The best things I’ve read recently (22/08/16)

This week: Marx and Corbyn, Democrats and Tammany Hall, and indecisive movie studios

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones – review by Oliver Bullough (the Guardian)

“Stedman Jones eventually comes to the conclusion that the pioneers of 20th-century socialism would have found Marx’s true dreams incomprehensible, since they were formed in a pre-1848 world that would have had little if any relevance to them. The eventual message is that Marxist ideology and Marx himself were very different things.

I couldn’t help noticing while reading the book, however, some clear parallels between modern leftist politics and the habits of the old man. Thanks to his obsession with minute points of ideological deviation, his determination to cling to leadership positions despite the increasing irrelevance of the groups he led, his conviction that victory was imminent despite near-overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and his repeated estrangement of potential allies for no apparent reason, Marx would surely have felt at home in today’s Labour party.”

Cinemautopsy: What Went Wrong With ‘Fantastic Four’? by Matt Singer (Screen Crush)

“History seems to have repeated itself this summer. Just 10 days ago Warner Bros. released Suicide Squad, another heavily hyped and very expensive comic-book adaptation with a massive identity crisis. Like Fantastic Four, Suicide Squad feels like two totally different movies sutured together. Some scenes are grim and cynical; others are colorful and jokey. Combined, the two movies suggest the beginnings of an alarming Hollywood trend: Studios greenlighting challenging takes on material, getting cold feet during production, then trying to backtrack to something formulaic and familiar after it’s too late to start from scratch.

With so much money on the line, it makes sense that executives would want to protect their investment (and, by extension, their own jobs). But I’m baffled why they don’t just play it safe in the first place. How do you start with a weird, serious Fantastic Four and wind up with the Thing punching Doctor Doom into a giant sky laser? I reached out to Jeremy Slater, one of the three credited screenwriters of the film, who offered a few insights into early versions of the script, and the thinking behind these massive tentpoles.”

Democrats Should Bring Back Political Machines by Kevin Baker (the New Republic)

“Politics, like any war, is best conducted by professionals. But liberals and the left continue to place their hopes in “outsiders” and “insurgents,” amateurs who rail against the system without the means to reform it. The Green Party, for example, has embarked on yet another presidential campaign to nowhere; as its presumptive nominee, Jill Stein, recently boasted to The Village Voice, “I’m a physician, not a politician.”

Stein seemed to consider this a point of pride. [Tammany Hall boss] George Washington Plunkitt would have set her straight. “Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry-goods or the drug business,” he observed. “You’ve got to be trained up to it or you’re sure to fail.”

11 barriers to a Lib-Lab pact

Why I think it would be so difficult to make happen (but think it’s still worth considering).

The notion of an electoral pact between Labour and the Liberal Democrats is being discussed more widely than at any time since the Blair-Ashdown ‘project’. Admittedly that doesn’t mean it’s being that widely discussed. There have been some articles in the Guardian and a segment on the Daily Politics about the notion. So the discussion is at a rather low level but real nonetheless.

That’s still remarkable. British politics is a tribal business and such discussions are easily construed as treachery. But the sight of the Tories entrenching themselves in government for the foreseeable future and a shared sense of desperation has created a sense amongst at least some that this might be worth exploring.

However, the obstacles are pretty vast. The most important are:

1. Jeremy Corbyn is Labour leader

Don’t get me wrong, the new Labour leader has fans in the Lib Dems. A lot of party members were intensely opposed to bombing of Syria. And some joined with Labourites in being incredulous that men who had made statements expressing sympathy for terrorist groups were branded ‘terrorist sympathisers’.

Nonetheless, for a party with strong centrist tendencies he is a deeply unattractive figure. His economic policy seems doctrinaire and dangerous, his ambivalence on the EU and hostility to NATO jar with our internationalist instincts, and the reluctance to compromise that propelled his rise is so antithetical to a party that makes a positive virtue of it. So many (perhaps most) Lib Dems – including myself – would rather see the Conservatives continue to govern than see him become PM.

