Crimes and Punishment: How Britain’s Raskolnikovs Took An Axe To The Nation

“The vast mass of mankind is mere material, and only exists in order by some great effort, by some mysterious process, by means of some crossing of races and stocks, to bring into the world at last perhaps one man out of a thousand with a spark of independence.”

These words, uttered by the student writer Rodion Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment help explain the mess in British politics. Why? Because they help explain the mindset that has put us here.

If you haven’t read Dostoevesky’s epic, Raskolnikov is a man who believes that the world contains only two types of people — the extraordinary and ordinary, those who shape it and those who must be shaped. Predictably he sees himself as the former.

This idea that there are great men who do not need to worry about morality is most famously found in the writings of Nietzsche, but it is Dostoevsky who explores its flaws. In the hands of the novel’s impoverished ex-student, rather than say, an embittered failed artist, such views should be harmless, an intriguing theory to put in a pamphlet or newspaper. However, convinced that the normal laws of morality and society do not apply to him, Raskolnikov uses an axe to murder an elderly pawnbroker (and her half-sister) for her money — money he will put to better use.

There are parallels with the current bout of bloodletting over Brexit within the Tory Party. Boris Johnson’s belief in his own greatness appeared unpuncturable until the moment Michael Gove decided it was he who was destined for the highest office in the land himself. It is not Johnson’s naked ambition that most closely fits the Raskolnikov template here but Gove’s intellectual zealotry.

The morning after the referendum, I was staggered at the lack of a plan leave campaigners. Reflecting, it was not an entirely correct conclusion. Gove and others, like Daniel Hannan have been planning for this since they began having grand visions in well upholstered Oxford common rooms. In fact, more than a decade ago, while studying for my AS Levels, Hannan came to my sixth-form college to give a speech. It is fair to say that his vision of Britain outside the EU did not go down well. In it he cited Iceland (whose deregulated banking sector suffered a worse collapse in 2008 than Britain’s) and Switzerland as models of a glorious future for Britain unencumbered by bureaucrats, operating with “competitive” tax regimes. There is no text of the speech, but considering Hannan spent his stag do in Iceland praising its lack of adherence to EU regulation, I feel my memories are sound.

The problem with Hannan and his fellow Tory ‘ideas’ men’s vision was that then, as now, their visions were about as popular with the electorate as an afternoon with Daniel Hannan was to students desperate to run amok in Godalming’s pubs. As a nation with a huge number of diverse political traditions, historically we have tended to elect governments who offer competence and tolerance rather than upheaval — with the major post-war exception coming in the 1980s when the Labour Party was divided and failing to provide a plausible alternative to Mrs Thatcher. Even then, Thatcher was unable to slash public spending in the way either her enemies or fans would like to believe.

It was as much a problem for the right’s Raskolnikovs in 2015 as it was in 2005. Much as everything he said has been submerged under an effluent strewn sea, David Cameron’s last election victory was like to his 2010 demi-triumph built on the pitch of being a steady hand on the tiller — a man making cuts where necessary but sparing the NHS and other areas of spending popular with Middle-England. You may, as many of us did at the time, point out that this stretched credulity, but not that it was what they campaigned on — the electorate went to the polls with the words “long-term economic plan” ringing in their ears. If Cameron and George Osborne had stood on a platform of leaving the EU, slashing corporation tax to 15% (as the Chancellor has now has said he will to mitigate the effects of Brexit), and abandoning deficit reduction in favour of a libertarian economic experiment, Ed Miliband would now be tucking into a bacon sandwich in a Downing Street kitchen.

The EU referendum though presented them with the weapon they needed to kill this old conception of Britain and shape a new one in their image — immigration. Anyone who says the Leave campaign’s win wasn’t driven by fears about immigration is either lying or delusional. Polls in the run up to the referendum placed it as either voters’ top concern or their second behind the economy. There was a strong correlation between an increase in concerns about immigration and leave’s rise in the polls. Evidence shows voters in areas which voted to leave were particularly interested in the subject. Leave.EU, the provisional wing of the Leave campaign run by UKIP donor Arron Banks relentlessly focused on the subject, with posters and leaflets arguing 70 million Turks were about to earn the right to live in the UK. Most infamously of all Nigel Farage stood in front of a poster which looked like it had been designed in 1930s Germany. Most importantly, Farage and Banks’ brand of populist xenophobia reached parts of the country which arcane arguments about trade, economics and sovereignty were unable to reach.

