Category: Labour

Trashing the BBC comes at a price

Progressives should defend public service broadcasting. Flirting with the anti-BBC lobby has helped imperil it

Hatgate: one of the more ludicrous pieces of anti-BBC hysteria.

For a certain sort of Brit, the NHS and the BBC have long been at or near the top of their list of things to be proud of about their country. They’re both big public institutions which everyone in the UK knows. Their existence speaks to some of the core values of the left. They show that not everything should be left to the market, shared institutions matter and public provision can be popular.

The BBC produces a huge amount of high-quality content of all kinds — news, drama and TV. It makes lots of stuff I’d never want to hear or watch, and quite right too: it’s not supposed to just appeal to me or people like me. But because it’s not driven by market imperatives, it produces things I doubt I’d ever get to see or hear without it. It provides common coverage across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — a pan-UK public arena. It supports local journalists around the country. It’s an enormous soft power asset for the country and a news source people in dictatorships have listened to in secret. I’d be horrified to see it go.

Governments always have an uneasy relationship with the BBC. That’s natural enough: journalists are meant to be a thorn in governments’ side. One of the licence fee’s plus points is that it’s not general taxation, so the tension’s reduced a bit: it’s not a direct case of biting the hand that feeds you. But rows about what the BBC does, how it does it, whether it reports fairly and so on are nothing new.

What is new is a government as determinedly hostile to the BBC as Boris Johnson’s. Their hostility extends to public service broadcasting more generally and fits a wider pattern. Today’s Conservatives seem hostile to scrutiny and independent institutions in a way which goes beyond the norm. Threatening Channel 4’s licence in retaliation for empty-chairing the Prime Minister and the ongoing boycott of the Today programme both set an unnerving tone. Proposing to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee has far more to do with an anti-BBC agenda than its (dubious, in my view) policy merits.

Faced with the possibility — hinted at before the election, floated by the former Culture Secretary and trailed in this week’s Sunday Times — of actually moving towards a subscription model and slashing the BBC to the bone, the Opposition should be rallying to its defence. Frankly, if Labour can’t even defend the world’s best broadcaster and one of our great public institutions, I’m not sure what the point of it is.

Sadly, most of its would-be deputy leaders haven’t got the memo. Ian Murray was an honourable exception. But Angela Rayner said she was ‘no big fan of the BBC’. Richard Burgon referred to the BBC ‘misreporting’ the news. And reaching the real nadir, Dawn Butler said ‘in a way, I thought “OK, that will teach you”’. They all went on to support the principle of a public broadcaster. But it’s more than a little reminiscent of Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘seven, seven and a half out of ten’ response on how strongly he felt about not leaving the EU.

You don’t have to claim the thing you’re backing is perfect. But in politics, you can’t sound lukewarm about which side you’re on when the chips are down. Rebecca Long-Bailey’s comments on a ‘People’s BBC’ this weekend were equally unhelpful. For a start, electing BBC ‘top brass’ is an atrocious idea. It’s a recipe for a hideous battle of obsessives and special interest groups in an inevitably low-turnout election. It’s also a road to politicising the BBC — the exact opposite of what it needs and the public wants.

It used to be mainly the right which trashed the BBC — their self-interest is clear, given a print media far more congenial to its views. Many Scottish nationalists joined in with vim after 2011 — and as the BBC’s very existence embodies the British public space they want to abolish, that’s not too surprising either. But Long-Bailey’s wheeze (not without precedent: a number of Corbynite politicians mutter about ‘democratising the BBC’) and would-be deputy leaders’ curmudgeonliness fit a pattern.

Triggered by the hard left but abetted by much of the soft left, Labour and many of its members have sounded increasingly hostile to free media per se. It’s gone far beyond reasonable discussion of concentrated ownership — booing journalists, the harrying of Laura Kuenssberg, bringing up media reform as a reaction to unfavourable coverage. And with a characteristic blend of zest for public control and suspicion of the actually-existing public realm, the BBC has become a bête noire. The self-parodying row over whether the BBC doctored the appearance of Jeremy Corbyn’s hat to make it look ‘more communist’ was a case in point.

Faced with a pincer movement like this, you’d think the centre and centre-left would be loud in defence of a core public institution. They should fear what wrecking one of the last bulwarks against a retreat to rival echo chambers might mean. And in fairness, the Liberal Democrats have been clear where they stand in recent weeks. But far too many self-defining centrists have not, usually as a result of Brexit. Dawn Butler’s ‘that’ll teach you’ has its counterparts. Andrew Adonis advocating a subscription model and even calling for the BBC to be in court for giving Brexiteers a platform) is a case in point. AC Grayling offers a daily exemplar.

Together with a stonking Tory majority, the result is a better climate for an assault on public service broadcasting than ever before. Britain is not Twitter, of course: plenty of Conservative voters value the BBC. Unease is spreading on the Tory benches. It’s not a foregone conclusion at all. But Opposition parties — and campaigners — need to stop making the Government’s job easier.

Yes, the BBC can merit criticism. I think it’s too inclined to juxtapose factual claims rather than evaluate their truth. I think it struggles to deal with a level of political dishonesty and bad faith we mostly haven’t had to deal with until fairly recently. I sometimes roll my eyes at solecisms in policy areas I know about. At the last election, I think it was too quick to frame an initially much more multiparty contest as a battle between the big two. Its reaction to Samira Ahmed’s totally justified complaint was dire. Some of its journalists should probably just tweet less.

But there’s a difference between constructive criticism and wholesale trashing. Criticise the BBC’s calls on election coverage: don’t say it ‘decided not to be impartial’. Argue for it to be bolder in challenging factual untruths: don’t call it the Brexit Biased Corporation. And recognise that a public service broadcaster’s job involves giving space to views you don’t like, not just playing your worldview back to you.

Because if the BBC becomes a British PBS for lack of champions, Britain will be far poorer for it. The scrutiny of government will weaken. And if you’re on the left or in the liberal centre, you really won’t like the media world you’ll get once the BBC’s brought low.

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 17 February 2020.

Give the voters credit

Don’t disdain the voters if they focus on character and credibility more than any single policy. They’ve got a point

They say the first step to recovery is recognising you have a problem. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, just before Christmas, that much of Labour hasn’t got there yet. More strikingly, much of Labour has decided that it’s other people who have a problem instead. For some it’s the media; for others it’s Brexit; for still others, increasingly, it’s the voters themselves.

But actually, even if we ignore the truism that the voters are never wrong, they deserve more credit than many are willing to give them. And looking at the early indicators of why they demurred, the reasons seem thoroughly fair. Labour would do well to start by recognising as much.

Fitness to govern

Challenged on Corbyn’s political record, many Labour supporters asked: ‘which Labour policies do you disagree with?’ That’s reasonable as far as it goes. The left places a great deal of weight on what manifestos say. It often dismisses those who focus on the character of those who seek to govern. They can sometimes ignore their own hero-worship in the process (this includes moderates, by the way). But more importantly, they miss the point of elections if they treat leaders as mere channels for manifesto delivery.

In every term, governments have to make decisions they never even considered before the election. They wield a great deal of power independently of Parliament. They usually set the agenda to steer through Parliament. And Prime Ministers have to take ultimate responsibility for all of that — and personal responsibility for decisions in a supreme national crisis. That makes a Prime Minister’s character, background and personal beliefs supremely relevant.

So it was entirely reasonable for voters to ask whether Corbyn was more or less fit to govern than Johnson. It is widely agreed that Corbyn’s personal stock was badly hit by the Skripal affair before the election, and that’s completely fair enough. People were murdered on British soil. Voters had good reason to question whether a man who suggested getting Russia to verify the Novichok it deployed could be trusted on national security.

