There have probably been thousands of well-informed words written by those in the know (and millions of ill-informed ones by those who wish they were) about the latest apparent slow-motion suicide of the parliamentary Labour party and I suspect there is little I can add to the sum of human knowledge in that regard. However that has never stopped me in the past and I have my own angle on the current situation born of my personal experience, that may be worth sharing.
Briefly, for anyone who is not aware, the narrative over the last few months has been (or the version promulgated by the UK media at least has been) one of open warfare between Jeremy Corbyn and his 'team' (the corbynistas) and large and vocal sections of his party's Westminster MPs. There have been off-the-record and even live on-air complaints by Labour MPs of everything from bumbling inefficiency to Stalinist ruthlessness and a steadily simmering air of dissent, dissatisfaction and dislike. The person most often absent from all this has been Jezza himself, whose pronouncements (such as they have been) have generally sounded reasonable (non-contentious even), conciliatory and non-aggressive. At least they have sounded like that until deconstructed and spun by a range of commentators inside and outside the PLP, seeking to interpret them as confrontational and/or naive.
So what the hell is it all about and why are the PLP behaving like this? There is no realistic prospect of them ousting Corbyn and having him replaced by a leader more to their liking, nor is there any possibility that this sort of internecine strife will do anything but damage the Labour party's chances of electoral success (on which their future careers depend). So why?
Perhaps it is less to do with political and ideological differences (does anyone actually, really, want to see billions and billions of pounds spent on a missile system designed to ensure that if the world is destroyed in a nuclear holocaust at least plucky Britain will have got to play its part?) and more to do with the nature of institutions and the relationship between staff and their bosses. Labour MPs may be the democratically elected representatives of their constituents, but they are also members of a small to medium-sized enterprise operating out of dilapidated premises in SW1 and as in all such institutions the relationship between staff and boss is a complex one.
Very rarely a charismatic boss (and one who is in the right place at the right time) can transform an institution, or at least be the figurehead who catches a process of transformation and makes it his or her own. In a political context Tony Blair pulled that trick, and before him Maggie Thatcher. True, in both cases the party they became leader of was ripe (desperate even) for change but arguably without them that change would never have come to fruition.
Much more often though, it is the institution that transforms the boss, much as the boss may believe otherwise. So David Cameron, shallow, plausible, untroubled by detail and human cost and able to articulate a vague vision of a 'stronger Britain' that covers a multitude of sins is the perfect leader for a Tory party that wants to dismantle the state and not feel guilty about it. Gordon Brown and Ed Milliband on the other hand were both troubled, ineffectively sincere, occasionally prone to impotent petulance and overshadowed by more successful and charismatic mirrors of themselves. They were the leaders the PLP expected and in a masochistic sense wanted because they gave MPs an excuse to
feel sorry for themselves.
Jeremy Corbyn doesn't fit that mold though. Habituated for so long to being on the losing side of any given argument he is no longer phased by voicing anti-populist sentiments. Unlike Brown and Milliband, both of whom appeared to have lived Labour party internal politics for so long that it had replaced the blood in their veins Corbyn seems endearingly out of touch with the complex shenanigans that clearly occupy most labour insiders' every waking moment. The bottom line (which is an ironic one in the situation) is that the PLP has evolved into an archetypally political (with a small as well as a big P) organisation and its new boss does not appear to be a political operator in that institutional sense.
So what happens when an institution acquires a boss who does not appear to be singing from the unwritten hymn sheets the staff have all memorised over years? Well, that is where my personal experience comes in. As head teacher I inherited a school that was obsessed with its own internal politics and I am simply not very good at (or very interested in, come to that) that sort of politics. And it seems that when an institution acquires a boss who does not fit its expectations then the reaction is confusion and (for some) something like hatred. It doesn't really matter what the boss does or says, or whether the staff involved agree with or even like him or her. It is more that they aren't playing the game by the rules the staff have internalised and made their own.
Some of my staff, I am convinced, never forgave me for not fitting the image they had of a 'proper' head. They might have complained about my predecessors- called them dictatorial bullies- but at least they knew where they were with them. I disorientated them. I asked them what they thought and believed in and told them that I didn't have magic top-down solutions for every situation and some of them hated me for it.
Of course I am not comparing myself with Jeremy Corbyn. I was head teacher of a secondary school, not potential Prime Minister of the UK, but in a sense I can empathise with him. And perhaps what he is doing is the right thing: rising above the vitriol and simply doing his best to keep a clear head (its is what I did in a similar situation).
However quite possibly it isn't. If I had my time again I wouldn't have been so high-minded about internal politics. Labour MPs (like my staff) are human beings who have dedicated a significant portion of their best years to serving in an institution that they may hate, but also identify with and have made their home. A leader who tells themselves they are above their staff's petty vindictiveness and squabbles is no sort of leader in fact. And if Jeremy Corbyn is to transform the Labour party then he has to engage with it. All of it. And that includes the MPs who are currently running him and themselves into the quagmire.
Showing posts with label Corbyn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Corbyn. Show all posts
Wednesday, 13 January 2016
Sunday, 6 September 2015
What would it mean for the Labour party if Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader?
I would begin by saying that Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader appears a foregone conclusion, except that the combined effects of unreliable polls and extreme press coverage make any such definitive statement questionable. It really is quite hard to dig beneath the hyperbole-ridden narrative to discern what real people actually think, but what I can say is that a remarkable range of people of my acquaintance seem (sometimes to their own surprise) to be pro-Corbyn.
