DEATH OF THE LABOUR PARTY
Today, barring a miracle, Corbyn will be re-elected leader, heralding the end of a great reforming party that’s being killed by the hard Left. And Britain will be the poorer for it
ON February 27, 1900, in a Christian meeting hall near London’s Smithfield Market, a group of political activists agreed to campaign for ‘a distinct Labour group in Parliament’ which would, they hoped, represent the interests of the British working classes.
For the Labour Party, the following 116 years brought plenty of highs. In 1924 the party had its first Prime Minister in Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a Scottish housemaid.
In 1945, a post-war electoral landslide brought to power Clement Attlee, whose government built the modern welfare state, founded the NHS and helped to establish the Nato alliance that won the Cold War.
In the Sixties, Harold Wilson abolished hanging, legalised homosexuality and set up the Open University. In 1997, another landslide took Tony Blair into Downing Street, where, for all his faults, he secured peace in Northern Ireland, devolved power to Scotland and Wales, and staked his claim to the political centre-ground.
At noon today, barring a miracle, Jeremy Corbyn will be re-elected as Labour leader. And at that moment, the party set up by those patriotic, public-spirited men in February 1900 will cease to exist as a serious political force.
At some basic level, Labour’s leadership campaign, fought this summer in an atmosphere of staggeringly poisonous bitterness and recrimination, has been a complete waste of time.
With the party’s membership trapped in an abyss of self- delusion and self-regard, the result was a foregone conclusion even before the contest began.
The challenger, Owen Smith, deserves considerable credit for stepping up to take on Mr Corbyn at a time when his betterknown colleagues shied away. But he has not really been up to it, and I suspect he knows it.
For the party itself, Mr Corbyn’s re-election will be nothing short of a tragedy. The miners, engineers and railwaymen who were at that first meeting in central London 116 years ago would be horrified to see what has happened to their party.
And even if you didn’t vote Labour in 2015 — in fact, even if you’ve never voted Labour in your life — I think you should be horrified, too.
Yes, the name will live on, as will the remnants of the party organisation. Most of the MPs, though, remain unreconciled to a man they regard as utterly unfit to lead their party, let alone to become Prime Minister of this country.
STILL, Jeremy Corbyn can console himself with his army of 500,000 members. And what an army! Idealistic students who will never vote, spoiled public schoolboys with more money than sense, academic professors who rarely step outside the seminar room, trade union barons whose empires shrivel by the day — it includes extremists, cranks and cultists of all kinds.
But then the truth is that, as everybody else in Britain knows perfectly well, the Labour Party is now further from power than at almost any time in its long history. Never before has it been so detached from the values and interests of the ordinary working- class families it was founded to represent.
Indeed, yesterday a new YouGov poll emerged which showed that more than half of the voters who backed Labour in the last general election, and then voted for Brexit, have now given up their support for Corbyn’s party.
In the past few weeks, every single living previous Labour leader begged the members to think again. Instead, drunk on their own self-righteousness and blind to the appalling reality of the opinion polls, the activists marched onwards towards oblivion.
In my lifetime, only one man has taken Labour from opposition into government — Tony Blair. The chances of anyone emulating him in the next few years strike me as infinitesimal.
In fact, I genuinely think there is more chance of Mary Berry becoming the next James Bond than there is of Jeremy Corbyn walking into Downing Street as our next Prime Minister.
The Labour leader’s failings are so obvious that it seems almost cruel to point them out.
As a speaker he is monotonous, as a parliamentary debater he is feeble, as an organiser he is useless, as a leader he is non-existent.
For a moment, though, forget his personal stupidity, stubbornness, vanity and incompetence.
Forget the lack of action on anti-Semitism, the lies about seats on trains, the antics of his sinister sidekick John McDonnell with Mao’s Little Red Book waved around in the Commons chamber, and the appalling abuse directed at moderate Labour MPs.
The fundamental reality is that Mr Corbyn represents a political tradition that has never come close to winning power in this country, and never will.
His supporters peddle a version of history that is quite simply not true. They claim that he represents the renaissance of a noble Labour tradition, wiping away the stains of supposedly ‘Red Tory’ leaders such as Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and rekindling the authentic, unspun socialism of Attlee and his contemporaries.
Whenever I hear this, I am never sure whether Mr Corbyn’s cultists are congenitally stupid, deliberately deceitful or just completely ignorant of their own party’s history.
The Labour leaders of old were not extremists. They were patriots. Unlike Mr Corbyn, they happily sang their own national anthem.
Indeed, in many ways they were often strikingly conservative, with a small ‘c’.
Attlee fought in the First World War and only approved the installation of a Downing Street ticker-tape machine so he could follow England in cricket Test matches. Harold Wilson could be brought almost to tears by reciting the Boy Scout code. Jim Callaghan was outraged whenever his aides made jokes about the Queen.
You could hardly find a more passionate Welshman than Neil Kinnock, and there is no more patriotic Scot than Gordon Brown.
But Mr Corbyn is in a completely different league. He and his Shadow Chancellor Mr McDonnell — who is probably the most malign political presence in Britain since the Thirties — do not like their country. They hate it.
Oh, I know they say they love it really. But the Britain they claim to love exists only in some weird fantasy of their own imagining, a world of interminable ‘anti-racist’ rallies and Labour Party committee meetings, a world inhabited only by evil plutocratic bosses and downtrodden povertystricken workers.