Credibility

Many Labour people say their manifesto policies were popular. Ultimately, well-received Labour manifestos don’t end up producing large Tory majorities. But it’s true to say voters seemed to like a lot of Labour’s policies, in isolation and in theory. In combination and in practice, it’s a different story. And again, whether you agree with their judgment or not, the voters’ point is a fair one.

Basic common sense — or experience of trying to run any project — will tell you people have limited capacity. The same applies to a state — especially given that the British state’s capabilities have declined a great deal since 2010. So it’s not just understandable if lots of voters say they support a raft of Labour policies and then worry about their ability to deliver. It made good sense for voters to worry.

Similarly, whatever you think about the costings of Labour’s manifesto — regarded pretty dubiously by many — the way it behaved in the campaign made voter doubts very reasonable. Labour threw a £58 billion pledge (for the WASPI women) into the middle of an election campaign after its manifesto was launched. There seemed to be (because there was) no sense of prioritisation from Labour. According to YouGov, voters tended to say Labour had a lot of policies which didn’t seem to be thought through. And voters had good reason to be sceptical.

Leadership

I would have preferred a Brexit compromise to the fight to the finish we ended up with. I found Johnson’s ultra-hard Brexit too much to live with and disliked the Liberal Democrats’ pledge to simply revoke Article 50 (even if I knew it was just a symbol). So in 2019, while I doubted what kind of Brexit they proposed and the timescales in which they proposed to work, Labour’s policy was my least-worst option.

Except for the part where Corbyn refused to say which side he was on. I found it irritating, but it looks like the voters cared about Corbyn’s unwillingness to pick a side more than I did. It looks like it reinforced their pre-existing view of his inadequacy as a leader — more than taking either side would have done. And again, voters were right about the choice facing them. Labour didn’t want to take a clear Remain- or Leave-aligned position. Its leader didn’t want to tell them what he thought. That reluctance was where its policy position ultimately came from.

Leave voters were right to think that if they wanted to ensure Brexit happened, then the Tories were the party to do that. Remain voters were right to think the Labour leadership’s heart wasn’t in its Remainier pledges — but that probably mattered less in practice. Not unreasonably, Labour Remainers were much more likely to stay loyal than Labour Leavers.

Ethics

Antisemitism’s impact on Labour’s fortunes seems harder to pin down than broader fitness to govern, lack of credibility and obfuscation on Brexit. But anecdotally, more than one Labour candidate reported that it did real damage. Anna Turley reported: ‘what they said was, “My parents or my grandparents — they fought the war over this.”’

This was reasonable and right. Under Corbyn, two female Jewish MPs were driven out of Labour, antisemitic incidents soared and Labour found itself investigated by the EHRC for institutional racism. Corbyn himself was (rightly) challenged for antisemitic tropes he’d used in the past. Corbyn’s antisemitism became a point of near-consensus in the Jewish community.

Did the voters as a whole go so far? Possibly not. But doorstep unease suggests a lot of ‘less-informed’ voters deserve a lot more credit than some very well-informed people who found excuse after excuse to avoid the obvious. Frankly, the latter could do with learning from the former. Voters who recoiled at the Corbynite record on antisemitism were absolutely right.

The voters had a point

Blaming the voters, who cannot after all be deselected, never gets you far in a democracy. But even leaving that pragmatic reality aside, Labour will do itself no favours by ignoring their overall message. You might be appalled by the alternative (and I’d agree with you), but Labour’s thumping was richly deserved, and the voters’ main apparent objections to their offering were right.

The voters neither trust nor much like Boris Johnson. Labour shouldn’t rail against them for looking at their man and deciding he was even worse. It should, instead, take a long, hard look at how they came to put the public in a position where they came to that conclusion.

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 24 December 2019.

Ends and means

Social democrats have every right to reject Corbynite guilt-tripping

Even by its prodigious standards, the hard left is being aggressive to ‘centrists’ this week. For the Twitter-uninitiated, these days ‘centrist’ includes everyone from actual centrists through to socialists on the radical left who oppose the Corbynites on democratic grounds. In particular, the hard left are accusing ‘centrists’ of enabling Boris Johnson and telling us all we have to rally behind Jeremy Corbyn to stop him.

After years of being told to fuck off and join the Tories, I suppose we could see it as refreshing that the Corbynistas want our votes again. But consider what they’re telling decent social democrats to support. They demand anti-racists vote for a leader with a lifetime’s history of anti-Semitic tropes and views, who with his allies reduced Labour to being investigated by the Equality and Human Rights Commission over institutional anti-Semitism. They expect reasonable people to support a leader whose every instinct — even when British people are killed on our own soil at the behest of a foreign power — is to excuse our enemies and decry our allies. They want democrats to set aside the records of extremism and the deep-rooted nastiness of the hard left.

And of course, they want pro-Europeans to support an incoherent mess on Brexit. I wanted Labour to seek a soft Brexit compromise and then, as the options narrowed, I wanted MPs to vote for the deal on the table. Most Remainers rejected meeting the other side halfway long ago. But Labour hasn’t even argued for a coherent compromise. And even now, when it’s calling for a referendum it mumbles. Labour won’t sing Remain or Leave’s tunes or stand up for meeting people halfway. It is of no use to anyone.

In return for moral collapse and strategic ineptitude, we are expected to be grateful for a domestic policy pitch rooted in nostalgia and a benefits policy to the right of the Liberal Democrats. So, out of arguments to persuade moderate social democrats their project isn’t toxic, of course the Corbynites seized on Johnson’s premiership. The hard left delight in being able to tell social democrats the hard right have captured the Tories and so they’ll just have to get in line. Sadly for them, other people have principles too. I regard Corbyn as a dangerous threat as well as Johnson. I want both of them gone, and failing that I want both of them kept in check in Parliament.

But there’s a cold strategic as well as principled logic to withdrawing support from Labour now. In my view, it is now clear the median Labour member won’t reject Corbynite politics because they’re wrong. I recognise the current median Labour member is probably still on the pro-Corbyn bit of the soft left, not the true hard left. I’m sure they wish anti-Semitism weren’t an issue in Labour ranks. I imagine they probably think the hard left sometimes has a point about foreign policy, but I don’t think they actively want to throw the Baltic states to Putin. I don’t think they like the viciousness that comes with Corbynism.

They just don’t see it all as a red line. Not really. Certainly not if it doesn’t lose Labour enough votes or overlap with something they really care about personally. (Which is why Brexit causes Corbyn so much more trouble internally than anti-Jewish racism.) I don’t think they ever will. Worse, I think plenty will minimise or excuse it to suit themselves. And I don’t think they’ll really and truly believe it costs enough votes for them to draw the line unless a general election proves the point.

As a citizen, I therefore have one weapon left: my vote. If Labour wants it, it will have to actually take anti-Semitism on, not deflect headlines and protect the Corbynistas’ friends. It will have to assure me that, in office, a Labour Prime Minister will take our NATO obligations seriously and in good faith. And it will have to convince me that the people it puts into Number 10 are committed parliamentary democrats.

Self-evidently, none of that will happen so long as Corbyn, McDonnell, Milne and Murray run the show. Nonetheless, Labour, that’s my price. I will not be guilt-tripped into lowering it. You can pay it or not as you see fit.

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 28 July 2019.

