I’m not a big fan of Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the British Labour Party. A product of the sectarian Labour politics of the nineteen-seventies and -eighties, he has often appeared to be stuck in a time warp, refusing to budge. Hitherto, he has shown little aptitude for, or even any inclination toward, the messy business of governing. Some of his foreign-policy views are naïve, and, as the Guardian’s left-leaning economics editor, Larry Elliott, pointed out a couple of weeks ago, many of the numbers in his economic program don’t add up. Moreover, Corbyn too readily dismisses the achievements of New Labour, which ended eighteen years of Conservative rule, oversaw big investments in Britain’s public services, introduced a national minimum wage and free daycare, guaranteed maternity leave and four weeks of paid holiday, introduced civil partnerships, quadrupled the international-aid budget, and reintroduced free entry to museums and art galleries.
But some of the criticisms that have been levelled at Corbyn in the past couple of days are unfair. He is neither a Communist nor a “threat to national security.” He is a self-described socialist. In his republicanism, his anti-colonialism, his borderline pacifism, and his suspicion of big business, he represents an old and honorable, if occasionally misguided, strand of British radicalism, which extends back to Bertrand Russell, Keir Hardie, and beyond. Whether he can translate his radical beliefs into effective (or coherent) leadership is a fair question to pose. I doubt he can, myself. But on some big issues, Corbyn has raised valid points. Here are five of them:
1. Austerity doesn’t work. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the United Kingdom and the United States carried out the closest thing you can get to a scientific experiment in economics. On this side of the Atlantic, the Obama Administration took measures to extend its stimulus program, and then, under pressure from Congress, slowly applied some spending restraint. In Britain, the Conservative-Liberal coalition, after coming to power in May, 2010, immediately slammed on the brakes, introducing a package of spending cuts and tax increases, amounting to more than five per cent of G.D.P., that were intended to reduce the deficit quickly. So how did this experiment turn out? In 2009, the United States government was running a deficit of 9.8 per cent of G.D.P., and the United Kingdom had a deficit of 11.1 per cent. In 2014, the U.S. budget deficit was 2.8 per cent of G.D.P., and the U.K.’s deficit was 4.9 per cent of G.D.P. The country that followed a moderate approach, the United States, cut its deficit by considerably more than the country that imposed strict austerity policies.
2. The Conservatives are the extremists. I have noted before that the Conservatives’ intentions go well beyond repairing Britain’s public finances: they are engaged in an ideologically driven effort to downsize the British state, particularly the welfare state. Last December, in his annual fiscal statement, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, set out plans to extend his austerity cuts until 2020, by which time, his projections showed, over-all public spending as a percentage of G.D.P. would fall to the lowest level since the nineteen-thirties. In the run-up to this year’s general election, Osborne disavowed these figures. But once he was safely back on Downing Street, he announced a new spending review aimed at cutting the budgets of some government departments by another twenty-five or thirty per cent, with some of the biggest cuts falling on welfare programs.
I am not the only one who has made this point. In a public letter issued last month, thirty-five economists, including a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary-policy committee, wrote:
3. The U.K.’s economy is unbalanced. To help revive British manufacturing and spur the growth of new industries, Corbyn is proposing to set up a National Investment Bank, which would invest public money in infrastructure projects and “support for high-tech and innovative industries.” Of course, there are important questions about how such an institution would be financed and how effective it would be. But there is no doubt that Corbyn is seeking to address a real concern. In the past thirty years or so, the British economy has become dangerously dependent on the London-based financial-services sector, and the problem is getting worse. According to some estimates, as many as three quarters of the jobs created during the recovery are in London and the South East. In other regions, the recovery remains sluggish.
There are longer-term issues, too. Recent research from the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development suggests that countries with very large financial sectors tend to grow more slowly, have more asset bubbles, and exhibit higher levels of inequality. Even David Cameron, the Prime Minister, concedes that the unbalanced nature of the British economy is a concern—or, at least, he used to concede it. “Today, our economy is heavily reliant on just a few industries and a few regions—particularly London and the South East. This really matters,” he said in May, 2010. “An economy with such a narrow foundation for growth is fundamentally unstable and wasteful—because we are not making use of the talent out there in all parts of our United Kingdom.”
4. NATO’s eastward expansion is problematic. During the Labour leadership campaign, one of Corbyn’s rivals, Yvette Cooper,accused himof “making excuses” for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aggressive policies toward Ukraine. “We have seen an international breach here in terms of the sovereignty of a country, and we shouldn’t make excuses for that,” Cooper said, and she was right. But Corbyn also had a point in holding to his longstanding position that NATO’s expansion to Russia’s western borders helped to create some of the current tensions with Moscow.
Originally formed mainly to check the threat posed by the U.S.S.R., NATO has outlived its Soviet-bloc counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, by almost twenty-five years. After 1991, many former Warsaw Pact countries, and some former Soviet republics, were allowed to join NATO. In 1999, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic joined; in 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia followed suit. Many of these countries feared falling again under Russia’s sway and wanted to ally themselves with the West, so it was only reasonable to let them join NATO. But why, for example, was the prospect of NATO membership never offered to Russia itself—contingent on it pledging peace and coöperation, and vowing to respect the borders of all member states? The idea was raised in Washington during the nineteen-nineties, but it never went anywhere, and that had fateful consequences. In the past decade—as NATO has added Albania and Croatia, and has discussed admitting more Eastern European countries, including Georgia and Ukraine—Putin has repeatedly used the fear of encirclement to whip up nationalist passions inside Russia. Indeed, recent events bring to mind Warren Christopher’s 1994 warning that “swift expansion of NATO eastward could make a neo-imperialist Russia a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
5. Bombing ISIS doesn’t appear to have done much good. Writing in the Observer on Sunday, Corbyn called ISIS “utterly abhorrent,” but added, “The Prime Minister will soon again be asking us to bomb Syria. That won’t help refugees, it will create more.” On the basis of what we’ve seen over the past year, in the period since the United States and some of its allies adopted the policy of launching airstrikes on ISIS targets, it’s hard to argue with Corbyn’s pessimism. According to recent Associated Press report, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that, despite the bombing raids, ISIS is no weaker than it was twelve months ago. And the number of refugees from Syria keeps on climbing.
To be sure, Corbyn doesn’t have much to offer in the way of a practical solution to the desperate situation there, either. During the leadership campaign, he called for a new diplomatic initiative to resolve the Syrian civil war, replace the Assad regime, and isolate ISIS forces. But he didn’t explain how such an effort would fare better than previous attempts at diplomacy. Still, his warnings about military action are well taken. “I have been in parliament a long time and I’ve seen many decisions taken,” he said on Saturday, when he appeared at a rally in central London organized by groups supporting the Syrian refugees. “In moments of clamour and moments of fervour, decisions are made—go here, invade there, bomb there, do this, do that.... The media build it up, there’s lots of military advice, there’s lots of apparently simple and easy solutions.”
