John Fraser
I don’t know what I expected to see when I walked out of the United Kingdom’s Parliament building, in the shadow of the iconic Big Ben, but a child in a rubber Donald Trump mask wasn’t it. And yet there he was, a reminder of the fact that, these days, all politics are global.
I was in London to get a closer look at the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon. While American exceptionalism tends to make people in the United States think our situation is unique, similar threads run through the body politic of many countries. Since the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recessions, the West has been defined by a series of shocks: crumbling institutions, austerity policies that prompt rebellions, social movements decrying inequity in the streets, and the rise of the far right and social-democratic left as the center hollows out.
In other words, Trumpism is just rightwing populism with an American mask, and Bernie Sanders is only one part of a rising international left.
The U.K. Labour Party’s shifts often mirror those in the U.S. Democratic Party. The current shift has brought us the improbable ascent of Corbyn, a longtime member of Labour’s left wing. Not only has he risen to a leadership position within his party, but there are polls suggesting he’d be prime minister if an election were held tomorrow.
Labour’s thirty-seat gain in last June’s snap general election—beating back a Conservative Party that averaged a seventeen-point lead in early polls—was a more dramatic political shift than that of a few thousand Obama voters who helped elect Trump in 2016. And the party did so despite the near-unanimous enmity of the press and even opposition from its own Members of Parliament.
The massive gain rippled around the world, giving hope to the left that a leader more comfortable at a street protest than at the glittering Davos World Economic Forum could challenge an internationally ascendant right. Where the political center had saluted France’s Emmanuel Macron as a bulwark against the far-right National Front, the left saw in Jeremy Corbyn the possibility of pushing back the tide of inequality.
Since the election, Corbyn has continued to face attacks from the right and from within Labour, but seems increasingly confident in his ability to reshape the party as an instrument for mass politics. A Democratic Party still seeking an identity with which to combat Trumpism could learn a thing or two.
“At the Labour Party conference, I used to go out and hold the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament banner. It was me, Jeremy Corbyn, and a few other people and everybody just walked past us,” recalls Ian Hodson, now national president of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union, the trade union behind the United Kingdom’s version of the Fight for $15 campaign. “His politics haven’t changed: improve the lives of people, represent the interests of ordinary people in the country.”
When the fast food protests began, Hodson says, Corbyn was one of a few Labour Party officials who would turn up, megaphone in hand. Yet even those who liked Corbyn did not foresee him as Labour leader.
In 2014, with Ed Miliband in charge, Labour changed its leadership election rules to allow rank-and-file members a larger say in selecting the head of the party. Member of Parliament Jon Trickett calls this “a fundamental change in the whole dynamics of the Labour movement.” It allowed “the impasse into which center-left politics had fallen in Britain [to] be broken.”
Corbyn ended up garnering nearly 60 percent of the more than 400,000 votes cast. It was the beginning of a massive surge in party membership. Observers blamed everything from outside agitators to clueless youth. But the truth, Trickett says, is simpler than that. Corbyn understands how social movements related to elections, and, most importantly, “has kept his hands clean of all of the decisions which inaugurated and then sustained neoliberalism.”
Corbyn has kept his hands clean of all of the decisions which inaugurated and then sustained neoliberalism.
The “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States often seems like an awkward, centuries-late apology for all that bloodshed during the Revolutionary War. But especially in recent decades, the twists and turns in each country’s major parties have mirrored one another, and even developed hand-in-hand.
In the 1980s came Reaganism and Thatcherism, rightward turns away from organized labor, and toward privatization and massive tax cuts for the rich—an ideological shift summed up by Thatcher’s famed comment that “there’s no such thing as society.” This set the stage, as Thatcher herself acknowledged, for the ascent of the New Labour party. But first came Clintonism, the “third way” in politics that meant coddling big business and vowing to end “welfare as we know it.” To Tony Blair and his colleagues, this was the way to beat the Tories—by adopting, as Clinton had, their key beliefs, while sanding off the roughest edges.
Blair won in 1997 by accepting privatization and outsourcing, further eroding workers’ rights. Neoliberalism, in the Clinton-Blair years, meant accepting Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative.” The only way forward for Labour or the Democrats was to appeal to enough of their rivals’ voters to eke out a narrow win.
