The eighties, as the hipsters among us know, are undergoing a revival. The music and fashion of the decade have been disinterred, and its politics too. Where, the pundits of America ask, is our Reagan? Meanwhile in Britain, the Labour party has revived its eighties’ follies by choosing an unelectable leader. Jeremy Corbyn is one of the hardest of the hard left, an ideological relic. His surprising success in Labour’s leadership election represents an unsavory turn in European politics.
If all this sounds as though Tony Blair never happened, then the Labour membership has achieved its first victory. In the early eighties, Thatcher’s shock treatment gave Labour a nervous breakdown. The Trotskyite true believers of Militant subverted local branches. A faction of senior moderates left to form a centrist party of their own, which eventually folded into the Liberal Democrats. And an erudite, shabby bumbler named Michael Foot led the party. The public responded by electing Thatcher for a second time, and then a third.
Slowly, Labour’s leaders accepted that times had changed. Neil Kinnock purged Militant, and then Tony Blair and the Clintonian triangulators of his New Labour faction led the party to the center. The backbench diehards never liked Blair, but could not argue with his electoral success. They became bolder as Blair’s uncharismatic successors, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, failed to retain Blair’s popularity with the voters. Last May, Miliband resigned after Labour’s defeat in the general election. The contest for control of the party began that night: an eighties-style schism between second-generation Blairites and the old, red guard, with Corbyn as the champion of the latter. Last week, in the first round of voting among Labour’s membership, Corbyn won 59.5 percent, defeating three Blairite candidates, and obviating the need for a second round of voting.
Can Corbyn, a veteran of the “loony left,” be the people’s choice too? His supporters, the Old Labour of union bloc votes and Red Flag socialists, hope to capitalize on public discontent with David Cameron’s austerity program. Asked if they have condemned Labour to a repeat of its eighties wilderness years, they cite the success of Syriza, the Greek socialists. This claim of hope is really an admission of failure. Only a fifth of British voters favor Corbyn as their prime minister. And only a Greek-style collapse of the U.K. could propel a British Syriza into Downing Street.
Corbyn would be a joke in a national election, but then so would Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. All three of them are running less for the public’s votes than against their parties’ leadership. They may be peddling quack medicine for a body politic that seems impervious to the usual treatments. But they could not gain an audience if nothing were wrong.
Corbyn’s cure for “grotesque levels of inequality” is far more extreme than anything offered by the likes of Trump and Sanders, and hence even more likely to fail. He proposes to go back to the eighties, by renationalizing the railways and reopening the coal mines. Labourites of yore responded to the challenge of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons by demanding the unilateral disarmament of Britain’s nuclear weapons. Today, while Iran furtively proliferates, Corbyn advocates unilateral disarmament. His high taxation and even higher spending would make the palsied economy of Enver Hoxha’s Albania look like a Singapore of socialism. But a protest candidate appeals to resentment, not reason. In this, Corbyn is something of an innovator.
Socialists, George Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), come in two types. They are either a “youthful snob-Bolshevik” whose politics will mellow when he marries well; in our time, the overeducated and underemployed moralizers of Occupy. Or they are “a prim little man with a white collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings.” Corbyn, the son of an engineer and a teacher, is white collar born and bred. The leader of the Labour party does not lead by example; the closest Corbyn has come to manual labor is shaking hands with a miner. He affects a Greek fisherman’s cap, in the way that President Obama and Hillary Clinton affect a twang and talk about how “folks” aren’t getting a fair shake. He is, inevitably, a teetotal vegetarian.
Orwell identified the great obstacle to the electoral success of socialism: the kind of people it attracts. In his day, it seemed that “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England” had signed up for the New Jerusalem. And lo, last week, Corbyn popped out to the shops in a daring ensemble of tatty tennis shirt, baggy shorts, brown sandals, high black socks, and calves the color of boiled veal. It is the ensemble of the socialist intellectual at rest. In the eighties, Michael Foot damaged his chances of election by attending the annual ceremony commemorating Britain’s war dead in a “donkey jacket,” a coat worn by municipal workers in bad weather. Last week, Corbyn attended the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain in an unmatched jacket and pants, his top shirt button undone, and his tie loose. Like a truculent adolescent, he refused to sing the national anthem.