However his election will not (would not) be the end of the story. There is a line of argument that suggests that he will lead the Labour party, and henceforth the country, back to the sunlit uplands of austerity-free social justice and progressive socialism, and another that he will preside over internal division and electoral collapse unmatched since the days of Michael Foot. Others of course believe that it won't make a blind bit of difference either way.
So what is the truth? And, more generally, what difference does it make to a large organisation like the Labour party (or an even larger one like the United Kingdom) who is or is not appointed its leader?
I have always found it mildly irritating when presenters on TV history shows say of a castle that it was built by King Alan (or whoever. There never was a King Alan, I don't think, but I like the name). Whatever the truth about the construction of the castle in question, one thing can be said with some certainty: King Alan did not build any part of it. Indeed King Alan would probably have struggled to tell one end of a pickaxe from the other and would have been very unlikely to have had any meaningful understanding of the load-bearing properties of stone arches. Why should he? He would have had people to do all that.
The same thing applies in a more general sense to the leaders of almost any large organisation. It is often said of chief executives that they "built the business up from nothing" and of head teachers that they "turned the school around," but what does that actually mean? The chief executive of a widget-manufacturing company will never have manufactured a single widget and neither will the head teacher have done much in the way of teaching of the students in their school. Indeed in very large and hierarchical organisations the head will have had very little direct involvement at all in any aspect of the running of their organisation. There will be levels and tiers of management between them and any of the actual workings so that their role becomes purely strategic.
So is that the fundamental importance of a leader then - to provide strategic direction? That would seem almost too obvious to be worth stating. Yet even there the importance of the leader is a shifting and amorphous thing. In really big organisations the only ways for the leader to provide strategic direction are through the appointment of (a few) key individuals and the occasional statement of principle. Yet the really effective leaders are those who appoint independent-minded people with strategic understanding of their own and then delegate to them not just tasks but responsibility and decision-making power too. And if they do that, is it not the people they appoint that begin providing the strategic direction? What is more, though the central decisions and keynote policy statements that a leader makes would appear to define strategic direction, in reality that is often less clear. Keynote policy statements are often pretty vague and amorphous things until they are translated into working policies, and that is work that is never done by the leader who made the initial statement.
All of this is very true of party leadership and of the office of prime minister as well. The PM may have made a grand statement in a party conference or an election manifesto, but that means nothing whatever until it is translated into deliverable policy by an army of civil servants, by which time it may well resemble only very loosely the vision that the politician initially outlined. They can hire and fire of course, but only (in most cases) within the relatively restricted pool of elected MPs, each of whom will have his or her firmly established strategic vision, to the point where cabinet reshuffles seem less like opportunities to provide strategic direction and more like attempts at herding cats.
And yet, it is the leaders who have made the political weather over time, is it not? There would have been no New Labour revival without Blair, and (obviously) no Thatcherism without Thatcher. And to take the example most closely related to the topic of this post, it was Michael Foot whose appointment hammered the last nail into the coffin of Old Labour, was it not?
Well, yes and no. Thatcher came to define a generation with its unholy amalgam of unbridled free-market capitalism, social division and the diminution of all forms of collective action. Blair was synonymous with Cool Britannia, PFI and the availability of highly skilled, cash-in-hand Polish builders. Yet did they change the weather or simply reflect meteorological changes that would have happened whether they arrived or not?
And what of Michael Foot? A more decent, principled politician it would be hard to identify yet the utter collapse of the Old Labour project did take place on his watch and the worry that the appointment of the modern-day politician who most closely resembles him (Jeremy Corbyn) will have the same effect seems a reasonable one.
I would argue though that the contexts are utterly different, and context is all. The assumption from a cursory analysis of UK history would be that Blair and Thatcher were effective leaders and Foot ineffective, but that is to ignore their context. Blair and Thatcher each in their own ways articulated a desire (which struck a chord with the electorate) for change - for an escape from a set of attitudes and process that people had tired of. In Thatcher's case it was an escape from the ageing and crumbling post-war consensus on the need for large and bureaucratic collective structures (nationalised industries, banks, unions) to to keep the country on the straight and narrow. In Blair's it was the nasty parochial anti-communiarianism of Thatcherism people were fed up of.
But what of Foot? Well it seems to me that he didn't offer the populace escape from anything really. In a time when many people were pretty much fed up of collective action, in "the longest suicide note in history" he proposed more of it. There might have been a great deal of unease about where Thatcher was taking the country, but even the working class (so-called Essex Man) was guiltily seduced by the idea that maybe they wouldn't have to sit through interminable union meetings any longer but could sell their council houses, get a credit card and spend, spend, spend.
Jeremy Corbyn's context is very different. It is free-market capitalism that the general populace is sick to the back teeth of now. They have had enough of city wide-boys putting their pension pots on the 3.45 at Chepstow and laughing all the way to the bank when the bet failed, leaving them having to work until they are 75. There is a depressing uniformity, and has been for years, to what politicians are allowed by their spads to say in public and at least Jeremy Corbyn is saying something different, and even appearing to say what he thinks rather than what a focus group in Wolverhampton has determined is the most electorally acceptable thing for him to say.
