Keeping Corbyn Right

The attempt by the Jewish Chronicle to intervene in the Labour Leadership Election, while mostly just sad, is particularly egregious for the fact that that newspaper is edited, is heavily staffed, and is no doubt heavily read, by former Labour Party members or further left-wingers who are now squarely on the Right as they have redefined it.

As that includes completely unrestricted markets, so it includes completely unrestricted immigration, as well as endless wars of the liberal intervention that always seems to serve giant commercial interests so well.

Anyone of that mind will have nothing to do with Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, meaning that that party's only right wing (not that one necessarily likes the term, but there we are) will be a broad coalition of non-Marxist heterodox economics in general and post-Keynesianism in particular, of Blue Labour, of social conservatism, of religion, of rural and provincial interests, of full-spectrum patriotism, of full-spectrum anti-totalitarianism, of foreign policy realism, and so on.

Of course, there is plenty of non-Marxist heterodox economics in general, and of post-Keynesianism in particular, on the traditional Labour Left. There is plenty of social conservatism, and there is plenty of religion: look at the Labour MPs who vote against abortion, or who voted against same-sex marriage, and consider quite how left-wing several of them are; it was of course Thatcherism that destroyed the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community.

The countryside and the provinces are the fertile soil and the rich seams of this country's ancient and living Radical traditions, with much of the mass flocking to the Corbyn campaign indicative of the extent to which those traditions survive and thrive, something that might also be said of the emergence of Tim Farron.

From the very start, the Labour Left was highly critical of the lack of participation in the management of the Welfare State and of the nationalised industries. In repeating that criticism, Corbyn is open to Blue Labour's more recent articulation of it and of possible solutions to it.

Opposition to both of European federalism and American domination has never been characteristic of everyone in the Labour Movement, but it has always been characteristic of quite a lot of people, and it is now a position unimaginable in the Conservative Party beyond the outermost fringes.

Today, it also entails holding the line against the erosion of national and parliamentary sovereignty by global capital and by the State enterprises or the sovereign wealth funds of foreign countries, by Russian oligarchs and by the rising powers of Asia, by Israel and by the Gulf monarchs, by separatists and by communalists, by media moguls and by over-mighty public servants.

Broadly the tradition of ILP stands comparison with any for its uncompromising struggle against all of Stalinism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Nazism, Fascism, apartheid, and so on. It exposed the USSR well before anyone else did. All the while, it opposed gung-ho military adventurism.

We are the Right that Corbyn's party needs. This time, there really is no alternative. It has no other possible right wing. We have no other possible party.