In some respects, there is less to Corbyn than meets the eye. He is no sex maniac. We know this because last week Jane Chapman, his first wife, announced that, maritally speaking, he had been a disappointment. “He didn’t take into account any other human interests besides politics,” said Chapman, who met him at a Labour party meeting when he was working as a union organizer. She also complained that the workingman’s tribune had been too busy to help with the housework. Like Bertolt Brecht, who held East German citizenship and a Swiss bank account, Corbyn talks feminism but does not practice it. The top five jobs in his shadow cabinet have gone to men. Extreme politics tend toward machismo; Corbyn is a “bro-socialist.” Somehow, the Conservatives, the party of business and all-male private schools, have a more diverse leadership than Labour, the party that supported the suffragettes.
Corbyn is, though, a crank, and his crankiness inspires the single, dubious innovation in his platform. The British may go in for the kind of anti-Jewish innuendo that, as the Olympic athlete Harold Abrahams explains in that eighties classic Chariots of Fire, floats “on the edge of a remark.” But not since the 1940s, when the trade union leader Ernest Bevin was foreign secretary, has a leading British politician so thoroughly alienated British Jews. Nor has any Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition before Corbyn courted Islamists with such enthusiasm, or seemed to enjoy the company of so many professed antisemites.
It is not just that Corbyn advocates an arms boycott on Israel, the boycotting of Israeli universities implicated in military research, and the effective dismantling of Israel by the so-called right of return. It is the sordid company he keeps. It was, Corbyn said, “an honor and a pleasure” to show “our friends” from Hamas and Hezbollah around the Parliament of Westminster. Raed Saleh, the sheikh who leads the Islamic Movement in northern Israel, has called Jews “germs” and “monkeys” and claimed that 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy and that Jews use the blood of gentile infants to make matzah. Corbyn has said that Saleh “represents his people extremely well,” and that he looks forward to taking tea with Saleh on the terrace of the House of Commons.
This is not the only time that Corbyn has appeared comfortable in the company of antisemitic conspiracy theorists. He has hosted a program on Press TV, the Iranian state channel whose propaganda regularly includes Holocaust denial. Earlier this year, when the Church of England suspended Reverend Stephen Sizer for “openly racist” Facebook postings publicizing the libel that Israel planned the 9/11 attacks, Corbyn wrote in Sizer’s defense. He claimed that Sizer, who in 2014 spoke at a conference in Iran whose organizers promised to reveal “the dominance of the Zionist lobby over U.S. and British politics,” was being “victimized” by unnamed “individuals” because he “had dared to speak out against Zionism.”
For 15 years, Corbyn donated money to the pro-Palestinian group Deir Yassin Remembered. Its founder, Paul Eisen, is a Holocaust denier who posts David Duke videos on his website. Eisen has described Corbyn as one of his earliest donors and claims that Corbyn attended “every single one” of the group’s meetings. Although Eisen is so extreme that in 2007 the Palestine Solidarity Campaign disavowed any links with his group, a 2013 photograph on Eisen’s website shows Corbyn at one of Eisen’s meetings. “During the time when I felt so marginalized and isolated, when the movement with which he was associated so despised me, Jeremy always said hello,” Eisen says.
But then, Jeremy always says hello. He has an inerrant ability to end up in a room with bigots, Jew-haters, and conspiracy theorists. If there is not one available in London, he is willing to travel. An investigation by the London Telegraph found that in February 2013, Corbyn and his wife visited Gaza through a $4,500 gift from Interpal, a British-based charity banned in the United States as “part of the funding network of Hamas.” Corbyn has received at least two further free trips from the Palestine Return Centre, which Israeli officials have described as “Hamas’ organizational branch in Europe,” and whose head of media
in the U.K., Sameh Habeeb, founded a “virulently anti-Semitic” website, featuring David Duke videos and conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the planet. The Telegraph also reported evidence from “security sources” that “at least one senior PRC leader has recruited individuals to Hamas.”
Such is the company that Jeremy Corbyn keeps. And such is the novel and sour flavor of Jeremy Corbyn’s radicalism. He is now the most prominent exemplar of Europe’s trend towards “red-green” politics: the marriage of convenience between the old left and the young Islamists. The partners in this May-December romance share common resentments, but theirs cannot be a long-term union. Each sees the other as a collection of useful idiots. The left wants to revive its old socialist nostrums and return to power with the votes of Europe’s growing Muslim population. The Islamists want to go back to an even more distant past, and are using the old left as their entree to party politics.
Meanwhile, Jeremy always says hello. So say hello to Jeremy Corbyn, the old-new face of Europe’s red-green coalition: yesterday’s failed politics for tomorrow’s angry voters.
Dominic Green, the author of Three Empires on the Nile, teaches political science at Boston College.
