The establishment feared Corbyn’s internationalism

Jeremy Corbyn in Glasgow for COP26. Photo: Laura Kelly

JVL Introduction

In this article for Jacobin, Oliver Eagleton highlights why the British establishment hated Corbyn so much: his anti-imperialist commitments.

In it he chronicles Starmer’s rapid reversion to a defence of the US-dominated world order.

But, more importantly, he locates the strategic shift taking place within the establishment to a realistic assessment of the British economy (read: City of London) and its need to reorient post-Brexit towards the expanding Asian markets, “courting allies and constraining China” while continuing to strengthen its alliances with – and dependency on – the Gulf states.

It is vital, he says, that the left develops a clear analysis of these overall developments rather than simply focusing on the government’s most clear-cut transgressions, such as its complicity in Saudi and Israeli war crimes.

This article was originally published by Jacobin on Sun 19 Dec 2021. Read the original here.

The establishment feared Corbyn’s internationalism

Above all, the British establishment feared Jeremy Corbyn because he advocated forcefully for socialist internationalist foreign policy. This anti-imperialist politics was the first casualty of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party leadership.

For the British establishment, the most intolerable element of Corbynism was its opposition to imperial intervention. Though the Tories tried to close the gap with Labour on domestic policy — floating plans to end austerity and put workers on company boards — their stance on overseas issues was resolute: facilitating the assault on Yemen and occupation of Palestine; bombing Syria and doubling deployments to Afghanistan; forging alliances with Gulf dictators and saber-rattling against Russia. On each of these points, Jeremy Corbyn’s dissenting position anathematized him in Westminster.

Accordingly, anti-imperial politics was the first casualty of Keir Starmer’s New Labour revival. The party is now marching in lockstep with the Conservatives: backing more defense spending and tougher sanctions against rival states while trumpeting its “unshakeable” commitment to NATO. Maximal support for Israeli ethnic cleansing is the new bipartisan norm. As Corbyn’s former political adviser Andrew Murray wrote in these pages, the Labour leadership has embraced a “warmonger internationalism,” stacking its foreign policy team with cheerleaders for the military ventures of the Tony Blair years.

Internationalism, Not Moralism

Opposition to such jingoistic reflexes has, thankfully, outlasted the Corbyn experiment. Stop the War Coalition and Palestine Solidarity Campaign have recruited a younger cohort of activists since the 2019 election, invigorating the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Left Labour MPs such as Apsana Begum and Zarah Sultana have condemned the atrocities of the multibillion-pound arms industry, refusing to toe the party line on weapons sales. And the United Kingdom’s socialist media sphere, fronted by Novara and Tribune, continues to publish spirited takedowns of liberal interventionism and rebuttals of Israeli hasbara.

Yet despite their success in keeping anti-imperialism alive, these worthy efforts to shift public opinion have failed to capture Britain’s position in the US-dominated order or explain what’s at stake in its ability to project power abroad — subjects that will become increasingly difficult to ignore as the UK reshapes its international role post-Brexit. With some notable exceptions, critiques of Tory foreign policy suffer from three interconnected problems that compromise their ability to articulate a convincing left alternative.

The first is a narrow framing that emphasizes the humanitarian impact of Whitehall’s bellicosity. Of course, counting the victims of air strikes and arms deals is useful to spark anger, or highlight the gulf between government rhetoric and reality. But it also serves to elevate effect over causation, the symptoms of neo-imperialism over the system itself. Rather than identifying the latter’s function for British capitalism, critics usually attend to its ideological scaffolding — attacking patriotism or imperial revanchism, as if they were the primary reasons for the UK’s overseas activity, instead of its post hoc justifications.

This generates the second problem: a single-issue focus that lends itself to campaigning on a series of distinct injustices but fails to draw links between them. Since the dominant left foreign policy framework is ethical as opposed to structural, it often centers on the government’s most clear-cut transgressions, such as its complicity in Saudi and Israeli war crimes. While this approach has obvious merits, it means that socialist commentary becomes heavily weighted toward specific issues (notably Israel-Palestine), which can then be dismissed by political opponents as irrational fixations or idiosyncrasies. By foregoing a comprehensive analysis of UK geopolitics, the Left becomes susceptible to the charge — tirelessly repeated by bad-faith columnists like the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland — that it is picking and choosing its pet issues, foregrounding the plight of Gazans but neglecting abuses elsewhere.

