"We don't pass by" - Jeremy Corbyn lays foundations for compassionate narrative based on renewing belief in public service

Jeremy Corbyn addresses a thousand people in Manchester Cathedral at a meeting organised by the CWU for their People's Post campaign, while several thousand more assemble outside.

Last night, Jeremy Corbyn had a strong message of support for the CWU's People's Post campaign. Yet just his presence alone was a great success for the Communication Worker's Union, as he drew an audience of around eight thousand people to the Manchester Cathedral meeting - the majority of whom were gathered outside for a parallel overspill event.

As part of the week of protests parallel to the Conservative Party Conference, it capped off a successful weekend for the People's Assembly that saw sixty to eighty thousand people assemble to march against austerity.

Jeremy Corbyn opened his speech with another of his recent references to the media coverage of himself, dismissing personal attacks by saying he really doesn't care about them:

"Once you get out of the swamp of personal recriminations people have to listen to the political arguments"

He also praised the politically active young people turning out for events like those this weekend, who he said had been 'written off by the political establishment'.

The focus of Corbyn's speech was on his belief in public service. Along with Dave Ward, the General Secretary of the CWU, there was praise for the post office as a strong force for good that connected people. The was also praise for the grandness of the principle behind the Universal Service Obligation.

Corbyn set his comments within the context of the importance of the public sector's role, echoing fellow speaker Natalie Bennett's sentiment that the private sector is 'no answer' for public sector provision of essential public services.

Corbyn also told the audience, echoing others at the People's Assembly rally on Sunday, that the campaign for the 2020 election starts now, not two or three weeks before 7 may 2020, and that campaigners need to start now to win ordinary people's hearts and minds over to hope. He expressed confidence that he, Labour and the anti-austerity movement would succeed.

The event also featured Kevin Maguire of The Mirror acting as chair; Owen Jones - who looked particularly fired up; and Natalie Bennett - who, looking more comfortable and confident than six months ago, received a warm welcome from a crowd that clearly had a lot of empathy with the Green Party's leader and her message.

Ultimately though, this was Corbyn's moment. This was another chance for him to lay out his new politics, with a different approach that is more reasonable and more democratically engaged with civil society. It was also a chance to lay the foundations for a new and more compassionate narrative, with which to oppose austerity based on renewing people's belief in public service. He summed up that message with the words: "We won't pass by".

The task now ahead for Corbyn and his team now is to maintain the momentum of the social movements that have come together against austerity. It was clear, however, that the majority of the crowd appeared to have turned up to see the new Labour leader and he was met, and departed from the hall, to standing ovations. If Corbyn can pull in near ten thousand people to hear him speak everywhere he goes, estimations regarding his chances of victory in 2020 are going to start changing dramatically.

Anti-austerity 'Take Back Manchester' event tries to prove that the Left is back in fashion

Billy Bragg plays to the crowd of protesters gathered at the start of the the march, which saw 60,000 people walk the streets of Manchester around the Conservative Party Conference.

The tone was set for several days of People's Assembly 'Take Back Manchester' protests at a day long gig on Saturday, organised by Sam Duckworth at the People's History Museum in Manchester. The event was headlined and closed out by Billy Bragg, who saved a rendition of The Red Flag for his encore - an anthem that Jeremy Corbyn's election seems to have brought back into style (Dearden, 2015).

The 'Take Back Manchester' protests, aimed at bringing the anti-austerity campaign right onto the Conservative doorstep at their autumn conference in Manchester (Pidd, 2015), follow an upsurge in activity after the shock Conservative election win. That surge has been given new energy by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the Labour Party (Young, 2015; Kuenssberg, 2015).

Billy Bragg told his audience on Saturday night that he'd been a member of the movement so long, it had become fashionable again. And that's a message that the People's Assembly is keen to impress upon the Conservatives - that the days of austerity are numbered in the face of a resurgent popular democratic Left.

Natalie Bennett addresses the crowds assembled at Castlefields arena at the end of the march.

That message was at the heart of what the speakers had to say to the crowds gathered in the sun at the Castlefields outdoor arena. Natalie Bennett told the crowd that the sun was shining on their movement - in this case figuratively as well as literally, on a beautiful Sunday evening.

Stood on the stage in the sunshine, Charlotte Church told the crowd:

"They can hurl abuse at us and we will fight back. They can scare people into thinking one way, but we can educate people into thinking another. They can claim that protest doesn't work, but we can prove protest has worked, does work and will work for us now."

Owen Jones followed by saying that a broad movement was needed to achieve these things, organised from the bottom up. Mark Serwotka went much further, arguing that the trade unions needed to stand together, as the real opposition to the government, and close to outright called for general strikes.