Uncompromising compromisers

The self-inflicted fate of Labour’s referendum sceptics

Since the EU referendum, I’ve thought our least bad option was to implement it in moderate fashion — to meet each other halfway rather than poison our politics or burn down our economy. I still think that. It may be the third choice out of three on first preferences. But I prefer universal grumpiness to pleasing one half of the country, enraging the other and filling both with mutual loathing.

So I’ve had a lot of sympathy with Labour’s reasonable second referendum sceptics. I think Lisa Nandy is right to fear the damage it could do to our politics. I completely understand why Ruth Smeeth and Gareth Snell worry about killing off the alliance between Hampstead and Hull. I see the People’s Voters’ confidence of winning a referendum and think hubris begets nemesis. I don’t want the UK to become an embittered cuckoo in the EU nest.

But at some point a diagnosis requires a prescription. And Labour’s sceptics have almost all refused to grasp, still less follow, the logic of their views. That logic was fairly clear. Save for Kate Hoey (with whom I have no sympathy), their problems with May’s Brexit related to the future relationship, not the Withdrawal Agreement. It was and is abundantly clear that the Withdrawal Agreement is the only one on offer and the Political Declaration is not binding. Quite rightly, almost no Labour MPs are prepared to countenance No Deal. They therefore needed the Withdrawal Agreement, and as much input for MPs into the future relationship as they could get.

Further, many of the Labour sceptics didn’t want a Brexit all that different from May’s. They usually wanted to end free movement. They wanted a customs union, and they usually wanted more regulatory alignment than the Tory Brexiteers. The Northern Ireland backstop entails a customs union for the foreseeable future anyway, so the real differences were relatively minor. Dynamic alignment on employment law rather than a level playing field is not a stake for which anyone should gamble the country.

In fairness, five current and two ex-Labour MPs did, at some point, vote for what they said they wanted. Kevin Barron, John Mann and (no longer Labour) Ian Austin did from the beginning, along with Frank Field (who’d left already). Caroline Flint did from the second meaningful vote. And Rosie Cooper and Jim Fitzpatrick voted for the Withdrawal Agreement on 29 March. No other Labour MP in favour of an orderly Brexit has cast a single vote to concretely advance their cause.

They may have voted for one or more non-binding options in the ‘indicative votes’. But any option they cared to name required the Withdrawal Agreement first — the Agreement they refuse to help ratify. And it rapidly became clear that even when the Government offered the main procedural requirements they could reasonably have hoped for on MPs’ input into the future relationship, it wouldn’t be enough for them.

By then it was far too late not to hold the European elections. And in holding them, we gave new shape to the radicalisation of British politics on Remain/Leave lines. The Labour sceptics gave their internal opponents the electoral argument they’d always lacked before: that if Leavers would punish a reversal, Remainers would punish a compromise. The result? More Labour MPs now fear losing votes to the Liberal Democrats than to the Brexit Party.

Sealing the fate of the Withdrawal Agreement also, finally, sealed the fate of Theresa May. Obviously Tory MPs had far more to do with her political demise than Labour MPs, who could hardly be expected to sustain her. But the likelihood must be that our next Prime Minister will be more, not less, hardline than she is. And if the Withdrawal Agreement is dead in Westminster, Brussels has no intention of allowing another to be born.

Partly as a result, the middle ground is dying. MPs who want a deal and a compromise — rather than a culture war grudge-match via a second referendum or an accelerationist, destructive No Deal — have no viable leaders and no concrete offer. Unless a genuine pragmatist wins the Tory leadership election, the Withdrawal Agreement seems dead. We are staring down the barrel of a No Deal or No Brexit choice.

I’d have voted for the Withdrawal Agreement. And until lately I’d have voted against a second referendum. But I can’t call myself a realist and argue for all MPs to resist a referendum when MPs who say they want a deal have shown they’ll never vote for a real, not imagined, Brexit. Our legal default remains No Deal. And so we can either seek to reverse Brexit or be dithered off a No Deal cliff.

I prefer a second referendum to revocation with no democratic mandate and to No Deal. I really don’t want one. I don’t want to turn our politics into something like America’s without the checks and balances. If the chance for compromise re-emerges, I’ll be relieved. But for now, I see no such hope.

The diehards on all sides must take their share of blame. But a special responsibility rests with those who said they wanted a compromise and never followed through. They have no right to blame moderate Remainers who seek other ways to stop disaster.

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 4 June 2019.

Red lines

I should probably start this piece by apologising for writing it. There have been too many leaving Labour blogs already. But I’ve told many people to vote Labour over the past few years. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy fighting for decent Labour since 2015. I have many friends I’m leaving behind politically (though I hope not personally). I feel I owe them an explanation.

I understand the people who stay to try to fight. Anyone who thinks this is an easy choice hasn’t thought about it enough. You will get no attacks on people trying their best to hold back the hard left tide from me. But this is why I felt I had to draw a line.

Anti-Semitism

In Corbyn’s Labour, each new anti-Semitic incident follows a pattern. Despicable views and behaviours emerge. The alarm is raised. Corbyn supporters blame it on attempts to undermine the leadership. The leadership delays. Corbyn claims to oppose anti-Semitism — in delphic terms which avoid telling anyone to do anything about it. Incidents are dealt with reluctantly, kicked into the long grass or ignored altogether.

The left had a problem with anti-Semitism before Corbyn rose to prominence. The problem went beyond the hard left, too. But it was always strongest there, because the hard left has specific susceptibilities to anti-Semitism. Suspicion of capital lends itself to tropes about Jewish capital. Conspiracy easily shades into international conspiracy. If your politics are formed in an ‘anti-imperialist’ crucible with Israel as the ultimate enemy, people who hide their racism under an ‘anti-Zionist’ carapace will be willing and eager to stand beside you.

Corbyn comes from that world, and both he and his inner circle are deeply and personally culpable. This is a man who spent years in a Facebook group filled with vicious anti-Semitic rhetoric. This was a group he’d commented in, for which he’d organised events, whose organiser he knew personally: a group spewing hate he can’t possibly have failed to see. This month, we found out he suggested ‘the hand of Israel’ was behind terrorist attacks in Egypt in 2012. There was no evidence — just a shadow conspiracy speculation (‘theory’ is too grand a word) involving the world’s only Jewish state. And this week, we discovered this gem about ‘Zionists’: ‘having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, [they] don’t understand English irony’. I am a British Zionist. Corbyn was not talking about me.

Corbyn’s record proves he will at the very least live with anti-Semitism to promote ‘anti-imperialism’. Worse, he has repeatedly used anti-Semitic tropes himself. He will do nothing serious about anti-Semitism on the left: to do so would be to damn himself. It is no surprise that Chris Williamson’s sharing platforms with Assad apologists and belittling the anti-Semitism crisis merited a vague pledge of investigation, while Margaret Hodge and Ian Austin were threatened with disciplinary action for calling anti-Semitism out. It is frankly untenable even to think Margaret Hodge was incorrect.

A Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn will never tackle anti-Semitism, because to Jeremy Corbyn Jews are dispensable. I will not tell voters he’s a consistent anti-racist. I can’t even say I don’t believe he’s an anti-Semite. And a man who, so far as I can tell, most British Jews regard with disgust, anger and sometimes fear would be utterly unacceptable as prime minister.

Anti-Westernism

Commitment to your country’s security should be a political prerequisite for running it. Corbyn has worn his hostility to the West on his sleeve throughout his career. He opposed defending the Falklands in 1982. Falklanders didn’t want to submit to a military junta, but the UK had to be in the wrong. He opposed enlarging NATO after 1989. Eastern Europeans wanted to join the Atlantic world after decades of Soviet oppression, but NATO had to be in the wrong. He described the Russian invasion of Crimea as ‘not unprovoked’. Ukrainians wanted to move towards the EU, and the EU had to be in the wrong.