Framing foreign policy issues in moral terms suggest that a lack of a social conscience, rather than specific strategic interests, is what motivates the Right. When Starmer launched his Labour leadership bid on a platform of “moral socialism” — winning votes from some 40 percent of former Corbynites — he tapped into precisely this sentiment. An inheritance from low-church Protestantism, the ethical case for socialism is, in the words of Tom Nairn, “founded not upon any idea of what the world is objectively like but upon the conviction of its wrongness and injustice.”

Moralistic socialism is held together by its belief that a concrete assessment of political-economic forces is not required to alleviate suffering; what’s needed instead is a leader who is willing to do the right thing, a “nice” party to oust the “nasty” one. If Starmer’s popularity among Momentum-aligned activists proved anything, it’s that this argument has more cache on the Left than many would like to admit — especially when it comes to foreign affairs.

This Manichean schema brings us to the third problem: a tendency to retreat from ethical complexity — and, by extension, from the most pressing aspects of the global conjuncture. The UK is currently gearing up for a new Cold War in which it will act as head servant to the United States, using its inflated military budget to counter Chinese and Russian influence. Last summer, Boris Johnson dispatched a warship to the Black Sea to antagonize Vladimir Putin, and sent an aircraft carrier strike group into the contested South China Sea to rile Xi Jinping’s Defense Ministry. Johnson has now joined the AUKUS nuclear pact with the United States and Australia, designed to militarize the Pacific region and escalate the arms race with China.

In this context, it is vital for the Left to forcefully oppose the Atlantic compact while also rejecting apologia for its strategic adversaries (whose crimes, from Xi’s internment of Uyghurs to Putin’s bombardment of Syria, should not be understated). Yet if socialists continue to confine themselves to black-and-white humanitarian crises, they will be unable to rise to this discursive challenge. The extraordinary danger of renewed great power conflict, mostly elided by progressive media outlets and MPs, calls for an internationalism with the analytic tools to confront it.

Inspiration for this project can be found in unlikely places. In a November 2020 document entitled A Very British Tilt, the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange encouraged London to mimic Washington’s pivot to Asia, concentrating its efforts on courting allies and constraining China in the so-called Indo-Pacific — a prescription which Downing Street has so far followed to the letter. Although we should discard its militarist conclusions, the paper is nonetheless useful for understanding the rationale behind such major strategic shifts.

It proceeds from a realistic assessment of the UK economy, which — oriented around the City of London — has spent decades in a state of external dependency, seeking out surrogates to compensate for the loss of its colonial possessions. One such surrogate was the European Union, whose common market and migrant labor were essential to offset Britain’s anemic manufacturing sector and aging population. Now that this relationship has been upended, the country faces hazards on multiple fronts: economic isolation, adverse trading arrangements, and supply chain disruptions, compounded by climate change and COVID-19.

Strong transnational partnerships will be needed to stave off such threats. Hence Policy Exchange’s recommended “tilt,” which promises to solve several predicaments at once: giving UK investors access to rapidly expanding Asian markets; safeguarding the free flow of commodities through trade routes in the Indian Ocean; and beating back regional competition from China, thereby deepening the special relationship on which the prized US-UK trade deal rests.

The Right’s Internationalism

Seen in this light, Johnson’s maritime operations against China do not amount to an outburst of mindless chauvinism. As with his maneuvers in the Black Sea, they are in fact a rational response to Britain’s fragile economic situation. Their purpose is to signal the UK’s position inside the American fold, which constitutes the best chance of shoring up its outward-looking economy — maintaining what has been described as its “strategy of eversion” — while exiting the European orbit.

Nor is British support for repressive Middle Eastern dictatorships a simple expression of Tory sadism. Gulf wealth is structurally integral to the UK’s financial stability, with petrodollars used to plug the growing account deficit and bankroll infrastructure schemes. As part of the government’s “Levelling Up” agenda, the Department for International Trade has made a concerted effort to attract investment from Saudi Arabia and Qatar in areas outside London. This has placed the British war machine at the heart of plans for regional rebalancing. Without robust ties to Arab monarchies, promises of a new post-Brexit settlement may yet come to nothing. Subsequently, Johnson’s political fortunes are dependent on those of the Gulf. This fact makes sense of his government’s £6 billion arms deal with Qatar, increased security cooperation with Oman, and covert deployments to Yemen.

