The future of the post-Corbyn left (part 1 of 4): From free hit to free ride

The Ming Vase has nearly crossed the floor

So the Ming Vase of electoral victory is nearly across the slippery floor and in the early hours of Friday morning we’ll know exactly what it contains, in quantitative terms, though the quality will only become clear over the first 100 days or so.

Some on the left of the floor stopped cheering a while ago, and started chanting about how the floor really isn’t that slippery if you’re confident about getting to the other side, and that the vase holder could even afford to look over their way for a chat about how to get there quicker and with more and better vase contents, even though when they tried it five years ago they tripped over half way across and spilled the bloody lot.

For myself, I’ve often been tempted to shout really very funny and sarcastic things from the back, really just for the bantz, but have kept quiet, not least because I really didn’t like the mess a few years ago, and blamed myself for creating it.

I’m not in a position yet to see what kind of stuff’s in the vase, but I have been watching the people on the left of the floor for a while and so, on the eve of the Great Vase Arrival, I feel emboldened — with the small potential for Streisand effect now fading — to make a few observations about them, and what they might be able to do after it has arrived.

But let’s drop the vase metaphor now. Even I’m tired of it.

I’ll set out my case in the following parts:

· From free hit to free ride: the quietly elitist logic of a call for a vote for other parties;

· From free ride to trolleybus problem: the strange link between The Third Way and the post-Corbyn left (life projects and life politics);

· A brief history of the Corbyn era, and the nascent Toynbeefication of the post-Corbyn commentariat;

· Mea culpa, and a comradely Meadean future, where agency meets intellect (again).

From free hit to free ride

The message that has become commonplace from the (sometimes newly) anti-Labour left is that it’s a good idea to vote for another party in the election because Labour is going to win a massive majority anyway, so it’s not as though as you’re going to let the Tories back in by default, so it’s a free hit against Labour.

The Labour response Is the obvious one — an appeal to the idea of collective action — but what’s not really been picked up is the strange logic of the free hit, which depends for its validity on the unspoken assumption that not enough people are going to take on board the free hit advice for it to become a collective action by mistake, such that Labour does not get a majority.

There are two things to say about this assumption-making.

First, at a practical level, while it’s a safe assumption in terms of the end of overall Tory rule — the opinion polls are not likely to be that far out — it’s not as safe at constituency level, where free hit votes for non-Labour candidates are quite likely to lead not just to the retention of obnoxious Tory seats but, more insidiously, to the election of a few Faragists candidates.

The rise of Faragism, and the coming merger with Orbanist Tories, is a matter for another (post-election0 essay), so suffice to say for now that the election of, say, a dozen Faragists in addition to Farage himself will strengthen Farage’s own position very considerably as he seeks to take over mainstream Tory associations and resources in the coming months, and will allow a head start in the 2029 challenge to Labour.

This is playing with Faragist fire. While I recognize that most of the new anti-Labour left cohort, both ‘leadership’ and followers, had decide to withdraw their support for Labour before Farage ignited his company’s electoral campaign by going to Clacton, and that it’s difficult, once having decided on or advocated a free hit strategy, to row back on that in light of events, that difficulty doesn’t make it any more wise.

And then, of course, there’s Galloway. Some of the newly anti-Labour left are actually advocating a vote for his personal advancement project. At least with Reform , it’s support by default. But support for Galloway? Really?

Second, less obvious as a political dynamic but arguably as important for the left’s own future in the long term, there’s a question of agency.

Those promoting the free hit strategy are not only effectively denying their own agency by assuming relatively few people will listen to them — a strange defeatism that Ill argue may be associated with their own political histories — they are also, and as importantly, denying the agency of the rest of us.

By promoting a strategy that depends for its validity on the idea that not enough people will pick up on the idea for it to have unintended negative consequences of the type I’ve outline above, anti-Labour left commentators are making either an explicit or an implicit distinction between those who are concientized, or of sufficient moral calibre, to take note of how bad Labour is, and the rest of us.

Here’s one of the more explicit such takes out there on social media, from a leftwinger with 30,000 followers or so, but picked almost at random as there are plenty such messages about:

I think people of conscience should vote against Labour this year. They’re going to win anyway and a minority government is the least bad available option.

In essence, what the tweeter is calling for is for “people of conscience” to exert the privilege that they enjoy as insiders to some kind if politics of integrity, safe in the knowledge that others outside this special group will do the wrong thing, which is also the right thing, or vice versa.

Or in other words, it’s not a free hit strategy; it’s a free ride strategy.

Now, of course I get what is likely to be a key objection to this argument. It’s that, for all my oh-so-clever analysis, I’m ignoring the main substance of why the anti-Labour left have disavowed Labour. For some that disavowal has come because Labour in opposition has trashed their Corbynist comrades, including Corbyn; for others it’s been that Labour has show no evidence of a willingness to pursue a re-distributive and Keynesian political economy, or one that truly faces up the scale of climate change, or that won’t countenance full public ownership, or all three. For others, it is Labour’s reaction to the scale and horror of the mass killing in Gaza that was a step too far.

But still, none of this addresses the key point: that those who want the free political and moral ride are willing to take that free ride in the knowledge that others have to carry them and, moreover, that they have to carry them while being abused for sins ranging from neoliberal tendencies to the abandonment of the trans community to genocide enablement.

That doesn’t seem very fair and nor, I’ll suggest, does it feel very socialist.

In part 2, I turn to the rather different mode of departure from Labour of one valued comrade, and what it suggests about the broader disjuncture between post-Corbynism and the demands of the mid-2020s.