So here I am in 2015 and the greatest thing I could hope for, have hoped for, has happened, a democratic socialist has been elected to the position of leader of the Labour Party. Attacked from all sides during his campaign and continuing to be attacked from within and by the press after his (landslide) victory we find ourselves as a nation trying to understand what it all means, why has this happened? And can the left actually bring about the sort of democracy that is actually democratic, in terms that we believe the notion of democracy to be, in our mythical understanding of the word? I make the comment that the understanding is mythical because I believe, like many others do, that what is understood as democracy and what is practiced under the current politic are two very distinct trajectories. Professor Rick Roderick once said that “the most dangerous ideology to yours is the one that yours claims to be, because somebody might actually ask you to do what you say”, and by that token we witness the new problematic Corbynism, a problem of attempting to make Britain an actually democracy, rather than a simply nominal one, with input from the populous, forums of debate and policy making power wretched from the hands of the internally self-appointed few and opened up to the many.
A new dawn has broken and in the emerging light step forward those from within the party who wish to beat-back or dilute Corbynism, those who name themselves, and have their media friends refer to them as, moderates rather than structure-traditionalists now under threat. Their arguments are careful (for who in politics wishes to appear against the masses) but their rhetoric is clear, they wish a return to the Blairite pragmatism of winning elections by being better Tories than the Tories are. To position oneself as MP is to have trust placed in that position from the people of a constituency to go to parliament and speak for them, to be their voice amongst others who are doing the same, is it not a betrayal of that covenant to then resist the overwhelming membership of their own party in order to protect individual power from mass power, individual ambitions from mass ambition?
This is the Labour Party after all, the party of the lower middle and working classes, the party of the working majority and the impoverished minority, the working man, the single mother, the immigrant, the sexually liberated, the disabled and the sick, the out-of-work builder or plumber. This very party rose to prominence in the early part of the 20th century on a mandate of mass democratic inclusion, to see justice done universally, to fight exceptionalism and elitism, to end gender inequality, to wrest power from the wallet and give it to the ballot, to change a system that was wholly unrepresentative but still called itself democratic. The labour Party of Corbyn seeks now to destroy the last remnants of an empire, an empire that once oppressed, exploited and marginalised nearly two thirds of the world’s population, an empire that still remains intact at home in the form of un-democratic institutions and traditions such as a sitting parliament that has power and influence but does not answer to the people or a privileged and politically active monarchy whose criminal or diplomatic indiscretions cannot even be discussed by our elected representatives, an empire that we should be happy to see the back of and embarrassed rather than proud to recall. Our history doesn’t remember the Vikings with romanticism or the Roman occupation as liberation; clearly it is only when we ourselves or our ancestors are the aggressor and the oppressor that we can be prideful.
As to the current derision of Corbyn the press are complicit, theirs is an attempt to sell copy by calling debate division instead of democracy; they highlight difference where there is dialogue. Pluralism is the condition in which two opposing positions combine to give an outcome that may not entirely please any side but will at least appease them and that is what Corbyn, not the media, stands for. The media employed little pluralism in its debates and political programming preferring instead to centre their polemic around the real possibility of a necessary destruction of the status quo, a status that (not accidentally) they have come to wield great power within. Owen Jones talks about the relationship between big business, government and the media as being a Revolving Door through which the upper middle class are constantly travelling and by this he means that a threat to the structure of one has the same impact on the others, they are small parts of a greater whole. A threat to the way the business of politics is done is an immediate threat to those that have long since bought and paid for the mainstream corporate media as well as ensuring future directorships for the MPs who do their bidding, MPs that are themselves manipulated into position through their links with Lords, media tycoons and CEOs. It is no accident that David Cameron is the PM, he has been groomed from above, he is their man.
Corbyn is clearly a man of principal and just as clearly not a man of personal ambition, I see that as a good thing rather than a weakness, how many times have you worked alongside ambitious individuals and known that they are not to be trusted? He is a servant of his constituency, a follower of the populous; he represents all that a leader should be with his humble, friendly and approachable nature, he is in stark contrast to the leader he opposes across the floor, a leader who forces poverty on those who cannot afford it for the sake of those who cannot bear to part with their fortunes even if their current troubles are of their own doing. I bailed out rich people, I lost public services that my family and friends needed, I will make sacrifices and do without so that the richest members of my species can keep their Ferraris and their sprawling mansions.
The reason I called this essay Missing Hitch is to highlight a weakness on my part, a weakness that I fear all that follow politics may share and may be unaware of. I once needed the media to tell me what I thought about the world, I would watch the news with an open mind and a journalist would mediate the struggles of apartheid South Africa and sectarian Northern Ireland through the square device in the corner and I was sure I knew my own mind, I once believed that Nelson Mandela deserved to rot in jail, strikers were anarchists and that the British Empire had brought civilisation to parts of the world where there was previously only barbarism. The reason I mention Hitch is because I once hung on every word, quite wrongly, while I was a serving soldier and while the towers fell in New York, of his support of the wars in the Middle East and his proposal that any Iraq that emerged would be better for the Iraqis than the one they had under Saddam. Time has proven me, him and the supporters of those conflicts wrong.
We look to the media to inform us but we find it indoctrinating us instead with its well presented corporate rhetoric, as Marx once suggested, “The ruling ideals of the ruling classes”. Television, newspaper and radio are no longer impartial institutions, they grant themselves the roles of parent and as such try to keep us as children, believing in Santa and the tooth fairy and monsters under the bed, using all their resources to ensure the survival of a system that is lawful but not moral. I will turn on the TV tonight as usual and I will tune into the news but before every piece of journalism I am asked to absorb I will first question myself, Ce Bono? (Who benefits?) As should you. Anyway, I still miss the Hitch for all he was right about.
Paul S Wilson
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