Former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has in recent months become a vocal opponent of government actions against Covid such as passports and mandates. This has been a disappointing turn for socialists who have admired and supported Corbyn1, though it has also, of course, been embraced by concern-trolls on the right. If you haven’t heard a libertarian say “Even socialist icon Jeremy Corbyn opposes mandates!” by now, you probably aren’t a socialist.

You might find that rhetoric persuasive if you just take your cues about politics from popular politicians. Here, however, I’m going to argue that Corbyn has become a very good illustration of why it’s a bad idea for socialists to simply adopt the politics of their favorite politicians — and of how the case against government action ultimately relies on a deeply libertarian rejection of the state as an instrument for the common good.

Does Corbyn have any socialist arguments against this? Let’s look at a video he put out just this morning.

Corbyn makes two bad points in this video and one that’s very good.

First, he objects to so-called “Covid passports” that would allow the government to confirm (or not) that its holder has been vaccinated. His concern is that doing so would “lead us into the direction” of “a massive databank of all of our information” controlled by the government.

From the outset I think it’s worth repeating a point I made a while back: socialism, as far as I can tell, requires the government to issue IDs. This is why socialist states have always had them; even the National Health Service, which Corbyn calls one of Britain’s “greatest achievements” and “a model for other public services”, relies on them.

The rhetoric Corbyn wields here is even worse. Why would a Covid passport program that collects some information “lead to” a database of “all of our information”? His specific explanation isn’t convincing: Corbyn tries to characterize this as a Tory push for surveillance by comparing it to their voter ID proposal, but ignores the fact that 85 Tories recently voted against Covid passports for nightclubs.

Beneath this, however, there’s also an ideological explanation: we are supposed to worry that a good program will inevitably slippery-slope into a bad one because that’s just how government works. And that’s why the only way to avoid such outcomes is to deny the government any power — even power that it could seemingly wield for good.

This is a deeply libertarian argument! The definitive socialist position is that people can use the government as an instrument to advance the common good. There are benefits from empowering the state that are not ultimately outweighed by “inevitable” disadvantages.

Next, Corbyn makes a similar point against Covid mandates:

If we go into compulsion on everything then you end up with an over-powerful government…a very controlling central state…

Again, there’s something about this nightmare scenario that’s odd to hear from a socialist. Why does Corbyn go out of his way to note that this tyrannical government is a “central” one? Decentralizing power may make sense in some cases, but it isn’t some foundational principle of socialist politics; there are all kinds of cases where it may make perfect sense to have some central body directing and coordinating government actions. This is why, for example, socialists have long called for a single sovereign global state — something that, if created, would be the greatest act of centralization in history.

But setting that aside, the implicit argument is much worse. Just as no one is actually proposing a database that would collect “all of our information”, no one is proposing anything resembling an “over-powerful government”. Why does Corbyn think we’ll “end up with” that? He doesn’t say, and he doesn’t have to because the premise is ideological: if you give the state power, it will inevitably take even more power and wield it towards malevolent ends.

This premise just doesn’t make sense if you are a socialist. If you are a socialist, you do not (for example) believe that a government mandate to wear seatbelts will inevitably lead to a “nanny state” where everyone has to drive at a safe 5 miles per hour. If you are a socialist, you do not (for example) believe that empowering the government to seize the property of the rich will end in the government seizing everyone’s property. Socialists understand that governments are (obviously) capable of abusing their power, but we don’t take for granted that this is some kind of inevitability.

You know who does take this for granted? Libertarians. And that brings us to what Corbyn gets right: at the very beginning of the video, he argues that “Boris Johnson claims to be a libertarian” — but that by supporting mandatory vaccinations, Johnson “seems to be burying that libertarian bit”. This point is absolutely correct: the politics that one abandons by supporting government action against Covid are fundamentally libertarian. Corbyn, by rehearsing all the same slippery-slope / anti-government arguments that libertarians always rely on, is making this perfectly clear.