Is Corbyn unelectable? The BBC's favourite question

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I was pleasantly surprised to hear a great interview given by Ed Miliband on the daily Corbyn-bash known as the Radio 4 Today Programme. He refused to be drawn into Jim Naughtie's very unsubtle attempt to criticise his successor, and to join in the new mantra that everyone now robotically repeats 'Corbyn is unelectable.' 
Unlike all his other critics, Miliband did not claim to have a crystal ball and vast mind-reading powers to determine how 40 million people will vote in four a half years time - given that we don't actually know what's going to happen in Britain and worldwide over the coming period, other than the likelihood that it won't be plain sailing.
The interview was a rare moment of relief from the constant stream of snipes, attack interviews and constant attempts by the Beeb to remind us that we are not acually living in a democracy. They used to call Chile after Pinochet a 'managed democracy', meaning a country where the people voted but did not truly decide who ruled. That seems to be Britain - vote for who you want but don't have the temerity to break with the fixed set of ideas laid down by our elite. I'd like to see an analysis of the main 8.10 interviews on the Today programme to see how many feature pro or anti-Corbyn interviewees - and to look at the balance of questions. That old myth of BBC balance has been well and truly busted since Corbyn's election. I get the feeling that some in the BBC and Guardian think this is all just a momentary aberration and all will return to normal (ie Tweedledum Tweedledee politics) once Corbyn is overthrown or disappears in a puff of smoke.
Of course the cynics will say that an endorsement from Miliband is like a death wish, given what happened in May. But what all these Nostradamuses seem to ignore is what Harold MacMillan famously called 'events, my dear boy, events'. George Osborne has probably ruined his chances of replacing Cameron as prime minister by taking an axe to tax credits. Beyond that there are a series of dangers for the Tories in the economy.
For the first time in modern British history, the export of profits to foreign owners of British assets has now exceeded so-called invisible earnings (income to Britain from overseas assets). This is a result of the systematic selling off British companies to overseas firms and governments. They are creaming profits to such an extent that the old fail safe of UK multinationals earnings from overseas has been wiped out by the reverse flow of funds out of Britain. We are now the equivalent of a colony being bled dry by absentee overlords.
Britain's visible trade deficit has been growing steadily, and rose to 5.9% in 2014, its highest ever level. This is due to a decline in our energy and manufacturing exports, and the rise of the pound, making our exports less competitive. As Anthony Hilton in the Evening Standard has explained, it is also linked to the decline in our invisible earnings, as already stated: 

The amount of credit generated by our overseas investments fell 31% between 2011 and 2014 to £73 billion. At the same time, the amount sent to overseas owners of British-based assets went exactly the opposite way.It rose 31% to £71 billion. The overall effect of the plunge in money coming in and the surge in money going out was to cut out FDI surplus from £54 billion in 2011 to £2 billion in 2014.

This fact is the one that should have Osborne lying awake sweating. His strategy is to increase "earnings" by flogging off the last bits of family silver - Royal Mail, Eurostar, etc.

Meanwhile the deficit budget strategy is in tatters as the deficit continues to refuse to go down thanks to self-defeating austerity.

Then there is our unprecedented property bubble, which thanks to £100 billion plus invested by tax-dodging companies in London property has reinflated the bubble that wrecked the economy in 2008 to unprecedented levels, with prices 40 percent higher than the pre-crash peak. For potential future PM Boris Johnson, the social cleansing this is causing is apparently nothing to worry about - the more foreign millionaires who want to use our homes to stash their shady cash, the better. As the Standard reported:

since 2008 there have been 27,989 purchases of homes, buildings and land in the capital by shadowy corporate structures usually registered in tax havens to hide the buyers’ identities.

Not only is this making London unaffordable for its inhabitants, and creating a kind of fake city for the global rich, it is creating an unsustainable bubble and denying the exchequer billions.
Then of course there is overall rising indebtedness: "Total outstanding non-mortgage borrowing grew by nearly £20bn or 9 percent in 2014, to reach £239bn." Including mortgage debt, people in the UK owed £1.443 trillion at the end of July 2015. This is up from £1.412 trillion at the end of July 2014 – an extra £604 per UK adult.
How are the Tories going to keep this all afloat over the next four a half years, when historically speaking, they have overseen a crash in each one of their periods of office.