So from here on out I will be writing on the assumption that Labour moderates manage in the near future to rest back control of their party. I am unsure if that will happen but if it doesn’t the topic is simply academic: a party of the centre-left is not going to help the far-left defeat the centre-right.

2. Mutual antipathy

An ex-Lib Dem MP recently wrote of Labour moderates being branded Tories by the far left: “They can now get a taste of the shit they threw at us”. This visceral reaction is all the more striking because the MP in question is one whose personality and politics would make them a prime candidate to support an alignment with Labour.

One imagines that many right of centre Labourites had a similar reaction watching the party that had lambasted them for breaking a promise not to raise tuition fees, itself break a pledge not to raise tuition fees.

3. Genuine policy differences

The Labour right might agree more with the Lib Dems than they do with either the Tories or their own left-wing but there are plenty of substantive differences. Indeed, one major complicating factor is that the Labour MPs who are closest to the Lib Dems on economics are generally the furthest away on constitutional reform, law and order, and immigration.

There’s also the issue of trident to contend with. Lib Dem policy is against any renewal yet the maintenance of the system is of totemic importance for some Labour moderates.

4. Differences of style

The Labour right – at least in its Blairite iteration – is very focused on looking ‘tough’ and ‘credible’. By contrast, the preoccupation of the post-coalition Lib Dems is appearing trustworthy and compassionate. Hence our decision to elect Tim Farron as our leader.

5.What to do about the areas where the two parties are in direct competion

The number of such areas was dramatically reduced by the post-coalition collapse of the Lib Dems. Nonetheless, they do exist and they pose a dilemma. If the parties are trying to be in harmony nationally then fighting locally risks disrupting that. But calling a truce may turn activists in those areas against the bargain as a whole. And worse still if the two parties cease opposing each other in those areas then another party may come in and fill that void.

6. What to do about the Greens

Caroline Lucas has recently called for ““joint tickets” in some constituencies, with a representative from either Labour, Lib Dems or the Greens agreeing on key principles.” If we assume that Corbyn is gone and the moderates are back in control then her attitude would probably change. Nonetheless, if the Greens are not included then the anti-Tory vote is still split. But trying to include them makes it even harder to get everyone agreed on a policy platform.

7. Bad precedents

The SDP-Liberal alliance eventually turned into a near death experience for British Liberalism. The last Lib-Lab pact was followed by the Liberal’s taking significant losses. The brutal experience of coalition has not exactly enamoured Lib Dems to co-operation with other parties. And the various liberal splinter groups that have allied with the Conservative Party were eventually consumed by it. Lib Dems have reason to be wary of such arrangements.

8. How much do the two parties really have to offer each other?

Labour moderates might look at a party with 8 MPs and 7-8% in most opinion polls and wonder whether forming an alliance with them is worth the bother.

Conversely, the platter of warmed up SPADs the Labour right served up as potential PMs in their last leadership election will generate even less enthusiasm amongst Lib Dem members than they did among Labour ones.

9. Will Lib Dem voters play ball?

In 2015, quite a number of former Lib Dem voters seem to have bolted from the party in fear of the prospect of electing Ed Miliband prime minister. This illustrates one fairly major drawback of any alliance: the risk that it would lead to potential Lib Dem voters switching to the Tories. This is especially acute given that one impact of the coalition was to push the Party’s support base rightwards.

10. Might an alliance curtail the Lib Dems ability to take seats of the Tories?

There’s a strong argument that the best thing the Lib Dems can do for Labour is defeat the Tories in rural and suburban seats where the Labour Party itself cannot compete. And if you are going to being fighting in seats where the Labour Party is generally unpopular isn’t being in an alliance with it rather a handicap?