The real Britain — the Britain of supermarkets, suburbs and market towns, of garden centres and video games, Poldark and Victoria, after-work drinks and Sunday league football, Harry Potter and the National Trust — is a complete mystery to them.
They think it is a capitalist invention, an illusion propagated by the wicked mainstream ‘Zionist’ media.
They know nothing of how ordinary people in Britain live and think. They prefer to asso-
ciate with monsters such as Gerry Adams, whom they invited to the House of Commons only weeks after his friends in the IRA had murdered five people, including one of their fellow MPs, in the Brighton hotel bombing.
The great Labour- supporting writer George Orwell would have recognised such repulsive characters straight away. The hard Left, he wrote in 1941, were characterised by ‘their generally negative, querulous attitude’ and their ‘complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion’.
For all their emotional outpour- ings, Orwell thought, the highminded Left had the ‘shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality’. They felt it a ‘duty to snigger at every English institution’; they were ‘sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro - Russian, but always anti-British’.
Almost incredibly, every word of this is still relevant today — even the bit about being pro-Russian. ( Mr Corbyn, remember, once advised his Twitter followers that Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine Russia Today was ‘more objective’ than the British media.) A particular line in Orwell’s essay, though, sticks out like a sore thumb. ‘There is little in them,’ he wrote of Mr Corbyn’s Left-wing predecessors, ‘ except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power.’
The problem, of course, is that Mr Corbyn is now in a position of power — something Orwell could never have anticipated when he was writing in 1941.
In that respect, the Labour leader is merely the extremely unpleasant symptom of a more profound condition, the political equivalent of a suppurating boil.
THE truth is that the Labour Party has been in deep trouble for years. As far back as the Seventies, it was caught between, on the one hand, the demands of winning and wielding power in a modern, prosperous, pragmatic democracy; and on the other, the half- crazed fantasies of its own activists.
For decades, the more sensible Labour leaders — such as Wilson, Callaghan and Blair — publicly indulged their own members’ emotional spasms while privately dismissing their infantile dross about socialist revolution.
The problem, though, is that over time, the ordinary working- class men and women who supported such leaders gradually fell away. By the dawn of this century, the engineers and railwaymen who had founded the party back in 1900 had long since disappeared.
In their place came middle-class teachers, university lecturers and public- sector employees, infused with a sense of their own cosmic self-righteousness.
They didn’t want to hear about the reality of modern Britain. They didn’t want to hear about the inevitable compromises of power, the difficulties of governing a major industrial nation or the importance of maintaining international economic confidence.
Nor did they really want a leader. They wanted a mirror: someone just like themselves, who would reflect their own sanctimony and self-interest, their colossal vanity and self-absorption.
And then, in 2015, they found him. For the first time, thanks to the ludicrous Ed Miliband, the members alone would decide the Labour leadership. Bearing in mind the many hard-Left extremists, it was as if the lunatics were invited to take charge of the asylum.
Today, on almost every issue you care to mention — Europe, immigration, law and order, even our national defence and relationships with our allies — they have taken their party so far from the political mainstream, so far from the instincts of most ordinary people, that it would take years for them to row back again. If you’re not a Labour supporter, perhaps you’re wondering why you should care. But we live in a democracy, and not a oneparty state. Our political culture is made of more than one strand, and a government without decent opposition is, almost inevitably, much weaker for it. Yes, Labour’s history has more than its fair share of disaster and delusions. But you surely don’t have to be a tribal Labour voter to recognise that the party founded that day in 1900 was, at its best, a noble and responsible institution, representing values — co- operation, community, fairness, tolerance — that millions of people instinctively share. But that history is over. It’s true that Labour danced on the brink of oblivion once before, in the early Eighties. But back then there were people of real talent — the likes of Denis Healey, Roy Hattersley and David Blunkett — to drag it back.
NOW the party is a hollow shell of its former self. And in any case, what sane, pragmatic MP is ever going to win the support of the political obsessives who twice backed Jeremy Corbyn?
In the short term, therefore, Labour MPs should probably follow the advice of Wilson’s battlehardened press chief, Joe Haines, which he set out in the Mail yesterday: they should break definitively with Mr Corbyn, and declare themselves the official Opposition.
The more sensible ones, at least, could present themselves as a patriotic centre- Left party, inspired by the example of Clement Attlee. It would be a gamble, of course. But if, just once, they can’t show some guts, then what’s the point in their even being there?
Whether the MPs break away or not, though, Labour seems condemned to a slow but inevitable decline. The days when it once piled up majorities in Scotland, the Midlands and London are now long gone.
I don’t expect to see another majority Labour government for a decade at least, and perhaps not in my lifetime.
No party has a divine right to exist. Exactly 100 years ago, the Liberals were the biggest game in town. They had been in power for ten years.
Their leaders, Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George, were the best-known and most respected men in the land. They were the big beasts; everyone else walked in their shadow.
But then, when the Liberals fell from power, they never stopped falling. Within ten years, they went from being the party of government to the third party. Today, you could comfortably fit their modern- day successors in the Commons into a people carrier.
Labour’s decline will probably be slower and certainly bloodier. But unless something radically changes, which seems highly unlikely, the end may well be exactly the same.
For Labour, the party is over. And British politics will be the poorer for it.