Thatcher's first government exacerbated the recession with austerity policies, putting 3 million on the dole in 1979-81. The 1990-92 Lawson recession saw Thatcher removed and Major returned to power, only to oversee the ERM debacle, which pretty much destroyed the Tories' credibility until 2010.

Labour has not yet recovered from the reputational damage caused by overseeing the 2008 financial crash. But by offering a radical critique of this government's policies, Corbyn's Labour can be shown to have pointed up the disastrous policies that could yet again tip Britain into a major crisis by 2020.

There's been a major economic crisis in Britain in every one of the last five decades: 1973-5, 1980-82, 1990-92, 2008-11. It is highly likely that the cycle will be repeated, and the above underlying economic problems are the time bombs ticking for the Tories before the next election.The problems in the housing market relate to affordability - people are being squeezed by very high rents and prices are beyond the reach of millions.

This market cannot continue to rise like this. Most housing prices bubbles don't gently deflate. They crash. Presumably Osborne believes that Britain's shortage of housing and the love affair of the global rich with London will make sure that the music never stops. We've heard this tune before and as Einstein said, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a a different outcome is the definition of madness.

According to a certain reading of the historical data, property crashes occur every 18 years, so the Tories are safe through 2024-5. But this bubble has been re-inflated by trillions in government quantitative easing, so the rules of the market have been massively distorted and may not behave normally going forward. Besides some other 'black swan' event may come from the side that we don't anticipate. Remember the tech crash of 2000-1?

If the Tories oversee another crash, who then will be unelectable? Perhaps only Boris Johnson, the curly haired future king, knows the answer.

Q: What else could we do with £100 billion other than blow it on Trident?

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A: Spend it on renewables and give us real national security

The Tories, the media and right-wing Labour MPs appear to be of one voice on the importance of spending a vast fortune on the next generation of submarine-based WMDs. Jeremy Corbyn’s insistence that he would never use them has apparently cast him into the wilderness of the unelectable and the dovishly naïve. Russia’s Putin is apparently rubbing his hands with glee at the thought of Britain’s imminent nuclear nakedness.

But in an age of austerity, when the government claims it has to cut the income of 3 million low-income families to the bone, while slashing subsidies for renewable energy following the hottest year on record, surely the question of value for money in achieving security for Britain should be paramount?

It’s not as if climate change has no impact on national security. Charlotte Church was sneered at for mentioning a report that found Syria’s uprising was in part caused by a severe drought over three years that drove thousands of people off the land and into slums prior to the 2011 protests.
Across the world, traditional rain patterns are being disrupted by climate change, adding to stress in regions that are already wracked by social violence. When the Pentagon recognises climate change as a bigger threat to global security than terrorism, the smart move for policymakers would be to invest heavily in green energy, not blow the nation’s resources on an unusable instrument of nuclear terror.
The cost of the subsidy for renewables soon to be axed by the government is £1.5 billion – a billion less than Trident 2’s annual cost of £2.4bn. Britain, by investing a big part of its Trident budget in a renewable revolution, could by 2030 have created a new green economy and weaned us off dependency on OPEC oil (36% of oil imports) and Russian coal (42% of coal imports). This change would surely offer us far greater security than to continue to rely for energy sources on countries who could, at some not too distant future point, suffer violent political change and possible economic collapse.
In a modern economy, energy security is central to national security. Following development of oil and gas production in the North Sea, the UK became a net exporter in the 1980s, but North Sea production peaked in 1999, and the UK returned to being an energy importer in 2004.
In terms of energy security, things have gotten worse since David Cameron came to power. In 2013, 47 percent of energy used in the UK was imported, up sharply from the 2010 level, due to the decline in oil and gas output.
In 2013 Russia remained the leading source of our coal imports, accounting for 41%, with the US at 25% and Colombia 23%. For crude oil we rely on Norway, which accounted for 40% of imports, with OPEC countries – including Algeria, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia - supplying a further 36%. Norway accounted for 58% of UK gas imports, with the remaining 20% as Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), with over 90% of this coming from Qatar. UK oil production in 2013 was 70% lower than the record 150.2 million tonnes in 1999. Gas production in 2013 was 66% lower than the record levels seen in 2000.
So there you have it – we are increasingly import dependent for fuel, with a significant portion of this coming from Russia and OPEC countries. Britain in other words, is reliant on fuel from countries – in the Gulf, Russia and Africa – who effectively have a gun pointed to our head over energy. Billionaires from these countries have been accumulating vast portfolios of British real estate, mostly in London.
In the case of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, they have funded the advancement of conservative Islam across an arc from North Africa to Indonesia that has helped spur militant violence across the world.
So Corbyn’s best option to win the argument, and for Britain’s future prosperity and energy self-sufficiency, is to propose investing a big portion of the £100 billion that was due to be spent on Trident in a green economy that will genuinely give us national security in a highly unstable world.
Alternatively we can continue with Cameron’s option of dependency on coal, oil and gas from our friends in Russia, the Middle East and Colombia, while holding a very expensive stick of dynamite and pretending that it makes us safe.

