Labour sails into oblivion
There is much conflict in the Conservative Party, especially over Brexit, but senior Tories are agreed on one thing: the Labour opposition offers no threat to them.
One former cabinet minister said to me the Brexit debate amounted essentially to an argument within the “conservative family”. By “family” he meant the Tory party, the right-wing press and the business community.
As far as he was concerned, Labour was irrelevant and had nothing to contribute to the defining political and economic issue of our times.
How has it come to this? Many Labour MPs blame their present malaise and disastrous poll ratings on Jeremy Corbyn. But the left is losing throughout Europe and Corbyn is a symptom rather than the cause of Labour’s decline.
Corbyn won two leadership contests in little more than a year and is clearly the leader the members and activists want and the biggest trade union, Unite, continues to support.
His anti-austerity message remains popular with a couple of hundred thousand people who self-identify as socialists. They have the whip hand in the party, and yet can give the impression of wanting to turn Labour into an anti-capitalist protest movement rather than the next government of the United Kingdom.
Labour is superficially united but in reality it is fragmenting. It has collapsed in Scotland, where the Conservatives, under the resourceful leadership of Ruth Davidson, are resurgent. Where it is not losing to the Tories in England and Wales, Labour is being squeezed by the populist nationalism of UKIP and the unashamed pro-Europeanism of the Liberal Democrats.
Labour’s position on Brexit isn’t helping. The party campaigned to remain in the EU only to be ignored by at least a third of its voters who wanted out. Worse than this, Labour can agree no coherent position on immigration.
Corbyn supports freedom of movement and open borders within Europe, which makes the party vulnerable to attack from UKIP.
Corbyn’s aides are determined to relaunch their man as a “left-wing populist”. They want him to make more interventions and more media appearances – to operate as a kind of socialist Nigel Farage.
But this isn’t Corbyn’s style. He is at his happiest among true believers, addressing rallies of the faithful or tending to constituency matters. He isn’t fired up by the day-to-day business of the Westminster jamboree, which is why Labour seems so often off the pace or merely silent.
After the failed attempt last summer to oust Corbyn as leader, many Labour MPs are now simply waiting for him to fail on his own terms, in his own way. They feel there is nothing more that they can do. You could call it a death wish.
This week the Fabian Society, a Labour-affiliated think tank, got some attention for saying the party “was too weak to win but too strong to die”. This was simply stating the obvious.
Meanwhile, the Unite leader Len McCluskey told the Mirror that Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell would be prepared to resign if the party’s poll ratings had not improved by 2019 – recognition that all is not well even among hardcore Corbynites.
McCluskey, who is caught up in a leadership contest of his own as he campaigns to serve another term, is one of the few individuals within the Labour movement whose power Corbyn fears.
For now, Jeremy Corbyn seems unassailable. He has the backing he needs to continue as leader, and so the good ship Labour sails on into the doldrums from which there may be no return.
Kim Kardashian is back on social media for the first time since armed raiders robbed her at a Paris hotel last October. But this time around, if she’s got any sense, she won’t be “oversharing” the intimate details of her life on Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram, and then complaining when the bad guys know where she is and come looking for her.