11. It doesn’t solve the fundamental problem

Add together, the Labour and Lib Dem votes in 2015 and they barely add up to more than the number the Tories achieved on their own. Now as we’ve seen you can’t simply transfer Lib Dem voters en masse to a Labour led centre-left alliance. Many would switch to the Tories or stay at the home. And the concessions Labour would presumably need to make to the Lib Dems would probably lead them to lose votes to the UKIP and the Greens. So in reality it is probably not possible for the centre-left to win simply by uniting its existing support, it needs to be attracting new voters.

To reinforce that point consider that the right-wing of British politics is at least as fragmented as the left and that the combined the votes of the Conservatives, UKIP and the DUP in 2015 amounted to an absolute majority.

The centre-left’s problem is not primarily that it is divided. It is that the electorate do not share its instincts on welfare, immigration and taxation. It either needs a plan to win under those constraints or change them. Forming alliances might make that easier but it doesn’t negate the need for it.

But….

Having said all that I’m not prepared to totally dismiss the possibility because….well it’s an idea I feel the need to write a thousand words about in an analytical manner. When I hear other Lib Dems mention the idea I raise practical objections rather than questioning their intelligence and/or loyalty. That’s quite a change because I really don’t like the Labour Party. The majority of my time as a Liberal Democrat has been spent fighting it. Indeed, there have been stages in my life when defeating it was the main thing I got out of bed to do. Yet if Chuka Umunna or Stella Creasy were Labour leader I couldn’t honestly claim to be indifferent whether they or a Tory became Prime Minister. And if the Labour Party schisms – which is unlikely but nonetheless possible – then it seems a given that the Lib Dems will have to reach an understanding – tacit or otherwise – with one or other faction.

So as remote as the prospect of peace between Labour and the Liberal Democrats is it’s not one I feel able either to ignore nor oppose outright.

I don’t understand the Labour Party anymore. Can you explain it to me?

For six months now I’ve been misreading what is happening in the party. So it’s time I fessed up to what I know I don’t know.

Until a few months ago I thought I got the Labour Party. I’d spent the best part of a decade fighting elections against it and therefore had by necessity developed pretty good instincts about what it would do. Then Jeremy Corbyn was elected its leader.

That I’m not such a great Labour watcher is with hindsight not much of a surprise. I don’t know that many Labour Party members and those I do are a rather unrepresentative subset. And while I’ve made a habit of reading Conservative Home, I don’t do the same with any media specifically targeting Labour supporters. Which is I suppose a gap I should probably fill.

Given my limited sources of information I have found it hard to get a read on how things are going to pan out within the Labour Party next. In particular, I have no real sense of the following:

1) How different are the new members of the Labour Party from the old ones?

If I got talking to a random person at a Labour event, what if anything would let me know whether they had recently joined the party? Assuming their views differ from those of old-timers, is that simply because they are new or are the new members joining post-GE2015 noticeably different from the people who joined before?

2) Are these new members becoming activists?

My prejudice is that people who join parties when something exciting happens to that party are disproportionately likely to stay grassroots members. Does that apply in this case? Are lots of these new members going to start showing up on local party execs, in council groups and ultimately as MPs?

3) Is Momentum a big deal?

Or is it a modest deal the media is getting excited about because it’s new?

4) Are issues of foreign and defence policy as divisive in the wider Party as they appear to be in the PLP?

5) How cohesive are the Labour right?

If Simon Danczuk thinks something is it safe to assume Tristram Hunt agrees? Do Alan Johnson and an armchair who dislikes Corbyn have a similar viewpoint? To what extent are the various actors who are seen as being on the right of the Labour Party actively co-ordinating with each other?

6) When anti-Corbynites dream of replacing Corbyn, who do they dream of replacing him with?

I tend to assume Chuka Umunna or Alan Johnson but I fear that means I’m a bit like the journalists who used to tout Danny Alexander as a potential future Lib Dem leader:  I think of them because they are the people I know about rather than because they are the most likely candidates.

7) Could Corbyn continue as leader after a General Election defeat?

The normal rule seems to be that if a party loses a General Election, its leader will either step down or be forced out. But many of the normal rules seem to no longer apply. Is this one of them?

