BagehotJeremy Corbyn, pillar of the establishment

Labour’s leader isn’t the outsider that both his friends and enemies believe him to be

THE one thing that people of all political persuasions agree on about Jeremy Corbyn is that he is an anti-establishment radical. Tories mock him as a professional protester who wants to take Britain back to the era of three-day weeks and wildcat strikes. Corbynites praise him for sticking to his pure Labour principles, whatever the personal cost. Since becoming leader of the opposition, and a member of the Privy Council, Mr Corbyn has gone out of his way to demonstrate that he hasn’t sold out. He refuses to bow to the queen (though he did present her with a pot of home-made jam) and sings the national anthem in a way that makes it clear that he knows it’s a farrago of imperialist nonsense.

The problem with this argument is that it ignores a more interesting reality: as well as being an inveterate protester, Mr Corbyn is a pillar of an emerging establishment. As well as being a throwback, he is a harbinger of a new world of high-minded millennials and woke corporations.

When Henry Fairlie coined the term “the establishment” in 1955, he was referring to a tightly knit group of politicians, civil servants and society ladies who held the fate of the nation in their hands. Since then Britain has added two new establishments to the old one. The most conspicuous is the neo-liberal establishment that celebrates itself every year in Davos. But even as this oligarchy was being forged by Margaret Thatcher and given a face-lift by Tony Blair and David Cameron, a parallel left-wing establishment was in the making. This establishment dominates the public sector, the trade unions, bits of the media and, above all, the universities. Fairlie defined an establishment as an “oligarchy of opinion”. The parallel establishment is defined by its commitment to three non-negotiable opinions.

The first is that “the people” and “the powerful” are locked in a perpetual conflict. The “people” in question used to be defined by class—Mr Corbyn delighted the Labour Party conference in Liverpool this week by noting that next year is the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, perpetrated by “troops sent in by the Tories”—but is increasingly defined by gender, race and sexual orientation as well. The second opinion is that Western imperialism is the primary cause of most of the emerging world’s problems, from poverty to dictatorship. The new establishment regards an overmighty America as the chief source of the world’s ills and treats its opponents, such as Hugo Chávez, as latter-day saints. Mr Corbyn’s attitude to Israel is driven less by anti-Semitism than by this “West is worst” narrative; he can’t help regarding Israel as an exemplar of Western imperialism and the Palestinians as virtuous freedom fighters.

The third opinion of the new establishment is that capitalism is a deeply flawed system, haunted by irrationalities and contradictions that only enlightened members of the new elite can fix. Clever academics and journalists have been thinking up ways of rewiring capitalism for decades, for example by giving more voting power to long-term shareholders or changing the composition of company boards.

The parallel establishment had to content itself with sniping from the sidelines during neo-liberalism’s glory days, consolidating its control of the universities and the public sector as it was locked out of Westminster and Whitehall. But then several things happened that profoundly changed what Marxists call the “balance of forces”. The Iraq war turned into a debacle. The financial crisis of 2008 shook capitalism to its core, ushering in a prolonged period of stagnation. And the Labour Party changed its system of electing leaders to give more power to party members.

This week’s Labour conference was a reminder of the power of the parallel establishment. The old private-sector trade union barons who dominated the party in the 1970s have disappeared. The most powerful groups in the party are now middle-class millennials and public-sector workers. It was also a reminder of how obscure academic ideas can become public policy. John McDonnell, Labour’s shadow chancellor, unveiled a plan to force “big” public companies to give 10% of their shares to a fund managed by employees.

Mr Corbyn was trained for his current role in the parallel establishment’s equivalent of Eton and Oxford: his Islington North constituency and the Tribune Group of Labour MPs. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he immersed himself in the new politics of race, gender and anti-colonialism, relaxing, after a long day of protests and meetings, by singing Irish protest songs. He forged close ties with the likes of Mr McDonnell and Diane Abbott, which were to prove enormously useful in his chosen career. He even got the equivalent of special tuition, attending a study group, the Corresponding Society, that met every week in Tony Benn’s house and included such luminaries as Perry Anderson and Ralph Miliband. (Mr Corbyn invariably arrived late from a demonstration and ended up taking a chair that had belonged to Keir Hardie, Labour’s founding father, but was so uncomfortable that nobody wanted to sit on it.)

The king is dead! Long live the king!

The Labour conference made clear that the parallel establishment is learning some tricks from the old one. There is the division between the “dignified” and “efficient” branches of government, as originally defined by Walter Bagehot. Mr Corbyn increasingly plays the role of the monarch, smiling benignly from the party platform, while Mr McDonnell does the real work of creating policies. Labour apparatchiks draw up “composite motions” in late-night conclaves, far from the prying eyes of ordinary mortals. This is Fairlie’s government-over-the-club-table in modern guise. Both Mr Corbyn and Mr McDonnell even claimed the blessing of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, for their policies. The British establishment is forever changing—and yet somehow forever remains the same.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "A pillar of the establishment"
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