It’s not easy to write up a positive take on a vanquished political movement, especially when you also think all its policies were somewhere between “mildly wrongheaded” to “outright insane”. But I thought I might as well try. No one else is interested. The commentariat has long since moved on. Corbynism is yesterday’s news, and the lingering taint of anti-Semitism makes it very difficult for anyone in the mainstream to express any appreciation for.
Nonetheless, Corbynism is significant as being the only shot that anyone in the Anglosphere has given '“youth politics” this decade. It wasn’t very successful, in part because it failed to build a broader coalition, and partly also because the Corbynites didn’t understand young people all that well outside of a hyper-engaged minority. I don’t think there was ever much of a Corbynite attempt to really appeal to Deano, for instance. In the end internal divisions over Brexit and other social issues proved entirely fatal, and a large chunk of the party’s core vote defected, rendering its attempts to win new marginal voters irrelevant.
Nevertheless, Corbyn was just about the only mainstream political figure to answer the “does it have to be this bad” question of the 2010s with the firm answer “no, absolutely not”. In a way he shares this distinction with Trump. Just as Trump correctly realized that the pathetically weak recovery from the Great Recession had left countless crippled communities in its wake, so too Corbyn should get some credit for not being content to settle for a politics of fighting over the shrinking scraps, and proposing something big and new.
The headline unemployment rate is not a good metric of how poor and miserable everyone is feeling, no matter how hard Obama and Cameron tried to convince us otherwise. As a great philosopher once said, “stop feeding me this pig slop! I’m only half pig!”. And while I strongly prefer the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as a solution over renationalizing the railways, a world where people of all kinds propose big solutions to big problems, rather than just pretending they don’t exist, is a better one.
Corbyn’s remedies naturally had a distinctly 1940s vibe, but this was almost inevitable, given the background of the senior people in the movement, and maybe they were never going to get past that. Ironically, it’s the Tony Blair Institute people that seem to be the ones developing a distinctly left-wing techno-futurist vibe, but sadly neither Corbyn nor (to date) Starmer ever really went for it.
Meanwhile, the discontents that Corbyn tapped into haven’t gone away. Deano may have cracked the cheat code of modern Britain by (largely) not living in the South East, but there are certainly plenty of disgruntled middle-class professionals whose living standards have been hammered by soaring housing & childcare costs and mediocre wage growth. A slowly reddening “Blue Wall” of urban and suburban seats, tilted to the south, indicates that there there will be more opportunities for a radical left-wing politics over the next decade or two.
Another underappreciated aspect of Corbyn was how much of a break he was from the stale British national security consensus, something the recent Integrated Review sadly refused to break from. Now, like George Lucas, he arguably went too far in a few places, and I can’t endorse his attitude towards the IRA or various unsavoury Islamist figures. But it was quite refreshing to have a senior politician express some skepticism about Trident. If you’re not going to increase the defence budget in line with defence inflation, the question arises just how much conventional capability you want to keep cutting in order to fund your nuclear weapons programme, which really has no utility other than maybe ending the world one day. Wars are still quite common, but Britain’s capability to meaningfully fight in them is vanishing. Does it really make sense to have an Army you could fit inside a largeish football stadium, but still maintain nukes?
Lastly, the Corbyn experience showed the Left that the British media is, with some honourable exceptions, chronically unserious and incapable of discussing policy. It can only talk about court drama: any other attempts at analysis are laughably superficial. The best example of this was perhaps the furore over Labour’s proposed nationalisations in the 2019 manifesto, which entirely focussed on what the upfront costs would be. This completely mad BBC article encapsulates the phenomenon. At no stage was there any kind of debate over what the consequences of nationalisation would be for the long-term health of these industries, which is of course the question that matters.
The Corbyn people were quite right to complain that they never got a fair shake, and perhaps the long-term consequences will be continued attempts by parties to have much more direct conversations with voters that bypass the self-appointed gatekeepers in the lobby. For a movement that today seems to have left no legacy, perhaps after all some good things will come of it - in unexpected places. Jez we couldn’t the first time, but in the long run? Who can say.