Jeremy Corbyn thinks he won the argument—and he says he has proof. A Tory government—a Tory government!—running huge deficits, subsidising private salaries, raising benefits, pumping money into the NHS, and scrapping rail franchises? In the minds of Corbyn and his followers, it's his world and we're just living in it.
It's easy to scoff, given Labour's electoral shellacking at the end of last year. But do they have a point?
Before Corbyn—specifically, before his 2017 election comeback—the Tories were the party of small state austerity. Now they're gushing money as laissez-faire goes up in smoke. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, Boris Johnson had pledged significant investment in schools and the NHS, just as Labour's 2017 campaign demanded.
The claim that this proves Corbyn won the argument on public spending is tempting. But that doesn't mean he moved that historic bane of the British left: the Overton window of electorally popular policies.
What the public values
The fact is Britain's political centre of gravity has long supported funding for schools and hospitals. The 2010 Tory manifesto pledged to increase NHS spending in real terms every year. Funding per pupil edged up in real terms under the coalition. George Osborne focused spending cuts on politically easier targets.However, from 2015 this began to fall apart under the sheer weight of austerity. Schools funding was cut in real terms. A&E services felt the squeeze. Corbyn capitalised on this. Labour's successful attacks on NHS and schools cuts in 2017 eventually forced the Tories to pledge more money for these areas.
There's no guarantee that a more centrist Labour leader could have pulled this off—nor that they would have even tried. Labour didn't commit to protecting NHS funding at the 2010 election, and many on its centrist flank were keen on service redesign rather than committing cash. And without Corbyn's across-the-board anti-austerity rhetoric, it's questionable whether an anti-cuts message limited to health and education, balanced by triangulation on the need for tightened belts elsewhere, would have cut through.
In this sense, Corbyn did 'win the argument'—but the argument he won concerned existing voter demands to protect health and schools funding, bringing to heel a Tory party whose austerity fetish had taken it outside the Overton window. The evidence that he actually shifted the Overton window is much thinner.
Missing from the manifesto
The clearest example of this is on welfare, which for a decade has been the biggest single target of Tory austerity.Corbyn's shadow chancellor John McDonnell recently called on the government to raise sick pay and Universal Credit to the real living wage. But Labour's election manifesto five months ago promised neither.
Labour 'fully costed' manifesto pledged to abolish Universal Credit but made no financial provision for a higher basic payment in whatever replaced it, nor for an increase in Jobseekers Allowance, and made no mention at all of higher sick pay.
So when chancellor Rishi Sunak added £20 a week to out-of-work benefits in response to the coronavirus pandemic last month, he pushed them well above the level Labour had proposed. When Labour now attacks this as too little to live on, they may well be right—but their own manifesto five months ago was even more inadequate.
How coronavirus has shifted the centre ground
Coronavirus has—for the time being—shifted the centre ground on benefit payments by vastly expanding the range of people dependent on them while pulling away the labour market ladder. Both main parties have shifted with it.When Sunak cranks up benefit payments that Corbyn had largely ignored, that isn't Corbyn winning the argument—that is crisis enabling reality to impose itself on the fantasies of political debate.
On public spending itself, the Tories have for the moment cast aside their balanced budget commitments. But Labour also had a (much less stringent) balanced budget commitment. Again, rather than Corbyn winning the argument,it is coronavirus which has shifted the political ground through sheer necessity, forcing both parties to shift in response. The extent to which Labour, the Tories and the public shift back after the pandemic remains to be seen.
The wrong emphasis?
Similarly, while announcements on rail and broadband services have seen Corbynites claiming victory for their nationalisation agenda, they should check the small print. In both cases, the Tories' direction of travel is towards greater regulation rather than outright nationalisation. If privatised rail is made to work along the lines of London's highly regulated and relatively effective system, will demands for outright renationalisation fall away?With McDonnell acting as Corbynism's economic brain, Corbyn never really pushed the dial on his own core interests: immigration, foreign policy and defence policy. He took principled stands on refugees and Windrush, the legacy of which is reflected in the stances adopted by the candidates to succeed him, but he triangulated on Brexit and made little impact on public opinion—the fact the Tories feel comfortable with Priti Patel as Home Secretary testifies to that. And while the British public now tends towards an isolationist foreign policy, Corbyn's toxic associations left him unable to capitalise.
A capital agenda
Is there anywhere that Corbyn's leadership genuinely blazed a trail the rest then followed? Perhaps there's one. Osborne senselessly slashed capital investment in his austerity mania. While McDonnell accepted the principle of balancing budgets in day-to-day spending, he built Labour's economic strategy around huge capital investment in infrastructure and regeneration—an agenda now adopted by the Conservatives.But did the Tories respond to Labour's agenda-setting? Well, no. For a start, Labour utterly failed to turn its huge infra spending pledges into votes at the election. They based their campaign on big sums of money rather than actual improvements, and voters—who rarely prioritise infra anyway—shied away from the resulting impression of a free-spending left-wing leadership. Unlike in 2017, there was nothing here for the Tories to fear.
Instead, the post-Brexit panic attack that engulfed British politics pushed regeneration and public transport investment up the Westminster agenda. The Tories pledged far less money than Labour, but framed it in terms of regenerating high streets in ex-industrial communities—something more recognisable than Labour's big numbers. Dominic Cummings is an enthusiast for capital investment, including in research and development—ideas close to Labour thinking, but not developed in reaction to it.
What we see, time and again, is the Tories shifting in response to broader developments rather than the demands of one of the most unpopular party leaders in British history.
It has been the brute force of reality that has driven change in both parties. Corbynism was a manifestation of this: a reaction to the practical reality of austerity while Labour centrists focused on the electoral reality of austerity. But Corbyn was a product of this dynamic. He was not the cause of it.
Corbyn won the argument within Labour—but Labour is not Britain. And in Britain, many of his arguments are still far from won.
