In these fretful times, it’s good to know that some still nod off easily. According to his wife, Michael Gove slept through the results on referendum night. This is incredible. Is it true? That no longer seems to matter.
Boris Johnson does not show up to the Commons; he is busy, presumably. But watch how the Tories are realigning. They can do this post-truth politics, where you say one thing and mean another; where you stab someone in the front as you do the old-boy handshake; where you are accountable to the few, not the many, and you don’t really pretend otherwise. There is a political agility here – some call it “Trumpism”, some psychosis – but recognise it if you want to understand it. It is unencumbered by “truth”, “authenticity” and “beliefs”, which is why the bloodletting over Jeremy Corbyn’s “leadership” is ever more sad.
The left is still talking in a series of binaries that no longer apply and are no longer helpful. The referendum was, of course, the false binary that bust them. In or out of Europe. You couldn’t be a little bit in, as most now seem to want. It was always destined to be a protest against the life-sucking effects of globalisation. It has unleashed horrendous racism. To say we choose, somehow, between race and class is just dumb. All of this is intertwined and remains in play.
Now, to see Labour re-enacting some Blair/Brown war a zillion years later is another totally dysfunctional binary. Most Labour MPs are on a spectrum. Most people are and, if we cannot move beyond that, we are, as children, forced to choose between warring parents for ever. The bile flows, the differences are irreconcilable, so we turn on ourselves with another false choice: the morally pure but unelectable against those who have committed vile sins of compromise.
This is a crisis of all representative democracy – What is it? Who represents us? How is this achieved? – and it is being acted out in a gestalt psychodrama by Labour. In public. Who has a say? Corbyn and his cadre of public school revolutionaries who speak for the members, or the MPs, some of them elected by actual voters? Are the internal party rules more important than external reality? Beam me up, Scotty. Lost in this equation are the Labour voters, more than nine million of them the last time I looked. I guess Labour is doing post-truth after all.
The personality cult around Corbyn is just damn weird, seeing as he is meant to be about the issues. I have always found his decency to be arrogance of a type I know well and his passion self-serving. Still, can anyone clinging on to the wreckage say that his team can run a decent general election campaign?
A movement needs more than bullying, self-belief and Twitter. You cannot grow a movement around a superannuated party leader and kid yourself it is Syriza or Podemos; a leader must emerge organically from a movement. Owen Jones, who was a key supporter, has said in an honest piece that he subscribed to the idea of Corbyn as a kind of caretaker leader. But who votes for a deranged caretaker? While some admire his resilience, it looks increasingly delusional.
This psychological fragmentation is painful. Worse, there is currently no real opposition except the SNP. There is simply haggling over a dead brand. Someone will get to keep the name Labour, whatever that means.
At a time when transactional politics is shown to be broken, this is tragic. By this, I mean the end of an era when the electorate are wooed by being offered specifics, whether that is £10 extra or an end to immigration. The referendum has smashed that completely as it cannot begin to deliver on its promises. A new transaction has to be brokered and it must come from a coalition of different forces. The broken heart of Labour is not big enough.
The macho talk of the union “brothers” and the Corbynistas belongs to another era. When it is possible the Tories could provide a second female prime minister, the so-called left want to look at why it can’t bust that binary either. And doubtless the answer will be in the Labour heartlands no one cares about gender politics because they are all somehow unsophisticated.
There is no going back now. As everyone peels away from Corbyn, someone urgently has to map out policies on equality and social cohesion. We saw how the courts behaved after the riots. The same should be done now for those committing race crimes.
I don’t much care where these policies come from. For there is an opportunity in all this. The links between politics and the economy become more transparent.
When Corbyn goes, the support he amassed will have to go somewhere. If this energy goes into just hating the other bit of Labour as it is now, we further deflate the currency of the left at a time when the Tories will punch through a new narrative.
This too may fall apart. It can be punctured but we now need the fluidity that the culture embraces. No right/left. Blair/Brown. The future/the past. But now.
The Gramsci quote everyone reaches for is the one about waiting for the new to be born, but here’s another: “The point of modernity is to live without illusions without becoming disillusioned.” That is ever more difficult, ever more necessary.
