Corbyn's Comeback
Those who have a narrow electoral end-result-only understanding of politics will miss the larger political-economy implications of the creditable performance by the leader of the British Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn, in the June 8th General Election. However, given the global shift towards neo-liberal politics as the “only game in town”, the strong showing of a largely vilified openly socialist leader, facing a hostile press which dismissed him as “unelectable”, Crobyn’s come back must be analysed in terms of future contestations over neo-liberal austerity versus the social protection of citizens.
Further, the similarities with the US election which witnessed overwhelming youth support for Bernie Saunders’ “socialism”, demands that political analysis moves away from the limited discussion of the seat-share following the UK election but begins to explore the deeper meaning for future global politics.
The main lesson for the Caribbean in the huge gains by Corbyn is the continued relevance of the social-democratic agenda. Caribbean politicians and political parties do not have a strong tradition of independent thought and of defining their policy options independent of “what is happening globally”. Thus in recent years, nominally social-democratic parties have become indistinguishable from right-wing free-marketeers. More importantly, previously “normal” policies like state-funded education, subsidised transportation and health care, have been treated as “unworkable”.
In this context, nominally “workers’ parties” have found themselves capitulating to notions of the scaling down of the public sector, the abandonment of the working class, and the privatisation of critical sectors of the economy. In the UK, like the Caribbean, privatisation is really an ideological device for placing wealth in the hands of the already privileged who believe in their God-given right to own everything.
There is no clearer indication of social-democratic capitulation to neo-liberal policy options than the island of Barbados where a defining social policy of universal tertiary education existent since the mid-1960s, and terminated four years ago, is treated like a “pipe-dream” that can never work, as if it never existed.
The significance of Corbyn is that he has never wavered from his social democratic agenda, convinced in the moral and objective correctness of his position. He never succumbed to the electoral opportunism of the Blairite project, which abandoned social democracy merely to win elections. It was interesting to observe the manner in which the press on election night, began to shift its narrative away from Corbyn’s “looneyness” to acknowledging the common sense of his policies on free education and the re-nationalisation of the railways.
The impact of UK politics on the Caribbean cannot be under-estimated. Just as there was a Blairite shift towards “new labour” within some parties, then it is expected that with a clear definition of a social democratic agenda within a resurgent British labour party, the Caribbean “mimic men” will reclaim their socialist voices.
The future is socialism or right-wing fascism.
