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In the days, even weeks, leading
up to Remembrance Sunday on 13 November, all public figures in the UK must wear
a poppy. This is not actually obligatory; it is just the way things are done.
Some 45 million poppies were attached to clothing this year, a total that far
outweighs the number of celebrities. If you are not seen wearing one, then
perhaps you forgot, perhaps it is on a different jacket, perhaps your mum or
dad did not buy you one and your pocket money was insufficient, perhaps you are
a household pet, or, heaven forbid, you might have some questions about this
totem for honouring/remembering the war dead in their sacrifices for ‘Britain’,
otherwise known as British imperialism. Just to make sure he was not numbered
among the latter persona non grata, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn
made sure that he was wearing a poppy when he appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr
show that day.[1] To reinforce
his patriotic credentials, Corbyn also made sure to note that he would be standing
at the Cenotaph later on Remembrance Day with a 92-year old friend, a Labour
party supporter and veteran of World War Two. Thus began his exposition of how
Labour’s policies would meet the demands of the UK electorate.
The interview with Andrew Marr
covered lots of questions. Corbyn came out clearly against racism, responding
to recent political developments in the US and Europe. In the aftermath of the
UK’s Brexit vote, he also stressed the importance of keeping its access to the
EU single market and the provisions for workers’ rights existing in the EU. But
my main focus here is on how Corbyn’s comments illustrated a common feature of
leftwing views in many rich countries, national welfarism.
National welfarism
National welfarism is somewhat
different from simple nationalism, which can be summed up as demanding that
government policies should benefit the people of a particular country (usually
meaning the corporations). Instead, national welfarism cloaks a nationalist
policy in progressive phrases and proclaims the need to protect the common
people from the depredations of the market. In all cases, national welfarism
amounts to a call for the capitalist state to implement such policies,
not for a struggle of people to protect themselves from such depredation. Furthermore,
it avoids naming names. Rather than singling out capitalism as the problem, and
the capitalist state as the enemy’s enforcer, it is a demand for different
government policies. It is the stance taken by those who do not like
capitalism’s impact on people’s lives, but who do not want to make a fuss about
opposing capitalism. One might think this is just letting discretion be the
better part of valour, but it is more than that. It is a facile belief that
good bits of capitalism can be salvaged from the bad bits of capitalism.
Worse than this, national
welfarism pays no attention to whether the state in question is one of the
major powers in the world that spends its time oppressing others, either
directly, or indirectly in making sure that the general system of oppression
and privilege for the major powers remains in place. The reason is that this
oppression by their own powerful state is something from which, implicitly at
least, the national welfarists would like to benefit.
Answering the questions
Andrew Marr, a pillar of the
BBC’s establishment opinion making elite, asked some pertinent questions.
Corbyn answered clearly.
Why has there been a political
shift to the right in many (rich) countries, and why has the left failed to
channel popular anger? Corbyn thought that the previous New Labour agenda was
mistaken and could not meet popular concerns, because it ignored the
deindustrialisation of Britain and focused on globalisation. This was how he
introduced his alternative Labour Party policy.
While Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in
France were in favour of trade protectionism, to stem the loss of domestic
jobs, Corbyn countered with the view that there should be new investment in
industry and ‘fair trade agreements’. He did not openly endorse tariffs and
protectionism, but was very open to other forms of trade control – to make it
‘fair’, of course – which would go back to the Labour left and British
Communist Party ‘alternative economic strategy’ programmes of the 1970s and
1980s. In this, he ends up posing foreign countries as the barrier to economic
welfare for the Brits, not the market system, and still less capitalism. So the
capitalist state should take measures against those who are not playing by the
rules that the major powers, such as Britain, have introduced. Environmental
concerns were also used to bolster his position. This is the common fashion
among radicals these days – and is essentially a dig at China, in line with
major power policy – despite the fact that the major powers have done by far
the most to destroy the global environment.
Corbyn later criticised Donald
Trump for demonising foreign workers, but, despite his anti-racism, he still
managed to point to migrant labour as a problem for British workers. Even from
his own perspective, he could have more simply said that migrant labour is not
the problem, it is the capitalist labour market, and that he would demand the
same conditions for all workers, whether migrant or not.
Immigration and UK politics
It was on the explosive popular
issue of immigration that Corbyn was most evasive. He posed regional
investment as a solution! The implicit logic was that if the state could
encourage investment in those areas that were most anti-immigrant (basically,
in England, and probably also in Wales), then such sentiment would fade away.
This stepped aside from the post-Brexit issue of who is meant to benefit
from the national investment policy, while his statement would, of course, be
taken as meaning the ‘national’ working class. When asked about whether he
agreed with the view of Keir Starmer, Corbyn’s Shadow Secretary of State for
Exiting the European Union, who has argued that immigration should be lower,
Corbyn said:
‘I think it [immigration] will be lower if we deal
with the issues of wage undercutting, deal with exploitation, but we should
also recognise that the migrants that have come to this country work and
contribute, and pay taxes, and the NHS would simply not survive without the
level of migrant labour, doctors, etc, because we have not invested enough in
high skills in our own economy.’
So, migrants are justified on
the basis of their economic contribution, but there is also the hope that
training domestic workers, and enforcing higher wages, will cut immigrant job
applications! This is the national welfarist’s solution to the anti-immigration
outlook of his electorate. Just in case you thought that Corbyn was ignoring
the demand from a sizeable chunk of that electorate for immigration to be
checked, even reversed, he wants to stress that his policies will help do just
that.
In a final, summary comment,
Corbyn makes the broader points that his economic policy is for ‘left behind,
broken Britain, poverty Britain’, one that will oppose the Conservative
government’s policies on the National Health Service, etc, and appeal to the
electorate that there really is an alternative that the Labour Party under
Corbyn can implement. But there’s the rub. How to reconcile the predatory
demands of capitalism and imperialism with the social welfare outlook of the
reformer, while not giving too much ground to popular reactionary nationalism
that the middle class, for now, still finds unacceptable?
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