Yanis Varoufakis comes with a warning for Jeremy Corbyn

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Greek ex-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis brought some rock star glamour to the opening of the TUC on Sunday in Brighton. The Syriza economist smiled for selfie shots with delegates at a 1,000-plus meeting of delegates high on the back of Jeremy Corbyn's stunning victory in the Labour leadership battle.

Varoufakis gave an inside account of the madness of the bailout talks with the EU troika and the way the Greeks withstood intimidation from outside and within to vote down the new austerity loan this summer. However he noted with sadness that while the people were up for a showdown with Euro finance ministers, some in the Syriza party were not.

He also warned the Corbyn camp of the challenges it will face in the coming months.

"Throughout this campaign which began yesterday and will end with the general election, it will be a focal point for progressive people throughout the world. You will be facing a wall to wall campaign of vilification, a campaign to discredit Jeremy…to discredit the labour movement.

"There are lessons from Greece. They will use fear against progress. You must return the favour by showering them with reason, with compassion, and with even a degree of self deprecation.

"You must be steadfast when the character assassination escalates beyond belief. I’ve experienced that. Alexis Tsipras experienced that.

"Beyond that, you must always believe as Franklin D Roosevelt said, that the only thing to fear is fear itself, and the people who are there can be made not to fear fear.

"It is important that we believe that because the saddest piece of news I bring you is that we the leaders didn’t believe."

"You will be told that if Jeremy wins, the UK will become another Greece."

On the 2008-9 financial crisis he said it proved that austerity was a non-starter and that the ruling elites were fully aware of this, but used it as a weapon to redistribute wealth - and to punish Greece and its left-wing Syriza government - for the temerity of putting EU diktats to Greek voters.

After the bankers broke the economy "the state ended up holding the baby. The same people who served the interests of the bankers during the era of ponzi growth turned to what I call Ponzi austerity – fake austerity… to ensure the costs of the crisis were passed on to those who never benefited from the Ponzi growth in the first place.

"The British economy began to recover after 2009, then George Osborne put his foot on the break. What did he do immediately after that? He removed his foot, he stopped doing austerity; austerity was very light in Britain. It was used as an instrument to affect a savage redistribution of income.

"From a macroeconomic perspective it was very very light. Greece’s austerity was eight times as harsh. What was effect on Greece – we lost 28% of national income, we lost one third of the jobs. We had a spectacular increase in poverty.

"Austerity doesn’t work. George Osborne knows that."

"Another element that will be very important for the Jeremy Corbyn team to understand - the practice of QE has been exemplary in maintaining some equilibrium in the macro economy of Britain while at the same time using austerity as a narrative to justify the transfer of income from the have-nots to the haves.

"This QE was quite remarkable even by the standards of Europe and the United States. Where did that money go? It went to purchasing mortgages, purchasing derivatives, purchasing bonds. Purchasing those pieces of paper that elevate the value of asset prices, but have nothing to do with industry, like house prices in London, like share prices in companies.