Being a refreshing voice on the media circuit is very different to being party leader of course, let alone PM, but what is interesting is the effect Corbyn has had during the campaign, even on what one might think to have been the archetypal tough audience- his leadership opponents. Until he emerged as the potential winner the Labour leadership[ contenders appeared to be vying with each other for the "Blandest Political Statement Imaginable" prize - desperate to show how electable they would be by never saying anything whatever that might alarm or offend (or indeed interest) anyone at all. Yet, stung into action by Corbyn's direct honesty and inexplicable popularity they have suddenly started coming up with ideas that one couldn't imagine having been pre-approved by Conservative Central Office. Yvette Cooper caught the changing public mood rejecting Tory little-Englandism by arguing for the admission of 10,000 Syrian refugees and Andy Burnham said he would include Corbyn in his cabinet and agreed with many of his ideas.
And I can't imagine Corbyn being a Brown-like control freak intent on stifling any and all opinions that are not congruent with his own world-view. The role he has laid out for himself in the campaign is something between what Belbin would call a 'co-ordinator' and a 'plant' and that really isn't a bad position for a party leader, or indeed a PM, to take. If he can regenerate the self-belief and political engagement of the Labour party and remind them why they (presumably) got into politics in the first place then maybe all he has to do is make a few high-minded statements of principle and let others get on with the business of translating those into policy.
For too long Labour has been frightened of its own shadow and ashamed of the political compromises they have had to make to cling to power. But that is no sort of atmosphere to bring out the best in people. So if Corbyn at least gets people thinking a bit and gives his colleagues the confidence occasionally to say what they actually think, then maybe that is all that the Labour party needs.
We'll have to wait and see.
However his election will not (would not) be the end of the story. There is a line of argument that suggests that he will lead the Labour party, and henceforth the country, back to the sunlit uplands of austerity-free social justice and progressive socialism, and another that he will preside over internal division and electoral collapse unmatched since the days of Michael Foot. Others of course believe that it won't make a blind bit of difference either way.
So what is the truth? And, more generally, what difference does it make to a large organisation like the Labour party (or an even larger one like the United Kingdom) who is or is not appointed its leader?
I have always found it mildly irritating when presenters on TV history shows say of a castle that it was built by King Alan (or whoever. There never was a King Alan, I don't think, but I like the name). Whatever the truth about the construction of the castle in question, one thing can be said with some certainty: King Alan did not build any part of it. Indeed King Alan would probably have struggled to tell one end of a pickaxe from the other and would have been very unlikely to have had any meaningful understanding of the load-bearing properties of stone arches. Why should he? He would have had people to do all that.
The same thing applies in a more general sense to the leaders of almost any large organisation. It is often said of chief executives that they "built the business up from nothing" and of head teachers that they "turned the school around," but what does that actually mean? The chief executive of a widget-manufacturing company will never have manufactured a single widget and neither will the head teacher have done much in the way of teaching of the students in their school. Indeed in very large and hierarchical organisations the head will have had very little direct involvement at all in any aspect of the running of their organisation. There will be levels and tiers of management between them and any of the actual workings so that their role becomes purely strategic.
So is that the fundamental importance of a leader then - to provide strategic direction? That would seem almost too obvious to be worth stating. Yet even there the importance of the leader is a shifting and amorphous thing. In really big organisations the only ways for the leader to provide strategic direction are through the appointment of (a few) key individuals and the occasional statement of principle. Yet the really effective leaders are those who appoint independent-minded people with strategic understanding of their own and then delegate to them not just tasks but responsibility and decision-making power too. And if they do that, is it not the people they appoint that begin providing the strategic direction? What is more, though the central decisions and keynote policy statements that a leader makes would appear to define strategic direction, in reality that is often less clear. Keynote policy statements are often pretty vague and amorphous things until they are translated into working policies, and that is work that is never done by the leader who made the initial statement.
All of this is very true of party leadership and of the office of prime minister as well. The PM may have made a grand statement in a party conference or an election manifesto, but that means nothing whatever until it is translated into deliverable policy by an army of civil servants, by which time it may well resemble only very loosely the vision that the politician initially outlined. They can hire and fire of course, but only (in most cases) within the relatively restricted pool of elected MPs, each of whom will have his or her firmly established strategic vision, to the point where cabinet reshuffles seem less like opportunities to provide strategic direction and more like attempts at herding cats.
And yet, it is the leaders who have made the political weather over time, is it not? There would have been no New Labour revival without Blair, and (obviously) no Thatcherism without Thatcher. And to take the example most closely related to the topic of this post, it was Michael Foot whose appointment hammered the last nail into the coffin of Old Labour, was it not?
Well, yes and no. Thatcher came to define a generation with its unholy amalgam of unbridled free-market capitalism, social division and the diminution of all forms of collective action. Blair was synonymous with Cool Britannia, PFI and the availability of highly skilled, cash-in-hand Polish builders. Yet did they change the weather or simply reflect meteorological changes that would have happened whether they arrived or not?
And what of Michael Foot? A more decent, principled politician it would be hard to identify yet the utter collapse of the Old Labour project did take place on his watch and the worry that the appointment of the modern-day politician who most closely resembles him (Jeremy Corbyn) will have the same effect seems a reasonable one.