But 2008 changed all that. New Labour was tossed out of office in 2010 for its handling of the financial crisis. Anti-austerity movements rippled across Europe, spreading on the Internet as well as through old-fashioned face-to-face organizing. In Britain, there were massive student protests and the growth of protest movements like U.K. Uncut, a dramatic direct-action movement focused on challenging tax-dodging corporations while public services were being slashed. The United Kingdom even had its own version of Occupy.
The man who supposedly couldn’t win elections kept winning elections, and doing what the centrists had assumed you couldn’t do: bringing new people into political activism.
On the right, immigration became a political football and demagogues like Donald Trump and the U.K. Independence Party’s Nigel Farage rode to fame on promises of economic nationalism. Labour capitulated somewhat to this trend, printing mugs for the 2015 election with “Controls on immigration” on them. But that didn’t save it from being trounced that year, losing twenty-six seats. Labour leader Miliband stepped down, opening a space into which Corbyn moved.
Michael Walker of Novara Media, an independent left media organization that sprang from anti-austerity movements, recalls that growing up under New Labour meant being aware that Labour was the further left of the two main parties, but “still seeing loads of policies you disagreed with—most importantly, the Iraq war.”
Young, politically active people, he says, didn’t see how their activism could fit within the Labour Party. And Labour seemed to return the sentiment: a retired Tony Blair made a speech declaring that leftist politics was not the way forward: “Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it.”
Rachel Godfrey Wood and Rida Vaquas both remember the first year of Corbyn’s leadership as simply “firefighting.” They were part of a group that had begun as an informal list of Corbyn supporters and became, after Corbyn’s upset win in 2015, Momentum, a membership-based organization somewhat like MoveOn.org or Our Revolution, seeking to push Labour to the left. Godfrey Wood became a staff organizer; Vaquas is on its national coordinating group. But for its first year of existence, Momentum mostly had to defend the very idea that Corbyn could lead.
Corbyn was regularly undermined by his own parliamentary colleagues. Labour’s local structures were mostly still in the hands of the centrists and hostile to so-called Corbynistas. Momentum was stymied by a series of press reports alleging that the group was taken over by Trotskyists.
But the main criticism of Corbyn was that he couldn’t win. The mainstream and even the center-left press, not to mention the rightwing tabloids, all argued that a socialist could never win a general election. He was just too far left.
The mainstream and even center-left press, all argued that a socialist could never win a general election. He was just too far left.
When the Labour establishment forced another leadership election in 2016, Momentum and the Corbyn-istas fought once again for the victory they’d already won, and the coup backfired, solidifying Corbyn’s base behind him. “It woke people up that it wasn’t just enough to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and then wait for him to get elected and make nice policies,” Godfrey Wood says. “They actually had to get involved and make it happen.”
Corbyn won his second Labour leadership election with a bigger mandate than before: 62 percent of the vote and another boost in Labour membership, to more than 500,000 members. The man who supposedly couldn’t win elections kept winning elections, and doing what the centrists had assumed you couldn’t do: bringing new people into political activism.
The main difficulty in comparing U.S. to U.K. politics is the difference in political systems. The United Kingdom has a parliamentary party system with leadership elections that determine who will lead and shape the parties’ direction. The United States has loose political parties with leadership decided by insiders, while pretty much anyone (including a lifelong independent democratic socialist) can declare themselves a candidate for the party’s nomination.
Corbyn said from the start that he wanted to turn Labour into a social movement, and as leader has continued to back that up. While Momentum, now with around 35,000 members, is an independent group aligned with the party, Corbyn is also setting up a “community campaign unit.” This will commit party resources to organizing, not just for elections but on day-to-day issues. Those issues can then be connected back to the party’s national priorities, helping leadership stay responsive to the issues facing members on the ground.
Activism in the London Borough of Haringey provides an example of this new strategy. The local council, dominated by Labour’s right wing, put forth a plan to privatize and bulldoze public housing. It was “there is no alternative” on steroids, pushed forward even after most Labour members indicated a preference for Corbynism.