8) Is there a potential Corbynite leader besides Corbyn himself?

Can he pass the leadership onto someone with a similar ideology? Might that person appear more primeministerial?

9) Does all this stuff affect the ability and willingness of the Labour Party to campaign to stay in the EU?

Should I be worried that Corbyn seems so equivocal on the subject? Are supporters of withdrawal anymore than a fringe within the Party? Will the increase in Labour Party membership translate into more activists for the ‘remain’ campaign? Can I stop worrying about my nightmare scenario of Corbyn being deposed and then campaigning to leave?

10) Has the Labour Party permanently changed?

One could look at what’s happening and conclude that Labour is turning into a British Podemos. Or one could conclude the situation is more like the Tories electing IDS and then thinking better of it shortly thereafter. The fact I can’t decide which comparison is more apt is what has driven all my other questions. I am trying to work out if Corbyn’s election indicates that something fundamental in the nature of the Labour Party has changed? Or is it just a freak event the effects of which will progressively dissipate?

I’m not qualified to answer that question, so am looking to you dear readers for guidance.

Voters know full well that Labour and the Tories have very different policies

At the last General Election, the IFS calculated that the difference in public spending implied by Labour and Conservative economic plans was £40 billion. That’s about the size of the entire economy of Croatia.

Despite this it’s not unusual to hear the view expressed that there just aren’t that many differences between Labour and the Tories anymore. In an interesting article by Adam Ludlow, a pollster for ComRes, a Corbyn supporter is quoted saying:

“When I go out canvassing, people don’t say “you’re too left wing in the Labour Party”, they say “you’re all the same as each other!”’

The problem as Ludlow details is that more systematic evidence just doesn’t bear out such anecdotes:

…when it comes to the last election, the public was well-aware of the differences on offer – and chose to reject Labour.

The chart below shows that prior to the election, the vast majority of voters thought that Labour and the Conservatives were different in their visions for the future of the country, their attitude to the economy and their attitude towards government spending. Contrary to what some might say, the public did not think that the choice on offer was just different shades of austerity. Labour did not lose because they didn’t offer a big enough alternative to the Conservatives on the big issues.

If anything, this graph shows some of the reasons why the Tories won: the NHS was meant to be Labour’s core area of strength, but fewer voters thought the two parties were different in this area than in others.

Indeed, the key to marketing strategy is to be similar to your competitors on their areas of strength and different to them on your own areas of strength. Lower-end brands emphasise their similarities to their better-known counterparts in terms of quality while simultaneously highlighting their differences when it comes to price. Better-known brands try to turn this on its head, using the existence of replicas to draw attention to differences in quality (being “the real McCoy” or “Just like a Golf”).

The story of the 2015 election can, in part, be told by the way the Conservatives reduced the difference to Labour on the NHS while maximising the difference between the parties on the economy.

I suspect that the fact that Corbyn supporters so often return to this trope is an indicator that they are rather politically cossetted. It is quite possible if you live in the right (or should that be left) part of the country, do the right kind of job and have the right kind of friends to only really meet people who wish Labour was more left-wing. But people who live such lives should not mistake their social circle for the country as a whole.

Further thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn’s (un)electability

Yesterday I published a post arguing that a “comforting delusion appears to have afflicted some of those supporting Jeremy Corbyn’s bid to be Labour leader: maybe his far left ideology isn’t electoral liability at all, maybe it’s even as asset.”

The basis for are some opinion polls indicating broad support for his positions on issues like tuition fees, rent controls and renationalising the railways. I suggested that this didn’t mean much: voters for appears to choose parties based more on a broad impression of them rather than on individual policies. With the British Social Attitudes survey indicating that support for tax and spending now a minority position, it is hard to see the belief that the British public are latently socialist as anything other than wishful thinking.

