by Jonathan Todd
The Mandibles – Lionel Shriver’s latest – is a gripping and darkly hilarious story of a family and an America, over the years 2029 to 2047, in spectacular decline.
In our imploding chimney of a country, collapsing in on itself, we, too, feel precipitous descent. The appalling suffering and injustice of Grenfell. The banality of Islamic and right-wing evil. The biggest governmental challenge since World War II, with the least convincing prime minister since the last one.
Oddly enough, as everything that could go wrong goes wrong, The Mandibles reveals an optimistic core. This hope doesn’t come from institutions, abstractions, or politics. It is created by the visceral self-sacrifice and resilience of individuals, driven by love for those around them.
Oh, Jeremy Corbyn.
Like the Mandible family, Britain yearns to hope. Unlike them, we haven’t given up on politics as its source.
I was too young for Blair and am too old for Corbyn. Still up for Portillo but too wide-eyed to really absorb its historic significance. Not wide-eyed enough to have any anticipation of Kensington and Chelsea turning red.
Hope is what unites Corbyn with the Blair of 97. Much of the country looks into their eyes and sees a better tomorrow. Others scoff and are certain of disaster. My A-Level Economics teacher won £10 on a pub bet that there would be a recession within six-months of PM Blair.
New Labourites are misremembering if they think that Blair did not suffer doubters, as Corbyn does now. They would be lacking in generosity to not concede that Corbyn, as Blair did then, has, for those who have suspended any disbelief, become a canvass for disparate, even contradictory, hopes.
I’m not the first to draw comparisons between Corbyn and Blair. The left’s instinctive trust in Corbyn allows him, according to Matt Bolton, to successfully triangulate, that most Blairite of things. But Brexit is a triangulation too far.
“While Corbyn’s much derided ‘0% strategy’ on Brexit proved to a be a short-term electoral masterstroke,” Bolton observes, “assuring Red Kippers that he was committed to pulling out of the single market and clamping down on immigration, while allowing Remainers to project their hopes for a softer landing onto him, at some point a decision has to be made.”
When making that decision, Corbyn should remember that the hope that he holds most dearly, and which many more have invested deeply in him, is to end austerity. In the real world of debt and deficits, this goal is incompatible with weak and deteriorating public finances. The harder the Brexit, the more likely this outcome.
Of the hardest of the hard, the UK exiting the EU with no deal, the Financial Times anticipates, “disruption on a scale rarely seen in peacetime affecting almost every business in Britain”. When our prime minister says no deal is better than a bad deal, she is as implausible as when she claims 80% of us support Brexit.
NHS nursing recruitment from the EU is down 96%. Forget Eurozone breakup, sterling is now deemed riskier, as Reuters explain. From banking to the creative industries, investment and jobs are moving out of the UK. Rolling chaos and constitutional crisis at home, laughing stock abroad. No street parties on the first anniversary of our “Independence Day”.
This is just the beginning but Project Fear is becoming Project Life, while the claims of Brexiteers are exposed as lies, without which they concede that they wouldn’t have won the referendum.
If four in five of us want this, we are the fools that Theresa May has taken us for. The past that May embodies is dying but the future that Corbyn promises is not yet born.
Those that cheer loudest for Corbyn – the Glastonbury kids – reject Brexit as vehemently as they do May, our diminished Queen Boudica. Equally, perhaps to a lesser extent than is sometimes suspected, Corbyn’s coalition includes Brexit voters. But what such voters most urgently need is a Corbyn government to end austerity, not a Brexit induced recession to continue it.
Corbyn being cool with Brexit – even of a softer variety – would go down as well with many as a Gary Glitter comeback on the Pyramid Stage. Those for whom Brexit holds more attraction will dwindle as its costs become more apparent, which Corbyn should be energetic in highlighting.
Ed Miliband told the Labour party that we could win to the left of Blair. Corbyn might prove him right. The main thing that Miliband told business was that he wouldn’t expose them to an EU referendum. This wasn’t enough to make Labour the party of business in 2015 but all that Miliband said that the Tories risked has come to pass, meaning a pro-EU Corbyn might now get a surprisingly enthusiastic response from business. Especially if flanked by the Labour voices most fluent in the language of business, such as Chuka Umunna.
The prize that Miliband held out to the UK – of being a northern European social democracy – is within Corbyn’s grasp. But, in political and policy terms, the EU remains a vital ingredient of this mix.
If Corbyn does not see this, if the UK does not change course, we’ll be forced to look for hope exclusively in the places that the Mandibles found it. The message of The Mandibles reflects Shriver’s libertarian politics. Socialists hope for more.
Oh, what a responsibility.
Jonathan Todd is Deputy Editor of Labour Uncut