It was always going to be like this

Gloom is contagious. Gloom is infecting progressives, and the Labour left is no different. This gloomy winter of half-formed slushy snow seems a long way from the hot, hopeful September of 2015 when we cheered the inauguration of a socialist Labour leadership. In contrast we spent last weekend dejectedly watching the inauguration of a fake-tanned fascist across the Pond — whatever inspiration the accompanying mass protests provided.

Those who thought we were on a clear path to a brighter future have been buffeted, bent, disappointed. Perhaps we could have been more prepared: narrowing the gap in wealth and power that has yawned even wider over the last thirty years was not going to be easy.

The new politics is completely, sometimes all-consumingly exasperating, and we’re all having to get used to it.

We were never going to get the whole party to agree with us…

The Labour right — both in Blairite and older forms — have spent their whole careers battling the Labour left, usually starting in student politics. They have ordered punishment deselections, political expulsions and boasted about physical assaulting the non-compliant. They ran, for a brief period of time, the most effective media operation British politics had ever seen. They were not going to roll over and be nice.

Crucially, we could never fully fight back in kind. One, because we would be made to look like the bad guys, and two, because no leadership benefits from prolonging and extending a narrative of internal divisions. We were just had to learn to deal with it.

Not only that, we were never all going to agree with each other…

That Monty Python sketch might be clichéd but has a ring of truth. We split often, and over absurd things. Partly because we care enough to obsess over detail. Partly because being nowhere near power has enabled inward-looking mentalities. Partly because a smallish grouping whose aim is to change the world, getting each little thing right matters.

The Corbyn project brought together different camps. There’s a cohort of (often younger) radicals who had come through movements against tuition fees and the Iraq war, and/or liberation politics. There’s belt of soft-left trade union-based Labourism that looked to Corbyn as a return to ‘real Labour’ even if they didn’t agree on things like Trident. There’s committed Bennites, former Blairites, former Greens and a smaller band of revolutionary socialists. Then there are people with less fully-formed politics, who see Corbyn as a principled breath of fresh air.

The Corbyn project is the only place where such disparate groups would organise together — which is a great strength. But these groups, with their own language and forms of organising, shibboleths and suspicions, were not going to agree overnight.

The rows in Momentum were as inevitable (and annoying) as the rows within Labour. Realignment is not easy but tortuous and hammered out in thousands of meetings, Facebook arguments and pub tables. We all feel there is too much at stake to lose ourselves to arguing, but finding the same page takes time and effort.

We didn’t have that time, and we were backed to the wall by a hostile press…

Before the general election our campaign needs three planks: a five-line, simple, intuitive argument for 21st Century socialism that forms the basis of our appeal; forums in which the experts and spokespeople of the new left are developed; and an organisation able to mobilise, train, develop and facilitate discussions among our activist base. This should form the basis of the biggest ground operation ever seen in British politics, backed up by a sophisticated understanding of the mix between new/old, print/broadcast/digital media — and a detailed policy programme explaining how we can rebuild and transform Britain after ten years of misery.

This is a mammoth job involving the coordination of hundreds of thousands of people and multiple agents with competing views and priorities. Ideally such things would be our main focus; alas that isn’t how real life works. In addition to obvious fixtures like the EU referendum and local elections, the process of updating our party’s programme has happened under a harsh, brutal spotlight. The press are institutionally biased against Labour. We appear to have Europe’s most right-wing media, who routinely just make shit up. Ownership of mass communication is in the hands of a few billionaires representing the same political class whose power we aim to undermine. This isn’t to bleat about media bias — it’s inevitable and we have to work through, around and with it. To be bullied into changing our political programme by the editors of the Mail is not an option.

The attacks were inevitable — even if we could do more to ensure our people are armed with rebuttals. There’s nothing worse than being unable to answer your crowing Tory mate holding up today’s Telegraph.

We were never going to be perfect, and nor was the polling…

We are not perfect. When Corbyn won, the Labour left had not held serious political power anywhere in decades with the possible exception of Ken Livingstone’s second-term London mayoralty. The pool of people with Labour memberships, radical politics and professional political experience could maybe just about fill a moderately-sized chip shop.

This was going to create mistakes. It was always going to invoke sneering from people much more ‘experienced’ who conveniently had forgotten that they lost two general elections and millions of votes. Political ‘competence’ is a perception built through multiple indicators — and with the (inevitable) level of disunity, we were never going to look completely in control. We have been pressured to move too quickly when we needed the space to think about the future.

The problem with focussing on fast-moving polling cycles is pursuing the present at the expense of the future. Having a well-crafted, timely response to the issues of today is great and we are seeing, thankfully, less of a bunker attitude from Labour.

But — if your political organisation has lost two general elections, rapidly undergone considerable demographic change, and is sundered by sweeping shifts in politics, then that won’t cut it.

The platform that unites a movement and offers a solution to the most unstable period in post-war Western history is not produced by a run of soundbites. Polling stories are self-fulfilling; they demoralise, scramble and disrupt a political operation. They foster bunker mentalities. We can’t ignore them, but nor can we afford to be paralysed by them.

Our ground operations were going to take a while to build…

An effective organisation combines the experience of veterans with the fresh ideas of the new. Labour has not been in the position to do so easily. Much of the veteran political bodies are moribund, ineffective, inflexible and suspicious of new people or ideas. Much of the new people are suffused with optimism and politically inexperienced; in tandem this leads to the ossification of half-formed woolly politics and endless rows about how much doorknocking you have to do before being a legitimate activist.