I would argue though that the contexts are utterly different, and context is all. The assumption from a cursory analysis of UK history would be that Blair and Thatcher were effective leaders and Foot ineffective, but that is to ignore their context. Blair and Thatcher each in their own ways articulated a desire (which struck a chord with the electorate) for change - for an escape from a set of attitudes and process that people had tired of. In Thatcher's case it was an escape from the ageing and crumbling post-war consensus on the need for large and bureaucratic collective structures (nationalised industries, banks, unions) to to keep the country on the straight and narrow. In Blair's it was the nasty parochial anti-communiarianism of Thatcherism people were fed up of.
But what of Foot? Well it seems to me that he didn't offer the populace escape from anything really. In a time when many people were pretty much fed up of collective action, in "the longest suicide note in history" he proposed more of it. There might have been a great deal of unease about where Thatcher was taking the country, but even the working class (so-called Essex Man) was guiltily seduced by the idea that maybe they wouldn't have to sit through interminable union meetings any longer but could sell their council houses, get a credit card and spend, spend, spend.
Jeremy Corbyn's context is very different. It is free-market capitalism that the general populace is sick to the back teeth of now. They have had enough of city wide-boys putting their pension pots on the 3.45 at Chepstow and laughing all the way to the bank when the bet failed, leaving them having to work until they are 75. There is a depressing uniformity, and has been for years, to what politicians are allowed by their spads to say in public and at least Jeremy Corbyn is saying something different, and even appearing to say what he thinks rather than what a focus group in Wolverhampton has determined is the most electorally acceptable thing for him to say.
Being a refreshing voice on the media circuit is very different to being party leader of course, let alone PM, but what is interesting is the effect Corbyn has had during the campaign, even on what one might think to have been the archetypal tough audience- his leadership opponents. Until he emerged as the potential winner the Labour leadership[ contenders appeared to be vying with each other for the "Blandest Political Statement Imaginable" prize - desperate to show how electable they would be by never saying anything whatever that might alarm or offend (or indeed interest) anyone at all. Yet, stung into action by Corbyn's direct honesty and inexplicable popularity they have suddenly started coming up with ideas that one couldn't imagine having been pre-approved by Conservative Central Office. Yvette Cooper caught the changing public mood rejecting Tory little-Englandism by arguing for the admission of 10,000 Syrian refugees and Andy Burnham said he would include Corbyn in his cabinet and agreed with many of his ideas.
And I can't imagine Corbyn being a Brown-like control freak intent on stifling any and all opinions that are not congruent with his own world-view. The role he has laid out for himself in the campaign is something between what Belbin would call a 'co-ordinator' and a 'plant' and that really isn't a bad position for a party leader, or indeed a PM, to take. If he can regenerate the self-belief and political engagement of the Labour party and remind them why they (presumably) got into politics in the first place then maybe all he has to do is make a few high-minded statements of principle and let others get on with the business of translating those into policy.
For too long Labour has been frightened of its own shadow and ashamed of the political compromises they have had to make to cling to power. But that is no sort of atmosphere to bring out the best in people. So if Corbyn at least gets people thinking a bit and gives his colleagues the confidence occasionally to say what they actually think, then maybe that is all that the Labour party needs.
We'll have to wait and see.
Friday, 14 August 2015
Why the anti-Jeremy Corbyn vitriol?
Jeremy Corbyn's unlikely emergence as the clear front-runner to succeed poor Ed seems to have got the Labour party all in a tizzy. At one level this is amusing: surely only the Labour party would become so terrified when one of its leadership contenders turned out to be popular. At another level though it is initially baffling that so many Labour stalwarts seem so keen to predict electoral meltdown, internal schisms, fire, pestilence and eternal damnation should a mild-mannered North London intellectual be elected to become their leader.
Some degree of antagonism during an election process is inevitable of course - how does one rescue a failing campaign except by attacking one's more successful rival? However what we have seen of recent days has been an order beyond that. There seems a real hatred of Jeremy Corbyn and all he stands for - odd, since the hatred seems one-way. He by contrast has refused to engage in mud-slinging and appears to be conducting a campaign remarkably free from vitriol. Even his supporter Ken Livingstone, usually the first to enter any slanging match, accused Tony Blair of no more than having failed to read Corbyn's manifesto.
So what is it all about, this hatred? Why did Blair accuse Corbyn of seeking to 'annihilate' labour and why did Alistair Campbell urge Labour voters to support 'anyone but Corbyn'?
The Corbynistas' view would be a simple one of course. Blair and Campbell are the spawn of the devil and all the other candidates have been brainwashed by their evil campaign to turn Labour into an offshoot of the Tory party. New Labour was a cynical betrayal of everything true believers like them held dear and so New Labour cannot forgive heroic mavericks like Jeremy Corbyn who speak truth to power and question its legacy.
There is some truth in this of course, but also some wilful fantasy. Many of Corbyn's supporters probably are champagne socialists plotting the downfall of the capitalist hegemony from the comfort of their Georgian townhouses, safe in the knowledge that whatever radical policies he pursues it won't touch their final-salary pensions or (horror of horrors) lead to house price deflation. Also, much as it soured towards the end, Blair's New Labour project certainly did do some good things. In the shadow of Iraq it is easy to forget the minimum wage, capital investment in schools, reductions in child poverty, Third World debt write-offs, peace in Northern Ireland... I could go on.
It is also pretty absurd to suggest that Blair and others hate Jeremy Corbyn because he stands for social justice and a protective State. For all their differences of opinion on methods, surely Labour supporters broadly agree on ideals. So why the hatred then?