"The Bank of England extended liquidity to banks, banks extended liquidity to companies. And what did companies do with that liquidity when people of Britain did not have enough money to buy more stuff – they bought back their own shares. They did not invest in productive activity, in jobs…

"There has been no surge in investment in the sectors which are essential for the future of Britain. That was a spectacular fail by Cameron and Osborne. And why did they not get challenged? They did not get challenged because the Labour Party lobotomised itself some time ago.

"Now in Greece we had contractionary contraction – the greatest austerity ever.

"What should you do? You are embarking on a long path which is going to excite all of us. Firstly, the Labour Party needs to stiffen its lip. For 30 years now we have had a one sided class war. The only in Britain who disowned the class war was the Labour party. Mrs Thatcher, Mr Major , Mr Blair, were exemplary class warriors, fighting for the interests of the class they represented. There was socialism for the bankers and the spivs, and unfettered markets for everyone else.

Since the 1980s, capital itself was diminished, fragmented, financialised, said Varoufakis. But he warned the British labour movement against looking backward as they work out economic strategies in the coming period.

"What does it mean to have to fight this good struggle? It means a number of things.

"We should not rush to the past for solutions. We have to be critical – [in the 1980s] we in the labour movement were defending tooth and nail towers that were crumbling because of the disruptive technologies of the time. From the Greek perspective, having coal fired electricity stations is a no no.

"We have to revive the spirit of Harold Wilson in the 1960s and the white heat of technology except this time it shouldn’t be the white heat of technology, it should be the cool breeze of green technologies.

"We need to show [young people] for whom the idea of the internet is decentralizing, it is what the idea of common ownership of means of exchange distribution and production meant to previous generations.

"The emerging markets have cottoned on to the importance of having a publicly owned development banks. Brazil has one, China has one, America doesn’t need one because it has the military industrial complex, which operates as their magnificently efficient development bank. In Britain we need one.

"People’s QE was a right-wing idea – helicopter money – created by Milton Friedman.

"Why can't a development bank issue bonds to the City of London to fund a green new deal? This will not push up house prices in London, you are not pushing up the share value of media companies – you are supporting the development of real productive green technologies directly.

"There are lessons from Greece. They will use fear against progress. You must return the favour by showering them with reason, with compassion, and with even a degree of self deprecation.

"You must be steadfast when the character assassination escalates beyond belief. I’ve experienced that. Alexis Tsipras experienced that.

"Beyond that, you must always believe as Roosevelt said, that the only thing to fear is fear itself, and the people who are there can be made not to fear fear.

"It is important that we believe that because the saddest piece of news I bring you is that we the leaders didn’t believe. The magnificent people of Greece responded to a terroristic act – they [the ECB and troika] shut down the banking system – [by defying it and voting No in the referendum on the austerity package].

Draghi and the Euro group said the Greek banks were solvent but warned me to keep my mouth shut or he might change his mind. He told me, ‘You have to protect their solvency by keeping your mouth shut.'

"On 27 June, the Eurogroup said they had no choice but to shut the Greek banks down – because we [Syriza] dared to put [the new loan agreement] to the Greek people in a referendum. I could not responsibly sign this agreement because I knew we could not repay it. That was considered an act of irresponsibility that deserved the reaction on their part of shutting down the banks. And I can't look at the Latvian, Slovenian or German finance minister in the eye and say I am going to sign this loan agreement and we’re going to pay the money back, because I knew we couldn’t – and they knew we couldn’t.

"The Greek media was beaming into their homes that if they vote No they will be destroying their land, they will be destroying their country – and they responded to this with a 62% No."

Yanis went on to say that the “magnificent Greek people" had shown that they could not be bullied, and were not prepared to surrender, but sadly that could not be said of the Syriza government.

"This was the first time in history that a creditors have offered a loan to a sovereign state that the creditors know will ensure that the old loan and the new loan cannot be repaid.

"We were elected with 36% and 62% said no. That no was a no to the fearmongers. The message I took from this 62% was: we don’t want to be taken out of the Eurozone, we want an hourable agreement within the Eurozone. We want compromise, not to be compromised. If they push us through the mud and humiliation, then let them do their worst."