By and large, Policy Exchange analysts are more attuned to these connections between international and domestic politics than their opponents on the Left. If the latter are to develop an anti-imperialism that surpasses moralism, they must adopt a similarly integrated perspective. For it is a dead end to condemn Tory policies without providing alternative solutions to the material challenges that they set out to fix.

For a brief moment during the Corbyn era, these solutions seemed to be within reach. The antidote to economic eversion is, of course, a coherent national industrial strategy — which would have been provided by Corbyn’s Green New Deal, developed in collaboration with the major trade unions to revive British manufacturing and transition away from a financialized, externally reliant model. This strategy was to be implemented by a more active state, unshackled from the ordoliberal competition rules of the EU, that could have played a dynamic role in coaxing and directing investment.

Leaving the “ever closer union” also gave the leadership the opportunity to develop a new trade justice policy, reshaping Britain’s trading relationships to reflect the principles of global solidarity (in contrast to the neocolonial EU Customs Union, which guarantees competitive advantage for European producers). Shadow minister Jon Trickett drew up plans for an international alliance of progressive leaders, including Brazil’s Lula da Silva and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, as a substitute for Britain’s circle of oil-rich despots.

This program combined a commitment to justice abroad with transformative measures at home. It was alert to the practical implications of disentangling the UK from its imperial networks — and it offered a radical vision of Britain outside the EU, bringing an end to the assumption that Brexit was an intrinsically racist or nationalist enterprise.

Yet it was never at the forefront of Corbyn’s pitch to the electorate. Indeed, during his four years in office, it was gradually eroded by a different faction of the party that believed it was better to concede to the establishment on controversial foreign policy issues (Brexit, NATO, Russia), maintain a rhetorical opposition to the Tories’ worst human rights violations, and focus on domestic issues such as wealth taxes and nationalization. This was not a winning strategy in 2019, nor will it be in this decade.

Comments (15)

  • Kuhnberg says:

    Those responsible for the defenestration of Jeremy Corbyn and the destruction of the country’s hopes for a desperately needed reforming socialist government, fall into five interconnected groups.

    1. The Blairite rump of the PLP furious at the prospect of Corbyn upending their shameful legacy – and after 2017 terrified that he might succeed in doing so. This groups was swelled by other Labour MPs on the so-called ‘moderate’ wing of the party.

    2. The supporters of Israel right or wrong, who feared that Corbyn might lead a UK government determined to see justice done to the Palestinians and indict Israel for its abuses of human rights. In an interconnected world they feared that a courageous stand in favour of Palestinian rights would have a knock-on effect throughout the western world, and possibly endanger the aid Israel receives annually from the USA, including its contributions to Israel’s defense capabilities.

    3. Armaments manufacturers and salesmen (including the UK) fearful that a Corbyn government might weaken their monopolies and prevent arms sales to dictatorships like Saudi Arabia.

    4. The obscenely wealthy and giant corporations fiercely opposed to the introduction of new levels of taxation including taxes on inherited wealth.

    5. Press barons like Rupert Murdoch and the weight of the traditional media who also felt that Corbyn threatened the comfortable neo-liberal consensus that provided them with employment and reliably high incomes.

    Oddly enough Labour Party interests feared Corbyn far more than the Conservatives, who stood in the wings watching Labour destroy itself without any need for them to assist.

    The unholy alliance of these groups launched a concerted assault on Corbyn’s reputation, trying out one line of attack after another, until they hit upon the very area where his record was strongest, his lifelong dedication to fighting racism. The notion that Corbyn and his allies should have done more to appease his attackers by acknowledging his failings in the area of antisemitism is patently absurd. Corbyn did far more along those lines than was advisable, but the more he did the more his attackers redoubled their efforts. In the end the very actions that he took to defuse the matter added credibility to the accusations. By 2019 the party’s Remainers, including the present leader, had bullied him into accepting a policy that made no sense to the electorate and positively incensed the large body of Leavers who had voted to leave the EU. Labour’s defeat in December 2019 was inevitable.

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  • John Mclaughlin says:

    Jeremy Corbyn is the greatest mp of our time’s.

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  • Janet Crosley says:

    Thankyou for this. A coherent understanding, of the change socialists didn’t want.