Partly of course it is the simple fact that there is no conflict more vicious than an internecine conflict. The human species seems to reserve its bitterest hatred for those most like themselves: the Jews and the Arabs; the Northern Ireland Protestants and the Northern Ireland Catholics; Indian Kashmiris and Pakistani Kashmiris; New Labour and Old Labour. Where fundamental values and cultures are entirely different we seem to rub along pretty well: it is only when we are identical but for one small, but (to us) hugely important, difference that we start killing each other in significant numbers.
There is more to it than that though. Labour has had its fair share of internecine hatreds, even before Iraq, but Blair's outbursts recently, and those of other party stalwarts, feel different. For a start they have not come in the context of an unedifying cat-fight of the sort politicians seem particularly prone to. Jeremy Corbyn is not fighting back (he doesn't need to. He is sitting pretty on 53% in the polls). The hatred seems to be self-generating, and coupled with what appears a genuine fear of an existential crisis for the Labour party.
So why would that be then?
Well, oddly enough I have a theory. I think the explanation lies in a variant of the 'zealous convert' syndrome, by which converts to a religion are frequently more antagonistic to their old beliefs than those who have never converted. Blair, Campbell and the rest seem to me to have just the same uneasy, fearful hatred of Jeremy Corbyn as would a zealous convert of worshippers at their own old church.
You see, much as I never liked or trusted him that much I simply cannot believe that Tony Blair joined the Labour Party with the explicit desire to subvert its fundamental principles in a swivel-eyed pursuit of Thatcherite neo-Conservatism. I remember the honest idealism of his first term. As a country we were reeling from Thatcher's onslaught and Blair brought back some sense of social responsibility, of interest in and care for the under-privileged and of an ethical dimension to policy.
The thing is that, like all serious politicians, Blair was a realist. See things from his point of view and there was a logic to his drift to the Right (sort of). Free enterprise and the unfettered power of capital seemed (at the time) a hugely powerful force which could, if harnessed properly, lead to real social good. And for a time it worked. Brown let the bankers off the leash and Labour used the money that came rolling in for some fantastically valuable investment in schools, hospitals and the incomes of the less well-off. Win-win, surely.
Yet there are consequences to selling one's soul, even for the best of motives. Blair, Brown and the rest knew that financial deregulation and the opening of public services to private enterprise was making some people hugely and unfairly wealthy and eroding something central in the UK's view of itself. Yet they went along with it with the slightly manic zeal of recent converts to a charismatic cult. Peter Mandelson's use of the word 'intensely' to show just how relaxed he was at people becoming extremely wealthy shows the internal tensions they were all living with though. Surely even he could have spotted the absurdity of the oxymoron.
And now it is those zealous converts to New Labour that face the existential crisis. Like Faustus, having sold their souls they then discover not just the price, but the illusory nature of the prize too. It is not just that New Labour's reputation now seems (unfairly, in some ways) tarnished beyond recovery, it is also that the unsavoury weapon (neo-conservative economic policies) they gritted their teeth to grasp in pursuit of their aims turns out not to have been a very useful weapon at all. Bank deregulation didn't give us riches beyond the dreams of avarice, it bankrupted us for a generation.
And what Jeremy Corbyn does that is completely unforgivable is to remind them that the uncomfortable road they bravely chose to follow in pursuit of their noble aims really wasn't the only road at all. And didn't take them quite where they wanted to go either. But one thing a zealous convert will never do, however conflicted (s)he might feel and however uneasy deep down about their new religion, is to convert back again.
So don't expect a gracious acceptance of Jeremy Corbyn's victory form Tony Blair any time soon.
Some degree of antagonism during an election process is inevitable of course - how does one rescue a failing campaign except by attacking one's more successful rival? However what we have seen of recent days has been an order beyond that. There seems a real hatred of Jeremy Corbyn and all he stands for - odd, since the hatred seems one-way. He by contrast has refused to engage in mud-slinging and appears to be conducting a campaign remarkably free from vitriol. Even his supporter Ken Livingstone, usually the first to enter any slanging match, accused Tony Blair of no more than having failed to read Corbyn's manifesto.
So what is it all about, this hatred? Why did Blair accuse Corbyn of seeking to 'annihilate' labour and why did Alistair Campbell urge Labour voters to support 'anyone but Corbyn'?
The Corbynistas' view would be a simple one of course. Blair and Campbell are the spawn of the devil and all the other candidates have been brainwashed by their evil campaign to turn Labour into an offshoot of the Tory party. New Labour was a cynical betrayal of everything true believers like them held dear and so New Labour cannot forgive heroic mavericks like Jeremy Corbyn who speak truth to power and question its legacy.
There is some truth in this of course, but also some wilful fantasy. Many of Corbyn's supporters probably are champagne socialists plotting the downfall of the capitalist hegemony from the comfort of their Georgian townhouses, safe in the knowledge that whatever radical policies he pursues it won't touch their final-salary pensions or (horror of horrors) lead to house price deflation. Also, much as it soured towards the end, Blair's New Labour project certainly did do some good things. In the shadow of Iraq it is easy to forget the minimum wage, capital investment in schools, reductions in child poverty, Third World debt write-offs, peace in Northern Ireland... I could go on.