The man who called for NATO to be shut down in 2014 campaigned on a 2017 manifesto which supported NATO membership. But it’s a bad faith pledge he undermines at every turn. He has never once committed to defending NATO members under attack. Instead, he dodges the question. He thought the run-up to Donald Trump (a fellow NATO-sceptic) becoming US President was the moment to suggest demilitarising our allies in the Baltic (never mind their views on the topic). Corbynites might say this displays an admirable preference for exhausting peaceful avenues first. I suggest Vladimir Putin would say it meant NATO’s second military power was no longer committed to collective security.

This year, we had yet more proof that Corbyn’s first instinct remains to blame the West and excuse our enemies. People were murdered with chemical weapons in Salisbury. All the evidence pointed to Russian responsibility — Moscow didn’t even offer a plausible lie in response. Corbyn allowed Seumas Milne to imply that rogue elements in MI5 might be trying to blame Russia and raised the possibility of mafia involvement (despite experts’ view that this sort of chemical attack required state-level involvement). He only acknowledged the likelihood of Russian responsibility through gritted teeth. Most recently, on tougher sanctions against Russia he said: ‘We cannot just have a building up of tensions on both sides of the border.’ It seems responding to the murder of our citizens makes us the ones ‘building up … tensions’.

I do not believe a man who has hated the West all his life has had a Damascene conversion. Jeremy Corbyn’s promises on NATO aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. I believe in international solidarity quite as much as he claims to. But my international solidarity includes Estonia. I believe in a Europe whole and free. I oppose people who think imperialism is best opposed by consigning free democracies to some Russian sphere of influence.

I will not tell voters they should trust the Labour leader with the UK’s or the West’s security when the chips are down. Everything we know about him, and his circle, shows they cannot.

Anti-parliamentarism

Corbyn’s hostility to the West has deep roots on the hard left. So does his acolytes’ intolerance of dissent and their contempt for parliamentarians’ link to their voters.

Corbyn has a populist appeal I never foresaw. Still, the Corbynites’ democratic centralist understanding of the world doesn’t lead to a ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ approach to politics. It produces a politics of bullying, intimidation and heresy-hunting. MPs and Haringey councillors can attest to that. (So can I. I’ve been in the meetings.) It subverts MPs’ accountability to their constituents in the name of subordinating them to their local General Committee. It takes power away from voters and moves it to self-selecting activists.

John McDonnell exemplifies the hard left’s contempt for parliamentarism. This is a man who joked about lynching a (female) political opponent. This is a man who saw ‘students kicking the shit out of Millbank’ as a positive, exciting thing; a man who saw fit to give speeches about how ‘sometimes you feel like physical force — you feel like giving them a good slapping’. More recently, this is a man who wanted mass demonstrations to force early elections mere days after the last one.

Meanwhile, Seumas Milne was a ‘tankie’, deeply involved with the Communist Party of Great Britain — with a long history of minimising Stalinist crimes, of mourning the demise of the USSR and East Germany, of defending or equivocating over every odious regime so long as it hated the Americans. When the Council of Europe condemned the crimes of communism, Milne said: ‘For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality.’

I do not believe that these people have changed their views after a lifetime of extremism. And I cannot stand behind them. I believe political power derives its legitimacy from our elected Parliament. I believe politicians have no business trying to rouse the streets to eject democratic governments. I believe in liberal constitutionalism and the rule of law. And I do not trust Corbyn, McDonnell or Milne to guard them. Their worldview is profoundly anti-parliamentary and would be dangerous if it ever controlled the state.

I cannot and will not go on doorsteps and pretend that a government with Jeremy Corbyn in 10 Downing Street, John McDonnell next door and Seumas Milne whispering in his ear would leave our democratic culture uncorroded. The fabric of our democracy already feels thinner than it did: a Corbyn Government would pull more threads out.

Standing by, not standing up

The decent left should be casting Corbynism out. Instead, Corbynism is being normalised. Like latter-day DDT, the levels of poison in our political bloodstream are building up as we swim along.

In a banal but crucial sense, it’s true that ‘centrists’ lack answers and complaining about Corbyn isn’t doing the job. Moderate politics is clearly failing to persuade people it can tackle their problems. Disliking Jeremy Corbyn, Jacob Rees-Mogg or Brexit does not make a programme for government. (Corbyn doesn’t have one either, but leave that aside.)

But the trope also shows how decent people can make the unconscionable unremarkable. Suppose centre-left politics is bloodless, soulless and visionless — technocracy plus tax credits. Do people who dislike Corbyn but think we’re complaining too much about him honestly believe enabling anti-Semitism is better? Are we even going to put them on the same moral plane?

People say that ‘we don’t like Jeremy’ isn’t enough. OK, it’s not a manifesto. But anti-Semitism alone should be enough to rule ‘Jeremy’ out. Much of the non-Corbynite left is forgetting that in the name of boxing clever. I want to reassert it.

Power and principle

People should think long and hard about the consequences of a hard left government. The UK has far fewer checks and balances than the US under Trump. We have no written constitution, veto-wielding second chamber or federalist constraints upon central government.

Only Labour MPs could prevent disaster if Corbyn won a majority. And having watched most of them kowtow most of the time since 8 June 2017, I am not sure they will resist his worst impulses. Anyway, backbenchers can’t make Corbyn’s word his bond on collective security: it would be too late by the time they acted. And the intimidatory style of politics — mob dressed up as movement — which characterises Corbynism could be much more dangerous with the state behind it.

So of course I don’t want Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister. Of course I don’t want Seumas Milne advising in Number 10 or John McDonnell at the Treasury. The idea sends shivers down my spine. It must not happen. I will not help to make it happen. And if it’s the price of getting rid of the Tories, it’s a price I cannot pay.

That leaves me no choice but to resign from the Labour Party. Someday, I hope there will once again be an anti-racist, internationalist, reliably constitutional social democratic party worth joining.

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 24 August 2018.

Exciting vision or doctor’s mandate? The problem for the centre-left

I wasn’t at the Progress Conference on Saturday. I’d promised my friends (and myself) a broadly non-political weekend after the past couple of months. But it seems that at least parts of the Conference were in ‘tell hard truths to our own side’ mode. In particular, Stephen Bush’s speech has attracted much comment:

There’s clearly plenty of truth in this. It is indeed wearing to hear social democrats talking about being divisive as if that were the issue. Quite clearly it isn’t. The issue is that we dislike Corbynite politics and want something different. Some allowance needs to be made for moderates’ exhaustion from trying to hold the hard left off. But to return Labour to its mainstream tradition, you need to persuade and inspire people who currently like Corbyn. Alternatively, you need to get people in to outnumber them. And no, Labour moderates can’t easily shout about electability in our current state.

But I’d make two main points in return. First, the Corbynite left can cross lines social democrats can’t. I’m not calling for a naive form of ‘straight-talking, honest politics’. (Bush is quite right there. Note to self: stop doing it.) But it’s hard to counter an entire prospectus based on the pretence that middle-class corporatism equals redistribution, sums we know don’t add up and a foreign policy which sells parochialism as ‘peace’ once people have bought into it.

If people believe fantasies, they’ll always sound better than messy trade-offs. In that case, how do you pit realism against the big lie mode of politics and win? I’m sure a sufficiently charismatic and inspiring leader could do a great deal to address that. And no doubt much more can be done to frame the issues differently. It’s still a huge problem.