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  • Stephen Flaherty says:

    Kuhnberg: “The notion that Corbyn and his allies should have done more to appease his attackers by acknowledging his failings in the area of antisemitism is patently absurd. Corbyn did far more along those lines than was advisable, but the more he did the more his attackers redoubled their efforts. In the end the very actions that he took to defuse the matter added credibility to the accusations.”

    I wrote an article along those lines to the Clarion back in July 2018 (just after Labour adopted the IHRA definition and all its examples), putting it slightly differently: “The problem with Jeremy Corbyn is that he’s too nice… He assumes that other people, especially other people he feels an affinity with, are like him and expects them to react accordingly, and with rationality… The IHRA definition of antisemitism was adopted in response to a smear campaign, intended to delegitimise the leader of the Labour Party. People who indulge in such despicable tactics are rarely amenable to reason and the attempt to appease them by conceding some of what they want whilst rejecting their more outrageous demands was doomed to failure. Because they don’t want compromise, they don’t want a solution. They want blood.”

    Clarion didn’t print it, nor any of the others I wrote, all of which predicted pretty much what happened. I’m quite proud (though also disappointed) to have been right about what was going to happen, way back in July 2018, especially as I don’t always do too well with such things (I predicted that 2019 would result in a hung parliament, for example).

    The article is OK, but riddled with spelling mistakes, e. g.

    saber-rattling
    defense spending
    centers
    anemic manufacturing sector
    aging population

    I mean, is it too much to ask that an article by a British author, about British politics, printed on a British website be written in English?

    [The article was publshed by Jacobin, a US-based website – JVL ed]

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  • Linda says:

    I’ve no particular respect for the “great ones” running UK politics in either of the main contenders for government BUT:-

    (1) they MUST have twigged that the USA now sees its partner in the European sphere as the EU and isn’t interested in sideshows.

    We’re no longer in the EU and are fast facing growing economic / political global irrelevance and isolation as a result. London is losing its global dominance as a centre of finance. While the USA will put pressure on the UK if it directly harms any political / economic concerns they have, the USA has almost nothing to gain from maintaining the relationship it had until recently with the UK. So it won’t.

    (2) These “great ones” must know that attempts to cosy up to what’s today’s largest super-power by squaring up to the super-power poised to take over from it are dangerous folly for a relatively tiny country already so dependent on Chinese manufactured goods and their investments.

    While the USA is CURRENTLY the world’s leading power, within the next 20 years China is likely to take over that role. It has a huge “soft power” empire already (based on trade, technology, loans and the creation of solid, sustained relations with a vast array of the world’s already rich economies and its developing countries).

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  • George Peel says:

    …and we’re, just, beginning to see, now, how today’s Labour Party are beginning to ‘reap the whirlwind’ of their treacherous behaviour, in their electoral failures.

    They can suspend, expel, gerrymander – lie – to their hearts content, but we’re, already, seeing how that translates, at the ballot box.

    The Party can replace Membership fees and donations. They can replace Union donations and structural support, by accepting large donations from well-heeled, private individuals, but…

    …without the votes, they’re going nowhere.

    One thing that’s needed to cement this scenario, is for ‘The Left’ to unite, and give people a real alternative, to vote for. Not, just, a political alternative, but a media alternative, as well.

    Too many left wing groups, too many left wing media outlets. Money is tight, and people can’t afford to donate to them all.

    Consolidate, The Left! Give us something to rally round.

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  • Stephen Richards says:

    The word is ‘SOCIALISM’ that is what the establishment have always feared. Anyone remotely associated with Socialism is completely ‘NO PLATFORMED’in the Johnson/Starmer Brave New World.

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  • John says:

