29 September 2016
Reflections from an Allotment
by J.R.Thomas
The Shaw Sheet does not have, as yet, a gardening correspondent. In spite of that, we had thought to bring our readers insights into the emotions of Labour’s leader as, the struggles of the leadership challenge over, he finds time to relax once more on that famous allotment. But, alas, we fear that our attempts to interview him on socialist vegetable growing techniques, or on the vexed question of whether cycling home with a bunch of cut flowers each Sunday for Mrs C might be sexist behaviour, would founder on our obvious ignorance of how to grow the reddest roses and how to store carrots for the winter.
Mr Corbyn, we surmise, must be ruminating, as he picks the caterpillars off the cauliflowers, on the strange standards of his comrades as they fulminate on his and Mr McDonnell’s alleged attempts to pack the Labour Party administration with persons of a redder hue. And, as he leans on his spade, watching the earthworms do their vital work, he must he be even more perplexed by the trade union opposition to increasing the number of trade unionists who sit on the JTUC, the Labour Party union representative body. Unattributed mutterings suggest a forthcoming Corbyn axe, not to his cordon of apple trees but to the staff who run Labour’s offices. No matter that Mr Corbyn had denied any such intent. At a union and staff meeting last week there was “an air of menace” said one of those there, with “Jeremy standing in the corridor outside”.
Mr Corbyn recently certainly said that loyal party members have been treated unfairly by the party administrators, not least by being suspended for paying the wrong subscription or filling in a defunct application form. This has led to fears among staff that there may be a wholesale clear-out in the office post Jeremy’s re-election. That may be true; and if you work in an office and persistently decline to carry out your manager’s wishes, you may be familiar with the sense of dread that news of his promotion might bring. Demotion to “Basement – Filing” would be the least of it. If Mr Corbyn, who is, after all, the democratically elected leader of the Labour Party, cannot get his own party machine to do what he wants it to do, he would be in a very bizarre position.
In any case, as so much in current Labour Party politics, all is not what it seems. There was a time when the staff of the party were not politicised – like civil servants, their views were private and irrelevant. They were there to do a job, and, whilst party big wigs had a few loyalist advisors, most paid staff got on with their work and did their campaigning, or not, at weekends. It was Tony Blair who changed all that, through his handmaiden Alistair Campbell; the leader had a project; and if you weren’t for the project you were assumed to be against it. The party machine became dominated by loyalists, and those who weren’t kept very quiet. Mr Brown also had a project and he began pruning and hoeing to make the party machinery hum with his project, though he didn’t get very far before it was Ed Milliband’s turn with the spade and secateurs. Ed made very few changes, which leaves Jeremy with not only a Parliamentary party that mostly does not care for his politics, but also a party machine that has little sympathy for him either.
Our editor wrote in these very pages last week of the increasing tendency of even supposedly liberal democrats not to accept adverse results. Determination not to accept defeat is fine for climbing to the tops of mountains, or getting outdoor tomatoes to ripen; but it is not so good in democratic societies where we all, or at least the vast majority of us, must cleave to the rules if our polity is to work. Mr Corbyn, and, even more, Mr McDonnell, would perhaps, in their most candid moments, say that they do not really accept the structure of our democracy in the UK; but equally, they seek to work within it, for now, at least. And to do that they need the party machine to do what they want. They are the bosses; for the moment, it is their machine; it must, as it always has previously, do as it is told.
Mr Corbyn might also expect a more sympathetic hearing on the changes to the Labour Parliamentary Party which he and his friends are quietly threatening to bring about. Their view is that local Labour Party members have the right to, in a favourite leftish word, “mandate” the parliamentary candidates, the aspiring and the sitting MP’s. This is after all how things are done in the USA, maybe not a great example of leftish activism but certainly a great democracy. Every four years (six for the Senate) paid up party members reselect their candidates in the primaries or the caucuses. Even sitting Presidents must expose themselves to this process; sometimes it is a shoo in, sometimes not; but the electorate are always entitled to say “thank you, but no more”. That is what the Corbyn collective wants to happen in the Labour Party. It is hardly the stuff of violent revolution. (That may come later, when the complexion of the parliamentary party is sufficiently red to start one.) It is in fact, a very democratic approach to representation.
MPs do not like a reselection process, of course. On a practical level many give up external careers for the House of Commons, and to be ejected by their local party after five or less years would be disastrous. A promising clamber up the greasy ministerial ladder could be destroyed by one kick to the bottom rung by disgruntled activists. And at a deeper level the tradition in the UK is that MPs are independent, not seeking easy popularity to hold on to their seats, free to do what they see as best for their country, not to do the electorate’s bidding or pursue its whims. But that is old fashioned theory that in practice had vanished by the time suffrage was semi-universal by the middle of the nineteenth century. If a modern M.P. wants to get on in his party, he had better be polite to those who control the party. What Messrs Corbyn and McDonnell are trying to do is to give more control over representation to the electorate, or at least to that part of it that has paid its £25 to join the Labour Party. Why they are trying to do this, and whether they would be so keen on grassroots democracy if those grassroots were Blairite rather than Corbynite is another matter entirely.
We seem to have moved into an era when consensus has broken down in many areas. There is a tendency to oppose on grounds of personality, or to set up tension between the established and the outsiders. We see it in the USA with Donald Trump and Bernie Saunders getting enormous support from those supposedly disenfranchised from the eastern liberal consensus. We saw it in the UK with the Referendum results, in France Marine Le Pen is a major beneficiary, and in Germany Mrs Merkel’s long career seems likely to run aground on the rocks of opposition from populist left and right.
Mr Corbyn and Mr McDonnell are revolutionaries of a sort we have not previously seen so close to the levers of power in the UK, allotments or no. But if we want to challenge their ideas, to reject their ideology, surely we should be concentrating on their ideas and as to why those are flawed and inappropriate for our times, not criticising the few parts of their behaviour that is in full accord with, could indeed enhance, our open democracy?
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