prioritisation of antisemitism over other forms of discrimination and bigotry should be seen not simply as factional instrumentalism by the Labour right, but as evidence that the Jewish community has become more politically Conservative since the 1970s, with the inflexion point occuring a decade ago. This secular shift has meant that Jewish political and cultural concerns have steadily gained credibility with a centre-right media that still exhibits instinctive antisemitism on occasions, and there has been relatively little pushback against the more extreme manifestations of it, such as Melanie Phillips' hatred of Palestinians. Just as the Mail and the Telegraph have managed to set the political agenda for the BBC in recent years, so too the Jewish Chronicle now has a subsidiary role as a catalyst for the broadcast media's treatment of antisemitism and the acceptability of the Labour Party. The news that the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement are now making explicit demands of Keir Starmer is less an indication of the community's relative strength, or of the Labour leader's sympathies, than evidence that they are only too well aware of the media leverage they now enjoy. 

One way of looking at the importance that the Labour right attaches to antisemitism is not just its utility as a stick with which to beat the left but as an apeing of rightwing attitudes. The history of the Labour right has essentially been the promotion of conservative policies, from austerity and wage restraint to immigration controls and higher defence spending, coupled with the limited amelioration of the consequent social ills. Antisemitism has become salient for the Labour right precisely because they believe Jews have moved politically towards the Tories. The obvious problem with "chasing conservative voters" in this fashion is that it doesn't work, which is why we've normally had Conservative governments over the last 100 years. For those in denial about the party's conflicted Brexit stance, the loss of the "red wall" of Northern and Midlands seats last year has been attributed to a combination of Jeremy Corbyn's personal unpopularity, a failure to pander to "legitimate concerns" over immigration, and an "extreme" manifesto, but the decline in Labour's vote long predated the previous leader and the turn left, while attempts to outbid the Tories on immigration, national security and punitive welfare have consistently failed over the years. 

As Jews have cleaved more strongly to the Conservative party, the Labour right have increasingly viewed them as swing voters, despite their negligible significance in all but a handful of constituencies, or even as a communal bloc vote that needs to be "won back", which is both patronising and inherently racist in its assumption that Jews vote as a unified community. Of course, the same patronisation is evident in talk of the "white working class" as a homogenous bloc. To a degree, this is part of the Labourist tradition, which long relied on votes aligning with sectarian and ethnic boundaries, but what is relatively new, dating from the New Labour years, is the almost complete disregard for those other dimensions of society - represented by groups such as the poor, the young and the old - that the party felt it had both an obligation to represent and a need to explictly target. This arises from an increasing focus on voters as bearers of "cultures" and "values", which is not just an anti-materialist (and inherently reactionary) perspective, but appears to reflect an acute sensitivity to contemporary sectarian and ethnic boundaries, however illusory they may be in reality.

Though antisemitism is more prevalent among Conservative party members, it is no longer definitional in the way that it was up until the 1960s. The historic role of the Jew - as the embodiment of the alien and the suspect - has now been inherited by the Muslim, while the asylum-seeker has absorbed much of the bigotry once aimed at the Irish and West Indians. The result is that Islamophobia and an intolerance towards refugees has become more respectable among both Conservative and Labour MPs, but it is only the former who can claim to be in harmony with their membership. Of course, being out of step with the members is a badge of honour for most of the PLP. This friction within the Labour party, which also manifests itself over trans and traveller rights, is not simply the latest cycle of the struggle between a predominantly leftwing membership and a predominantly rightwing apparatus. There is more going on here than a dispute over socialism versus revisionism. As a political vehicle built on the trade unions and affiliate societies, Labour is the ultimate bloc party. At heart this is a dispute over whether the party's future will be based on ethnic and cultural blocs, with the more conservative (notably the "native English") enjoying a privileged position in determining priorities, or whether it will remain a class-based party seeking common cause in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. Is it a coalition of verticals or a horizontal?

In the US, the same secular evolution is paradoxically more antagonistic at a societal level, because of the country's history of slavery and genocide and its institutional bias against non-whites, but less antagonistic at the party political level, because party affiliation is looser and the constitution encourages broad (if deradicalised) coalitions. There's no membership to expel and consequently the media spends little time trying to badger party managers into disciplinary action. Instead the focus is on policy development, which in practice is bought or blocked by mega-donors. Radical challenges to this order are either marginalised through media blackouts or neutered by black propaganda with an emphasis on lurid conspiracy and character assassination. One of the more notable developments since 2015 has been the way that this traditional American style of anti-radicalism has seeped into British politics, with examples of conspiracism (chiefly, but not only, around Brexit) and blackballing (Corbyn, obviously). To call this McCarthyite isn't hyperbole. 

