on the wall of Preston council leader Matthew Brown’s office is an “Anarchy in the UK” Sex Pistols poster. Having once been a byword for economic stagnation (a planned £700m redevelopment of the city centre collapsed in 2011), the Labour-run Lancashire authority has embraced radicalism. Rather than chasing inward investment from large multinationals, as it previously had, the city council forged an alternative growth model. It championed worker-owned co-operatives, persuaded public sector bodies to “insource” services, became the first living wage employer in the north, founded a not-for-profit energy firm and established a credit union to combat avaricious payday lenders.
“We needed to do something that was more resilient but also, crucially, put more democracy and ownership in the Preston economy,” Brown told me when we met one recent morning. The councillor, who identifies with Labour’s Bennite left tradition, observed: “One of the reasons that Thatcher found it so easy to privatise a lot of the public assets was that working people didn’t have a huge amount of affinity with them. If they had been on the board, sharing the profits and had a real ownership stake then she wouldn’t have been able to do it, they would have been hugely popular.”
When John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, visited Preston in 2016 he declared: “This kind of radicalism is exactly what we need across the whole country.” The following year, Jeremy Corbyn praised the city’s “inspiring innovation”.
Labour may not be in power but it is already reshaping Britain.
Corbyn has now led Labour for three years. Never before has the party’s left enjoyed such power. The Marxist Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League of the 1930s, the Bevanites of the 1950s and the Bennites of the 1980s were all divided or defeated. Having previously been consigned to internal exile, Corbyn and his allies control Labour’s commanding heights.
They have won two landslide leadership victories, more than doubled the party’s membership to 540,000 and delivered the biggest increase in its general election vote share since 1945 (from 30.4 per cent to 40 per cent in 2017). These advances are still more notable when set against the decline – or “Pasokification” (a reference to Greece’s vanquished Pasok) – of the European centre left. In Germany, France, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and, most recently, Sweden, social democrats have endured their worst results in postwar history. Labour, by means of an internal revolution, has averted this fate.
Yet among Corbynites, the exuberance that followed the 2017 election has given way to unease. It is not merely that the opinion polls are too tight for the party to be confident of winning power, or that the party’s summer was consumed by the anti-Semitism crisis. In the view of many on the left, Labour is failing to take full advantage of the historic opportunity before it.
Whenever the Labour Party has won landmark election victories it has done so by having a compelling vision of the future. After the Second World War, in 1945, Clement Attlee promised a “home fit for heroes” and vowed “never again” to return to the poverty and mass unemployment of the Great Depression. In the 1960s, Harold Wilson harnessed the “white heat” of technology against the grouse moor politics of Alec Douglas-Home. In 1997, Tony Blair spoke of a “new, young country” and swept away John Major’s Conservatives.
In a speech on 21 January 2016, John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, observed: “The charity Nesta published a fascinating piece of research recently, showing how ‘future-focused’ the different party manifestos were in last year’s election [2015]. The Tories talked relentlessly, overwhelmingly about the future. Labour, strikingly, did not. We cannot allow that to happen again. We cannot be small ‘c’ conservatives.”
But one of the charges most frequently levelled against Corbynism is that it merely represents the politics of nostalgia. Rather than shaping the future, critics say, it wishes to resurrect a discredited pre-Thatcherite corporatist past.
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triumph of neoliberalism, the left has struggled to articulate an alternative. The Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson observed in 1994 that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”. After the financial crisis, it was the austerian right, rather than the socialist left, that initially benefited.
In recent years, however, the left has rediscovered the politics of futurism. Books such as Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s Inventing the Future, Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists and Peter Frase’s Four Futures argue that technological advancements could render much work unnecessary and liberate humans – sustained by a state-funded universal basic income (UBI) – to pursue a new kind of freedom. Aaron Bastani’s forthcoming Fully Automated Luxury Communism (January 2019) will occupy similar terrain: “What if, rather than having no sense of the future, history hadn’t really begun?” But Labour’s swiftly assembled 2017 manifesto, For the Many, Not the Few, was largely unreflective of such thought. It made no mention of UBI, automation or a shorter working week. Though the manifesto’s headline proposals – the renationalisation of water, energy and rail services, the abolition of university tuition fees and higher taxes on top earners and corporations – were overwhelmingly popular, they were redolent of postwar social democracy.
The document revered by Labour radicals is, in fact, Alternative Models of Ownership, a report published to little attention on 6 June 2017, two days before the general election. It called for “rapid automation”, “new models of collective, democratic ownership” to ensure the benefits of technology are shared, “a shorter working week to fairly share productivity gains” and “potentially in time a universal basic income to supplement labour market income”.
