There are a lot of parallels. Foot and Corbyn share many attributes, too, including the disconcerting (to politicos) aura of having a life outside politics, which makes them appear insufficiently professional to some (compare and contrast Owen Smith in his neat suit), while being part of their appeal to others.
As with all parallels one should beware of becoming mesmerized, though. The discussion of entryism glosses over one huge difference - the numbers involved. Labour's ranks have swollen by 130,000 in the last few weeks alone, and to hear some people talk you would think all these people were members of Militant sleeper cells waiting for the wink from the Kremlin to leap into action - but the fact is that groups like the Socialist Party are tiny, with a total membership well below 5,000.
Another factor to consider is that the Overton window has swung far to the right since 1981. From the point of view of many Labour members, the real entryists here are those who've joined the party from the right with a PPE degree in hand, then been (in many cases, Angela Eagle's being a classic example) imposed on local constituencies against their will. That's where the split between the membership and the PLP has its roots, not from some recent Trotskyite conspiracy. For decades traditional Labour members have put up with a rightwing version of their own party because it was the only game in town. Now they have a chance to change that, they're not going to let it go in a hurry.
It would be interesting to compare the platform of the SDP at that time with the positions proposed by Corbyn today: I suspect you would find very little difference (with a few exceptions over, for example, nuclear disarmament). As I recall, the issue that gave the nascent SDP most of its impetus was sense that Labour was in hock to union power - both in terms of the party itself and its industrial policy. That's really not the case now.
I don't know who's been talking in terms that sound like charges of sleeper cells, but I don't think it's relevant to count up the formal members of tiny Trotskyist parties and ignore the possibility of vast numbers of non-members who might agree with them, or at least are operating under their sway. In the days of the US Commie scares, such people were known as "fellow travelers" and were considered as big a problem as what were known as "card-carrying Communists" - if not bigger, because you couldn't identify them from the cards they carried. True enough that fear was vastly overblown, but that was because the fellow-travelers never actually elected any Communists, except perhaps for Vito Marcantonio who was really only a fellow-traveler himself. But if that makes the line of reasoning specious, then so is today's charge that, while not all Trump supporters are racists, they're actively enabling racism, and most people on our end of the spectrum think that charge has bite.
In the days of the SDP, the entryism that was being extirpated was that of card-carrying Militants, who could be identified and removed because of their cards. There was, however, nothing to prevent them from abjuring their cards and becoming sleeper agents, and this was pointed out. The broader policy war that the SDP was in was against a broader tendency labeled Bennism, of which Corbyn was an active member. The thought was that by extirpating Militant, Bennism would lose most of its real danger and some of its energy. The Gang of Four and their acolytes, before they left the party, didn't want to expel the Bennites, they just wanted them under control, and the Bennites felt the same way about the Gang of Four, with the difference that the Bennites had only recently seemed to be taking over, while the Bennites felt the Gang of Four and their ilk (e.g. Healey, Callaghan) were only now being deposed after a long reign.
This is because the Overton window doesn't change the parallels. True enough that "New Labour" was further right than any previous edition of the party, but the charge that Labour was being desecrated by right-wingers dates back as far as Bevan's charge that Gaitskell (or an unidentified person very like him) was "a dessicated calculating machine," unless you want to go even further back and invoke the expelling of MacDonald, Snowden, and Jimmy Thomas. In fact the impetus for Bennism was a feeling that the entire Wilson government was an exercise in right-wing entryism (and they had evidence for this: Wilson himself had been a Liberal at university, and Jenkins was described as "one of Nature's Liberals"). Frustration at the government's ignoring the more left-wing manifesto was what led to the writing of a raw-blooded extremist manifesto in 1983 that nobody could ignore.
Going back to the SDP's defining issues, their objection was not to union power per se - unions could be in policy agreement with the Gang of Four and often were. The Gang's policy battle was with the Bennite/Militant tendency expressed by many (not all) unions and many (not all) constituency parties alike, and their power struggle was with the Bennite desire to give unions and constituency parties more power over the PLP and the leadership election. The point at which the Gang realized they'd lost the struggle and began to prepare a new party was when Callaghan agreed to an electoral college and mandatory reselection (Bishop's Stortford conference, June 1980). That wasn't about union power, that was about the PLP losing both power and autonomy to a leftist wave of which unions were just an element.