The Labour party leadership's current preference for values in place of policies and its ambition to build an Obama-like coalition of the undemanding is likely to prove fruitless, both because the electoral blocs it wishes to court are nowhere near as coherent and institutionally robust as they are in the US and because the few blocs that have disproportionate media clout, due to their alignment with the right on key issues, will push the party so far to the right as to be indistinguishable from the Tories. Making a martyr of Jeremy Corbyn doesn't just risk alienating the left, it risks alienating those groups that Corbyn and the left have traditionally championed, hence the increasing concerns expressed by Black and Asian party members at the perceived hierarchy of racism and bigotry displayed under the "new management". That Donald Trump managed to grow his vote among ethnic minorities and women was seen as a paradox by many, even an irony, but it simply proves that he was a pragmatist who was happy to take support from any quarter. In contrast, Keir Starmer seems set on a course that will inevitably narrow Labour's electoral coalition further. Following the vote-share high of 2017 and the setback of 2019 (for which Starmer's Brexit policy must shoulder a lot of blame), this looks self-defeating.

American Polarisation

Donald Trump's election in 2016 didn't reflect well on the Constitution (not least the electoral college), the vulnerability of the Republican Party establishment to a leveraged buyout, or the weakness of the Democratic Party in the face of an unabashed plutocrat. His relatively narrow defeat in 2020 (currently 78 to 73 million votes with 97% counted) is not a victory for the Democrat establishment, let alone "normality". Liberals are now ruefully conceding that "Trumpism" is here to stay, but they remain resistant to conceding that Trump is essentially a symptom of a deeper structural malaise, to do with the operation of American capitalism and the anti-democratic design of the constitution, rather than simply a freak occurence. Instead there will be a renewed scolding of the left, for its carping and lack of enthusiasm, combined with an ever more contemptuous distaste for "vulgar populism" and "demagogic nationalism". The meta-narrative of the political scientists will simply be the old tune of polarisation, again ignoring that the appearance of a deep divide centred on irreconcilable "values" is a product of the constitution and of the power of money, rather than something intrinsic to the American character.

One reason why Trump has managed to not only retain voters but grow his support is that he has been an exemplary Republican President. His has not been an activist administration, despite the promises. He didn't build the wall, he didn't bring the coal & steel jobs back, he didn't pull out of NATO. For many GOP voters this isn't a problem, not simply because he can blame inactivity on an unhelpful Democrat-controlled House or bogeys like antifa, but because the failures affect few voters directly (his Florida win appears to have been down to retirees and wealthier Latinos, for example). He has also avoided alienating his supporters. His remarks over the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the Proud Boys were seen by liberals as evidence of his moral debasement, but far from suggesting that he is a secret collector of Nazi memorabilia they merely indicate that he is a pragmatist keen to preserve all parts of his base. His tax cuts are seen as aspirational by many (the product of decades of ideological spade-work across the aisle) and his handling of the pandemic has been sufficiently obscured by supportive media to allow many voters to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Did the Covid-19 pandemic influence the result? If you argue that it did, and furthermore that Trump lost voters due to his mismanagement and performative ignorance, then the counterfactual is one in which no pandemic occurs and Trump retains those voters and possibly wins. If you argue that it didn't, then you have to conclude that the Democrats failed to make it a sufficiently decisive issue. The key takeaway for me is that Trump has recorded not only the highest ever Republican candidate vote (beating his own 2016 record) but more than Obama won in 2008 when pollsters were predicting a lasting demographic shift to a coalition of the young, liberal and minority centred on big cities. Trump's relative success can't be attributed simply to population growth, though that is obviously a factor. It suggests that the Republicans are now suceeding in generating fresh "angry white guys" and are even cultivating new reactionary groups among ethnic minorities that have hitherto cleaved to the Democrats. One of the keys to Trump's persistent popularity is that he is still seen as "not a politician", and that anti-establishment vibe clearly appeals way beyond the traditional conservative core.

It looks like the GOP will keep the Senate (the two Georgia run-offs are likely to split at best) and therefore a chokehold on Congress. I suspect the Republican party establishment won't seriously challenge the result (even if Trump and his administration does - though the manner in which he is doing it looks more like a grift to raise funds than a coup) as they'll calculate that Biden will be timid and they can block any legislation they don't like. This suggests it's going to be four years of posturing and little substantive change. This will be celebrated by centrists as a return to normality, and in many senses they'll be right. It will be like the Obama years - insufficient reform, the indulgence of Wall Street, more drones - but without the slick presentation and with even less appetite to fight the far-right. Centrist ideologues will no doubt interpret the close result as evidence that the Democrats must reject left-leaning policies in order to "heal the nation" and "unify" a polarised public. The subtext will be an attempt to allay the fears of  independent and "moderate" Republican voters that socialism might enter through the back door.

