54 Britain The EconomistNovember 30th 2019
T
his is anage of political surprises. Donald Trump won the
presidential election of 2016 after being treated as a no-hoper.
The Brexiteers won their referendum despite being dismissed as
cranks. Jeremy Corbyn is now widely seen as a lost cause, particu-
larly after a week in which the chief rabbi accused him of anti-Sem-
itism and a large poll suggested the Tories could win a majority of- But history could easily have another surprise up its sleeve.
What happens if Mr Corbyn defies expectations and enters
Downing Street next month? Most people have focused on the eco-
nomic consequences. Labour boasts that it will “rewrite the rules
of the economy” and jack up public spending. But just as signifi-
cant will be the political consequences. The party plans nothing
less than what Tony Benn, Mr Corbyn’s mentor, called an “irrevers-
ible shift in the balance of power in favour of the working people”.
The political revolution is in many ways more central to the Cor-
byn project than the economic one. Economics is only the means
to remaking Britain’s political soul.
The two most obvious changes will be big increases in the pow-
er of the state and of the trade unions, reversing four decades of
movement in the other direction. Labour’s manifesto bristles with
government-powered solutions to every problem: the renational-
isation of the utilities; a free, state-run British Broadband Service;
a state-run drug company to provide cut-price medicines; a sus-
tainable-investment board and a national energy agency; national
commissions on food, health, working time, women, pensions;
and agencies galore. Alongside this it contains a detailed list of
promises to organised labour. The party would roll out sectoral
collective bargaining across the economy, remove “unnecessary
restrictions” on industrial action and grant “the biggest extension
of workers’ rights in history”.
But this is only the beginning. The two great watchwords of La-
bour thinking are “democracy” and “decentralisation”. The mani-
festo unveils plans for a democratic “revolution”, reducing the vot-
ing age to 16, extending full voting rights to foreign residents,
creating a Constitutional Commission, advised by a citizens’ as-
sembly, and a host of other measures to “put power in the hands of
the people”. Democratisation goes hand in hand with decentralisa-
tion, to redress the lopsided balance of power between London
andtherestofthecountry.Much of this sounds appealing. Brit-
ain’s version of representative democracy is broken. The political
class is held in contempt. Parliament has spent three years decid-
ing nothing. Dozens of mps—including some of the brightest—are
retiring from political life because it is too toxic. And much of the
anger that is upending politics is driven by a revolt of left-behind
regions against an over-mighty capital.
Yet Labour’s version of people power promises to make a mock-
ery of both democratisation and decentralisation. Two ideas lie at
its heart. The first is extending the reign of democracy from the
public sphere to the private sphere. John McDonnell, the shadow
chancellor, told last year’s Labour Party conference that “the la-
bour movement has always believed that democracy should not
stop when we clock in at the factory gate, in the office lobby, or—
like my mum in bhs[a department store]—behind the counter.”
The second idea is handing power to activist groups in local gov-
ernment and in workplaces. In practice this doesn’t mean empow-
ering ordinary people. It means handing control to highly motivat-
ed activists who are prepared to devote their evenings to passing
composite motions. If ordinary folk try to get a look in they will ei-
ther be ignored, as Mr Corbyn did when the majority of Labour sup-
porters urged him to take a clear line on remaining in the eu, or
shouted down. Some activists think nothing of resorting to bully-
ing, misogyny and racism if they don’t get their way, driving dedi-
cated mps such as Luciana Berger out of the party and turning local
party meetings into echo-chambers of extremist ideas.
The manifesto opens up growing areas of British life to be
treated to the same technique that Mr Corbyn has used to take over
the Labour Party. Labour plans to force big companies to put 10% of
their shares into Inclusive Ownership Funds, managed by employ-
ees. It wants to double the size of the co-operative sector, with a
combination of incentives and subsidies. Mr Corbyn has even sug-
gested that employees should have the power to elect the editors of
newspapers and television news programmes.Power to which people?
Labour regards activism as a way of subordinating both the state
and the business world to the popular will. One of the sacred texts
of Corbynism, “In and Against the State”, encourages radicals to get
jobs in the public sector in order to turn it into an instrument of so-
cial activism and a funder of left-wing causes. Labour’s share-ap-
propriation plan will make Inclusive Ownership Funds, which will
probably be run by worker-activists, the biggest shareholders in
blue-chip companies such as AstraZeneca, Tesco and Marks &
Spencer. Again, some of this might sound attractive: too many civil
servants live in a Whitehall bubble and too many managers over-
pay themselves for spouting claptrap. But Mr Corbyn’s ideas repre-
sent a threat to one of the basic principles of liberalism: that there
is a limit to the power of politics. Liberals accept that the business
world operates according to the principles of property rights and
free exchange, rather than the popular will, and that individuals
possess basic rights that cannot be overruled by democratic diktat.
Mr Corbyn is having none of that.
All this makes Labour’s political agenda even more dangerous
than its economic plans. It injects politics into every corner of
society. It whips up enthusiasm by demonising opponents (the
stinking rich, the heartless Tories) and organising supporters into
euphoria- or rage-fuelled rallies. And it feeds on itself—the more
opposition it encounters, the more it relies on the sheer force of
the people’s will. This could be Britain after December 12th. 7Bagehot Too much of a good thing
Labour plans to redistribute power as well as income. That is more dangerous than it sounds