"But comrades, to finish on a slightly pessimistic note and a word of caution to what is happening here [in Britain]: the enemy is always within. The enemy is always the Ramsay Macdonalds, the enemy is the fear in our ranks. Try to excise it from your hearts and the hearts of your leaders."

Corbyn's rise is caused by neoliberalism's onslaught on 'Middle Britain'

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Hark the sound of panic from the Labour establishment and its media backers, from the Sun to the Guardian, vainly trying to warn voters away from the surge in support for Jeremy Corbyn.
But Tony Blair's warning of annihilation, along with those of Mandelson and Campbell, are a Canute-like chorus against a swelling tide caused by decades of neoliberal policies of new Labour and the Tories.
Essentially the middle ground, middle England voter to whom new Labour has always sworn its undying faith, has been whittled away as a voter demographic by the economic and social policies of the last 35 years, and especially of the last five years. The first signs of this were clear from the 2015 election - with the millions voting Ukip, SNP and Green.
The theory of Blairism was that the working class was disappearing, being replaced by a new middle class of aspirational voter, especially in the south and Midlands where most elections were won or lost. This was the result of the policies of Margaret Thatcher, which deindustrialised Britain and turned many more people into homeowners, thanks to the Right to Buy policy, and also the culture of consumerism and the decline of trade unions.
In theory this change was irreversible and meant that the traditional Labour social base was being replaced by a new type of voter more naturally inclined toward consumerist and individualist ie Tory values. Hence new Labour's shopping list approach to politics, with pledges and carefully triangulated messages - minimum wage, yes, but tough on welfare and immigration, and an insouciant acceptance of rising inequality.
Behind a lot of this was fear of the Tory media, which new Labour spent an enormous amount of energy cultivating in order to avoid the fate of Neil Kinnock. Recall Blair's early meetings with Rupert Murdoch in Australia and of course, his model, Margaret Thatcher.
However, it makes no historical sense whatsoever to believe that the moderate centre-left appeal of early Blairism that worked in 1997 after 18 years of Toryism is in any way relevant to the 2020 election. The biggest party in recent elections has been the non-voters - who in 2015 were 34 per cent to the Tories' 24 percent. These are the people Russell Brand says he represents - those who no longer have a stake in a political system that appeals to lower middle and middle-class homeowners. As for traditional Labour voters - public sector workers and carers, they were always treated with contempt by Blair - but in Corbyn, they at last have a candidate who unashamedly shares their values.
Since the financial crisis of 2008, the social divisions caused by a policy of deregulation and privatisation have accelerated - and it is clear who has lost out: average wage earners, young people, renters and others, such as those on in-work benefits and zero hours contracts, have suffered declining living standards, while often apparently treated by our political class as the great unwashed whose votes don't count.
Home ownership is in decline, private sector renting is moving toward 9 million, zero hours contracts have rocketed, food bank use has become a commonplace. In this deeply divided country where the wealthiest 0.1 percent saw their assets double in value since 2008, for whom austerity is what happens to the little people, Corbyn is the answer to the question - who stands up for us?
This is the socio-economic soil from which the Corbyn surge emerges, and is only surprising to those living in a privileged Westminster-media-West London bubble. It is not going away.