Political polarisation in the US is real, but it needs to be emphasised that this is a product of the political system rather than a Jekyll and Hyde divide in the American psyche. Commentators and political scientists routinely blame the people without observing that they are channelled by the media into one of two camps whose cultural opposition masks significant consensus on economic, social and foreign policy. This is far more of a "managed democracy" than the UK, where less gerrymandering means the two-party system is prone to insurgent third parties, usually aimed at preventing Labour moving too far to the left or occasionally acting as ginger groups to push the Conservatives rightwards. US democracy was an elite stich-up at birth that inherited the factional approach of the British system. While the UK's democracy evolved through the struggle for suffrage and working class representation, exemplified in the replacement of the Liberal party by Labour, the US system largely maintained its 18th century form even as the party names changed (it even survived the Civil War). Interests would coalesce around individuals and these pseudo-monarchs would vie for the Presidency. The original convention that the loser in the election would be appointed Vice-President indicated how cosy the relationship was. 

Maintaining the current system is key to maintaining the dominance of the Republicans and Democrats. While the UK has always had minor party representation, the current US House of Representatives has only one member not affiliated to the big two, and that's a Libertarian party representative who was elected as a Republican in 2018. One of the ironies of British commentators insisting that Labour should be more like the Democrats is that the US system forces broad coalitions and encourages semi-independence (e.g. Bernie Sanders, as one of only two independent Senators, running for the Democrat Presidential nomination, which would be the equivalent of Caroline Lucas standing for the Labour leadership). Party membership is not the site of contest it is in Britain. What matters are registered supporters (Labour's move towards giving them a say in the leadership contest was ironically held up as destabilising). Purges are rare in the US, but paradoxically this is because the party establishments are so dominant and money matters so much in winning elections at every level. 

Democrat disgruntlement has grown as the biases inherent in the system have increasingly favoured the Republicans, but it is doubtful they would radically reform the system under any conceivable circumstances as that would potentially open the door to genuine multi-party politics. While the British left ponders once again whether it should work within Labour or challenge it, running independently of the Democrats is simply not seen as a credible option in the US where the left has consistently propped up the party. The GOP has only won the popular vote for the Presidency once in the last 30 years, when George W Bush was re-elected in 2004 (a vote that largely reflected patriotic support post-9/11 and which occurred before the debacle of Iraq became undeniable). Barack Obama had the capital to initiate reform in 2008, but even without the intrusion of the financial crisis I doubt he would have been inclined to do anything, preferring to believe that the demographic wind was behind the Democrats' sails and that they could make the existing system work to their advantage. Given Biden's bipartisan instincts and the GOP's dominance of the Senate and Supreme Court, the chances of substantive reform over the next four years are nil. And that means that a Trump revival in 2024 can't be ruled out.

Corbyn and After

The Labour Party's disciplinary processes have always been factional. While the party is not, as the EHRC report confirmed, institutionally antisemitic, it is institutionally anti-left. The purpose of the party is to restrain the socialist impulse, channelling it into parliamentarianism. This means it must balance between keeping socialists inside the tent, to prevent the emergence of an electoral challenger (or significant spoiler) on the left, and expelling leftwing members when they become too dominant or troublesome. It doesn't face the same issue on its right flank, where dissidents will be tolerated by the party hierarchy (and lionised by the media) all the way up to the point where they shamelessly turn their coats or even set up new parties with the express intention of burying Labour for good. This asymmetry means that the disciplinary system invariably tends to favour the right, and consequently its focus shifts over time to reflect those issues deemed (whether reasonably or not) to be dividing lines with the "far-left", hence the current focus on antisemitism and the lesser importance accorded to Islamophobia. 

Will an independent complaints procedure change this? No. It will allow the leadership to claim that it is incapable of interfering, but the idea that factionalism will disappear is naive. This will be present not only in the interface between the party and the independent body, i.e. how complaints are initiated and the role of the NEC in judgements and sanctions, but structurally in the likely sympathies of the membership of a panel appointed by the party hierarchy itself. They will almost certainly be middle-class, professional and committed to liberal orthodoxy, which means they will inevitably bias towards the political centre and be wary of left "extremism". In other words, this will simply further institutionalise factionalism, providing a defensive shield against claims of bias and injustice. That Keir Starmer and Dave Evans have immediately interfered to suspend Jeremy Corbyn is recognition that they know they can get away with this pseudo-independence. They now have power without responsibility.

