Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Centre

My latest long form piece for Salvage is about Corbyn and the snap election:

"Nothing is forever, except absence. And if the bromides of the British pundit class seem timeless, that is because the political centre registers as an absence.

"Credibility, they’re saying. What Corbyn needs now, and sorely lacks, is credibility. How does one get credibility? A sharp swerve to the centre. The capitals of the European centre are collapsing around their ears, from London to Madrid to Athens to Amsterdam. Only Paris has averted the complete collapse of the centre through, as Perry Anderson put, a yuppie simulacrum of populist breakthrough. And even there, it followed the implosion of the Socialist Party and survived only because its major opponent was fascism. Yet nothing can shake a belief that has never even been thought about as such. The answer – cleave centre – is given with the same confidence that spiritual adepts once prescribed trepanning for the sick. Corbyn needs centrist credibility, in other words, like he needs a hole in the head.


"That Corbyn lacks credibility is the implied or explicit premise of almost every report, every editorial, every interview question in this election. When Corbyn supporters are sought out for a grilling on national television, the question is usually put with a degree of polite amusement: ‘do you really, in your heart of hearts, believe Jeremy Corbyn is a potential Prime Minister?’ The interviewee then has to choose between appearing to be unreasonable, in view of the polls, or offering a half-hearted, mealy-mouthed defence which amounts to the patronising idea, indulged by even his bitter enemies, that he is ‘a thoroughly decent person’.

II.

"Let us cut through the bad faith and bullshit. The answer to the question is ‘no’: by their standards, Corbyn has absolutely no credibility, and is not a potential Prime Minister. However, while this should be given its full weight as a material factor, we should also recognise that the British political and media establishment is akin to Standard & Poor’s in their disbursement of ‘credibility’ ratings. This establishment has spent years giving triple A scores to what turned out to be toxic political stock, while regularly using its ratings and public statements to organise the processes it claims to be reporting on. And these last few years have seen a credibility crunch of gigantic proportions.

"This is not to double down on the unworldly claims of some of the Corbynite Left’s social media prize-fighters, who routinely claim that he is about to school Theresa May. As an expression of a devoutly held wish, an animating desire, this is laudable; as anything else, it is ineffectual bombast. The Conservatives may fall short of the 20 per cent leads they began to score after announcing a snap election. Labour’s polling, having been depressed to around 25 per cent post-Brexit and amid the ‘chicken coup’ and its reverberations, seems to have returned to around 30 per cent, which is where it has been in practice since 2010. But the local election results were poor, with the Conservatives gaining seats in the hundreds while Labour shed seats in the greater hundreds. Credibility may be a hugely depleted currency, but it is still a material force in this election. The punditocracy still has its power, and so therefore does its received wisdom. The centrist political establishment is on the back foot, but fighting back with ruthless determination and resourcefulness. The same countersubversive zeal with which May announced the snap election, pledging to crush the saboteurs, expunge division from politics and forge a unified national will, also animates the centre’s war on Corbynism..."

Read on.