The second problem is the unappealing truth of where we find ourselves. The UK faces several crises which we need to address, with limited state bandwidth to devote to them. Fortunately for all of us, I have neither any prospect of becoming Prime Minister nor any desire to try. But were I in charge, I have a rough idea of what I’d prioritise.

I’d need to find a substantial amount of money just to keep core bits of the public realm from falling over. The NHS, social care, councils, welfare and the justice system desperately need cash. To be clear, the cash injection wouldn’t even be to make things (much) better: it’d mostly be to stop them from getting worse. As we’re talking tens of billions of pounds of current, not capital, spending (and we’d better have some room for manoeuvre to prop the economy up if Brexit goes disastrously wrong), this means broadly-based tax rises. By all means try to hit the very rich too. But there’s a reason social democratic paragons have higher VAT than we do, not just higher top rates of income tax.

I would, of course, try to minimise the damage from Brexit. This means delivering the softest version compatible with electoral acquiescence and political reality. Unfortunately, a Brexit with a severely constrained trade policy and free movement probably won’t stick. If that’s true, it gets worse. The least-worst Brexit is different in Great Britain and Northern Ireland — but the consequences of substantial differentiation between the two are unacceptable. And it may well be that neither of these least-worst options can be agreed. Whatever the result, the question is how much worse off we end up — not what we gain.

I’d also look to our east and west and conclude we as Europeans were dangerously exposed. We have a currently indifferent hegemon across the Atlantic and a dangerous revanchist at the other end of the North European Plain. Democratic Europe should be planning for a real security crisis in which Washington abandons it. It shows little sign of doing so. The UK is of course one of Europe’s best defence and security performers. That doesn’t make it anywhere near good enough, and the 2% of GDP floor has ceased to be high enough. Unfortunately, we are in no position to advise others on pan-European policy and expect to be listened to. But Europe needs to make a start. To get anywhere, the UK will need to commit serious additional resources of its own.

I am well aware both that climate change is rapidly reaching a tipping point, if it hasn’t already, and that the UK can do little on its own to turn things around. We’ve long since reached the point where we need to talk frankly about adaptation and mitigation. This includes our responsibilities to the wider world, most of which got much less than we did out of the emissions which created the crisis. By all means try to push the wider world towards keeping climate change in bounds. But don’t bet the mortgage on the wider world responding.

I’d look to bolster our institutions and our constitutional safeguards. When the extremes seem on the rise and more and more politicians seem happy to pull threads out of our liberal democratic fabric, this is now urgent. There are many possible ways to do this. We could have a stronger and more democratic second chamber, no longer vulnerable to prime ministerial packing or easy charges of illegitimacy. It could have a power of veto over amending certain key statutes. (Better yet, we might try to require a parliamentary super-majority of some sort to do so.) Ideally the Commons’ voting system would make it harder for one party to control it, if reform could pass a referendum. (It wouldn’t. I know better than to try to hold one now.) But frankly, even a reliable defence of the roles of the BBC and the judiciary would be a start.

And finally — the one potentially cheery thing on the list — I’d want to start doing something about the housing crisis. That might mean planning reform, dropping the ‘every sperm is sacred’ approach to every acre of the Green Belt (can we all please note the M25 is in the Green Belt and stop confusing it with AONBs, by the way?), major capital investment in housebuilding (a much better use for public money than renationalising water and creating public option energy companies), untying local authorities’ hands and a dash of statist ‘use it or lose it’ when it comes to land banking. We could even tie a land value tax (or a property tax of some kind) to providing ongoing revenue for housebuilding.

The problem is obvious. This is a daunting list, quite possibly more than any government can realistically manage in five years while keeping everything else ticking over. It’s also a pretty cheerless prospectus, with one significant but deeply divisive exception. (Let’s not kid ourselves that the voters are going to hear ‘property tax’ and think ‘a home for my kids’.) Essentially, it amounts to ‘stop things from falling over, implement a bad decision tolerably and try to protect ourselves in a dangerous world’. But right now, I honestly think a sensible government needs to play doctor more than visionary.

Clearly, Labour members and quite a few British voters want to be inspired. Unfortunately, damage limitation doesn’t have much of a heroic arc. I’m not sure the centre-left has often, if ever, managed to win a doctor’s mandate. And I’m not sure there’s an obvious way to square the circle. Can the centre-left make making the best of things sound hopeful?

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 8 May 2018.

Labour’s despairing dissenters

Anyone who’s tried to hold the political or moral line in Corbyn’s Labour knows the drill. Criticise Jeremy and you definitely get nowhere. Cite something Jeremy’s said to back your argument and you probably get nowhere. Draw a pragmatic line and the Corbynites call you unprincipled (except on Brexit, which is of course completely different). Draw a principled line and the Corbynites think you’re hiding a conspiracy under a moral carapace.

Much ink is spilled about how moderate Labour messed up its response to Corbynism. I’m sure that’s true in many ways. Yes: from moaning about McDonald’s to a premature leadership challenge, moderate Labour messed up on plenty of counts. Yes: moderate Labour should realised that Labour members wanted clear red water, at least in rhetoric. (It turns out they’re much less fussed about actual redistributive policy, but I digress.)

That’s all perfectly true. It’s also beside the point. Because people who think sorting all that would be enough for the median Labour member now are kidding themselves. It’s far, far worse than that.

If we’re honest with ourselves, today’s terrible poll just confirms what we already knew. Only 19% of Labour members could bring themselves to answer that their party faced a serious problem with anti-Semitism which needed urgent action without equivocation. 30% of members actually seem to believe that, even though the main representative body for British Jews has effectively declared Corbyn beyond the pale until things improve, Labour has serious no anti-Semitism problem and it’s all being hyped up to undermine him and/or stifle criticism of Israel.

Some cite the fact that 47% think it’s a genuine problem, but deliberately exaggerated to damage Labour or Corbyn (or, again, to stifle criticism of Israel), as comfort. Quite which bits of the problem anyone can seriously deem exaggerated is, frankly, hard to tell. But I suppose it’s less bad than outright denial. I suppose some people will be new to the issue and won’t have fully processed the scale of the crisis. I suppose some will have read ‘exaggerated’ as ‘leapt upon by others’ and not quite clocked what they’ve signed up to. (None of this excuses failing to see the age-old ‘shadowy conspiracies’ trope lurking in the middle option, but there we go.)

Even discounting generously, it’s a grim figure. And 61% think failing to even call for Christine Shawcroft to stand down from the NEC counts as handling the issue well. In short, a comfortable majority of Labour members seem OK with how this is being handled.

That is damning. It also places Labour dissenters in an impossible bind. When I stood in solidarity with British Jews on Monday, I hoped this horror might at least be a turning point, that more people who claimed to believe in equality might put it before loyalty to Jeremy Corbyn. For a few hours I even kidded myself it felt different this time. But if you’d asked me before last Sunday, I’d have said dissenters would make themselves more unpopular for speaking out. And now I’ve seen the poll, I’m not really surprised by the results.

Corbyn loyalists: if you think Labour dissenters are acting from calculation, put it from your mind. So far as I can see, talking about Labour’s moral crisis makes our internal position worse, not better. But so long as we stay, we have no choice. How can we keep our heads down and live with ourselves? We have to think about the long game. But we also have to look at ourselves in the mirror. (No, I don’t have a game plan. There was a time when I hoped someone cleverer, preferably with some actual influence, might have one.)

So, yes: when certain lines are crossed, some Labour dissenters stand up. This time they’ve exploded in rage because Corbyn’s personal enablement of anti-Semitism was exposed once too often. And it makes most members angry. And they dig in deeper. And the dissenters’ plight gets worse.

