Curator of the Future(originally published in The Guardian)

[Ken Burch]

http://www.monbiot.com/2015/08/18/curator-of-the-future/

On one point I agree with his opponents: Jeremy Corbyn has little chance of winning the 2020 general election. But the same applies to the other three candidates. Either Labour must win back the seats it once held in Scotland (surely impossible without veering to the left) or it must beat the Conservatives by 12 points in England and Wales to form an overall majority. The impending boundary changes could mean that it has to win back 106 seats. If you think that is likely, I respectfully suggest that you are living in a dreamworld.

In fact, in this contest of improbabilities, Corbyn might stand the better chance. Only a disruptive political movement, that can ignite, mesmerise and mobilise, that can raise an army of volunteers, as the SNP did in Scotland, could smash the political concrete.

To imagine that Labour could overcome such odds by becoming bland, blurred and craven is to succumb to thinking that is simultaneously magical and despairing. Such dreamers argue that Labour has to recapture the middle ground. But there is no such place; no fixed political geography. The middle ground is a magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves.

As the social philosopher Karl Polanyi pointed out towards the end of the second world war, when politics offers little choice, and little prospect of solving their problems, people seek extreme solutions. Labour’s inability to provide a loud and proud alternative to Conservative policies explains why so much of its base switched to UKIP at the last election. Corbyn’s political clarity explains why the same people are now flocking back to him.

[Ken Burch]

1. More:

http://www.monbiot.com/2015/08/18/curator-of-the-future/

In an article for openDemocracy, Ian Sinclair compares the attempts by Labour to stop Corbyn with the attempts by the Conservatives in 1974-75 to stop Margaret Thatcher. Divisive, hated by the press, perceived by her own party as an extremist, she was widely dismissed as unelectable. The Tory establishment, convinced that the party could win only from the centre, did everything it could to stop her.

Across three decades, New Labour strategists have overlooked a crucial reality: politicians reinforce the values they espouse. The harder you try to win by adopting your opponents’ values, the more you legitimise and promote them, making your task – and that of your successors – more difficult. Tony Blair won three elections, but in doing so he made future Labour victories less likely. By adopting conservative values, conservative framing and conservative language, he shifted the nation to the right, even when he pursued leftwing policies such as the minimum wage, tax credits and freedom of information. You can sustain policies without values for a while, but then, like plants without soil, the movement wilts and dies.

The Labour mainstream likes to pretend that Blair’s only breach of faith was the Iraq war. The marketisation of the NHS, the private finance initiative, the criminalisation of peaceful protest, collusion in the kidnap and torture of dissidents from other nations, the collapse of social housing – I could fill this page with a list of such capitulations to greed and tyranny. Blair’s purges, stripping all but courtiers from the lists of potential candidates, explain why the party now struggles to find anyone under 50 who looks like a leader.

The capitulations continued under Miliband, who allowed the Conservative obsession with the deficit and austerity to frame Labour politics. As Paul Krugman explains, austerity is a con, that does nothing but harm to the wealth of this nation. It has been discredited everywhere else: only in Britain do we cling to the myth. Yet Miliband walked willingly into the trap. His manifesto promised to “cut the deficit every year” and to adopt such cruel Tory policies as the household benefits cap.

[Nay]

2. For years, many democrats have begged the leadership to STOP adopting conservative

positions. Begged. Begged. It has done little good. You know how conservatives have infiltrated city, county, and state elected positions for the last 30 years? Now they've got tons of governorships. It's no stretch of the imagination to believe that explains Blue Dog Democrats and the rightward swing of Democratic Presidential candidates. If no true liberal positions are discussed in the public sphere, none will be implemented. That's where Bernie is so, so valuable.