The Silences of John Harris

Imagine being au fait with politics since the 1980s but only just discovering the work by the New Times group who ran Marxism Today magazine. What might that look like? There's no need to waste time wondering, for John Harris is that man and he's just found the answers to Labour's miserable outing at the general election. Better late than never, I suppose.

Channelling the work of Stuart Hall, Martin Jacques et al, he conjures up an unattributed quote to the effect that the left in the late 80s were stranded in the class politics of the post-war period, and their strategy was about giving the old Keynesian state a lick of paint. True to a degree, and especially of those affecting a revolutionary poise. Except, in John's view, this is pretty much what happened in 2019. Substitute "the many" for the industrial working class, and Labour's manifesto for getting the Fordist gears grinding again, and you have the exact same scenario. The Corbynist Delorean failed to hit 88mph and slammed into the wall instead.

Except this isn't what happened and John's polemic is a load of dishonest rubbish. I mean, to also claim there is a "silence" in and around Labour about what happened is self-evidently ludicrous. Call me old fashioned, but surely you have a duty to represent an opponent's position accurately and fairly. If you're confident in your argument, there is no need to distort the other. Perhaps all those poverty safaris outside the M25 have made John so feverish as to forget his polemical Ps and Qs, because had he bothered reading Labour's manifesto he might have spotted a strategy entirely consistent with the politics pushed by our New Times comrades of yesteryear. That would be lifelong learning to allow workers to reskill in a shifting, "post-Fordist" economy, the opening of the workplace to democracy, and the empowering workers and consumers via Labour's plans for nationalising and democratising transport and the utilities, encouraging the development of cooperatives, and offering a mix of regulation and inducement to manage the transition to green industry. The nationalised industries of old did many things - they provided full employment and helped comprise the backbone of the labour movement - but they weren't democratic and weren't, by design, especially empowering.

And as for treating the so-called many as an undifferentiated mass, please. Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, and their advisors had a much better grip on the character of the British class system than those now shouting about towns and the working class. If class was a homogenous blob, we would not have seen policies against precarity and low pay sitting alongside pledges not to put up tax for those earning up to £80k. Far from the male, stale, and pale triptych John provides us of the labour movement, the party's policies addressed young workers and old people, women and men, minority ethnicities and EU migrants, unskilled workers and the professions. Ultimately, even Labour's Brexit position was overdetermined by the class politics of Labour's base. 13 million voted for this two years ago, sans the shift on the EU referendum, and if the party hopes to be in with a shout four or five years hence rolling back and alienating our new core support is about the most stupid thing it can do.

Of course, like most establishment commentators it is John who treats working class people as a regimented strata. The young people in the big cities are somehow less authentic than the retirees who own their homes and have "forthright" views about a great many things. What we saw at this election was, effectively, the clash of class cohorts divided and opposed to one another thanks to their differing relationship to the prevailing political settlement, the experience of work, to an increasingly socially liberal culture, and the sharpening of these tensions by austerity, Brexit, and anti-snowflake propaganda pumped out by the press and daytime television. And, for whatever reason, John and chums cannot or refuse to see it. But someone else did and rode the dynamics of the new class politics more effectively than Labour, and that was Boris Johnson.

Nevertheless, if you want to keep getting the media gigs you have to let reality intrude occasionally, which John does. He jumps on precisely what brings the Labour right out in a rash: making Labour a movement. Rightly, he rails against stitch ups and top-down culture, of opening the party up and looking at ways of empowering voters by organising them, and waging the culture war in more imaginative ways than the yah boo sucks of Twitter. He even makes the outrageous suggestion that Labour in local government should get competent. Yes, yes, yes, the left couldn't agree more. And yet, having offered the glimpse about how it should be, John will faithfully avoid endorsing or encouraging the runner by far the closest to what must be done and embrace the sensiblism of one of the Westminster-as-usual candidates. And when the hour of that inevitability chimes, we have to determine if John is serious about this kind of politics, or whether he's just paid to write left-sounding words.

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