These were not the areas which have endured most immigration, but those areas which felt economically left behind. Newcastle, whose city centre has been transformed by investment, narrowly voted to remain. Nearby Sunderland, which has not seen the same attempt at ‘regeneration’ emphatically did not. Manchester and Liverpool, the metropolitan posterboy of the North and Europe’s beautified 2008 Capital of Culture respectively, voted to Remain, Lancashire’s neglected old mill towns wanted out. Some will have voted leave due to xenophobia, for others perhaps objections to immigration represented anger at not having seen any of the supposed benefits of the cultural change wrought by globalisation. After all, if you, your friends and family are struggling in, or to get badly paid jobs, the argument that the economic benefits of immigration outweigh any drawbacks is likely to fall on deaf ears. If local services are getting worse, it’s easy to listen to pied pipers telling you the strain is caused by immigrants swelling the population.

Nigel Farage was entitled to argue for his imaginary version of 1950s Britain (he has now, seemingly resigned to spend more time with it). However a basic understanding of economics as well as international and British politics would reveal severe costs to his version of Brexit. Free movement of people within the EU, which is the bit of immigration which you can stop by leaving, is a non-negotiable aspect of being within the single market. Norway and Switzerland, which are outside the EU but within the single market have to allow free movement of people. If you want to end it, you have to be outside the single market, which is where the costs start to mount up. Of course leaving the single market wouldn’t represent Armageddon, but almost every serious analyst believes it would make us significantly poorer as a nation, or as analysts at JP Morgan put it:

“In our view, leaving the EU’s single market is like smashing a crystal flower vase, and then trying to glue the pieces back together again. You may be able to do it, but the result may not hold water, will not be pretty, and the flowers will wilt in the meantime.”

The consequences are fairly simple; any deal that gives those who voted on the basis of immigration what they want is extremely likely to be detrimental to the country economically as businesses reliant on the EU either relocate or scale back (plus there’s a whole other issue with financial services). Any deal that maintains our existing close relationship betrays those voters on immigration.

Of course, many of the right-wing Raskolnikovs knew this well, but didn’t care. They saw a higher purpose, one captured by the Chancellor’s immediate response to Brexit, a promise of a massive cut in corporation tax. That is ultimately how you square the Brexit circle of doom — by cutting the costs of business taxes and regulation below the costs incurred by leaving the single market. You are forced by necessity to pursue Hannan’s Icelandic dream (although, it is worth pointing out Iceland itself sits within the single market).

They took an axe to the nation and divided it, because they believed in their theories’ superiority, and that they were the men to shape us. Not those in Sunderland, who voted leave but will now likely face deeper or more prolonged cuts to services as we adjust to their brave new world, who are incredibly unlikely to see the huge cuts to immigration they desire, nor the thousands of jobs they need.

The arrogance of these guilty men, perhaps would not have mattered if the left had been ready to play Razumikhin, Raskolnikov’s level headed friend from Dostoevsky’s novel, who attempts to alleviate the confusion and fever that sets in after the murder. Instead, the left and Labour Party is led by people who are even more like Dostoevsky’s troubled anti-hero than Gove or Hannan.

For Rodion Raskolnikov was not merely an overambitious man prepared to act destructively to justify his theories. He was a man driven to delusion and delirium by them. It is a delirium into which the left has fallen, and which has played and is playing its own part in destroying the Britain we loved.

Those of us who predicted Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party would end in disaster, calamity, farce, or as is happening at the moment all three, did not do so out of nostalgia for Tony Blair. In fact, if there was one thing everyone can agree upon it’s that Labour needed to revolutionise its thinking. Its situation had become rather like the Conservatives in the early years of New Labour — trapped between its natural instincts (cutting taxes for Hague and IDS’s Tories, increased public sector investment for Labour) and economic and political winds which made them tricky to sell to enough voters to win an election.

It was, and is a difficult question, a homework assignment made even tougher by a cultural shift away from the party in its heartlands towards populist, nationalist parties. However, electing Jeremy Corbyn was like waking up on the day that assignment was due in, going back to bed and dreaming you’re an astronaut. It fills you with hope until you have to wake up and face the consequences.