    I knew we’d get hammered in the 2019 election. The electorate were confused about Brexit and they swallowed lies about Corbyn being an antisemite. What it taught me is this: the pro-Israel lobby will never, ever ease off and will use a series of arguments which have little consistency depending on the constituency they are trying to influence. They aim to confuse and portray themselves as ‘the victim’ in order to get sympathy. It managed to confuse some on the Left who swallowed the nonsense that criticism of Israel – ‘the Jewish State’ – was an attack on Jews. The pro-Israel lobby is used by the UK ‘establishment’ as a Trojan Horse against the Labour Movement and is a political force that needs to be identified and isolated, and destroyed. Corbyn was, at heart, a romantic socialist – with all the right morals. But it isn’t enough. He lacked the clarity and killer instinct that is a pre-condition for anyone in his position to have an impact. He should have concentrated on sorting out the Labour Party and NOT swallowed the nonsense that he could become PM and change the course of history. In the absence of a mass movement this was never going to happen. One of the things that irritates me increasingly by those good natured ‘socialists’ who want to accommodate the fears of pro-Israel Jews is that they fail to understand that there is a concerted and coordinated pro-Israel lobby that is rational and well funded working in Israel’s interests as well as the interests of British Capitalism in the Middle East. It should not be overestimated – but to acknowledge its existence is not a conspiracy. This lobby will attack and undermine those who shine a light on it – like David Miller. But it needs to be exposed and it will be exposed – as Walter Hixon’s recently published book ‘Architects of Repression: How Israel and its Lobby Put Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of U.S Middle East Policy’ has done in the USA. I know that there are those who fear that this line of argument MAY ignite some real antisemitism when it becomes the subject of popular discourse. That’s a risk that will need to be taken. But I’ve had enough. There are many Tories such as Alan Duncan who know that UK foreign policy in the Middle East is heavily influenced by Tel Aviv – and I know from years of activity that few politicians with any public profile will stand up to the pro-Israel lobby because if they do it will mean their political ‘career’ will be over’. The message is clear: time to go onto the attack against these bastards.

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  • Teresa Grover says:

    The traitors within Labour hold financial interests that they did not want to lose.
    Kuhnberg has written this brilliantly, & has stated clearly why Mr.Corbyn was stabbed so often even by Starmer, the fake Labour Leader, all in all Mr.Corbyn was so feared, & still is because thousands remain loyal to this man who represents Socialism.
    Bernie Sanders another man who has been crushed under the capitalists greed.
    I would still vote for an honest politician but the abhorrent corrupt keep creating lies, smears to protect their personal wealth!

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  • Monash Kessler says:

    This is a great article, clear and succinct. I don’t need to look up any references on Google to understand what it is saying. It is therefore all the more powerful in its argument which is something I had not fully appreciated before, which I would like to be developed and built upon.
    Lets try and keep discussion and ideas from being too intellectualised and verbose.

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  • bob cannell says:

    The UK has been beholden to the US since the 50s. An example is the nuclear power industry. Britain provides the US ,illegally, with plutonium for nuclear weapons. Because the reprocessing of nuclear fuel can be done in Britain more easily than the US. Our legal restraints are looser. In 1957 Britain nearly had a major nuclear disaster at Windscale making plutonium. Since then civil nuclear reactors have been used. Not safe, cheap, cool reactors but dangerous, massively expensive, hot reactors, because they produce plutonium. It carries on today. The new generation of reactors which produce electricity costing three times as much as wind, have been funded regardless, because they make plutonium. Because the US demands we make it for them. We are their slaves.
    Our hope is to wriggle free as the US economy falls into decline, like the USSR, unable to fund its grossly bloated war machine.

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  • Linda says:

    George Peel – the Starmer supporters also believed Labour “can replace Membership fees and donations. They can replace Union donations and structural support, by accepting large donations from well-heeled, private individuals” … but when they tried this approach it didn’t work. A “Guardian” article some months into Starmer’s leadership admits this. Too few of the well-heeled made donations and too few of these donations were anywhere near big enough to offset the money lost from membership subscriptions and union affiliate fees.

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  • Kuhnberg says:

    John is right about intimidation – the way political careers are threatened if someone expresses support for the Palestinians. Another factor equally important is political opportunism – expressing unwavering support for Israel and unwavering opposition to anyone who disagrees as a way of advancing one’s political career. I can’t say that in all cases the posture adopted was insincere, since I can’t read the minds of the persons involved, but the rewards are a matter of record.

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  • Stephen Branscombe says:

    Excellent article and great commentary from Kuhnberg. Thank you.

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  • Richard Snell says:

    There are members of the Labour Party who place the entire blame for Corbyn’s electoral loss at Corbyn’s feet. One has said to me that it was his complete refusal to recognise alternative agendas to his own which earned him the disfavour of his party colleagues, and ultimately earned him the disrespect of the voters. It’s a great shame there are members of the party who hold to this ill-judged view of events, and this article tells us just how misjudged it is.

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