If Labour wants to beat a big-spending Boris, it must be far more than just an anti-austerity party

Johnson’s profligacy should be seen as an opportunity for Corbynism to show it is about more than boosting public investment. Its plans to democratise the economy are far more radical than anything the next Tory PM has up his sleeve

July 20^th marks the fourth anniversary of a milestone in the trajectory of Corbynism. On that date, Corbyn’s three leadership rivals gave validation to the cuts in the infamous Welfare Bill (by abstaining on interim leader Harriet Harman’s instruction). Corbyn, meanwhile, proved how simpatico he was with the anti-austerity passions of the membership by voting against it. John McDonnell went as far as to say he would “swim through vomit” to oppose it. In the 2017 election, Labour’s unexpected success proved how much of the country were similarly distressed by austerity and willing to vote for a party that was clear about its opposition to it.

Being “anti-austerity”, however, may not be the political virtue it once was. The likely-next prime minister, Boris Johnson has already promised to employ 20,000 new police, the number the force has fallen by since 2010. Invoking a populist leader willing to spend his way to popularity, even if it puts him at odds with his own government, former Treasury advisor Stewart Wood predicts that “Boris will over-promise and want to own the ‘PM who ended austerity’ tag. When the Treasury says no to him, Boris will ensure the world knows how beancounter-ish they are.”

So used to facing opponents they are able to paint as tightwads withholding investment from the country, facing a profligate “PM Boris” will prompt the question for Corbyn's Labour: is being anti-austerity enough? The New Labour years showed it is perfectly possible to increase public spending, while also entrenching neoliberal features in the economy, such as extractive outsourcing of public services to unaccountable private companies, and the eroding of public support for services by introducing means testing and thereby weakening the universality with which they are dispensed.

Labour’s periodic attempts under Corbyn to outdo the Tories by promising greater police spending, meanwhile, is criticised on the left as throwing money at a problem that really requires a political reassessment of the relationship between criminality and society. The ease with which Boris outbid Labour (who last year promised 10,000 officers) is a warning against promising more spending without addressing the underlying causes of what the money is spent to deal with.

"Undoing austerity" needs to be combined with working against Britain's ineffective and often racialised dependence on custodial sentencing, as well as its poor rehabilitation rates, while changing public misconceptions about the social basis of crime. There is nothing radical about simply propping up funding for regressive systems already in place.

Fortunately, Corbynism has always been about more than “reversing austerity”. True, a population enchained by credit card debt and stagnant wages needs more individual financial autonomy. This is going to require more public spending, including in the more adventurous proposals discussed by McDonnell, such as a universal basic income or universal basic services, and a four-day working week. Yet as the thinkers around McDonnell stress, it is not enough to simply carry on as we are, just with more free time and assurance of the money in our pockets. The society itself needs re-structuring.

As Labour’s 2017 “Alternative Models of Ownership” report details, Corbynism seeks to undo the “implicit assumption in UK society that there is a natural separation between the political and economic realms, with democratic structures and processes only applying to the former”.

The aim is a democratised economy that is responsive to the people it affects, via automatic shareholding rights for employees, greater employee influence on company board decisions, a “Right to Own” first-refusal for employees to take over companies as cooperatives when they come to be sold, and major nationalisations that remake utilities into democratic centres for sharing both wealth and decision-making.

In Preston, the “Corbynista council” has inverted the existing incentive for private value extraction and cronyism in outsourcing and PFI, by giving priority in the awarding of contracts to companies that are local, pay a living wage, and have cooperative elements and green credentials.

Keeping wealth in local circulation, the model incentivises positive forms of local entrepreneurship and a local economy responsive to local needs, at the same time as making more direct the relationship between people’s work and the good effects it can have on their lived environment. Corbynism’s own municipal, communitarian project in Preston could be copied across the country.

As Christine Berry and Joe Guinan’s new book, People Get Ready, and my own Other People’s Politics argue, such ideas are easily the most exciting and transformative parts of Corbynism, but they need to be better known. Under prime minister Boris, Labour needs to be speaking less about ending austerity, and more about economic democracy.