Because Corbyn was never just an anti-austerity politician, he was a representative of a political tradition consumed by its own Marxist theorising. It can only see the world through that prism — of oppressor and oppressed, for or against, revolutionary socialist or corrupt ‘neoliberal’. Disagreement with the leader and his acolytes puts you on the side of the oppressor, evidence, mathematical and empirical, which contradicts the theory and predictions of eventual victory are dismissed as emanating from corrupt sources. Such a mentality is fine (if objectionable) in a small protest movement, but a disastrous and potentially dangerous way to think about working with colleagues to create public policy in the real world for millions who don’t view the world that way.

Corbyn has always associated with the Marxist left, existing within the semi-permeable membrane that separates Labour from the revolutionaries in parties like the SWP. You can read a far more in depth exploration of these associations here, but I will briefly skim over Labour’s history. Labour was consciously founded as a parliamentary party with the aim of drawing on all traditions on the left, from liberals, to Fabians and trade unionists purely concerned with members’ conditions and pay. In fact, it’s perhaps why it is called ‘The Labour Party’ rather than the ‘Socialist Labour Party‘ ’— at the 1893 founding conference of its forerunner, the Independent Labour Party, a decision was taken to name the party ‘Labour’ as it was thought the name would have more appeal to workers who weren’t fully signed up to socialist theory. Since then, the Labour Party has acted as the parliamentary wing of a variety of movements stretching from the hard left to liberal pragmatists. It is why you have Co-Operative MPs, Fabians, MPs with strong union ties, Progress members and self-confessed revolutionary socialists like Corbyn and John McDonnell all under the same banner. Traditionally this pluralism has been the party’s strength and the source of its ability to defeat the Tories in a way that no ‘Judean Socialist Front’ party has ever dreamed of. It wasn’t Tony Blair who worked out that to win you needed to ally working class votes with liberal middle-class ones. However the revolutionaries have been complaining that those from traditions other than their own have betrayed Labour’s founding purpose almost as long as the Labour Party has existed. They are not intent on taking the party back to the good old days (of opposition) before Tony Blair, but in refounding it as a vehicle for their own beliefs, one of which is that those who disagree with their worldview are traitors who should tow the new line or get out (some MPs have been told as much). Hence why it is not just actual ‘Blairites’ (who are close to extinct at the top of Labour anyway), but anyone not adhering to the strictures of the Corbyn creed. Putting such people in charge of a party which was hitherto pluralistic has caused predictably unpleasant results — if you denounce people as traitors to the mob, don’t be surprised when things turn nasty.

The Labour leader has surrounded himself with the likes of Andrew Fisher and Seumas Milne, people who’ve, to say the least, long held an interest in the finer points of Marxist theory. These are not people interested in finding the best way to elect a Labour government or block policies which will harm millions of working people, but who want to exercise their intellectual vanity by using Labour as both a foghorn and a testing ground for theories they thought would only get an airing in comment sections and poorly read journals. In electing Corbyn, Labour members were not voting for a man of high principle who could reform the party to create a left-wing alternative but another zealot, a mild-mannered Raskolnikov prepared to take an axe to all traditions but his own in pursuit of his followers’ vision of themselves as men (and if you hadn’t noticed, it tends to be men) of great consequence.

His is not a “new politics”, it is the old intellectual mania of the hard left — that the theory is truth and those who don’t get it are morally defective or blinded. It is why every sceptical MP or member is dismissed as a Blairite, even when they are nothing of the sort. It is why opinion polls or local election results that make Ed Miliband look like Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair rolled into one by comparison are dismissed as not showing the full picture. Conversely, it is why allegations of antisemitism or intimidation are overlooked — if you’re on the right side, then even the most egregious comments, such as saying the Jews funded the slave trade, are excusable because you are fighting on the correct side in the wider struggle. It is why any complaint from Jewish leaders and Jewish Labour MPs about the toxic atmosphere are problematically dismissed as part of a conspiracy to undermine the Labour leader. You are either with us, or against us, and your complaints have no validity if you don’t see the bigger picture.