In the end, they lost that war, and restricting the leadership selection to MPs alone is now a dead issue. But the principle lives on in the Eagle/Smith position that a leader, however elected, isn't viable without at least substantial support among the MPs and that Corbyn hasn't got that. Contrast that with the Corbyn position which is essentially vox populi, and you have an exact replica of the 1980 struggle, just slightly updated because of changed rules. The presence or absence of unions from the equation has nothing to do with it.
A very interesting and informative reply (more so than the article that sparked in, imo). Sleeper cells was hyperbolic: you're right, fellow travellers would be the mot juste. Even so, there's no evidence that there is a large number of Trotskyite fellow travellers among those who have joined the Labour Party,. Corbyn's support there is certainly not evidence because, well, he's not a Trotskyite, simply a leftish democratic socialist, much as Benn was (as you point out). I don't think there's any parallel with Trump, to be honest, because Trump is clearly a racist himself, so to support him is to some extent to connive in or at least turn a blind eye to racism.
I quite accept your long-view comparisons - you're right that this is a 'debate' that's been going on in some form since MacDonald (family loyalty reminds me to add the charge of Butskellism to the list of its manifestations). And you're right about the SDP's immediate casus belli, but as I remember, independence from union power was a large part of the way in which they subsequently distinguished themselves from the party they'd left - that being a hot topic in Thatcher's early years.
I'm not sure that restricting the leadership to MPs alone is a dead issue. Look at the way Eagle and Smith coordinated just yesterday to leave the choice between them to MPs rather than the membership, thus bypassing the existing mechanism to whittle candidate lists through second-preference votes. And then there's Will Hutton's recent call for a return to PLP-only leadership elections, which rules members out of the equation entirely. If they can, you may be sure that the PLP will try to take that option.
They don't have to be Trotskyites, they simply have to be unrepresentative of the party and they'll elect an unrepresentative leader. The counter-argument to that is that the existing long-term members voted for Corbyn too.
Benn wasn't simply a "leftish democratic socialist," at least not in the SDP's eyes: they considered him positively dangerous in a way that Foot was not, and Corbyn is not either. But exactly how Corbyn and Foot rank comparatively on that scale is what I don't have enough information to calibrate.
Union power was an issue in those days, yes, but it wasn't a relevant issue for the left-right split that I'm drawing a parallel with today's split on. Indeed, insofar as the SDP had an active beef against Labour's union policy at the time of the split, it was against the right wing ministers in the Wilson/Callaghan government for being, in the SDP's view, pusillanimous.
A call for a return to PLP-only leadership elections would be reactionary indeed, but I find on reading Hutton's article that that's not what he's proposing. He wants a system like what the Tories have, with the PLP to choose two finalists and an electoral college of some kind to pick the winner. Of course, the Tories' latest election was cancelled due to Leadsom's withdrawal, but note that one of her reasons was that she didn't want to be the Tories' Jeremy Corbyn, a leader without the parliamentary party behind her.
The counter-argument to that is that the existing long-term members voted for Corbyn too.
They did indeed, and it's a pretty unanswerable argument too.
I don't know of any evidence that Benn was anything other than a democratic socialist. The only constitutional proposals I ever remember him making (i.e. to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords) were to introduce democracy where it didn't currently exist.
Hutton wrote:
"Its constitution would put the election of its leader in the hands of the parliamentary party, with a run-off of the two frontrunners elected through a reconstituted electoral college."
On rereading, his words are ambiguous. I can see how you got your reading, but he does quite clearly state that the leader's election would be in the hands of the PLP, which I take to mean that they would choose between two candidates offered by the electoral college (the constitution of which is undefined, but certainly doesn't seem to be one-member-one-vote, like the Tories). To read the college as having the final say makes nonsense of the first part of the quotation. But quite possibly it just is nonsense.
The answer would be "temporary spasm" (in reaction, perhaps, to an overdose of Little Ed). Polls suggest that Corbyn's ratings have gone down even among the Corbynistas, and I don't imagine it's any better among the old-line rank and file.
I didn't say that Benn wasn't a democratic socialist, but that he wasn't simply one. In internal party politics, he pushed democracy to its limit, and expected MPs to tow to any whims of their constituency parties. That was pretty extreme. I don't know of any evidence that Boris Johnson has or had unconstitutional plans either, but he would have been a dangerous PM. There are matters of character that go beyond policy. If you were a Bennite I don't expect you to get this, but to take the most extreme example of this, Mosley's economic policies were extremely foresighted before he turned rancid, yet even those who touted his policies were made nervous by Mosley, and this was long before he turned fascist. I imagine it was something of this sort that made Ann Widdicombe say "there is something of the night" about Michael Howard.