Why the right can't handle democracy

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The horror, the horror. Democracy - that quaint idea of the people actually deciding who leads us, as against having to choose between pre-selected establishment candidates - has broken out in the Labour Party. The Blairites and others who see in Jeremy Corbyn everything they hate about their own party's traditions - honesty, socialism, commitment to principles - must be truly cursing Ed Miliband now for introducing a new democratic system for electing the leader. In the 1990s, the Parliamentary Labour party had half the votes on the leadership of the party. It was a way of making sure grassroots members didn't get above themselves and start thinking it was their party. God and Tony Blair forbid!
At some point, the leader election system was changed again, with a third of votes going to members, a third to affiliated unions, and a third to Labour MPs. That system put Ed Miliband in charge over his brother, whose Blairite record made him a dead duck for the unions.
And now, thanks to Ed, its just one member, one supporter, one union affiliate, one vote. Oh glorious democracy. Getting Corbyn on the ballot was a way of showing how fair minded Labour MPs were in the wake of the shocking defeat in May. But very few ever expected there to be an insurgency of the kind we are now seeing.
They bought into the Tory media line that Miliband lost for being too left wing. What is it about Labour politicians that they believe everything they read in the Sun, Telegraph and Mail? It's as if they lack the capacity for independent thought. They all trot out the same line - the Tories won and Labour lost because we don't 'get' popular right wing sentiments on immigration, welfare, tax etc. Yes, many people do worry about these things, but if you go and ask someone on the doorstep what they feel about these issues, some of them might repeat what they have read in the papers. Gypsies with big families are given five bedroom houses. People enjoying a life of ease on welfare. God forbid that you should challenge the distortions and lies that appear in the papers and point out some other salient facts - the billions in subsidies that go to landlords and businesses to subsidise high rents and low wages. No, no - that would be to suggest you could change these inequities and build a fairer country No, that would be a dangerous raising of expectations. Just keep it vague and aspirational and hope people vote for you out of desperation - maybe stick it on a stone plaque with apple pie promises of sunshine and warm feelings. This then becomes Labour policy.
Then along comes Jeremy Corbyn, squeezed onto the ballot for Labour leader and now leading the pack. I've known Jeremy for years as a peace and solidarity campaigner whose commitment is second to none - he has supported a lot of unfashionable causes, from Diego Garcia, to Palestine, CND, to Colombian trade unionists and the Kurds. Those who sneer should ask themselves what it is about political commitment they find so off-putting.
Corbyn is straight talking and is not burdened with the kind of inflated ego that has been the downfall of other left leaders in the recent past - abrasive personalities who, while charismatic, too often can't live up to the principles they espouse.
Kendal and Blair and all their right-wing media acolytes warn that we might be moving back to the 80s. They seem to be unaware that when the country voted Labour in 1997 and 2001, it was looking for an alternative to the right-wing Thatcherism that had governed the country and raised levels of inequality and poverty in the 80s and 90s. They did not actually vote for Blairism - they voted Labour. A landslide in 97 was almost inevitable. But even more important than this, 2020 is 23 years after 1997. The country has been ruled by a neoliberal regime - with a very short interregnum of Gordon Brown - since 1979. Perhaps only a radical candidate committed to real social change can challenge and bring to a halt this juggernaut that keeps coming back stronger like a zombie we thought we had killed.
Remember 1990 and the end of Thatcher. After that we got Major and the closure of the mines and the rail privatisations. With Blair we got Public Private Partnerships, Iraq, and ever greater security surveillance, plus the micromanagement and farming out of public services.
Neoliberalism comes in different guises, with different faces - but each time the electorate is fooled that it has voted for change, the continuity candidate wins. Even Brown, confronted with the biggest crisis in capitalism in 80 years, bailed out the banks with our money and asked for nothing in return - no radical reform of a financial sector that had become a blood sucking beast on the backs of ordinary people.
Blair reorganised Labour's democratic system so that members no longer had any real say over policy. Miliband began to change that.
So yes, people are desperate for something different. Janus-faced candidates like Burnham and Cooper - who declare love for big business or Israel whenever someone says jump and can't give a straight answer to a question - are not going to do it.
This is why Corbyn has caught the moment, and why Labour's political establishment - and the right-wing and liberal media including the Guardian - are in shock and don't know what's hit them.
Can Corbyn win in 2020? Who knows? And who knows what catastrophes Osborne will have inflicted upon the nation by then. Anything is possible - except the sudden discovery of conviction and principles coming from any of the other three candidates.
And as for the Labour right, the slick-faced elitists like Tristrum Hunt and Chukka Ummuna, they have shamefully exposed their contempt for democracy. After 20 years of managed control of the party in the name of staying rigidly to centrist politics that kill all enthusiasm, they have revealed the very reason millions in Scotland and England no longer want their kind of politics.
There is every chance that if Corbyn wins, they will split the party as happened in 1981 with the Social Democrats. That didn't work out well. However, as European politics has shown, new popular left movements can eclipse traditional social democracy - or at least give it a run for its money. See Spain, Greece, Italy, Holland. Britain needs a left-wing alternative to Ukip and the SNP in Scotland. This could be the beginning of something truly exciting.