Harold Wilson, British prime minister in the 1960s and 1970s, once said that the Labour party he led owed more to Methodism than to Karl Marx. Those at the top of the party today do not share their predecessor’s view.
Before Jeremy Corbyn was unexpectedly elected Labour leader in 2015, he led a career of far-left obscurity, catching the attention of the public now and then only thanks to his support for Hamas, Hugo Chávez, and anyone lined up on his side in what he sees as a global battle against capitalism and the West. Three years later, he is the bookmakers’ favorite to be Britain’s next leader.
But for all that Corbyn has poisoned British politics—most recently by allowing the emergence of a rabid anti-Semitism in his party’s rank and file—he isn’t the biggest threat to the country. The man who would take the reins of the British economy were Corbyn to become prime minister is far more dangerous.
John McDonnell is Corbyn’s closest political ally. As shadow chancellor of the exchequer, he is the second most powerful man on the British left. And he sees the Labour party’s intellectual inheritance a little differently from Harold Wilson.
On May 5, when the rest of London was outside enjoying the spring heat wave, McDonnell was inside a drab lecture hall at the University of London, delivering a speech on “Marxism as a Force for Change Today.” It was 200 years to the day since the birth of Karl Marx.
Just a few hundred yards from the British Museum reading room where the political philosopher committed many of his dangerous and disproven ideas to the page, earnest and aging Marxists gathered to mark the date. The speakers included representatives from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of Berlin, the head of the Marxism department at China’s Academy of Social Sciences, and the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), with an assortment of left-wing sociologists making up the numbers. McDonnell’s speech was the main event.
The shadow chancellor heralded the fact that “10 years after the banking crash, interest in Marxism hasn’t declined, it has increased.” “This,” he went on, “has led Labour to discuss how it can develop the co-operative sector and take back into public ownership rail and water and the post office.” For McDonnell, it’s all part of the broader question that the rise of the far left under Corbyn has reopened: “Who really owns our society?”As he spoke, an embroidered banner of Karl Marx emblazoned with The Communist Manifesto’s rallying cry, “Workers of All Lands Unite,” hung behind him.
Corbyn once confessed that he had “not read as much Marx as I should’ve done.” But for McDonnell, Marx is the ideological lodestar. According to a recent profile in the Financial Times, the members of a trade union book club that McDonnell ran in the early 1980s used to joke that he prescribed the same book every week: Das Kapital. In 2006, he said that the biggest influences on his thought were “The fundamental Marxist writers of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, basically.” In 2013, speaking about the financial crisis, he said, “I’m honest with people: I’m a Marxist. This is a classic crisis of the economy—a classic capitalist crisis. I’ve been waiting for this for a generation. . . . [For] Christ’s sake don’t waste it.” The man who could soon be in charge of the British economy is someone who sees a recession not as a time to limit economic damage, but as a chance for revolution.
McDonnell’s hard-left views extend well beyond economics. Like Corbyn, he has a history of praising violent extremists, particularly the IRA. Speaking two years after the IRA killed five people and came close to murdering Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with a bomb in Brighton in 1984, McDonnell said that the “ballot, the bullet, and the bomb” could all be used to unite Ireland. As late as 2003, he was still suggesting, “It’s about time we started honoring those people involved in the armed struggle.”
The British electorate is usually good at spotting—and avoiding—dangerous ideologues. And that’s why, appearances at Marx birthday parties aside, the shadow chancellor sticks in public to a critique of the government’s spending cuts, which appeals to large swaths of the electorate weary of the Tory belt-tightening that is now in its ninth year.
According to a recent poll, 66 percent of British voters think public-spending cuts have gone too far, with even a narrow majority of Conservative voters agreeing with that verdict. Labour’s flagship economic policy of renationalization of utilities and the railways is also popular. Sixty percent of voters support a return of the railway system, which was privatized in the early 1990s, to government ownership.
Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott, another close Corbyn ally, recently said that as shadow chancellor, McDonnell “has done his best to transform himself into a friendly, bank-manager-type figure, which, if you know John McDonnell as well as I do, is . . . interesting.”
On occasion, the mask slips. When pushed on the cost of Labour’s nationalization plans recently, his response was “Parliament will set the price,” a clue as to what a more “democratic” economy looks like. It is one in which the tried and tested ingredients for prosperity—including private property—aren’t just subtly undermined but wholly ignored.
Behind its well-meaning and popular-sounding calls for government to spend more, Labour is committed to far-left economic ideas that have left people poorer and less free whenever and wherever they have been tested. And when doctrinaire radicals are given a chance to run their experiments on us all, they tend not to change course when things go wrong.
The economic debate in Britain is dominated by Brexit, with people on both sides of the conversation obsessed with the question of how much the decision to leave the E.U. will end up costing the nation. That debate flared up once again last month with the news that the British economy grew by a measly 0.1 percent in the first quarter of 2018.
It is just possible that the real drag on the British economy isn’t Brexit, but the Marxists waiting in the wings. And if other far-left governments—with their hostility to political as well as economic liberty—are anything to go by, the price Britain would pay were McDonnell ever to get the keys to the Treasury would be counted in more than just pounds and pence.