Short of leaving, what else can they do?

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 31 March 2018.

Dissenting Labour

Some have tried to analyse what happened in the election on 8 June and to make predictions for the future. They have more courage than I. Personally, I won’t hazard any guesses about how voters will behave in future for a while.

But clearly I was wrong about how the public would react to Jeremy Corbyn. I didn’t expect Theresa May to prove to be as woodenly, jaw-droppingly, clunkingly useless as a campaigner as she turned out to be. But I would never have predicted the surge in support for Labour which we saw. I always thought people would look at a manifesto like our 2017 effort and conclude we still couldn’t count. I thought voters would look at Corbyn’s history, ‘friends’ and record and run a mile. I thought people would recoil from linking terror attacks to foreign policy days after an atrocity like Manchester. I will eat my share of humble pie on all counts.

But my objections to Corbyn were never solely, or even mainly, about electability. And even though we won 40% of the vote rather than 25%, I do not believe we gave voters a credible or honest choice this year. We failed to prioritise in public spending, neglected the poor to the benefit of the middle classes, offered a Brexit policy as incoherent as the Tories’, undermined our own foreign and defence policy and left the moral objections to Corbynism undiminished. I will take each in turn.

Nostalgia is not a basis for public spending choices

Our optimistic campaign belied our often backward-looking manifesto. Nationalising the utilities was a case in point. You can already switch energy providers: I’ve done it. Companies can compete: we don’t need a public option energy company per region to make it happen. I accept people aren’t great at actually using this right, but I’m not sure adding a public option will change that much.

We do have a problem with an energy market where too many get a raw deal. I suggest we should deal with that and tighten rules on (for example) offering social tariffs, rather than letting private energy companies cherry-pick while the most vulnerable consumers gravitate to the public companies at public expense. Granted, the National Grid itself is a monopoly. But nationalising it would cost around £25 billion — let’s assume we don’t nationalise its overseas holdings. Is this really the top priority for an investment programme?

Similarly, I see that water is a natural monopoly — but is nationalising it worth £69 billion or so of capital spend? Our manifesto complained about price rises. A hypothetical Labour Government would want to bear down on prices more than the private sector (reducing bills by £220 a year, at what cost we know not). Presumably, it would therefore want the state to bear more of the cost. How long would the argument that nationalising profit-making industries would pay for itself last?

Neither the National Grid nor water companies will stop needing investment if they enter public hands. Bearing that in mind, I question whether pitting capital investment in water and electricity networks against building and repairing schools or hospitals will deliver much investment in the former. It seems much more likely that the political attention and, in the end, the capital spend will go on the latter. The failure to invest was one of the main reasons for privatising utilities in the first place. But add in nationalising the Royal Mail and (presumably) at least some costs from setting up our new public energy companies and we probably planned to spend well over £100 billion on changing who owns things. Surely we’d be much better off actually investing in the UK’s future than changing the nameplates on our utility companies?

We had some rather better ideas as part of our £250 billion fund. (Is this the right amount? I’ll leave that aside. Our economy is faltering but not currently in the doldrums. That said, interest rates are low, borrowing is cheap and I can see a case for investment to soften the damage from Brexit. The figure feels suspiciously neat, but I’m not an economist.) Funding HS3 could give the Northern Powerhouse some teeth and help metro Mayors present northern cities as an alternative to London. Funding HS2 to Manchester and Scotland could significantly increase rail capacity.

But if we think £100-odd billion of extra borrowing is feasible on top of £250 billion, then what about expanding our public transport network further? What about supporting green energy projects? What about upping our offer on social housing, or supporting private housing developments? What about seed funding for businesses seeking to export outside the EEA, since we know there will be trade diversion when Brexit happens? Or an infrastructure fund targeted at areas where recent migration is particularly high?

I’m not saying all these ideas are all right, or even that any of them necessarily are. But the wider point stands: could we not find something future-facing to throw billions at rather than refighting the 1980s?

Redistribution is not a sideshow in tax and benefit policy

I agree far too many low-income consumers struggle with energy and water bills. It would have been much better to target our efforts on boosting low incomes. But on welfare, our manifesto had far more to offer the well-off elderly and middle-class graduates than the working or non-working poor.

Labour is a party of the left. Shifting income and wealth to the poor should be core to what we believe. But this year, we pledged to protect the triple lock on pensions and universal winter fuel payments. We prioritised a group largely protected from austerity and made talking about generational fairness even harder. We committed £11 billion to abolishing tuition fees. This is a direct gift to graduates, who will generally do much better than their peers and who in any event repay fees in line with their incomes. We did this even though fees were never actually shown to stop people going on to higher education.

Meanwhile, we failed to commit to ending the freeze on working-age benefits. Inflation has risen to 2.9%, which means these cuts will bite harder now. And yet we forgot the people we were founded to represent. We could afford to scrap student fees. But apparently we couldn’t afford to, for example, restore the Social Fund. The Social Fund used to help fund things like a bed or white goods for, say, someone who left their abusive partner and had nothing. We couldn’t promise to end the benefit cap. Nor could we, say, lower the taper rate for means-tested benefits to ease the path into working more hours (or working at all). Younger, mainly middle-class voters — admittedly the group who swung most strongly to Labour; clearly Jeremy can target voters better than I thought — and better-off pensioners trumped those in greatest need.

This wasn’t even electoral strategy — just carelessness. Note how Labour spokespeople kept chopping and changing on the benefit freeze, just as Theresa May did on the ‘dementia tax’. They simply hadn’t thought about it. We were caught out because our ‘radical’ leadership didn’t think about the distributional impact of our policies. We let the Liberal Democrats offer a more progressive approach to benefits than we did.

I understand Labour manifestos need an offer for all parts of society. But this isn’t a return to socialism. It’s middle-class populism which forgets the whole point of socialism — greater equality. We confused bungs for the fairly well off with narrowing the gap between rich and poor. We did exactly what we’ve spent years attacking the SNP for. We committed the same sin the Liberal Democrats did for years. We should be embarrassed if this is how we define a move to the left.

Coherence is not an irrelevance in Brexit policy

If we weren’t nostalgic or regressive, we were too often incoherent or outright evasive. Our Brexit tactics may well have worked electorally. But we were no more honest than the Conservatives about the trade-offs in different deals with the EU. We promised ‘a strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the single market and the customs union’. We said our Brexit policy differed radically from the Tories’ and listed a number of institutions we wanted to keep links with.

I agree that tone matters in negotiations. But how did we propose to keep the benefits of the single market without its rules? How do you keep the benefits of the customs union without a common external tariff? What did our manifesto mean? As three spokespeople have each recently given different Labour policies, I assume the Shadow Cabinet is no clearer than I. I accept Brexit poses horrible dilemmas for Labour. I accept we may even have won votes with our approach. But the country deserved better than a non-policy designed to evade rather than elucidate. We should have tried to offer a Labour vision on the UK’s biggest challenge.

Our manifesto was shot through with a failure to think things through, to say anything about how to achieve lofty aims. I cannot find a single word in the manifesto about how to build more houses in the private sector, for example, except for guaranteeing Help to Buy funding — yet we committed to a housebuilding revolution. I know the Tories’ manifesto proved dismally thin, but shouldn’t we do better than them?

Credibility is not an optional extra in foreign and defence policy

Labour’s leadership was incoherent on welfare and evasive on Brexit. It also wilfully fudged one of the most basic issues for any government: foreign policy, defence and collective security. Corbyn’s hostility to NATO and sympathy for just about any enemy of the West, however vile, was one of my biggest problems with him as leader. So of course I welcomed our manifesto support for NATO.

