All political parties struggle to reconcile their core convictions with their desire to win elections. But apparently there's one party so pristinely principled that it despises its own electoral successes.
I refer, of course, to Britain's Labour Party. In choosing as its new leader Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time fixture of the hard-left fringe, the party has emphatically repudiated the winning ways of "New Labour."
Corbyn is a throwback to the doctrinaire socialism of the 1970s and 1980s, which became linked in the public mind to crippling strikes by imperious labor unions, economic stagnation, welfare dependence, reflexive anti-Americanism and enthusiasm for "revolutionary" forces around the world. An iconic image of the era: the actress and prominent "Trot" Vanessa Redgrave holding a Kalashnikov aloft while dancing with PLO gunmen.
The party's thralldom to the "looney left" paved the way for Margaret Thatcher's ascension and kept Labour out of power for 18 long years. Finally, in the early 90s, a band of young reformers led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown jettisoned the party's tired collectivist dogma and launched a drive to modernize the party's image and governing philosophy. Inspired by Bill Clinton's success here, they borrowed heavily from his "New Democrat" playbook.
Blair led Labour to a smashing victory in 1997, and went on to win two more elections. He and Brown served as Prime Minister for 13 years -- Labour's longest run in government ever.
While popular with British voters, New Labour's attempts to define a modern and pragmatic progressivism were anathema to the party's left. They disdained Blair as a glib and soulless centrist willing to sell out Labour's socialist ideals for a mess of electoral pottage. That disdain curdled into intense hatred when Blair later supported George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.
Now, with Corbyn's victory, the left has its revenge. But this petulant act of self-immolation will only make Britain's Tories stronger.
Blair sees the danger with characteristic clarity, though sadly he's now a prophet without honor in the party whose fortunes he revived. "The Labour party is in danger more mortal today that at any point in the over 100 years of its existence," Blair warned before the vote for leader. He predicted a Corbyn-led party would suffer "annihilation" at the polls.
New polling by YouGov supports his argument. More than 80 percent of Corbyn's voters describe themselves as left-wing. "They reject capitalism, and they admire Tony Benn more than they admire Tony Blair," says Peter Kellner, writing in the New Statesman. "Two-thirds of them want to abolish private schools and the monarchy, and favour higher taxes to pay for greater welfare." The party's dilemma, however, is that such views don't even command majority support among rank-and-file Labour voters, much less the swing voters it will need to build a new Parliamentary majority.
In fact, lurching to the left is a strange way to react to the thrashing Labour suffered in last May's national elections. Despite pre-election polls showing Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives and Labour running neck and neck, the Tories won big, rolling up an outright majority.
Labour was broadsided in its traditional bastion of Scotland, losing 40 of its 41 seats to the Scottish National Party. More worrisome, because Scottish separatism may wane, was the party's dismal showing in England, especially in the prosperous South. It was Labour's worst defeat since 1983 (the year Corbyn won his seat in Parliament) and Miliband promptly resigned.
Labour's case for change foundered on Britain's economy, now the fastest-growing in Europe. That inconvenient fact made it hard for Milliband and company to rail against the Tories' supposed obsession with fiscal austerity. If anything, the austerity issue cut the other way, as post-election analysis found that voters didn't trust Labour to be a frugal steward of public spending.
Labour instead focused its campaign narrowly on inequality and distributive justice. Claiming that Conservative economic policies favor Britain's finance and business elites at the expense of the working classes, Labour called for higher taxes on the rich and more spending on social welfare to smooth out Britain's uneven prosperity. That's a real problem, but Milliband and company failed to articulate a progressive case for stimulating growth and wider prosperity, or offer new ideas for modernizing public services. These omissions made it easy for Cameron to cast Labour as a threat to Britain's hard-won fiscal and economic gains.
In a widely noted post-mortem, Chuka Umunna, a rising star in Labour's pragmatic camp, argued that the party's narrative of economic injustice offered little to the aspiring families of Middle England:
"Why did we do so badly there? First, we spoke to our core voters but not to aspirational, middle-class ones. We talked about the bottom and top of society, about the minimum wage and zero-hours contracts, about mansions and non-doms (wealthy Britons who claim residence outside the country for tax purposes). But we had too little to say to the majority of people in the middle."
The failure of Labour's message of economic grievance is instructive for U.S. Democrats, who are under pressure from the populist left to embrace business-bashing and class warfare themes. In any case, nothing in the UK election results lends support to the view that British voters are clamoring for unalloyed socialism or that Labour lost because it wasn't populist enough.
Yet now comes Jeremy Corbyn promising a return to the old time religion of class grievance and struggle. Stridently anti-capitalist, he's for nationalizing key industries like banking and railways. His solution to Britain's housing shortages is rent control, which can be relied upon to make them worse. He wants to tax the rich, raise caps on how much welfare households can receive, and repeal tuition fees New Labour instituted to tackle a university funding crisis. Using choice and competition to modernize public service delivery? Forget about it.
On foreign policy, Corbyn's views incline toward pacifism and anti-Americanism. At the recent Labour conference, for example, he affirmed his support for a hoary chestnut of the British left - killing Britain's nuclear deterrent. He's leery of military action against ISIS and has declared himself a friend of Hamas and Hezbollah. He's professed admiration for former Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, and essentially blamed the West for Russia's aggression against Ukraine. Since his election, however, Corbyn has made some concessions to pragmatism. He's stepped back from his long-standing support for withdrawing from NATO, and he's being circumspect about the prospect of the country's "Brexit" from the European Union.
How long the Corbyn Restoration will last is anyone's guess. At some point, however, Labour will remember it's a political party that has to win elections to put its principles to work.
(AP photo)
