Recently while canvassing for Labour in Chingford, I met a middle-aged man who told me he could never vote for Labour because Jeremy Corbyn is a “communist” who plans to confiscate all the money of everyone earning over £50,000 and “throw it in a big pile.” He said Labour would probably take away all the houses and “nice cars” too, and that every footballer would leave the UK, as well as “every other skilled person.” I asked him where all these people would go, since many countries in Europe have similar, if not higher, level of taxation and state spending to what Labour is proposing. He suggested either America or Dubai.
These may sound like the words of an extremist, but he was a well-spoken man living in a large house in London. There were two “nice cars” in his drive. He said he worked in finance. He came across, in other words, as a fairly normal, well-educated middle-class man. While speaking to him, I realised how normalised this language of communist extremism has become during this election campaign.
Spectres of Stalin
In his election announcement column for his old employer, The Telegraph, Boris Johnson declared that Labour Party members “point their fingers at certain individuals with a relish and a vindictiveness not seen since Stalin persecuted the kulaks.” The kulaks were a group of land-owning peasants deemed to be class enemies of the poorer peasants. It’s hard to understate the level of hyperbole used here: through arrests, exiles and work camps, Stalin was at least indirectly responsible for the deaths of almost 5 million kulaks.
Johnson went on to claim that Labour “would end up putting up taxes on everyone: on pensions, on businesses, on inheritance, on homes, on gardens.” Later, when the Labour Party announced its proposals for free full-fibre broadband, the BBC asked Rebecca Long-Bailey to respond to claims that the policy amounted to“broadband communism.” A search through media database LexisNexis shows that since the election was called on October 29, some variation of the words “communist,” “Marxist,” “socialist,” “Lenin,”’ and “Stalin” have been used almost 2,400 times by the UK’s biggest newspapers (The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Times, The Financial Times, The Sun and The Guardian).
In the last few days of the election, The Telegraph has published columns that describe Corbyn as a “Marxist true-believer,” with a “Marxist outlook” under whom “Britain’s economy would shrivel” due to his “Marxist zealotry”. They have also declared that if the Labour project doesn’t go to plan, the Labour party will behave like “the Stalinists of old.” Dominic Raab has written a column claiming that Corbyn “would weaken our security at home and abroad with his Marxist loathing for the West.”
And it continues in other papers. The Times has described the Momentum grouping as “Marxist cult”, as well as labelling Corbyn “A tired Marxist who befriends terrorists.” If Labour wins, they assure readers that Corbyn’s “posture as a man of peace and democracy would be exposed by his preference for autocrats, such as the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.” The Daily Mail has decided Corbyn is a “neo-Marxist” who would take the country into a “terrifying Marxist dystopia.”
The Sun regularly refers to Labour’s communist leanings, and other Labour politicians are Corbyn’s “equally dangerous communist buddies”. It has also upgraded Labour under Corbyn from the “looney left,” to the “lethal left.” One could laugh at this, or dismiss it as usual rhetoric of right-wing newspapers, but these papers have some of the highest readerships in the UK. For many voters “communism,” but specifically Cold War communism, has been a dominating theme of the election.
Frenzied reactions to banal proposals
It’s strange that communism and Marxism are now such accepted features of the discourse given that Labour’s manifesto is not even particularly radical compared to others in Europe. Many of the proposed policies are already in action elsewhere in the world. Free, or heavily subsidised, university education is already in place in France, Germany, Norway and Sweden, among others. In Germany and France, the railways are run by state-owned companies. Labour’s proposed corporation tax of 26% would be lower than the current ones in France and Germany. Why would policies which have not had catastrophic outcomes in other parts of the world set the UK on the road to a ‘Marxist dystopia’?
The prevalence of communism is probably a tactic designed to appeal to the Conservative Party base, Steven Fielding, a professor of political history at The University of Nottingham and expert in the history of Labour Party, told me over the phone. “For older voters and Brexit voters, who are usually older too, the Cold War and the propaganda associated with that, the demonisation of the Soviet Union, the sense of threat and imminent destruction, and stories about what Stalin did, would still be rolling around their brains on some level.”
According to research by Onward, a centre-right think tank, almost half of over-65s voted for the Conservatives in 2017, and so were born during Stalin’s lifetime. “In politics there are two ways you can win. One is to inspire hope, the other is to mobilise fear” said Dr Fielding.
But it isn’t just people in their 70s. The “broadband communism” style hysteria around Labour’s proposals to nationalise certain industries is also common among middle-aged moderates (like my friend from canvassing).
Dr Fielding sees this as a remnant of Thatcherism, which touted the superiority of the unshackled free market against what it saw as a clumsy meddling state. While nationalised utilities were fairly commonplace in the UK during the post-war period, the generation who grew up under Thatcher tend to have a lingering suspicion of state-run industries because of the libertarian rhetoric of their earlier years.
That programmes like free education are fairly common in Europe does not make much of an impact on how they are perceived here, Fielding explained: “People are usually insular in terms of politics and don’t really keep up with what is going on in other countries, especially on a policy level. That’s why you get ‘broadband communism’ or ‘whoo this is a bit dangerous’ reactions about policies which are commonplace in Europe, and actually quite banal.”
Narrowing the political imagination
Astrid Hedin, a political scientist at Malmö University who studies perceptions of communism in the West, tells me that it is “odd” that the association between universal state-funded services and communism still persists. “When you look at how the welfare state under communism was organised, the more profound difference is between communism on the one hand, and then social democracy, liberalism and social conservatism on the other. The key difference is how they are organised. It is the difference between democracy and non-democracy” said Hedin. For her, the difference between social democracy and communism lies in the former’s value of individual rights, rather than whether or not one offers state-funded services.
The perception that communism equates to free services is also misplaced, she explained. There’s a key difference between policies that are universal and those that are means-tested (conditional on meeting certain values). In communist regimes, such as the Soviet Union, access to services were strongly dependent on regime loyalty. “Education [in the Soviet Union] is an excellent example. If you were passively loyal you could maybe get an engineering education, but if you wanted an education in the social sciences or humanities you had to be explicitly and actively loyal. That is not universalism” said Hedin.
Communism might not be the most accurate shorthand for Labour’s manifesto but it is a useful tool to achieve something else: it narrows what people think is possible in social democracy and taints the project of hope with fear. It also brings to mind unaccountable regimes, wars and the looming threat of spies and foreign interference. It makes people imagine strict controls on the type of life a person can have, based on arbitrary things like their parents’ position in the regime, and a life defined by gruelling working conditions, where people starve and freeze to death. It brings to mind a leader who refuses to submit to any scrutiny. And aren’t we all glad we aren’t living through that.