But it isn’t enough for the manifesto to state that Labour supports NATO, or even for a Labour Government to stay in NATO. For collective security to mean something, adversaries need to believe we’ll actually defend our allies, or at least that we genuinely might. No one can, in the end, force a Prime Minister to honour a guarantee to a NATO ally. MPs could ultimately depose a Prime Minister who refused. But by then, Estonia (say) could well find itself overrun already. Anyway, the point of collective security is to avoid getting to that point.

I’m afraid the fact that Corbyn’s reaction to the invasion of Crimea was to describe Russia’s actions as ‘not unprovoked’ actually matters. The fact that he was shouting about closing down NATO as recently as 2014 actually matters. The fact that Corbyn’s reaction to every foreign policy dilemma is to blame the West actually matters. This is not a man who, prima facie, deserves public trust on the basics of security. And even if voters don’t see that in a Leader of the Opposition, our enemies most certainly will see it in a Prime Minister.

This means that Corbyn’s refusal — even during the election campaign — to commit to defending a NATO ally matters all the more. We already have Donald Trump in the White House. Other NATO governments have been desperate to get the man to say — himself — that he’s committed to Article 5, because evidence of commitment matters. On current evidence, Corbyn in Number 10 would mean two of NATO’s three main defence powers’ commitment was questionable. That could be a deadly threat to the whole Western world.

Corbyn needs to do everything he can to show he can be trusted on this issue. He can’t just dodge the question because his anti-Americanism trumps anything Putin does to his neighbours or Assad does to his people. Pieties about a better world aren’t enough. In the actually-existing world, I want to know my Prime Minister will support such protections as we have unless and until I have a real alternative.

Moral qualms are not irrelevant if you win enough votes

I can see why many Corbynites feel their critics always attacked them on electability and suddenly changed tack on 9 June. Personally, Andy Burnham and Owen Smith frustrated me because they didn’t challenge Corbynism enough. And the Corbynite narrative labelled all critics unprincipled, so I understand the irritation of those who believed it. (It also labelled them all right-wing at the same time — rather inconsistently, but there we go.)

But actually, I meant everything I said about Corbyn’s blind spot on anti-Semitism. It wasn’t a proxy attack. We should be ashamed that Ken Livingstone is still a member of the Labour Party. I have not forgotten how, faced with concerns about anti-Semitism, Corbyn once elected to explain this as part of a conspiracy against him. I have not forgotten how, when a Labour MP faced anti-Semitic abuse at the launch of a report on Labour anti-Semitism, Corbyn apologised to her abuser. I still think Corbyn’s understanding of anti-Semitism fails to acknowledge how anti-Jewish hate has mutated and the new forms it took after World War II. I know anti-Semitism was a problem on the left before Corbyn became Labour leader, but I want him to ask himself why it is that so many anti-Semites seem so much keener on Labour since he won. I have no reason to believe he will. I have no reason to believe he is any more committed to tackling this issue than he was before 8 June.

I do not regard Corbyn’s support for violent over constitutional Irish republicanism as a minor historic flaw. I’m not willing to gloss over Corbyn taking money from Press TV — a theocratic regime’s state broadcaster — and keeping quiet in the face of anti-Semitic remarks. I’m not OK with his indifference to Falklanders’ self-determination. I don’t buy his claim that referring to Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘friends’ was some sort of diplomatic norm. I think the long list of extremists, including (sorry, but it’s true) Holocaust deniers, he’s shared platforms and associated with is a genuine problem. I worry more, not less, about these now he has come so much nearer to power than I ever thought he could.

The people around Corbyn worry me at least as much as the man himself. I have not forgotten John McDonnell’s praise for the ‘bombs and bullets and sacrifice’ of the IRA. Nor do I fail to notice his continued support for the Cuba Solidarity Campaign — apologists for a repressive dictatorship. The idea of Seumas Milne (one of whose favourite hobbies is minimising the crimes of the Soviet Union) having real power worries me no less than before. The idea of Andrew Murray (a member of the CPGB till recently) having real power worries me no less than before. Milne and Murray do not just stand for a more left-wing version of my politics. Their record tells me that their attitudes to parliamentary democracy, views on foreign policy and moral compasses differ profoundly from my own.

You cannot just gloss this over. If Corbyn, McDonnell, Milne, Murray and others no longer hold these views, they need to recant them. They need to draw the line between democratic socialism and the far left. And then they need to stand on the democrats’ side of the line.

Here I stand

In the end — unless convinced otherwise by argument, not voteshare — I remain a liberal-minded social democrat. I am neither a left-populist nor an anti-Western hard leftist.

I believe in multilateralism in foreign policy and defence alike. I am unequivocally opposed to political violence deployed in a constitutional democracy. I believe our public spending should be targeted to redistribute wealth, not give more to people like me. I believe in difficult trade-offs. I am a parliamentary democrat, not a democratic centralist. Whether Corbynism wins 25%, 40% or 75% of the vote, it is not what I believe.

Does Corbyn’s Labour have room for dissenters? Ed Miliband let Corbyn and McDonnell pledge to try to wreck a Labour Government’s Budget. The history of the hard left suggests they’re unlikely to return the favour, given a choice.

More than that, I have to accept the election result on 8 June shows I must have misread the popular mood — at least in part. Perhaps my politics are less popular than left-populism. Perhaps a leader with Corbyn’s history, personal beliefs and ‘friends’ can get away with all three.

I don’t know where that leaves me now. I do know I can’t be a quiet loyalist when faced with a leadership with whom I fundamentally disagree. I will not pretend. Here I stand.

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 28 June 2017.

On Article 50

Whether the Supreme Court was legally correct to say that Parliament must legislate before the Government can invoke Article 50 is for others to debate. Rightly, the courts gave judgment and have settled the issue. Politically, I always believed the Government should seek approval from Parliament for its timing and strategy.

But the Supreme Court’s decision places Labour in a truly poisonous position. Most of our voters backed Remain; most of our seats backed Leave. We cannot defy the referendum result; we cannot back a hard Brexit. I do not envy our embattled MPs.

Second Reading

I can see why Jeremy Corbyn wishes to ask Labour MPs to vote for the Article 50 Bill at Second Reading. And ultimately, I won’t blame him for that, although I disagree with a three-line whip. I know Labour cannot simply ignore the referendum result, and that many – probably most – will feel they should vote in favour to show they accept that result.

But Labour MPs overwhelmingly backed Remain. In many cases, their constituents did too. MPs like Jo Stevens, Catherine West and Tulip Siddiq put themselves at great risk if they ignore their own residents’ views. And some – those who are and have always been committed Europeans – will feel their consciences can only stretch so far.

I accept parties of government must have a position on such issues, but frankly I see little point in pretending Labour is in any danger of being in government soon anyway. The current struggle is for survival – one which many MPs will struggle to win if they alienate their Remain-voting constituents. Jeremy can take his position, and most Labour MPs will back him, but it is divisive and unhelpful to force MPs’ consciences at Second Reading. MPs will split hopelessly anyway; best to make some shred of virtue out of overwhelming necessity.

Third Reading

The more important question for the national interest is how Labour MPs vote at Third Reading. Here, there comes a point where Labour MPs must consider the policy consequences of their votes, however electorally inconvenient that may be. Reluctantly, I accept the country voted to leave: overriding the vote without a referendum would be anti-democratic and could occasion a terrible backlash against mainstream politics, and we would lose a second referendum by a larger margin than the first. We now need to try to minimise the damage. As such, I recognise Labour cannot reject Article 50 en masse regardless of the circumstances.

