Why Corbyn aide Andrew Fisher was right – and wrong – to say steel crisis was “good for Labour”

“Show, don’t tell” was a lesson aspiring novelists were once told, in a nod to the style of Ernest Hemingway. Well, someone needs to give the same lesson to Andrew Fisher.

He was the Jeremy Corbyn aide apparently caught on camera saying the steel crisis had “played very well for us”.

As Fisher soon learned, however, as soon as you admit to profiting from a crisis – whether economic, social or natural – then your success starts to stall. His own analysis of the steel job cuts, as Fisher admitted, “sounds quite cynical, because it hasn’t played very well for communities in Rotherham and Port Talbot”.

Well no prizes for working that out, Andrew.

No politician or party can look like they exploiting a national problem for their own partisan gains. The costs are too great to the people mired in the crisis, in this case more than 10,000 employees of Tata Steel UK, who face losing their jobs, unless a buyer can be found for the steel mills in Port Talbot and elsewhere. In total the positions of some 40,000 workers are at risk when you include the supply chain.

So Fisher’s comments look very unwise – although Corbyn’s office said they had been taken out of context. Fisher has been angrily denounced by six Labour MPs whose communities have been devastated by the wave of job losses across the steel industry. The group – of Tom Blenkinsop, Caroline Flint, Stephen Kinnock, Christina Rees, Angela Smith and Anna Turley – said they were “absolutely horrified” by the verdict of the policy advisor, which he delivered at a Momentum meeting last week.

And they are right to be cross. But many former Labour staff and seasoned pundits are shrugging their shoulders and saying Fisher’s error was his naivety in describing his political strategy. Every opposition seeks to exploit the difficulties of a government for its own advantage. It is not unreasonable to want to land an attack when you see ministers failing horribly to deal with such a significant problem as that facing the steel industry – but shadow ministers and their aides must never lose sight of the hardship created by a crisis of this nature.

The other half of Fisher’s now-infamous remarks – that the crisis exposed “a complete lack of industrial strategy on behalf of the Tory party” – are, of course, correct.

Sajid Javid has not so much watered down Labour’s industrial strategy as abandoned it altogether.

As a Thatcherite ideologue he deplores state intervention – yet was recently part of a Government and a Treasury team which offered some kind of industrial strategy, albeit inadequate, when Vince Cable was in charge of the Business Department.

By contrast Lord Mandelson, in his time as Business Secretary, presided over a wave of “industrial activism” as he and Gordon Brown tried to drag Britain out of the depths of recession in late 2008 by supporting key growth industries, such as low carbon technology and advanced manufacturing. It may not have been perfect, but it was a damn sight better than the chaotic response we have seen from the Tories over the steel crisis.

As the risk to jobs grew over the last few months, Javid has conspicuously avoided publicly talking about the concept of an “industrial strategy” and has refused to unequivocally commit to matching even the imperfect commitments to business support seen under Cable.

So it is no wonder the Tories have been caught out so badly by events at Tata. Javid, you will remember, chose to fly to Australia on a trade mission last month rather than go to Mumbai, where the Indian firm was deciding on the future of their British mills. And, as soon as Javid arrived, he was ordered back to Britain by a panicking David Cameron.

Even now, after a belated Tory offer to take a stake of up to 25 per cent in Tata Steel’s UK operations – a central part of Labour’s plan to deal with the crisis – the details of what the Business Department could offer remain unclear.

So Fisher and Corbyn and Angela Eagle should continue to attack the Tories over their arrogance and indifference towards a vital British industry. But Fisher must learn that the best way to prove you care about a crisis is not to tell your supporters you are winning, but to find a solution and show you have won.