It appears that this may not unduly bother many Corbyn supporters. There’s evidence that, surprisingly for avowed socialists, they prioritise individual expression over social change: they are more interested in whether Corbyn is saying things they like than in whether he’s ever likely to be in a position to turn those words into actions. So unsurprisingly the efforts to argue he can win have tended to be pretty shallow and bluntly not worth dealing with.

An exception to this rule is a piece by my friend Robin McGhee. He suggests that:

I’m not saying Jeremy Corbyn is wonderfully electable. I’m not saying he is necessarily more electable than his opponents. I’m not saying he will lead the Labour party to triumph if he wins its leadership election. I’m not even necessarily saying he’s very good. I’m only saying it’s not true he will be an electoral disaster for the party compared to his opponents.

I find his reasons more persuasive than most yet I am still unpersuaded.

Andy Burnham , Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall are all perfect examples of the slick professionalised politician. This doesn’t mean they are actively bad communicators or necessarily come across badly- they aren’t and don’t- but it’s fair to say they will struggle to stand out against the Conservatives.

It seems to me simply obvious that Jeremy Corbyn’s unslick, unprofessionalised, more honest image will be a major advantage against his opponents in the Conservative party, and will likely lead to greater respect amongst, at least, the part of the country which does not hate his views so much they would never contemplate liking him.

Is it so obvious? The blandness of his rivals did not come about by accident, they’ve deliberately cultivated it. It’s their armour against constant media probing for a gaffe. And the less distinctive they make themselves, the fewer potential lines of attack they open up. By contrast, Corbyn will be vulnerable from myriad angles.

If the government becomes unpopular then the Conservatives could turn the next General Election into a referendum on Corbyn as PM. By contrast, I doubt many people have a strong enough view on Andy Burnham to do the same to him

… there is lots of evidence to suggest Corbyn’s policy positions are widely popular amongst the electorate, with majorities supporting them. The day after the release of the poll showing Corbyn with a large lead amongst Labour members, both the Independent and Wings Over Scotland published posts highlighting polling evidence showing support for many of his positions.

As I discussed yesterday this just doesn’t seem all that important. Not only are policies not what drive most voters but the issues on which the public seem to agree with Corbyn don’t seem all that electorally salient.

Corbyn will, less controversially, also be very useful at reconnecting Labour with its increasingly disloyal core vote. Meanwhile, research by the highly-respected academic John Curtis shows Labour’s defeat in 2015 was closely related to the drop of its traditional working-class support between 2005 and 2010, which was not reversed in 2015. Support amongst affluent voters held up in 2015. Obviously a lot of this failure to recapture working-class voters was due to the rise of UKIP and fear of immigration- but it seems absurd to assume that pursuing an economic policy which is against these voters interests’ will be very effective in bringing them back to Labour.

My problem with this is that if you create a polarity between affluent idealists/traditional working class voters then Corbyn seems to belong firmly to the former. He’s from Wiltshire, the son of middle class peace campaigners and now represents of all places Islington.

The suite of policies that are supposedly so popular – scrapping tuition fees, rent controls and renationalising the railways – seem aimed more at a graduate renting a house in the Thames Valley and catching the train into London for work than at anyone else.

It also seems likely that his views on immigration (and perhaps also the monarchy) would alienate traditional working class voters even further.

It is worth remembering Labour lost twice as many MPs to the SNP in 2015 as it did to the Conservatives: it’s clear it needs to make up ground in Scotland at the next election in order to become a bigger parliamentary bloc.

As astonishing as Labour’s collapse in Scotland was, it’s actually a side issue. If Labour had won every seat in Scotland then instead of having a Conservative government with a majority of 12 seats, we’d have had a Conservative government with a majority of 11 seats.

…. a huge proportion of the mainstream print media, not to mention his political rivals, depicted Miliband as a wildly insane “Red Ed” who would destroy the economy with his radical left-wing policies.

The evidence from Ed Miliband’s tenure, therefore, implies that any Labour leader from the current crop of candidates- except possibly Kendall- would be depicted as far more extreme than they actually are. It doesn’t matter what they say or do. The only way Labour could get around this is by electing the most right-wing candidate, Kendall, and even then there is no guarantee it would work due to the die-hard partisanship of an important part of the print media.

