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Who’s the Better Manager?

Starmer and Corbyn — Seeming Relevant Versus Being Relevant

Andy Higson
4 min readJan 4, 2021
Corbyn and others
Image rights: Jeremy Corbyn, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Someone pointed out that the biggest lasting legacy of the Corbyn-McDonnell project, from when it ran the Labour Party, could well be its influence on Rishi Sunak and the Conservative government’s economic policy response to COVID-19.

The ex-leader and ex-shadow chancellor called for massive state intervention in the economy and substantial assistance to industry and workers. The government would borrow about £400 billion in 2020 to make it happen. For comparison, the extra spending commitments in Labour’s 2019 general election manifesto totalled £80 billion.

Call it the Overton Window in action if you like, but Corbyn and McDonnell weren’t trying to seem relevant, they were just being relevant. They laid out an alternative course of action to that of the government, and the government was forced to respond. In defiance of Corbyn and McDonnell’s critics, it seems they may well have; ‘Won the argument.’

With Keir Starmer and the centrist takeover of the Labour Party, we see what the desperate need of seeming relevant, rather than of actually being relevant, looks like in the form of ‘managerial politics’.

“What difference as an MP have you actually made to people’s lives?” It’s a good question to ask…

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Andy Higson
Andy Higson

Written by Andy Higson

Psychology, politics, history, and moments of realisation and despair. There are attempts at humour.

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