The emphasis everywhere was on the power of the popular movement and not without good reason. Without the support of a broad social movement, the new campaign for an alternative cannot succeed. The new leader of the Labour Party cannot succeed.

On Saturday, Billy Bragg told the audience that he believed that the last election proved that the times are still in flux. That there is a world to win. But Bragg followed up with a word of caution. He said that the real enemy was cynicism - which needed to be replaced with hope and the belief that victory was possible.

If the People's Assembly and the trade unions are to build a bottom up movement and have a sustained impact, then Jeremy Corbyn - who addresses the Communications Workers' Union this evening in Manchester - will have an important role to play. Whatever lack of loyalty the parliamentary party has offered him as the new leader of the Labour, the wider social and trade union movements have adopted him as their figurehead.

But Corbyn needs to be wary. Alexis Tsipras has shown perils and difficulties of serving the people's idealism within the depressingly pragmatic political mainstream (Cohen, 2015). If Corbyn can be a lightening rod, the focal point and agent of the wider movements, he could be both the coordinator and the public spokesperson for the movements aims.

Yet, ultimately, it will require the sustained attention, energy and engagement of those taking part to overcome the austerity narrative, because a political party alone in the political sphere is not enough (Rogers, 2015). Only a sustained campaign - debating, educating and informing - can change public perceptions and give people a reason to believe in an alternative.

What kind of economy would Labour's new economic advisory council build?

Photograph: John McDonnell MP, with residents and supporters of Grow Heathrow outside Central London County Court in 2012, by Jonathan Goldberg/Transition Heathrow (License) (Cropped)

John McDonnell, Labour's new socialist shadow chancellor, has moved to rebuild the party's economic reputation by appointing an economic advisory council (BBC, 2015). The council is, by all estimations, a supergroup comprised of the rockstar economists of anti-austerity thinking: Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, Mariana Mazzucato, Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ann Pettifor and David Blanchflower.

There are two clear aims to this move. The first is to show that, not only is austerity thinking flawed, but that there are clear alternatives. The second is win back for Labour the credibility on economic policy that they had lost, fairly or not, by 2010.

It has been argued, seemingly endlessly, that without both credibility and a clear alternative, Labour's reputation - and so its ability to win elections - will not recover (Elliott, 2012; Kendall, 2015; Reid, 2015). So it is important to know what kind of alternative Labour's new advisors would have them construct.

The resumes of Labour's new advisors

Thomas Piketty is a French economist who had a large impact, in political and economic circles, with his 2013 book Capital in Twenty-First Century. In that work, he puts forward a simple premise and explores it in depth.

Piketty's thesis is that the concentration of wealth, resulting from the rate of return on capital being in the long term in excess of economic growth, is as much a political problem as an economic one. In his assessment, the access to capital brought by inherited wealth and the 'rentier' power it gives, prevents the competition and distribution for which the free market is lauded.

That is an assessment agreed with by the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They argue that their findings show that income inequality in fact strangles growth, with countries that have a more even income spread actually performing better (OECD, 2014).

Piketty's proposed solution is for progressive taxes to be levied upon wealth and coordinated globally to suit the globalisation of capitalism. The failure to pursue this, in the French economist's eyes, means standing by as the rich consolidate control over society, crushing democracy in their wake by leaving the poor dispossessed and powerless (Naidu, 2014).

This concern with regards to inequality is shared by Joseph Stiglitz, former Clinton advisor and critic of the management of market globalization (Stiglitz, 2000). Stiglitz's work The Price of Inequality argued that inequality was as much the concern of the 1% as the 99%, as 'their fate is bound up' with how the other side live (Roberts, 2012).

To tackle inequality, Stiglitz argues that there needs to be a change in norms. He argues that free markets in fact need the protection of strong regulations and transparent accountability (Edsall, 2012), in order to break the monopolies on power that are used to influence selfish terms - to, in essence, reclaim capitalism.

For Mariana Mazzucato, reclaiming capitalism begins with reimagining the role of the state (Mazzucato, 2013). Mazzucato envisions the state as a risk-taking innovator, the creator and shaper of markets, and the natural agent to act in the 'common good' where privatisation is poorly suited and will not stop public subsidy (Mazzucato, 2013{2}).

She argues that this includes the provision of essential public services like education or health; investments in public infrastructure; investment and support for entrepreneurs, whether in business, for research, or for science and technology - all areas where steady, engaged, long-term investment commitments are needed.

Yet Mazzucato is not arguing for nationalisation or a growing of the state, but rather for a smarter state (Mazzucato, 2014) - bold and able to take risks. Quoting Keynes, she argues for a state that opens up new markets and regulates them:

"The important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all."

As for the others on Labour's select list of economists?