But local activists rebelled and Momentum jumped in to support the residents, forcing out the Haringey council leader. Councilors complained that facing challengers was “undemocratic”—something Americans, with our fractious semi-open primary process, might find funny. The struggle, wrote The Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty, was “an inflection point in one of the great battles of our times: Big Finance versus the rest of us.” And it trickled up to Corbyn’s speech—and policy—at the Labour Party conference in September.
If the global move to the center unleashed politicians’ endless paeans to the “middle class,” the post-2008-crisis movement has brought a measurable shift in people’s perception of their own class status.
“In this time period, where you have such huge inequality,” Vaquas says, “people are deeply angry about the filthy rich right now and are not really in the mood for reconciliation. They want someone who wants to fight for their interests.”
What Corbyn has shown is that new voters will vote if you give them something to show up for, and older voters will come back to a party that stands for something.
Months before the 2017 election, Jon Trickett presented a paper to the Labour leadership calling for “transformational” politics—a break from New Labour’s neoliberal policies. Caught off guard when Prime Minister Theresa May called the snap election in April, Labour scrambled to quickly develop a platform, incorporating the policy work they had begun into the party manifesto.
And then it leaked. Trickett recalls seeing a colleague come in, white as a sheet, saying, “I’ve just been told the papers have got the manifesto.” He thought they were finished. But instead, the manifesto, titled “For the Many, Not the Few,” became hugely popular. It called for higher tax rates for the wealthy; renationalizing mail, utilities, and rail; public housing; free childcare; an end to university tuition; and more—the kinds of policies that Labour had long abandoned.
There can be a backward-looking tendency to social democratic demands, a sort of “make America/England great again” for the left that implies that if we could just turn back the clock to the midcentury, with its welfare state and its union jobs, everything would be fine. But at its best, Corbynism hints at something else: a country where the everyday people not only have free health care and education but are counted on to govern themselves. The Labour left is fighting for a transformed world.
That world includes a radically different view of foreign policy. When two terrorists attacks came in the U.K. during the election process, Corbyn’s response was a speech connecting “wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home.” Instead of prompting a reactionary backlash, it emerged that much of the public agreed with Corbyn’s analysis. It was a massive risk that paid off.
“This shows that people are much smarter than the political elite gives them credit for,” Vaquas says. “If you make an argument and say what you think honestly and openly, people will be able to see it for what it is.” Rather than conceding ground to the opposition—the Clinton-Blair strategy—Corbyn’s Labour frames issues its own way and makes arguments on its own terms.
What Corbyn has shown is that new voters will vote if you give them something to show up for, and older voters will come back to a party that stands for something.
There are now nearly more members of Young Labour than of the entire Liberal Democrats, the traditional third major party. They are backing strikers at Picturehouse and McDonald’s, battling privatization, and working on campaigns that the entire party can agree on. And they are doing it within a formerly moribund legacy political party. All of this is happening because the party took steps to democratize itself, and because its leadership has shown that it is sincere in saying it wants a movement on the ground.
As Corbyn has said, “Our party was formed out of the labor movement and we are a movement once again. By organizing more effectively with communities across the country, not only can we build support to help Labour win elections, form a government and transform our society, we can make real, practical differences to people’s lives, even while in opposition.”
Labour’s gains show that committed activists on the ground matter, and the United States has an army of those activists after a year of protesting Trump. They want Democrats to put up a fight on immigrants’ rights, abortion rights, LGBT rights, health care, and economic inequality. Centrists like Cory Booker have sent early signals to that base by signing on to co-sponsor Bernie Sanders’s single-payer health care bill.
Having a platform of ideas backed with real commitment has helped Labour respond to crises, whether they be the Grenfell fire, which highlighted the lack of concern from political leaders for the very lives of the working class, or the collapse of Carillion, a massive firm that mostly existed to profit from government privatization contracts. In those moments when the existing government looks foolish, clueless, or downright malevolent—as our own does regularly—Labour has a consistent set of answers that focus back in on the public good.
It would take a lot of work to turn the Democratic Party into a vibrant social movement. For most of its history, Labour has already been three steps further down the path toward social democracy. But if there’s anything we should have learned in the years since the financial crisis, it’s that this is no time to think small.
Sarah Jaffe is a reporting fellow at the Nation Institute, the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and the host of Interviews for Resistance, which you can find on our website at www.progressive.org/topics/sarah-jaffe.