Douglas Carswell

The death of the Left?

Labour faces wipe-out, according to Tony Blair. If the cyber comrades really do elect Jeremy Corbyn as party leader, warns the former Prime Minister, Labour will suffer catastrophic electoral wipe out.

I reckon he's right.

For years, Labour has been run by politicians who never quite said what they meant. Triangulation and spin became such common currency in the upper echelons of the party, no one ever seemed to know what the Labour front bench stood for – least of all those on the front benches.

Craving something more authentic, and uninspired by the mediocrities standing for the leadership, the leftist tribe appear to be ganging up on line to elect Comrade Corbyn.  Lost in that echo chamber called twitter, the left simply cannot see how toxic their authentic socialism will actually be to swing voters in marginal seats.

Yet this is not merely a crisis of the Labour leadership.  This is an existential problem for the whole of the left.  

Being on the left has always meant wanting to do things by top down design. Whether under Attlee or Blair, Wilson or Clegg, the left in this country has in its DNA an assumption that human social and economic affairs are best be organised by blue print.

Comrade Corbyn's grand plan – with its aim of renationalising industry – might be a little grander than the Yvette Cooper / Andy Burnham blueprint – which will merely want to tell us how much sugar we should eat and how to raise our kids. But they are all in the business of bossing us about.

The trouble for the left is that the assumption that human affairs are best arranged by grand plan is coming to an end. Digital means the democratisation of decision making. Its not just on Spotify or iPlayer that we will be able to decide things for ourselves. Self selection is becoming a cultural norm. Public services will increasingly be personalised, to the point where it won't really matter what Yvette Cooper or Andrew Burnham think.

Corbyn's cyber comrades might believe that the banking crisis shifted politics leftward. To the rest of us, its just another piece of evidence to undermine the leftist assumption that "experts' – in this case central bankers – know best.

A handful on the left see the danger. The rest seem to be gearing up for vote for Jeremy Corbyn.

Jeremy Corbyn, of course, wants to reinstate Labour's Clause 4, which talks about putting the "means of production, distribution and exchange" into the hands of the people. Of course, in the age of Amazon, additive manufacturing and bitcoin, the means of production, distribution and exchange are indeed increasingly in the hands of the people. Only not quite the way the left intended.

To me, the catastrophe of British politics happened in the 1920s, when the Liberal party was displaced by Labour. From then on, political discourse was about the extent to which the apparatus of the state should run things. From that, all subsequent disasters followed; nationalisation, currency debasement, the expansion of the state, EU membership, the rise of corporate parasitism.

But what if we could undo the tragedy of the 1920s? What if UKIP, with almost 4 million votes to Labour's 9 million, were to displace them? What if politics became a contest between a patrician market Tory party and a properly radical, genuinely reformist, free market alternative?

Vote for Corbyn, comrades!

Back to all posts