Much of the political spite displayed towards Corbyn this week has repeated the highly personalised judgements that have been made against him since he first became leader, notably that he is thick and narcissistic: qualities he supposedly shares with Donald Trump. But the most telling charge is that he was simply unfit for office, an opinion that even those who oppose his suspension are happy to subscribe to, as this carefuly curated selection of letters to the Guardian shows. This emphasis on Corbyn's inadequate leadership is an indication that the real target of the liberal media's ire is the party membership, who had the temerity to not only elect him in 2015 but to re-elect him in 2016 despite the charge that he had single-handedly murdered the remain campaign in the EU referendum. It is the party members (and to an extent the wider electorate who delivered the "wrong" result in 2017) who are really being told off.

Corbynism was initially an attempt to build a wider social movement in support of parliamentary socialism. Its beleaguerment after 2017 was not simply the result of a decapitation strategy by its factional enemies but a wider campaign by the political centre, notably embodied in the astroturfed People's Vote and the Change UK farce, which aimed to force it to focus on Westminster and media opinion to the exclusion of movement-building. As such, this was a perfect example of parliamentarianism, the idea that all politics outside the Westminster framework is illegitimate, that Labour's first priority is to allay the fears of the establishment and prove its "fitness to govern", and that militancy of any sort is a guaranteed vote-loser. Though Ralph Miliband's Parliamentary Socialism only traced this tradition up to the 1960s, there has been nothing since to suggest it doesn't continue to reflect the thinking of the PLP. If Kinnock's tenure focused on beating down militancy and New Labour majored on fitness to govern, the early signs are that Starmer's focus will be on the illegitimacy of extra-parliamentary action (the comments on the Black Lives Matter protests and criticism of the National Education Union are illustrative).

There is an argument to be made that Corbyn's crime in the eyes of the establishment was not merely being too far left (objectively he was only offering lukewarm social democracy that was well within the bounds of Labour's history), or even of being obsessed with the rights of the marginalised and the interests of foreigners, but of being too disrespectful of the parliamentary system (the lobby as much as the Commons chamber). This was not so much down to his own attitudes (he is arguably one of the staunchest contemporary champions of Parliament as a democratic body, in the mould of Tony Benn), but to his encouragement of organising and pressure beyond Westminster (for the media, an area suitable only for anthropology or ventriloquism, not autonomous politics). The sneering about his historic support for marginal causes, his ready attendance at demonstrations and his insistence that everyone was capable of independent thought and appreciation, bizarrely demonstrated in the hysterical reaction to his admission that Ulysses was a favourite novel, all point to a contempt for someone who doesn't know his place.

Corbyn's elevation to the leadership was an aberration in Labour's history, even if the ethical tradition he represents has been part of Labour since its inception. The question that has to be asked is how he managed to come to power. It wasn't because of his own cunning or resourcefulness, or the strength of the organised left. It can't be attributed to luck or the stupidity of his opponents either, despite those who would later loudly regret enabling his candidacy in 2015 and the ineptness of the 2016 coup attempt. A more plausible answer is that the party right was so bereft of ideas, so intellectually exhausted after the disappointments of New Labour, that some felt the need to support Corbyn's candidacy simply to lend the respectability of ideological contest and variety to what would otherwise have been a depressing executive search process. But even that isn't wholly convincing. 

The answer, surely, is that the party membership wanted a more leftwing leader and programme, something that should have been understood with the election of Ed Miliband but which was dismissed at the time as being due to the malign influence of the unions (a dismissal that seems to have encouraged Miliband's own caution). The introduction of democracy into the election of the Labour leader has been destabilising because it no longer allows the party and union establishments to control the process. The result, in the short-term, has been Starmer's strategy to campaign left and lead right, but this isn't likely to be viable in the long run simply because the membership will quickly tire of such dishonesty. As one-member-one-vote cannot be repealed, the most likely fix will be to raise the threshold for candidate nominations, so preventing a leftwing MP from bypassing the bulk of the PLP to appeal directly to the membership. In the circumstances, further moves to democratise MP selection can be assumed to be off the agenda in the interests of "unity".

Corbyn's failure to radically reform Labour guaranteed that he would never get the chance to radically reform the country. And that failure was as much down to him and John McDonnell being thoroughly institutionalised as it was to any lack of managerial nous. Building alliances and solidarity is the very nature of leftwing politics, but it faces a particular problem when it comes to dealing with the PLP, which is that the latter ultimately has the power of the state at its back and it is also adept at isolating dissent (though the Socialist Campaign Group has 34 members, only 18 have signed a letter calling for Corbyn's reinstatement). This can only be negotiated with from a position of strength, and that strength can only be built outside of Parliament, whether as a movement working through Labour's membership (a la Momentum) or as a ginger group disciplining the party through electoral threat (a la UKIP). As the sneers about Glastonbury and the dismissal of his willingness to ask questions on behalf of ordinary citizens revealed, the establishment's fear was never that Corbyn would dominate the Commons but that he would make it look irrelevant.