It is also pretty absurd to suggest that Blair and others hate Jeremy Corbyn because he stands for social justice and a protective State. For all their differences of opinion on methods, surely Labour supporters broadly agree on ideals. So why the hatred then?
Partly of course it is the simple fact that there is no conflict more vicious than an internecine conflict. The human species seems to reserve its bitterest hatred for those most like themselves: the Jews and the Arabs; the Northern Ireland Protestants and the Northern Ireland Catholics; Indian Kashmiris and Pakistani Kashmiris; New Labour and Old Labour. Where fundamental values and cultures are entirely different we seem to rub along pretty well: it is only when we are identical but for one small, but (to us) hugely important, difference that we start killing each other in significant numbers.
There is more to it than that though. Labour has had its fair share of internecine hatreds, even before Iraq, but Blair's outbursts recently, and those of other party stalwarts, feel different. For a start they have not come in the context of an unedifying cat-fight of the sort politicians seem particularly prone to. Jeremy Corbyn is not fighting back (he doesn't need to. He is sitting pretty on 53% in the polls). The hatred seems to be self-generating, and coupled with what appears a genuine fear of an existential crisis for the Labour party.
So why would that be then?
Well, oddly enough I have a theory. I think the explanation lies in a variant of the 'zealous convert' syndrome, by which converts to a religion are frequently more antagonistic to their old beliefs than those who have never converted. Blair, Campbell and the rest seem to me to have just the same uneasy, fearful hatred of Jeremy Corbyn as would a zealous convert of worshippers at their own old church.
You see, much as I never liked or trusted him that much I simply cannot believe that Tony Blair joined the Labour Party with the explicit desire to subvert its fundamental principles in a swivel-eyed pursuit of Thatcherite neo-Conservatism. I remember the honest idealism of his first term. As a country we were reeling from Thatcher's onslaught and Blair brought back some sense of social responsibility, of interest in and care for the under-privileged and of an ethical dimension to policy.
The thing is that, like all serious politicians, Blair was a realist. See things from his point of view and there was a logic to his drift to the Right (sort of). Free enterprise and the unfettered power of capital seemed (at the time) a hugely powerful force which could, if harnessed properly, lead to real social good. And for a time it worked. Brown let the bankers off the leash and Labour used the money that came rolling in for some fantastically valuable investment in schools, hospitals and the incomes of the less well-off. Win-win, surely.
Yet there are consequences to selling one's soul, even for the best of motives. Blair, Brown and the rest knew that financial deregulation and the opening of public services to private enterprise was making some people hugely and unfairly wealthy and eroding something central in the UK's view of itself. Yet they went along with it with the slightly manic zeal of recent converts to a charismatic cult. Peter Mandelson's use of the word 'intensely' to show just how relaxed he was at people becoming extremely wealthy shows the internal tensions they were all living with though. Surely even he could have spotted the absurdity of the oxymoron.
And now it is those zealous converts to New Labour that face the existential crisis. Like Faustus, having sold their souls they then discover not just the price, but the illusory nature of the prize too. It is not just that New Labour's reputation now seems (unfairly, in some ways) tarnished beyond recovery, it is also that the unsavoury weapon (neo-conservative economic policies) they gritted their teeth to grasp in pursuit of their aims turns out not to have been a very useful weapon at all. Bank deregulation didn't give us riches beyond the dreams of avarice, it bankrupted us for a generation.
And what Jeremy Corbyn does that is completely unforgivable is to remind them that the uncomfortable road they bravely chose to follow in pursuit of their noble aims really wasn't the only road at all. And didn't take them quite where they wanted to go either. But one thing a zealous convert will never do, however conflicted (s)he might feel and however uneasy deep down about their new religion, is to convert back again.
So don't expect a gracious acceptance of Jeremy Corbyn's victory form Tony Blair any time soon.
Wednesday, 30 July 2014
Leadership in politics
Following Ed Milliband's recent speech there has been another outpouring of commentary on the nature of effective political leadership. Specifically, can Milliband ever demonstrate it, and is there a role for it any more in today's focus grouped and spin doctored political climate?
Before discussing Milliband's or Cameron's abilities as political leaders, I would like to focus on the broader question of what effective leadership actually is. There have probably been millions of words written (and delivered by inspirational speakers with face mikes) on this subject, and countless academic and commercial institutions dedicated to its study so it is perhaps impertinent of me to think that I have anything to add. Ah well, that has never stopped me in the past, so here goes.
One aspect of effective leadership that I do not believe has been sufficiently discussed is the extent to which leaders hold up a mirror to their followers. Effectiveness in leadership (the consensus seems to be) should be defined not by what the leader does or says but by what the followers achieve. The kind of leader (known as the "hero head" in schools) who focuses all of their attention on their own inspirational dynamism has long been shown not to be particularly successful.- the conductor who spends all his time blowing his own trumpet isn't going to get much of a performance out of the orchestra.
Yet truly effective leadership is about more than just supporting ones followers and letting them get on with it. Leaders need to inspire and motivate too. The most effective leaders render themselves redundant eventually as their followers, invigorated, empowered and united, set off in pursuit of a common goal. Yet paradoxically the followers would not have been able to achieve that degree of energy, self confidence or unity alone. It was the leader who brought out those qualities and forged that sense of shared purpose.
