Jeremy Corbyn’s own goal

If you saw the photo that emerged on Tuesday of the snow monkey attempting unnatural congress with a deer, then I’m sure, like me, your minds immediately turned to Jeremy Corbyn’s struggles to find favour with a reluctant nation. That’s not to say that Corbyn looks like a snow monkey or that the British public resemble deer (though both might well be true). There is, however, something familiar, if not a little perverse, about the way the Labour leader has gone about clambering onto the backs of a public that doesn’t share his political DNA.

Take, for example, what we saw on Tuesday when the man who quotes Ben Okri, who champions and writes poetry, and spends his time photographing drain covers, suddenly began talking football. ‘I think, certainly, the salaries that are paid to some footballers are simply ridiculous,’ he said. ‘I think some of the salaries paid to very high-earning top executives of companies are utterly ridiculous.’

Gesture politics are hardly extraordinary in the context of a political relaunch yet this was also a telling moment of parallelism, by which Corbyn hoped to connect with that portion of the electorate who think only in broad terms. To understand the problem with overpaid executives, he seemed to say, you need only understand the problem with overpaid footballers.

The flaw in this argument is that people do understand the ‘problem’ of overpaid footballers and it’s not necessarily perceived as a problem.

That’s the problem with public opinion. It is fickle and popular truisms might not necessarily be so ‘true’. Many of our ‘complaints’ are merely phrases that linguists would describe as ‘phatic’, conveying social meanings rather than proper information about the world. ‘Horrible weather’ we’ll announce when it’s actually bright outside. ‘My train was late’ when it was actually on time. ‘There’s never anything good on the TV’ when we’re actually enjoying a golden age of television. These are the things one says to keep a conversation going, to form societal bonds, and to simply establish common ground. We complain about footballers because we can complain about footballers. If it means anything, it’s really a complaint about our own lives and it would be a mistake to base an economic policy on our bitter mutterings.

This, perhaps, is the unusually revealing aspect of this story. Wage caps might or might not work. Economics wonks might be able to make a good case for them or destroy the idea entirely. What is more fascinating is how Corbyn seems incapable of understanding something quite fundamental about human nature. Had he suggested a wage cap for bankers, most people would have agreed in an unthinking heartbeat. But to suggest the same to a football fan is to invite a 15 minute breakdown on their team’s current midfield against the midfields of their rivals. Fans understand the transfer system only too well and know that a wage cap in the English game would see it decimated of talent, with all the best players moving (or more likely returning) to play football on the continent or in China. By comparing executive pay to footballers pay, Corbyn ably destroyed the credibility of his own proposal in one short breath. There really isn’t a better model for why wage caps wouldn’t work.

If Corbyn were sensible, he’d have realised that football is the one sport that should find its greatest champions on the left. Few sports so neatly replicate Marxist models of economics; being almost pure class struggle whereby the efforts of the workers so clearly produce the wealth of for the club owners. Yet it’s also the point that it’s only in football that the workers have the power. There are, arguably, few areas of life or business where effort is proportionately rewarded and where young working class lads can use their talents to escape poverty. If he were to interpret the example of football correctly, he’d talk about a community that nurture and encourage talent and then ensuring that workers are rewarded for the work they do.

He could and perhaps should argue that government has a part to play in such a system and it would not be an abandonment of his socialist principals to accept that making money is not necessarily an evil if those feeling the benefits are the people who work hardest towards their own success. To argue otherwise was and is cheap politics as well as lazy opportunism. It was enough, in fact, to make even a snow monkey blush.