A Belated Appraisal of Corbyn on Newsnight

Corbyn recently kicked off the public aspect of his campaign to become Labour leader by featuring in a Newsnight interview with Evan Davis. From first impressions the interview went ok, however what struck me when watching it was the extent to which Corbyn's arguments were often instantly dismissed, as if they were somehow tautologically false. Davis himself is a competent economist, having previously worked for the Institute of Fiscal Studies, and whilst I don't want to extend my remit into areas where it doesn't properly belong - I feel that I should at least point out some areas within the interview where Corbyn made good points that shouldn't be quickly written off as either utopian, deluded or damaging towards the majority of the population. Something which the political mainstream often indulges in when socialism is given a public platform.

1 - The Left Can't Win in England

After a somewhat bizarre start to the interview in which Corbyn was asked whether or not he regretted his past support for Northern Irish peace negotiations, the interview swiftly moved on to whether or not the left could ever win an election outright, particularly in England. Davis seemed to take a typically "Rational choice" approach towards the issue, which I don't feel is nuanced enough to adequately describe why many people opted not to vote for Labour.

First of all I don't view it as particularly correct to deem and entire country, in this case England, as intrinsically right wing when compared with Scoltand or Wales. There are economic and historical factors in large parts of Scotland and Wales which might lend themselves more favourably towards Labour, however this doesn't equate with individuals in these areas having an entirely unique set of political values. Different experiences of the system may lead to different voting outcomes however there still remain large consensuses on important issues. For the same reason large parts of Scotland didn't vote for the SNP simply because Scotland is a left wing country, they did so as in their eyes an SNP vote was a way of making a positive change to the established, tired political system, a phenomenon that manifested to a smaller extent elsewhere in the form of UKIP. Of course individual beliefs on issues such as austerity and immigration matter in the outcome of elections, however if this was always the case then Vote for policies wouldn't indicate that Labour and the Greens are more popular than the Conservatives and UKIP when ranked by manifesto content, nor would UKIP voters generally support nationalising the railways and utilities.

In conjunction with the above point about England I think it's also important to dispell the notion that the recent defeat was worse than expected due to middle class people rejecting the left-wing position of Labour's manifesto. The '15 manifesto may have been to the right of Blair's in '97 - yet the media still managed to successfully cultivate a consensus that Miliband's manifesto drove away hordes of Blair era voters who were deterred by punitive tax policies. This opinion doesn't however appear to be supported by the electoral data. Research published by Jon Trickett suggests that what has really been perniciously eating away at Labour's vote share since the start of Blair's first term - is the coring out of its working class support. Relative to past performances, it seems that in 2015 middle class people were relatively happy to see Miliband become prime minister, even in the face of horrified gasps from the partisan press. Unfortunately for Labour though, this was accompanied by traditional Labour supporters in many cases opting to vote for other parties such as UKIP, or indeed choosing to stay at home – something which is becoming increasingly common.

2 - The Public Support Austerity

This argument to an extent is probably true, the British public trust the Conservatives with the economy to a greater extent than they trust Labour, even if in a contradictory fashion they personally on an aggregate level aren't confident about their own economic security. Fuelled by media spin, the public often abide by the thesis that Labour crashed the economy in 2008 through fiscal profligacy, leaving the Conservatives to clean up the mess - kickstarting growth through the use of fiscal contraction, something which Davis his self has repudiated in the past. In reality OBR data suggests that the GDP lost as a result of austerity is equivalent to at least £1500 per year per person. There exists an academic debate surrounding the pros and cons of austerity both in an economic and a humanitarian sense (as a non-economist I'll let Simon Wren-lewis explain why I'm on the "against" side economically here, here, here, here and here). However, despite academic disagreements this debate was largely non-existent in the sphere of mainstream discussion prior to the election. Even without convincing everyone that austerity had lost them £1500 a year, merely invoking a sense that what constituted a sensible economic approach wasn’t a foregone conclusion could have helped convert many voters who opted for the Conservatives despite being worried about the effects of cuts. Neverthelss, through using this artificially created consensus the Conservatives successfully tapped into the self-interest aspect of many voters - by essentially conveying the message that "of course it's bad that 1 million people are using foodbanks, but this is a necessary step if the rest of the population - and eventually the foodbank users themselves are to get on in life". Labour got stuck in the no man's land of supporting the Tories' flawed "nation's credit card" analogy to the extent that it alienated many of the people the party was created to represent, whilst simultaneously fighting a losing battle to beat the Conservatives in the “responsibility” stakes, somewhat unsurprisingly seeing as this economic narrative was fundamentally drawn up by the Sun and the Daily Mail.