But once the UK triggers Article 50, we have a two-year window in which to negotiate an exit agreement, hopefully with a transitional deal as we move to a new relationship with the EU. It’s all very well to talk about meaningful parliamentary votes on the deal, but we can only extend those talks if every other EU member agrees. It’s legally uncertain whether we could even revoke Article 50 outright unilaterally, but clearly the Government will not do so. That means a vote on the final deal on exit and transition is very likely to be a choice between whatever May comes up with or nothing at all. Backing the Tories’ deal or being thrown out on WTO rules isn’t much of a choice.

If Parliament really wants to influence the shape of Brexit, it has to exercise that influence now, before the two-year countdown starts. And that means Labour’s backing for the Article 50 Bill must depend upon the amendments the Commons passes. If Labour MPs will not vote against the Article 50 Bill at Third Reading in any circumstances, they will effectively show that in the final analysis, they are prepared to let any kind of Brexit through.

The referendum gives Theresa May no right to a blank cheque. Nor does she have a right to ride roughshod over the views of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’s administrations and legislatures. Her form of Brexit will do enormous damage to the people Labour represents. It may well poison our relations with the rest of Europe at the very time when the United States may abandon our continent too. Labour should not sign her cheque so long as it stays blank.

Labour and Brexit

More broadly, Labour needs to be frank about the true implications of what Theresa May plans to do. She has said she wants to leave the single market and the customs union, although she seems to have some notion of simplifying customs proceedings. Responding to her speech, Keir Starmer said: ‘It is good that she has ruled out that hard Brexit at this stage.’ He also said ‘I accept that form follows function’.

His response ignores the secret of the single market. The rules and institutions of the single market are the single market: the form creates the function. It is simply not the case that May’s ‘bold and ambitious free trade agreement’ will do the same job. And Labour does no service to scrutiny by allowing that elision to pass unchallenged.

Jeremy Corbyn’s response shows where such a path leads us:

We welcome that the Prime Minister has listened to the case we’ve been making about the need for full tariff free access to the single market but are deeply concerned about her reckless approach to achieving it.

It is simply not good enough to say ‘hard Brexit’ is only about process, not endpoint. Labour should back remaining in the single market and level with voters about the tradeoffs – as well as the reality of our EU partners’ position. The Opposition should puncture the Government’s delusions, not indulge them.

In conscience

Finally, I will not lie about what I would do at Second Reading if I were a Labour Member of Parliament. I could not in good conscience vote to give any impression I approve of what we are about to do. I do not approve, even if I try to be resigned. I am a passionate European and I always have been. I believe the European project is, for all its faults, the greatest attempt to build relations between our countries on the basis of law and not just power we have ever seen. I believe it has made an invaluable contribution to peace, democratisation and constitutionalism on the continent of Europe. I believe it is part of a web of institutions and habits of mind and inaccurate historical memories, a web which helps keep the dark heart of man at bay. And I would not want it said that the United Kingdom’s representative assembly walked away from it as one.

NATO: on solidarity

Labour is collectivist by instinct and culture. Founded by the trade unions, it could hardly be otherwise. The welfare state the Attlee Government did so much to build was founded on collective insurance. Labour has stood in solidarity with oppressed groups, minority communities, countries under attack and many others in the past.

Collective security is solidarity by another name. It’s wholly fitting, therefore, that the Attlee Government took the United Kingdom into NATO as a founding member. As the Cold War deepened, western Europe needed the United States to guarantee its security. Not all NATO’s members were always democratic, but it nonetheless bound free Europe to the US. Since then, it has formed the bedrock of British defence policy. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty provides almost our ultimate insurance – our fallback in an existential crisis.

When the Iron Curtain lifted and the Soviet Union fell, new eastern European democracies wanted to join NATO. Given their history, it’s hardly surprising. On a continent where collective security lost its meaning, Chamberlain and Daladier browbeat Edvard Beneš into signing away the Sudetenland in September 1938. Czechoslovakia was dismembered by Hitler the following March. A Franco-British guarantee meant nothing. In September 1939, Britain and France did honour their guarantee to Poland. Poland still suffered years of unspeakable horror. In 1945, eastern Europe came under Soviet control: the ‘people’s democracies’ only fell in 1989. Again, the West stood aside. You might say the West had little alternative in 1945-8: it’s a sobering and unedifying story nonetheless.

That so many of those countries have now joined the community of Western democracies is a cause for celebration. Churchill’s ‘capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe’ no longer languish behind an Iron Curtain, but have joined with their sisters to their west. NATO has provided the anchoring for a community of states linked by law to grow together.

The last Labour Government was a good friend to eastern Europe – championing its right to a place in the Western world. And until now, no Labour leader has ever wavered in their support for the Atlantic Alliance. Michael Foot opposed nuclear weapons, but he kept Labour pledged to NATO. Jeremy Corbyn’s ambivalence at present and in public, and his hostility in the past and probably in private, is unique. His opposition to NATO deployment in eastern Europe as a deterrent to a revanchist Russia is deeply misguided. His refusal to say he would defend NATO allies under attack is profoundly dangerous.

In 2017, eastern Europeans have good cause to value their NATO membership. In February 2014, Russia and Estonia signed an (admittedly unratified) agreement finalising their border. In March, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea because Ukraine wanted to sign a deal with the European Union. Both countries have large Russian minorities. Both once formed part of the USSR. Granted, Ukraine is central to Russia’s sense of self in a way which doesn’t hold true for the Baltics (of course, this doesn’t make its aggression any better). But another crucial difference is the guarantee under Article 5.

It would be unwise enough in normal circumstances to disdain our current insurance policy with no alternative in mind. In these abnormal ones, it is almost farcical in its foolishness. In 2014, a great power annexed a neighbour’s territory on the continent of Europe for the first time since 1945. Its leader is hostile to the liberal international order on which the UK relies, and nothing in his history suggests ‘relationship resets’ or a pacifying stance will appease him. It has links to far right (and radical left) parties in democratic Europe. It props up a toxic but anti-Western regime in Syria. It interfered in the US presidential election and may have even affected the outcome.

Thanks in no small part to the US election, NATO has rarely faced greater threats from within. In eight days’ time, a man whose commitment to European security is questionable will become President of the United States. That Donald Trump and Theresa May agreed on the importance of NATO in a telephone call is of limited comfort, even if he meant what he said. Credibility means everything in deterrence: it matters that Trump once said he wouldn’t mind too much if NATO dissolved, not just whether he continues saying such things as President. This is exactly the moment at which European governments must try to ensure NATO does not wither on the vine. It’s also a moment when NATO’s word must be seen to be its bond. I struggle to imagine a worse time to argue for undermining its shared deterrence strategy in Europe.

History makes clear that Britain cannot ignore the rest of Europe, that its security is bound up with its continent. Brexit does not change the essential fact, however much Nigel Farage might like it to. If the US disengages, Europeans will need to look to our own security: the UK has no opt-out. But in any event, it would be profoundly wrong to let Putin dictate policy in eastern Europe – and even more so to regard any NATO ally as somehow dispensable. I see nothing left-wing about old-style spheres of influence. I see nothing progressive in ignoring eastern Europeans’ right to choose their own destinies. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became liberal democracies by their own free choice. They are our allies. They deserve better than to be treated as our buffer states.

Collective security is vital for democratic Europe. It has not faced such severe threats from without for many years. It has rarely, if ever, seemed more besieged from within. Britain could never separate itself from the fallout if it broke down. And even if it could, it would be an appalling act to abandon our friends and allies to Vladimir Putin. No true progressive should countenance it.