John McDonnell: Be Nice to Keir

The ever awful Daily Express were crowing Friday morning about "Corbynistas at war" because ... John McDonnell had said nice things about Keir Starmer. Speaking on Times Radio, Big John said the Labour leader has got his approach to the government during the crisis "exactly right". Taking a constructive tone to opposition while pointing out Tory failure is helpful for getting "much wider leeway" in the media. "We’re on the same page. Sometimes I’ll want the party to be a bit more vociferous on some of these things, but that’s a matter of style. As long as we get the point across." If only the so-called rebels of the last five years were as graceful when they had the chance, eh?

What to make of this? Capitulation? Selling out? From his long-time reputation as the hard bastard of the parliamentary left, in recent years John has affected a more emollient figure. Last October, John became a magnet for criticism as he sat down with Alastair Campbell to talk politics. An attempt at olive branching and bridging the fissures after years of infighting and scabbing, it was entirely understandable and, in my view, supportable. Especially with an election in view. Then again, I think we should take an instrumentalist approach if opponents offer the left and Labour an opening, as The Mail on Sunday did last weekend for Keir Starmer.

We can't begin to think about it in isolation from the strategic direction of the Labour left after our greatest triumph and biggest defeat. After leading the party, changing the direction of political travel in this country and even, as John rightly said, supplying the Tories with the policies (albeit subsequently watered down) that has kept most people going during the crisis, where does the Labour left go from here? Trying again outside of Labour is a non-starter for the bulk of the Labour left, though I can understand why some hold out hope of building something. Seeing Rebecca Long-Bailey getting shafted and grovelling in court to a bunch of toerags is hard to stomach, and then there are the issues with Keir himself. Yet this is nothing. The Miliband years were markedly worse and before that, well, it was somewhat south of awful. This isn't to fetishise staying power as a virtue, but to gain a sense of proportion. Despite everything, the left are still much stronger in the party now than at any time between the early 80s and 2015. The question is what do we do with it, how should the left build influence, push its agenda and carry on struggling to get the party back and the Tories out.

Shouting about Keir Starmer on Twitter might be cathartic but it's not going to build the left. Bearing in mind a lot of Corbyn supporters voted for Keir in the first place, winning internal elections and getting more leftwingers selected for local government, the devolved administrations, and Westminster, and making sure we win the policy arguments itself partly relies on building soft power. When you look at what John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn have done since leaving the leadership, they have concentrated on attacking the government from the left. This is not picked up by mainstream outlets or comprises talking points on Newsnight any more, but they are still listened to by Labour's membership and can find tens, if not hundred of thousands of sympathetic ears there. In other words, this is an attempt to build a constant pressure on the leader's office - if the party can be bounced from the right, the same happening from the left is a live possibility - especially when on a raft of issues the left is closer to where the electorate are at than centrism and right wing Labour. If the left are engaging constructively with "Starmerism", and are seeing to be doing so, the thinking goes it puts the left in a stronger position to defend the policy heritage it bequeathed the party. Again, it's worth remembering a lot of former Corbyn supporters voted Keir in the hope he would offer some sort of Corbynism without Corbyn, and winning them over in the future is something that cannot be avoided.

Comrades might disagree with how John and Jeremy are positioning the Socialist Campaign Group. Their overtures to Keir do run the risk of letting the Labour leadership off the hook - Keir's preoccupation of returning kids to school and people to work even though Covid-19 carries on its debilitating and deadly work needs criticising openly, for example. Or does Labour want to cede these concerns to the Liberal Democrats? Yet their thinking is strategic and has the position of the Labour left now and in the immediate future in mind. If there are alternative strategies for taking back the party or building an alternative, let's hear them.