The Real News Network recently ran an interview with some British Economists who think that the new Labour Party Leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is steering the party’s policies where they ought to go. John Weeks, a Professor Emeritus at SOAS, at the University of London, had this to say, and it struck me that there are some obvious parallels with the situation here in America:
WEEKS: First I must stress that our group is not affiliated with the Labour Party. Our report does not endorse the Labour Party. It looks at the British economy. But nonetheless, [inaud.] should be interpreted as showing [inaud.] considerably more credible on economic policy than the current government. I’ll briefly explain why. To understand the context, the American watchers should realize that the election of Jeremy Corbyn as head of the Labour Party would be rather like the Democratic party nominating Bernie Sanders to run for president. There would be that much of a dramatic break. There has been that much of a dramatic break.
The Labour Party before the election in May took a position that most people would call, most people would call, austerity-lite. That is, there was a hesitancy, some people would say a fear, of breaking with the Tory policy of budget cuts because, for fear that the Labour Party would be attacked as not understanding the economy and not being worried about deficits. Jeremy Corbyn has come in and he has picked a chancellor, that’s a person who is in charge of economic policy, with an absolutely clear policy: the Labour Party is now against budget cuts. Cuts are necessary, on the contrary, the government needs to spend, the government needs to spend more to expand the economy and generate productive employment. And John McDonnell has developed a fairly clear and detailed plan that emphasizes public investment in infrastructure, and basic things such as high-speed internet access, and such as that.
So I think that the Labour Party is now credible and impressive on economic policies. I mean, nobody’s perfect. But there’s such an improvement upon the past that they look awfully, awfully good. As a result, of course, of a dramatic change, a basic change that was brought about from the grassroots, I should add. Jeremy Corbyn won over 60 percent of–someone, one of my colleagues may correct me, it may have been more than that–of the Labour Party membership. Maybe up towards 70 percent. And the Labour Party is of course filled also with supporters of Tony Blair, and out of that ideological period. And so there is a very deep split within the party.
And the new leadership faces a very difficult time imposing its policies as the united front of the opposition. And I think some progress has been made in that regard, but we can’t kid ourselves. The right-wing elements within the Labour Party are attacking Jeremy Corbyn, and attacking him precisely for the policies I just described.
via Naked Capitalism
Weeks draws an explicit comparison to Bernie Sanders, but there are other parallels.
The Democratic Party too, even when it was in power, was austerity-lite. Despite the large Congressional majorities he had in 2009, Obama proposed a largely inadequate stimulus package that he further diluted in order to make it “bi-partisan” by getting Susan Collins’s vote. Had Obama, and a fair number of Congressional Democrats not been captive to “austerity-lite” thinking, they could have rammed through an effective stimulus package that would have done more than simply put the brakes on decline. Had there been a real recovery, we might have avoided the 2010 electoral disaster, and the gerrymandered nation it produced. The most charitable explanation for their blindness is that they were victims of the same fears Weeks ascribes to the Labour Party. Less charitably, one might argue that they never really cared to initiate a broad based recovery, because it was not something for which their major donors were particularly pining. After all, the rest of us might have gone nowhere since 2008, but the bankers have been doing great. In any event, there is only one candidate for President who is not, at best, “austerity-lite”, and that candidate is not Hillary Clinton.
Here at home, broadly speaking, I’ve run into two kinds of Democrats, since I am not privileged to consort with the Wall Street types. The first group supports Bernie. The second group supports Hillary, almost universally because they think Bernie can’t win and that they are therefore left with Hillary. I’m sure there are some Hillary enthusiasts out there, but I have yet to meet one. On issue after issue, these folks agree with Bernie, but they’re holding their noses and sticking with Hillary.
Maybe they’re right, but you have to wonder. If you step back and look at the trend line, it seems unlikely that any semblance of real representative democracy can survive four more years of government by and for the plutocrats. It’s all very well that Hillary would likely appoint Supreme Court justices that would protect the social advances of the past few years, but those are issues about which the plutocrats care nothing. On the economic front, it is simply unclear that we can recapture the ground that will surely be lost in the next four years, when Hillary, safely elected, reverses course on issues such as the TPP and the Keystone Pipeline, and reminds us that on other issues she never said she was with us, she simply said she would listen. It just so happens that she listens a lot harder to the plutocrats. Everything put together sooner or later falls apart, and as some have pointed out recently, the period between 1932 and 1980 was an aberration in the first place, a period of retrenchment for the plutocrats. Maybe Corbyn won’t win in Britain, and maybe Bernie won’t win here, but if they don’t, the course of history may be irreversibly fixed, and we will be back, perhaps permanently, to the days of government of, by, and for the capitalists.
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