Many people fear that Jeremy Corbyn’s election as leader will throw Labour into a policy war so long drawn out that it will end up in the zombie world of the undead and unelectable (like the Liberal Democrats). Corbyn has already been subjected to unfavourable comparisons with previous Labour leaders but in truth he is incomparable. Never before has someone just wandered in from the street, as it were, and been crowned. Only 20 MPs support him but party activists love him and it is clear he is capable of reaching the parts other politicians cannot reach – particularly the young. New Labour doesn’t know how to take him on. The Tories don’t know whether to take him on. The press – all the press, not just The Guardian – search for some sort of benchmark. This being an English party now, it’s only a matter of time before George Orwell is brought in to see how Jeremy measures up.
Orwell spent half his life caught between his hatred of ideology and his belief in socialism. As a socialist he felt he was obliged to support the working-class (aka “The People”), and even like them, and believe in them. As an Old Etonian middle-class socialist however, he knew that liking and believing in the exploited class meant not liking, and not believing in, his own class and that, in some visceral way, meant not liking or believing in himself (a tolerable position perhaps for a writer but absolutely impossible in every other respect). Orwell was convinced, therefore, that all middle-class socialists must be hiding something. Which is to say, he saw left intellectuals as in hoc to socialism as an ideology – not their own true feelings – and ideology, as everyone knows, is about power. Lest we forget, INGSOC was a party of left intellectuals.
If he couldn’t abolish himself, and he couldn’t be ideological, Orwell’s way out was to invoke a deeply English middle-class sense of personal duty to the poor and underprivileged. ‘Politics’ therefore was something he elected to do on their behalf; writing about it was his art. His cultural writing was warm and original. He found his best subject in the English people. His political writing, on the other hand, could be cold and brutal, especially when he sensed the lies behind the ideology, as he did in Burma and Spain.
So how does Jeremy measure up to Orwell? To begin with, the two men have more in common than a posh school and no degree. Apart from their obvious points of resemblance – from anti-colonialism and anti-war to bikes and allotments – both men believed in the power of the state to make life more agreeable for the majority. And although commentators will find in Orwell things to throw at Corbyn to make him look like a crank, the truth is, should they have met on Upper Street one bright Saturday morning and gone for a latte, there is much in one that the other would have warmed to.
Except, of course, that the Labour leader is indisputably a middle-class socialist, and to put it mildly, Corbyn is not the least ideological of MPs. The sheer global range of his ‘positions’ on this and that and everywhere suggests an ideological rather than a sceptical frame of mind – a man who gives the impression of someone not used to real debate and knowing what he thinks even before he thinks it. He uses the 250,000 who voted for him, rhetorically, like a Leninist stick against all those in the party who disagree with him, particularly the MPs. We have yet to see whether he will turn that virtual army into a cadre inside the party. And yet, in spite of Corbyn’s old Trotskyite friends, Orwell could not have helped noticing how easily the Labour leader mixes on the street and, far from being the sort of deracinated left intellectual that gave Orwell “the creeps”, and made him “sick”, that he has represented and lived in his constituency for over thirty years. Anyone who rides a bike round London is not trying to hide from anybody.
But what does he keep under his helmet? Corbyn, for all his ordinariness, is the high priest of “What Is Universally True”. In a long tradition of the platform in these islands, he is against all that is “wrong” and in favour of all that is “true” before seconding the motion. But what then? What about actual workable sustainable realistic coherent government? Robbing Peter to half pay Paul might mean the premium falls on Petra not Peter. Helping one set of people may be at the expense of another equally deserving set of people. Grabbing the levers of state might not get you what you want because the state is itself a variable. Punishing the financial sector is one thing; what do you do when the markets move against you is another.
At which point Jeremy’s International Socialism springs to mind – the perfect partner for the “What Is Universally True” Party. One doesn’t expect to look under Jeremy’s helmet and find Anne Hathaway’s Cottage or Danny Boyle’s Isles of Wonder, but the man never shows much sympathy for the history and culture of his own country except as a testing ground for human rights. Indeed, unlike Orwell he never shows much political interest in history and culture generally. His Brighton speech made literary reference to Okri and Angelou, but only as bolt-ons and after-thoughts (“that man’s a genius”).
Corbyn won the Labour leadership but if he is going to win the country he is going to have to keep the bike and look again under the helmet. Above all, he is going to have to make connections with his own party and the British people that might make for disconnections with himself which, for a man who hasn’t changed his mind in 40 years, is not going to be easy. What is more, he hasn’t got much time. Electoral failure in May will see the sharpening of the knives. Electoral success will see panic over what to think next. He may even have to read some Orwell.
The political future suddenly looks interesting.
Featured image credit: Big Ben. Public domain via Pixabay.
Recent Comments
There are currently no comments.