Corbyn’s proposal to deal with this: a nationwide programme of organising academies to turn activists into effective advocates — is likely meeting with resistance at HQ. Even if that’s not true, the infrastructure takes a while to build. Hundreds of thousands of new members can shape electoral outcomes, but only when equipped.

…and meanwhile, the Remain/ Leave binary was always going to pose an existential risk.

Much of Labour internal debate has (falsely) split up process-level issues: doorknocking, media appearances, time management and big political questions — and then ducked trying to talk about big issues in favour of endless stupid arguments about canvassing.

Meanwhile the country has been cleaved in two. The left and right are being replaced as key identifiers of national division with two caricatures; a Waitrose-shopping Hampstead liberal elitist and a pubgoing Clacton bigot. Some polling now suggests that two-thirds of the electorate now identify with their referendum vote above their party of choice.

These divisions mean very little, and collapsing the diverse social coalitions around both Remain and Leave into such a binary is bizarre. But it is real for plenty, and is an existential threat to both main parties. The Tories are a little better set up to handle it because they’ve been living with a cold war over Europe since Margaret Thatcher was in office.

In Labour, half the moderates now want to shift a shade towards Ukip and the other half a shade towards the Lib Dems. Meanwhile on the Labour left, those who have accepted the Brexit vote are accused of being weak on racism or old-fashioned, and those more upset about Brexit are accused of being liberals. Everyone insists on misrepresenting each other’s positions — and needs to stop.

The door is closing on us. Labour has to wedge it with a viable third front, and fast — like it failed to in Scotland, where the national question has become the dominant political identifier.

The left is best-positioned to do that. We can talk about inequality and class in a way that recruits both left-behind Leavers and liberals. Empowering communities and mass social investment can appeal to those in both camps. But the bigotry visible within the Leave campaign and the sneering dismissal of the result in the Remain camp needs to be called out. We can appeal to people of different stripes while not tolerating bullshit.

I suspect that’s true even on immigration, where our basic message is that the Tories and bosses have stripped down your wages and public services, not migration. Beyond that a consensus can be built around the rights of existing EU citizens, the rights of refugees, and a future policy that accepts two things: there are newcomers who need (and deserve) the British state’s help and newcomers whose help the British state seriously needs. With ‘control’ moving away from Brussels, we can replace endless arguments about ‘control’ with a fight for a decent community cohesion strategy, labour market changes to prevent undercutting and policies that reassures migrants they won’t be treated like second-class citizens (e.g. closing horrific detention camps) whilst reassuring people who read the Mail that no-one is being shoved to the back of the queue — backed by a labour movement-based campaign against racism that unambiguously shifts blame onto the government.

The labour movement now has a huge responsibility to heal the divisions created by Brexit. It will be difficult, but worth fighting for.

So why bother?

In September 2015 I guessed that all the above (apart from the EU referendum result) would create a series of rolling crises for the Corbyn project. I also believed (and still do) that the worst will come if and when we actually win a general election. (Seumas Milne’s Secret War Against the Miners and in fiction, Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup are excellent visions of the forces aimed at any project trying to remove wealth and power from the small clique of public schoolboys that run Britain.)

One might reasonably ask, then, why I didn’t vote for another candidate. And if one accepts that the other candidates were either equally or more likely to preside over a catastrophic election loss and the breakup of social democracy (a perfectly reasonable conjecture), it could then be asked why I bothered voting for Labour’s leader at all.

Part of the reason is that whilst there were inevitable problems, there are also opportunities. Hundreds of thousands of new members are an asset (despite all the chaos, Labour’s ground game has taken back two city mayoralties and won all winnable parliamentary by-elections so far). Socialist policies being debated in the media more often is a good thing that would not otherwise have happened. A leader who, even when polling is terrible, consistently scores highly on honesty when the measure of trust in public figures is at its lowest since records began, is invaluable.

The other part is that this project provides the only viable set of solutions to the ongoing crisis. We don’t need quasi-religious faith in our politics: a sober, evidence-based assessment provides all. Our post-crash economy is profoundly unstable, our workforce is even more so — and is increasingly being corralled into poverty-pay sweatshops or sham self-employment — and we lack the insulation of a strong set of public service to undo social damage. Our social and physical infrastructure are both creaking. Our communities are divided and increasingly isolated. Poverty now costs taxpayers £78bn a year. Add to this the threat of a chaotic Brexit, the threat of the far-Right, and the more latent but just as real threat of energy shortages, mishandled technological advances and runaway climate change and you have a bleak, intractable picture. Few politicians in Britain are even bothering to consider serious answers to these questions — and only a huge transfer of wealth and power to people and communities, backed up by an active, democratised and strategic state can slow down or avert the oncoming juggernaut. Every force other than the Labour left is either less willing or less able to take bold, radical action.

We certainly can’t leave it to a government that lobs faulty nuclear weapons around and covers it up.

There may be a light at the end of the tunnel. But we are in a tunnel nonetheless. The only iron certainty is that Sod’s Law will continue to apply. There are no short cuts to the end. Credulous optimism will only lead to disappointment when expectations are not met — and that goes whether it’s Trump or Toryism you’re resisting.

The practice of politics is not cheerful — it turns confidence into cynicism and is survived only by combining care, solidarity and mutual support with grey, flinty determination.

But what happens next is still up to us.