Corbyn is right that the Labour party needs to be proactive in setting its economic priorites. There's often a tendency within Labour to try and make do with whatever agenda the partisan press feels like setting, but whilst this may seem easy as a short term solution it often just leads to battles which the party can never win. Despite this however, in my view the reason to oppose Conservative austerity is more fundamental - aside from the deep human suffering government cuts have caused, in isolation they have also been very unpopular. Bearing in mind that there seems to be a general consensus within the party (including the centrist wing) that we lost the economic argument due to a general public misunderstanding of the disputed nature of government economic policy, rather than through anti-austerity arguments being factually incorrent - shouldn't Labour as a party set out to explain that there is a way of avoiding cuts without ruining the economy? Rather than expediently accepting a policy that many Labour MPs quietly disagree with? The public are incredibly dissatisfied with politicians as it is, as exemplified by declining election turnouts, therefore I question the long term viability of a strategy which relies on the party capriciously reassessing its core values irrespective of the actual, objective opinions held by those in charge. After all the trouble with disingenuity is that it's often very easy to read, and the public will readily judge politicians whom they deem guilty of it.

3 - State economic activity is inherently "dangerous"

As part of his political "litmus test" Davis decided to grill Corbyn on his ideal extent of state activity when measured as a percentage of GDP. Davis, despite not explicitly saying so - I gather falls into the anti-state camp, having previously advocated the privatisation of state services for efficiency purposes. Irrespective of his personal views however this strikes me as a somewhat strange and rather presumptuous question, Davis implied that the current level of state spending at 40% of GDP is approaching "dangerous" territory, which he deemed to be anything above 50%. Once again I don't feel like this is a subtle enough evaluation of the current political situation to put into percentile brackets.

Firstly, much of what the state does is important for the rest of the economy, for example state spending in the form of research and development is often needed to compensate for low levels of research conducted in the free market, something which Joseph Stiglitz has categorised as a negative externality of laissez-faire capitalism. Mariana Mazzucato in her book 'The Entrepeneurial State' outlines many examples in which state activity has led to the creation of cutting edge technologies. On top of this many of Capitalism's success stories have been prime examples of mixed economies, for example Post-War Japan, Britain, the USA, the Nordic countries and the countries of the "East Asian miracle”. Growth has slowed down and become more unstable since the dawn of deregulation and privatisation, I don’t feel like this is a strong enough context to write off state activity as dangerous.

Second of all, and the main reason why I see Davis' approach as insufficiently subtle is that it lumps state transfer in with state led physical economic activity. In the post-Piketty world even the IMF is talking about the dangers of high inequality, with the OECD also warning that high inequality has cost the UK nine percentage points of growth. Bearing in mind the fact that high inequality is generally unpopular both publicly and politically I'm not sure why increasing transfers along the lines of what Tony Atkinson has suggested should be viewed as "dangerous", even if I agree that in the long run inequality needs to be addressed by proper regulation rather than just through transfers.

To finish off this evaluation, of course socialists within Labour such as myself want to see Corbyn run a good campaign, this goes without saying. However I think what's important, and hopefully what I've managed to convey in this post - is that even if you're just a mild social democrat, or for that matter someone who simply wants to see the current system managed in a better and more ethical manner, Corbyn is most certainly worth listening to. Davis like many in the media intimated that the only people who could ever support Corbyn are those with goals driven by ideology, rather than those who have goals set through rational analysis of the status quo. In the context of this election election and of the disarray within the wider economy in general, this simply isn't the case.