I have three distinct responses to this:

1) It sounds like a good argument for voting for Kendall.

2) You can give your enemies more or less to work with here. Corbyn gives them loads.

3) Was it really the perception that he was ‘Red Ed’ that damaged Miliband or was it the view that he was weird, weak and potentially dominated by Nicola Sturgeon?

Finally, Robin adds the caveat that:

Corbyn would still damage the Labour party severely in the short to medium term if elected, because the right of the party would likely go apeshit and cause a civil war, constantly attempting a coup against him and making it difficult for him to govern properly.

I’d suggest that actually understates the problem. Corbyn would also have a lot to fear from his own backers, who I’ve already mentioned seem to prize purity over success. They’re, therefore, likely to punish him for the compromises he will inevitably have to make both to placate Labour MPs, amongst whom he enjoys conspicuously little support, and to begin broadening his appeal enough to potentially win a General Election. It seems likely that a Corbyn led Labour Party would be deeply unstable and therefore distracted by internal infighting.

I suspect that regardless of who become Labour leader, the next election is the Conservative’s to lose. Nontheless, a Corbyn led Labour Party would make it harder for them to bring on their own defeat. He’d have a polarising affect that would allow them to mobilise their own voters and prevent them defecting; Labour would find itself defending its own leaders more out their ideas when they would want to be talking about the government’s deficiencies; and that’s assuming the Party could avoid an all out civil war.

There are in short plenty of reasons to think that Burnham, Cooper and (especially) Kendall are indeed more electable than Corbyn.

Britain is NOT waiting for its socialist saviour

A comforting delusion appears to have afflicted some of those supporting Jeremy Corbyn’s bid to be Labour leader: maybe his far left ideology isn’t electoral liability at all, maybe it’s even as asset. The empirical basis for this are opinion polls indicating broad support for his positions on issues like tuition fees, rent controls and renationalising the railways.

Writing for Left Foot Forward, Robert Priest ably dissects this wishful thinking:

It goes without saying that the same opinion polls persistently overstated Labour’s popularity and suffered deep methodological problems, but this does not entirely discredit them. Individual findings are certainly questionable. Yes, polls showed that the public was opposed to the tuition fee rise and broadly supportedLabour modestly reducing tuition fees to £6,000. (By the way, the same polls showed voters thought this would most benefit the well-off.)

But this is not the same as the electorate supporting Corbyn’s total abolition, which he has costed at £7bn. If pollsters offered this much stronger policy to the public with its price-tag attached, it is reasonable to assume reception would be more lukewarm.

We do have an alternative index of public opinion: the British Social Attitudes survey, held every year since 1983 and co-authored by pollster-of-the-moment John Curtice. The most recent BSA showed that a mere 21 per cent of people share Corbyn’s belief in the abolition of tuition fees. People might favour lower fees but they do not oppose them in principle.

Most pressing for the Left is the big picture: the proportion of people in favour of higher taxation and spending has collapsed from 63 per cent to just 37 per cent in the ten years from 2004 to 2014. Support for welfare spending has plummeted. Those who remember Blair-era clichés about a ‘social-democratic majority’ should consider whether they still stand up to scrutiny.

He goes on to discuss a broader problem with the apparently positive polls for Corbyn: voters don’t appear to make their decision on who to vote for based on individual policy positions. Many of the Coaltion governments most popular policies originated with the Liberal Democrats yet the Party still found itself reviled for its perceived treachery and unreliability. Likewise a Corbyn led Labour Party might well find individual policies like nationalising the railways and introducing rent caps were popular but that it was itself unpopular as it was percieved as extreme and economically incompetent.

To be clear, the reason that the British electorate keeps electing broadly centre-right governments is that it is itself broadly centre-right. The Labour Party either needs a plan to change that fact or to win in spite of it. Wishing it away is not a sustainable strategy.