Thus far, you get to pick one of two responses to Jeremy Corbyn. The first is that he’s an ideological throwback, clubbing together with his “union pals” to form a “Trotskyist tribute act” that will drive Labour off a cliff. Alternatively, he represents a “new politics”, armed with a set of policies to enthuse the apathetic and combat austerity. Dichotomies don’t come much starker: the new leader of Britain’s left is either delusional or a saviour.

Needless to say, both depictions are bunk. They ignore the breadth of the shadow cabinet finalised on Monday, the constant talk of “open discussions” and the policy papers issued during Corbyn’s campaign that came heavily salted with such tentative terms as “options” and “consultations”. A fully worked-out programme this is not.

Moments before his final campaign rally last Thursday, I asked Corbyn how much of a work-in-progress his opposition would be. A lot, came the answer: everything hung on who would join his frontbench and what ideas they’d bring. Then he shrugged: “But life is a work in progress!”

Corbyn supporter Owen Jones takes us behind the scenes as Jeremy Corbyn is elected Labour party leader on Saturday. Guardian

This is not the kind of politics Britons are used to. Since at least the 90s, British politics has run like a well-oiled machine operated by all-knowing professionals. Cabinet reshuffles are done and dusted in time for the Six O’Clock News. Policies are drafted by think-tankers, leaked to the papers and expounded on the Today programme even before trickling down to the furthest reaches of the cabinet.

Then came 2008. The banking crisis keeps on showing how this heavily scripted politics cannot deliver on its promises. After seven years of the best efforts of the Labour and Conservative elite – of Alistair Darling’s stimulus, George Osborne’s cuts and the magicking up of £350bn of new money – Britons are still poorer (as measured by GDP per head) than they were before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Not only that, it’s now clear that the Thatcher and Blair booms really worked by handing money to the well-off and offered loans to the rest of society. Most striking of all, the Big Spinning Dicks of Westminster couldn’t even rein in the banks that triggered the crash.

The old politics is now too arthritic to accommodate itself to the crash. The new politics that’s emerging in its wake is improvised to the point of messiness. That applies to Occupy Wall Street, to Syriza and Podemos – and it certainly characterises the groups around Corbyn. Every time one of these movements gains serious momentum, you get the usual rigmarole of media explainers and investment notes: who is in charge? Who’s mates with whom? What’s the big idea? Such questions, and their common assumption that these new movements are institutionally similar to the dinosaurs that roamed the territory of the 20th century, are often precisely the wrong ones to ask.

This lack of rigidity is part of what makes Corbyn-mania infuriating for those politicians and commentators who never saw it coming and are now eager to explain why it’ll soon go away. For this generation, still stuck in what theorist Jeremy Gilbert calls “the long 90s”, the political centre ground is a fixed address you simply plug into Google Maps.

But you can’t hold mass movements to tight, logical standards, nor should you expect under-resourced grouplets to traffic in glossy policy brochures short on imagination but long on footnotes. Reliant upon goodwill and energy and starved of institutional support, these movements sometimes fade away; the arguments that they’re engaged in do not. If you can’t join the dots between, say, Occupy and Bernie Sanders, then you need a better colouring book.

‘John McDonnell has clearly decided that austerity will be the key dividing line between Labour and the Conservatives.’ Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian

What does all this mean for organised politics in Britain? That it’s about to get much bumpier and messier – and that a lot more will be up for grabs. On the core issue of political economy, Corbyn and his shadow chancellor and campaign manager John McDonnell have clearly decided that austerity will be the key dividing line between them and the Conservatives. In a way that Ed Miliband failed to do, they’ll oppose cuts to welfare spending. This is the right thing to do – which in itself means it will be a shock to see Labour doing it – but there’s a lot else in the economics package that needs to be thrashed out.

I can’t honestly believe that any government will be able to find £120bn in tax avoidance and evasion. As for the £93bn in corporate welfare – since I wrote the news stories for this paper that those calculations are based on, allow me to put straight some of the criticisms and wishfulness that surrounds it.

A National Investment Bank isn’t a bad idea, but what about opening up our pension funds to greater democratic control?

First, the figure comes from research by Kevin Farnsworth, a senior lecturer at York University who’s been working on corporate welfare for more than a decade. The £93bn is a “conservative estimate” of how much British taxpayers hand to business in grants, subsidies, tax reliefs and other direct support. His research was published by the University of Sheffield and is available online, although this hasn’t been enough of an incentive for critics to read it.



The original point of highlighting the corporate welfare bill was to show how little it is discussed or even acknowledged by the British state. Some forms of corporate welfare can, I believe, be justified, while others, such as the millions handed to Amazon to set up distribution centres, cannot. Taxpayers surely deserve an open debate about how much we pay for business, rather than just being told that people with disabilities or who don’t earn enough to rent are scroungers.

If Corbyn is going to talk about these issues, and highlight how badly British capitalism serves society, as opposed to a wealthy elite, then that is a politics worth following for the first time in decades. But that means developing an economics that is about more than opposing austerity – indeed that is more than the traditional statist Keynesianism that runs through other of his team’s ideas. A National Investment Bank isn’t a bad idea, but what about opening up our pension funds to greater democratic control – so that rather than paying fund managers big commissions to invest in bits of paper, we use the money to invest in social housing?

These are the kind of questions that a post-crash progressive party should open up – not just about the deficit but also about how to give more people more of a stake in our economy. They haven’t been raised in Britain in decades, and the new Labour leader may not be ready or able to do it. But as a man with a fuller beard than Corbyn’s once put it: “Men make their own history, but … they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves.”