Either Hutton meant that the PLP would choose the finalists and the electoral college would vote for the winner, which I consider the less contorted reading of his words and the less difficult method to manage in practice, or he meant that the electoral college would choose the finalists and the PLP would vote for the winner. Either way there's an electoral college and not just "PLP-only leadership elections," despite the sloppiness of his words "in the hands of the parliamentary party." No, the electoral college would not be the same as the Tories' one-member one-vote, but based on the history of Labour electoral colleges, it would include the membership. And what I meant to say was that the basic structure of the election would be like the Tories', despite the differing composition of the college, and not PLP-only. Although frankly what they have now isn't all that different either, since leadership candidates still have to be nominated by MPs.
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Date: 2016-07-20 07:19 am (UTC)As with all parallels one should beware of becoming mesmerized, though. The discussion of entryism glosses over one huge difference - the numbers involved. Labour's ranks have swollen by 130,000 in the last few weeks alone, and to hear some people talk you would think all these people were members of Militant sleeper cells waiting for the wink from the Kremlin to leap into action - but the fact is that groups like the Socialist Party are tiny, with a total membership well below 5,000.
Another factor to consider is that the Overton window has swung far to the right since 1981. From the point of view of many Labour members, the real entryists here are those who've joined the party from the right with a PPE degree in hand, then been (in many cases, Angela Eagle's being a classic example) imposed on local constituencies against their will. That's where the split between the membership and the PLP has its roots, not from some recent Trotskyite conspiracy. For decades traditional Labour members have put up with a rightwing version of their own party because it was the only game in town. Now they have a chance to change that, they're not going to let it go in a hurry.
It would be interesting to compare the platform of the SDP at that time with the positions proposed by Corbyn today: I suspect you would find very little difference (with a few exceptions over, for example, nuclear disarmament). As I recall, the issue that gave the nascent SDP most of its impetus was sense that Labour was in hock to union power - both in terms of the party itself and its industrial policy. That's really not the case now.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-20 08:55 am (UTC)In the days of the SDP, the entryism that was being extirpated was that of card-carrying Militants, who could be identified and removed because of their cards. There was, however, nothing to prevent them from abjuring their cards and becoming sleeper agents, and this was pointed out. The broader policy war that the SDP was in was against a broader tendency labeled Bennism, of which Corbyn was an active member. The thought was that by extirpating Militant, Bennism would lose most of its real danger and some of its energy. The Gang of Four and their acolytes, before they left the party, didn't want to expel the Bennites, they just wanted them under control, and the Bennites felt the same way about the Gang of Four, with the difference that the Bennites had only recently seemed to be taking over, while the Bennites felt the Gang of Four and their ilk (e.g. Healey, Callaghan) were only now being deposed after a long reign.
This is because the Overton window doesn't change the parallels. True enough that "New Labour" was further right than any previous edition of the party, but the charge that Labour was being desecrated by right-wingers dates back as far as Bevan's charge that Gaitskell (or an unidentified person very like him) was "a dessicated calculating machine," unless you want to go even further back and invoke the expelling of MacDonald, Snowden, and Jimmy Thomas. In fact the impetus for Bennism was a feeling that the entire Wilson government was an exercise in right-wing entryism (and they had evidence for this: Wilson himself had been a Liberal at university, and Jenkins was described as "one of Nature's Liberals"). Frustration at the government's ignoring the more left-wing manifesto was what led to the writing of a raw-blooded extremist manifesto in 1983 that nobody could ignore.
Going back to the SDP's defining issues, their objection was not to union power per se - unions could be in policy agreement with the Gang of Four and often were. The Gang's policy battle was with the Bennite/Militant tendency expressed by many (not all) unions and many (not all) constituency parties alike, and their power struggle was with the Bennite desire to give unions and constituency parties more power over the PLP and the leadership election. The point at which the Gang realized they'd lost the struggle and began to prepare a new party was when Callaghan agreed to an electoral college and mandatory reselection (Bishop's Stortford conference, June 1980). That wasn't about union power, that was about the PLP losing both power and autonomy to a leftist wave of which unions were just an element.