Ann Pettifor predicted the severity of the economic crisis with her 2006 book The coming first world debt crisis and, in a very Keynes-esque manner, has worked hard to make clear the dangerous role that debt has played in events (Cooper, 2015). She has also argued that the debt crisis exposed dangerous collusion between governments and the finance sector that broke the 'link between risk and reward' and so chained 'free' markets (Pettifor, 2014).

David Blanchflower, a former member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, has spoken out against the idea that Labour 'caused' the 2008 financial crisis and against the economics of austerity (Blanchflower, 2015). Blanchflower was amongst the signatories of a letter during the Labour leadership campaign - along with Mazzucato - that argued Jeremy Corbyn's economic policy was in fact the moderate, mainstream response and it was instead George Osborne's austerity that was extreme (Blanchflower et al, 2015).

And finally there is Anastasia Nesvetailova, whose work Fragile Finance warned in 2007 of the fragility and instability of the finance-based economy, upon which the whole political and globalised economic house of cards was based (Nesvetailova, 2007).

The respectable face of economic opposition

So what kind of economy do these ideas combine to form?

In a definite stance of opposition to the dominant, and austere, conservative approach, the consensus running through Labour's new advisors is for the state to have a strong role - though not through nationalisation. The emphasis is placed upon the work the state does to create a framework for society - on infrastructure, on social security, on regulating market activity.

In fact, looking over the recommendations is almost like a review of German economics in the late twentieth century during the time of Germany's Wirtschaftswunder - its 'economic miracle'. The social market, so-called Rhine Capitalist, system that underwrote that economic boom was plush with public-private partnerships.

Inspired by German Ordoliberalism, the state was to act as regulator and facilitator in the Rhenist system (Guerot & Dullien, 2012). The aim was to ensure greater equality, and widely enjoyed prosperity, all while retaining an appreciation for free markets - so attempting to get the social aims and a vibrant market to go along hand in hand.

The ideas also bear some resemblance to those of Liberals and Liberal Democrats in the UK over the decades. Setting themselves apart from the Conservatives and Labour, their approach was to argue that it was not about a large or a small state, but about what the state is and what it does (Brack et al, 2007) - so Liberals might pursue the most efficient solution with the least interference with the individual.

In these similarities with liberal ideas, the approach of Labour's new advisors marks a kind of sharp change for the party, away from the centralised and overbearing managerialism it has pursued since the Second World War. But what stands out most is that, if we can accept that austerity represents a purely right-wing form of economics, the vision these economists are putting forward represent the mainstream - the democratic economics of the centre.

Building an alternative

With these very much mainstream, Keynesian-esque, ideas - based on broad analysis critical of austerity but friendly to markets - accomplishing the task of recovering Labour's credibility should not be such a long shot. Even reaching out to reintegrate the unhappy New Labour-ites should not be impossible.

For restoring their respectability, it is now a matter of building that model and presenting it to the public, which - if done right - could create the base from which the Conservative approach can be disassembled.

That would mean embracing Keir Hardie as Jeremy Corbyn did, in his first speech to the Labour Party conference as leader (Kennedy & Grierson, 2015). The existence of a credible alternative to the rigours of austerity allows the party to challenge the necessity of the suffering it has caused, and to try to 'stir up divine discontent with wrong'.

And yet, while the dry and balanced macroeconomic mainstream vision is the economist's dream ticket to government office, it is not hard to imagine these technical reforms falling short of progressive expectations.

There are radical ideas with not touched on here.

Citizen's income (Razavi, 2014), mutuals and co-ops (Webb, 2015), shorter working hours and the possibilities that automation are bringing (Mason, 2015) - these are all ideas tied closely to questions of equality, accountability and innovation.

However, there is likely more to come from the team of Corbyn & McDonnell - not least the pursuit of rail renationalisation (BBC, 2015{2}) and community owned energy companies (BBC, 2015{3}) - than is being accounted for here. Those extra measures are needed.

If we are to have more equality and accountability in the economy, there needs to be more co-operation. Which means more say for workers in the running of their workplaces and a greater mutuality of aims.

And if people are to enjoy full balanced lives, they also need enough time to embrace more than just their universal human rights to fair paid work and 'rest and leisure'. They need the resources and time to study, to raise families, to assemble, to debate and to act.

And if people are to have both of the above with freedom, from both want and coercion, they need the basic guarantee against poverty and homelessness afforded by a Citizen's Income.

As it says in the old Liberal Party's Yellow Book (1928), written under the deep influence of David Lloyd George and John Maynard Keynes:

'We believe with a passionate faith that the end of all political and economic action is not the perfecting or the perpetuation of this or that piece of mechanism or organisation, but that individual men and women may have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.'

A true progressive alternative to conservative economics needs to embrace big ideas. It needs to reform, it needs to challenge and it needs to spark hope of a new way forward.