So how do leaders do that? Partly no doubt it can be about personal charisma and visionary thinking, but these qualities only take one so far. Indeed in some contexts they can get you stoned to death as a heretic rather than lauded as a leader. And in a more mundane context we will have all come across people who are personally charming and/or full of excellent ideas but no one seems particularly inclined to follow them in any important respect.
Partly it is to do with social structures. The boss of a company or the Prime Minister of a country becomes its de facto leader and to some extent people get into the habit of seeing them as such. So even when David Cameron made an utter tit of himself over the Jean-Claude Junckers affair he was seen (by the Press at least) as leading the UK into battle with the reactionary forces of the old EU.
But mostly, I believe, an effective leader does it by showing their followers an image of themselves that is more dynamic and forceful and more focused on the goals the leader wants them to strive for. I was about to say 'better' but of course it is not always clear that the image leaders show followers of themselves is better in any real sense. Churchill presented the British wartime population with an image of themselves as stoically pessimistic, resilient, iconoclastic and always ready for a bit of a laugh at anything and that image was uplifting in a sense. However Churchill was not the only effective wartime leader. Hitler showed the German people themselves as the inevitable inheritors of the New World Order: strong, efficient and ruthlessly intolerant of weakness or impurity in others. Stalin revealed to the Russian people their own brutal vindictiveness, their paranoid distrust and their willingness to submit to tyrannical overlordship in the face of external threats.
So what of today's leaders? Obama I think did briefly show Americans themselves, not as they were but as they could be. However as the machinery of State surrounded him and took him further and further from the people, and as his own ethics became fatally compromised by extra-judicial killings in Pakistan and the Yemen the clarity of that vision clouded and few Americans seem to see any version of themselves in him any more.
The leaders I am most interested in in this regard though are David Cameron and Ed Milliband. How successfully does each of them hold up a mirror to the British public?
In the case of David Cameron it seems, extraordinarily, that he does it very successfully indeed. This is not because he is particularly empathetic towards, or even that interested in, the lives and attitudes of ordinary British people. He is clearly an arrogant, over-privileged toff with nothing whatever in common with any but a tiny minority of the richest members of the electorate. He has also lead a government that has shown frightening contempt for the well-being of a large tranche of the population at the opposite end of the wealth scale.
However the version of themselves that David Cameron shows the British people is remarkably in tune with his own relationship with them. He shows the British people themselves as resentfully sorry for themselves, baffled by modernity, distrustful of the big bad world beyond the Channel yet simultaneously convinced that everything British (including schools, the NHS and the civil service) is by definition crap. And so they allow him, nay work with him, to isolate Britain in Europe, tear up the institutions that made this country what it is and punish the weakest and poorest in society for their temerity in being weak and poor.
With Ed Milliband the case is very different. He appears to be of the Gordon Brown school in this regard, with no apparent connection to the British electorate at all. Tony Blair was hugely successful in showing his followers a vision of themselves as younger, trendier, more metropolitan and European- in short, more New Labour. Until his messiah complex got the better of him and he drifted away into the self-delusion that led us into Iraq and Afghanistan. However Gordon Brown and now Ed Milliband were utter disasters in this regard.
The most revealing incident for me was the notorious occasion when Gordon Brown (thinking he was off camera) called a Labour voter, Gillian Duffy, a "bigoted woman." What was key for me was not so much the incident itself (Gordon Brown was never known for his social skills) but the scale of the mea culpa that Brown indulged in afterwards. You see, it seems that Labour have become so terrified of being seen as out of tune with the electorate that they are desperate to pander to the lowest common denominator on subjects such as immigration, welfare 'reform' and crime. And Ed Milliband, badgered by his spin doctors to appear more 'a man of the people' adopts cringeworthy poses that actually just emphasise the opposite.
This is not authentic leadership. This is not even showing the electorate an image of themselves that inspires them to follow. Churchill was about as far from being a man of the people as it is possible to get and he made no compromises in his addresses to the populace. He told them that he had nothing to offer them but blood, toil, tears and sweat and they followed him almost to a (wo)man. What Ed Milliband (or somebody on the left) desperately needs to do if they are to provide the sort of leadership this country needs is to say to the electorate, "You are better than this! As British citizens you believe in decency and fairness and you are not going to stand for this dismantling of the Welfare State. You have always supported the underdog and you will again, whether the underdog be a homeless family in Birmingham or a newly arrived Syrian refugee."
That is an image of itself that I genuinely believe Britain could unite behind, but Ed Milliband is running out of time to show it to the electorate. His recent speech saying that he was about substance not image was all very well and it outlined some of his core beliefs and principals, but frankly the British people don't particularly want to know what Ed Milliband thinks. They want to know what they think- what they should believe in. How they should live their lives.
And if Ed Milliband doesn't tell them then David Cameron and Nigel Farage certainly will.
Before discussing Milliband's or Cameron's abilities as political leaders, I would like to focus on the broader question of what effective leadership actually is. There have probably been millions of words written (and delivered by inspirational speakers with face mikes) on this subject, and countless academic and commercial institutions dedicated to its study so it is perhaps impertinent of me to think that I have anything to add. Ah well, that has never stopped me in the past, so here goes.
One aspect of effective leadership that I do not believe has been sufficiently discussed is the extent to which leaders hold up a mirror to their followers. Effectiveness in leadership (the consensus seems to be) should be defined not by what the leader does or says but by what the followers achieve. The kind of leader (known as the "hero head" in schools) who focuses all of their attention on their own inspirational dynamism has long been shown not to be particularly successful.- the conductor who spends all his time blowing his own trumpet isn't going to get much of a performance out of the orchestra.