In the end, they lost that war, and restricting the leadership selection to MPs alone is now a dead issue. But the principle lives on in the Eagle/Smith position that a leader, however elected, isn't viable without at least substantial support among the MPs and that Corbyn hasn't got that. Contrast that with the Corbyn position which is essentially vox populi, and you have an exact replica of the 1980 struggle, just slightly updated because of changed rules. The presence or absence of unions from the equation has nothing to do with it.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-20 10:36 am (UTC)I quite accept your long-view comparisons - you're right that this is a 'debate' that's been going on in some form since MacDonald (family loyalty reminds me to add the charge of Butskellism to the list of its manifestations). And you're right about the SDP's immediate casus belli, but as I remember, independence from union power was a large part of the way in which they subsequently distinguished themselves from the party they'd left - that being a hot topic in Thatcher's early years.
I'm not sure that restricting the leadership to MPs alone is a dead issue. Look at the way Eagle and Smith coordinated just yesterday to leave the choice between them to MPs rather than the membership, thus bypassing the existing mechanism to whittle candidate lists through second-preference votes. And then there's Will Hutton's recent call for a return to PLP-only leadership elections, which rules members out of the equation entirely. If they can, you may be sure that the PLP will try to take that option.
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Date: 2016-07-20 11:33 am (UTC)Benn wasn't simply a "leftish democratic socialist," at least not in the SDP's eyes: they considered him positively dangerous in a way that Foot was not, and Corbyn is not either. But exactly how Corbyn and Foot rank comparatively on that scale is what I don't have enough information to calibrate.
Union power was an issue in those days, yes, but it wasn't a relevant issue for the left-right split that I'm drawing a parallel with today's split on. Indeed, insofar as the SDP had an active beef against Labour's union policy at the time of the split, it was against the right wing ministers in the Wilson/Callaghan government for being, in the SDP's view, pusillanimous.
A call for a return to PLP-only leadership elections would be reactionary indeed, but I find on reading Hutton's article that that's not what he's proposing. He wants a system like what the Tories have, with the PLP to choose two finalists and an electoral college of some kind to pick the winner. Of course, the Tories' latest election was cancelled due to Leadsom's withdrawal, but note that one of her reasons was that she didn't want to be the Tories' Jeremy Corbyn, a leader without the parliamentary party behind her.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-20 01:43 pm (UTC)They did indeed, and it's a pretty unanswerable argument too.
I don't know of any evidence that Benn was anything other than a democratic socialist. The only constitutional proposals I ever remember him making (i.e. to abolish the monarchy and the House of Lords) were to introduce democracy where it didn't currently exist.
Hutton wrote:
"Its constitution would put the election of its leader in the hands of the parliamentary party, with a run-off of the two frontrunners elected through a reconstituted electoral college."
On rereading, his words are ambiguous. I can see how you got your reading, but he does quite clearly state that the leader's election would be in the hands of the PLP, which I take to mean that they would choose between two candidates offered by the electoral college (the constitution of which is undefined, but certainly doesn't seem to be one-member-one-vote, like the Tories). To read the college as having the final say makes nonsense of the first part of the quotation. But quite possibly it just is nonsense.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-20 03:48 pm (UTC)I didn't say that Benn wasn't a democratic socialist, but that he wasn't simply one. In internal party politics, he pushed democracy to its limit, and expected MPs to tow to any whims of their constituency parties. That was pretty extreme. I don't know of any evidence that Boris Johnson has or had unconstitutional plans either, but he would have been a dangerous PM. There are matters of character that go beyond policy. If you were a Bennite I don't expect you to get this, but to take the most extreme example of this, Mosley's economic policies were extremely foresighted before he turned rancid, yet even those who touted his policies were made nervous by Mosley, and this was long before he turned fascist. I imagine it was something of this sort that made Ann Widdicombe say "there is something of the night" about Michael Howard.
Either Hutton meant that the PLP would choose the finalists and the electoral college would vote for the winner, which I consider the less contorted reading of his words and the less difficult method to manage in practice, or he meant that the electoral college would choose the finalists and the PLP would vote for the winner. Either way there's an electoral college and not just "PLP-only leadership elections," despite the sloppiness of his words "in the hands of the parliamentary party." No, the electoral college would not be the same as the Tories' one-member one-vote, but based on the history of Labour electoral colleges, it would include the membership. And what I meant to say was that the basic structure of the election would be like the Tories', despite the differing composition of the college, and not PLP-only. Although frankly what they have now isn't all that different either, since leadership candidates still have to be nominated by MPs.