经济学人文章

BEFORE he had finished belting out his first celebratory rendition of “The Red Flag”, a hymn to class struggle, some of Jeremy Corbyn’s colleagues in Labor’s shadow cabinet had already handed in their resignation s. A 66-year-old socialist, MrCorbyn has spent 32 years as one of the hardest of hardline left-wingers in the House of Commons and a serial rebel on the Labour backbenches. On September 12th he flatten ed three moderate rivals (seearticle) to become leader of Britain’s main opposition party. Labour MPs are stun ned—and perhaps none more so than MrCorbyn himself.

Two views are emergin g of Labour’s new leader. The more sympathetic is that, whatever you think of his ideology, MrCorbyn will at least enrich Britain by injecting fresh ideas into a stale debate. Voters who previously felt uninspired by the say-anything, spin-everything candidates who dominate modern politics have been energised by MrCorbyn’s willingness to speak his mind and condemn the sterile compromises of the centre left. The other is that MrCorbyn does not matter because he is unelectable and he cannot last. His significance will be to usher in a second successive Conservative government in the election of 2020—and perhaps a third in 2025.

Both these views are complacent and wrong. MrCorbyn’s election is bad for the Labour Party and bad for Britain, too.

Cowards flinch and traitors sneer

Start with the ideas. In recent decades the left has had the better of the social arguments—on gay rights, say, or the role of women and the status of the church—but the right has won most of the economic ones. Just as the Tory party has become more socially liberal, so, under Neil Kinnock and then Tony Blair, Labour dropped its old commitment to public ownership and accepted that markets had a role in providing public services. Mr Blair’s government put monetary policy in the hands of an independent Bank of England and embraced the free movement of people and goods within Europe.

The argument today has moved on—to the growing inequality that is a side-effect of new technology and globalization; to the nature of employment, pensions and benefits in an Uberisinglabour market of self-employed workers (see article); and to the need for efficient government and welfare systems. Fresh thinking on all this would be welcome—indeed it should be natural territory for the progressive left. But MrCorbyn is stuck in the past. His “new politics” has nothing to offer but the exhausted, hollow formulas which his predecessor s abandoned for the very good reason that they failed.

Only in the timewarp of MrCo rbyn’s hard-left fraternity could a programme of renationalisation and enhanced trade-union activism be the solution to inequality. If just spending more money were the secret