It is why, when involved in a campaign, the loss of which is likely to have brought on increased economic and social hardship, it is alleged Corbyn and his team steadfastly refused put the welfare of the country ahead of his own political purity, missing planning meetings and failing to co-ordinate with the rest of the Remain campaign to make a coherent case. Perhaps Brexit was a lost cause, but an actively engaged Labour leader making the argument that Brexit meant more austerity, rather than one delivering rambling asides about his own pet criticisms of the European project, might have had a chance of pulling things out of the fire. It would have certainly been more difficult to dismiss a left-wing Labour leader’s economic warnings as establishment scaremongering. Instead, evidence has emerged that Corbyn’s team were at best too worried about his own political project and positioning after the referendum, than actually doing what it took to win it. Saying that two-thirds of Labour voters came out for remain is not good enough. It was known long before the referendum that a heavy Labour remain vote was needed for victory, votes even Jeremy Cobyn’s now former economic adviser Thomas Piketty has said he did not do enough to win.

All this is why we’re in the current situation. Labour, founded as a party determined to further socialist aims through the election of MPs to parliament, has more than 180 of its MPs saying the leader is not up to the job. These are not ‘Blairites’ or ‘New Labour apparatchiks’. These are people from all traditions within the Labour Party except Jeremy Corbyn’s revolutionary one. They include MPs who left the party due to the Iraq war, MPs who backed Corbyn throughout his leadership until now, those who deposed Tony Blair, and those who have spent decades campaigning for Labour. Even the economists and thinkers whose ideas Corbyn and John McDonnell borrowed to add a fresh lick of paint to their outdated dogma have abandoned him.

We have seen a leader fail to stand up for one of his Jewish MPs when she was abused by one of his supporters at the launch of a report into antisemitism. The same leader, a man who has long held an interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was unable to recall the bit of the Hamas charter which praises the killing of Jews. His staff would not even allow him to meet his deputy out of fear he will be contradicted, while the leadership and his Momentum agitators whip up a protest mob. If this is the new politics and a path to power then I’m a tractor production report.

Instead of acknowledging that all this is a complete mess. A mess which could, especially given current political events, set the cause of progressive politics including the far left, back a lifetime let alone a generation, his supporters have concocted a bizarre conspiracy theory involving a PR company which employs a lot of people who used to work for Labour under Tony Blair. Predictably, it doesn’t unearth anything other than the astounding revelation that some former party workers who quite liked Tony Blair don’t think Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is a great idea. A former Labour candidate accused of being part of this ridiculous conspiracy, has now been sent a death threat. Still no word on why those 180 MPs, from all parts of the party except Corbyn’s bunker backed a motion of no confidence in him or why the wider public are utterly unimpressed, nor any actual evidence beyond the idea that if you think Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is a terrible idea you must have a motive beyond thinking he’s rubbish and wrong.

No one who observed the strange spectacle of Bernie Sanders’ backers claiming the U.S. Democratic primary was rigged and he was winning, even as Hillary Clinton won millions more votes than him should be surprised. Their view of the world is never wrong, others’ motives are never honourable and their failures are always due to a grand capitalist or Blairite conspiracy. The more their ideas flounder, the greater the need for them says the revolutionary — it is just proof society is more corrupt than we imagined.

Despite his faults, Raskolnikov is not a villain. He is often motivated by altruism , giving away the ill gotten gains of his murder to the family of a deceased drunkard and falling in love with an impoverished prostitute. One cannot dispute, despite some of their comrades viciousness, many of those who back Jeremy Corbyn enthusiastically are motivated by kindness, empathy and a desire to change the world for the better. However, just as Dostoevsky’s anti-hero was convinced by his own grand theory to act harmfully, those who buy into the intransigent theories that form his worldview will continue taking an axe to things they claim to want to defend. It’s how anti-racists end up defending antisemites, how people who claim to have the best interests of Labour at heart can leave its hardest working foot-soldiers, its MPs, in tears with abuse, and how through their own obsessions they will leave the field open for the right’s own dogmatic zealots to dismantle the imperfect, but decent conception of Britain that since 1945 progressive politicians have worked so hard to create against the odds.

In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov realises the error of his grandiose theorising and comes to terms with the society he believed he was above. If the left is to have a hope of stopping the right’s intransigents from continuing their axe wielding, then it needs those who have supported Corbyn and his fellow travelers for good reasons to do something similar. To ask themselves whether all certain things are tolerable in a political party in any century, let alone one which hopes to win? To take a look at themselves and attempt to envision how you win support by shouting ‘traitor’ at those whose political aims you’re supposed to share? To understand where this toxic politics comes from, and see that while some of Corbyn’s traits are to be admired, the package it comes in is a worldview that draws him and his closest comrades towards killing the very things they sincerely want to protect.