Yet truly effective leadership is about more than just supporting ones followers and letting them get on with it. Leaders need to inspire and motivate too. The most effective leaders render themselves redundant eventually as their followers, invigorated, empowered and united, set off in pursuit of a common goal. Yet paradoxically the followers would not have been able to achieve that degree of energy, self confidence or unity alone. It was the leader who brought out those qualities and forged that sense of shared purpose.
So how do leaders do that? Partly no doubt it can be about personal charisma and visionary thinking, but these qualities only take one so far. Indeed in some contexts they can get you stoned to death as a heretic rather than lauded as a leader. And in a more mundane context we will have all come across people who are personally charming and/or full of excellent ideas but no one seems particularly inclined to follow them in any important respect.
Partly it is to do with social structures. The boss of a company or the Prime Minister of a country becomes its de facto leader and to some extent people get into the habit of seeing them as such. So even when David Cameron made an utter tit of himself over the Jean-Claude Junckers affair he was seen (by the Press at least) as leading the UK into battle with the reactionary forces of the old EU.
But mostly, I believe, an effective leader does it by showing their followers an image of themselves that is more dynamic and forceful and more focused on the goals the leader wants them to strive for. I was about to say 'better' but of course it is not always clear that the image leaders show followers of themselves is better in any real sense. Churchill presented the British wartime population with an image of themselves as stoically pessimistic, resilient, iconoclastic and always ready for a bit of a laugh at anything and that image was uplifting in a sense. However Churchill was not the only effective wartime leader. Hitler showed the German people themselves as the inevitable inheritors of the New World Order: strong, efficient and ruthlessly intolerant of weakness or impurity in others. Stalin revealed to the Russian people their own brutal vindictiveness, their paranoid distrust and their willingness to submit to tyrannical overlordship in the face of external threats.
So what of today's leaders? Obama I think did briefly show Americans themselves, not as they were but as they could be. However as the machinery of State surrounded him and took him further and further from the people, and as his own ethics became fatally compromised by extra-judicial killings in Pakistan and the Yemen the clarity of that vision clouded and few Americans seem to see any version of themselves in him any more.
The leaders I am most interested in in this regard though are David Cameron and Ed Milliband. How successfully does each of them hold up a mirror to the British public?
In the case of David Cameron it seems, extraordinarily, that he does it very successfully indeed. This is not because he is particularly empathetic towards, or even that interested in, the lives and attitudes of ordinary British people. He is clearly an arrogant, over-privileged toff with nothing whatever in common with any but a tiny minority of the richest members of the electorate. He has also lead a government that has shown frightening contempt for the well-being of a large tranche of the population at the opposite end of the wealth scale.
However the version of themselves that David Cameron shows the British people is remarkably in tune with his own relationship with them. He shows the British people themselves as resentfully sorry for themselves, baffled by modernity, distrustful of the big bad world beyond the Channel yet simultaneously convinced that everything British (including schools, the NHS and the civil service) is by definition crap. And so they allow him, nay work with him, to isolate Britain in Europe, tear up the institutions that made this country what it is and punish the weakest and poorest in society for their temerity in being weak and poor.
With Ed Milliband the case is very different. He appears to be of the Gordon Brown school in this regard, with no apparent connection to the British electorate at all. Tony Blair was hugely successful in showing his followers a vision of themselves as younger, trendier, more metropolitan and European- in short, more New Labour. Until his messiah complex got the better of him and he drifted away into the self-delusion that led us into Iraq and Afghanistan. However Gordon Brown and now Ed Milliband were utter disasters in this regard.
The most revealing incident for me was the notorious occasion when Gordon Brown (thinking he was off camera) called a Labour voter, Gillian Duffy, a "bigoted woman." What was key for me was not so much the incident itself (Gordon Brown was never known for his social skills) but the scale of the mea culpa that Brown indulged in afterwards. You see, it seems that Labour have become so terrified of being seen as out of tune with the electorate that they are desperate to pander to the lowest common denominator on subjects such as immigration, welfare 'reform' and crime. And Ed Milliband, badgered by his spin doctors to appear more 'a man of the people' adopts cringeworthy poses that actually just emphasise the opposite.
This is not authentic leadership. This is not even showing the electorate an image of themselves that inspires them to follow. Churchill was about as far from being a man of the people as it is possible to get and he made no compromises in his addresses to the populace. He told them that he had nothing to offer them but blood, toil, tears and sweat and they followed him almost to a (wo)man. What Ed Milliband (or somebody on the left) desperately needs to do if they are to provide the sort of leadership this country needs is to say to the electorate, "You are better than this! As British citizens you believe in decency and fairness and you are not going to stand for this dismantling of the Welfare State. You have always supported the underdog and you will again, whether the underdog be a homeless family in Birmingham or a newly arrived Syrian refugee."
That is an image of itself that I genuinely believe Britain could unite behind, but Ed Milliband is running out of time to show it to the electorate. His recent speech saying that he was about substance not image was all very well and it outlined some of his core beliefs and principals, but frankly the British people don't particularly want to know what Ed Milliband thinks. They want to know what they think- what they should believe in. How they should live their lives.
And if Ed Milliband doesn't tell them then David Cameron and Nigel Farage certainly will.
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