Labour does not have a God-given right to permanent existence

Brexit will force a longoverdue realignment of politics whether or not Corbyn is leader

There is no law of politics that states that a party must live forever. If the circumstances that brought it into existence change fundamentally and the party cannot or will not adapt, it will die. Anyone who supposes that the Labour Party has some kind of God-given right to permanent existence simply because it has been around for 116 years ought to look to Billingshurst in West Sussex, where the skeleton of a dodo is expected to fetch £500,000 at auction in October.

For even if Owen Smith wins the leadership contest, that dodo might well be a picture of perky good health compared to Labour by the end of the autumn party conference season.

In 1845 the Tory supporters of Sir Robert Peel seemed to be the way of the future. Full of ideas, brilliant young leaders and intellectual selfconfidence, they had reformed Britain profoundly and were about to lay the foundations of Victorian midcentury prosperity. Yet within a year, the battle over the repeal of the Corn Laws had left the Peelites broken and dispersed, their party wrecked by ideological infighting. British politics saw its first fundamental realignment of modern times, and the Tories did not form another majority government for 28 years.

In 1886 Theresa May’s political hero, Joseph Chamberlain, caused the next generational realignment when he took his Liberal Unionists out of Gladstone’s Liberal Party and into a coalition with Lord Salisbury’s Tories over Irish Home Rule. This electoral pact kept the Conservative and Unionist Party in power for 17 of the next 20 years, until the circumstances that had brought that coalition into being changed and the issue of tariff reform predominated. In 1906 the Liberals won a devastating election victory over the Conservatives and seemed to be the new wave of the future, yet only a decade later the First World War forced them to relinquish sole power, which they were never to regain.

Another generational realignment in 1918 brought Labour into a prominence that was to lead to its forming a government six years later and eclipsing the Liberals as the new power on the Left. Fast forward to 1981, and the most recent of the generational realignments created the SDP-Liberal alliance out of the carcass of a Labour Party that failed to adapt to the Thatcherite revolution and was therefore condemned to irrelevance until Thatcherism was at last recognised and accommodated by Tony Blair.

The Country Party, the Whigs, Peelites, Liberal Unionists, Common Wealth Party, Ecology Party, British Union of Fascists, Independent Liberals, National Labour, New Party, Social Democrats: all of them died or were transmogrified into something else over time, usually because of new circumstances that eclipsed them.

British politics is long overdue for another such vast generational realignment, and it will get one whether Jeremy Corbyn wins or loses the Labour leadership.

If he wins, Mrs May would be mad not to call a snap general election on the issue of ‘‘Who can best deliver Brexit?’’, thereby sending Labour back to what a recent analysis suggests would be 140 seats in the Commons, the lowest it has achieved since 1931. Even if Mr Smith wins the leadership and no election is called, Labour’s central problem remains: its leaders and many of its members support an elite metropolitan agenda that means little to its traditional voters.

Labour entered Parliament in 1900 created by the trade unions for the attainment of Socialism for the supposed benefit of the working classes. Today, unions are particularly weak in terms of power, moral authority, popularity, finances and membership, while Socialism is a proven election-losing idea and fewer Britons self-identify as working class than at any time since polls began. The Labour core vote was shattered in its heartlands in the 2015 election – today there are more people who have walked on the Moon than there are Labour MPs in the East, South-East and South-West of England – and that was only reinforced by the Brexit referendum in June.

While over one third of Labour voters supported Brexit, only a handful of Labour MPs did (at least in public: I’d bet folding money that Corbyn voted for it). That split between MPs’ and voters’ concerns and priorities is axiomatic of what has been happening to Labour for years, and why Ukip is making such inroads into traditional Labour heartlands.

Trotskyite entryism into Labour was a problem for the party even before the expulsion of Leon Trotsky from the USSR, so it is in a sense a tribute to the hard Left’s sheer persistence that they have finally managed to insert one of their own into the leadership.

One can almost feel the earth moving over the graves of Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison and the other anti-Communist heroes of the Labour movement, for as those giants all warned, the huge amount of weird, irrelevant baggage that comes with ultra-Left politics has turned off Labour voters in their millions.

Take the leadership’s obsession with the politics of the West Bank and Gaza. As Dave Rich’s penetrating new book, The Left’s Jewish Problem, shows, the repulsive views that Shami Chakrabarti’s recent report failed sufficiently to nail tend not to be found among Labour’s grassroots, but are common amongst its nomenklatura. Labour nearly didn’t hold a party conference this year was because the proposed security firm for the event, G4S, runs prisons in Israel – the only country in the Middle East to have a decent, hygienic, properly managed prison system.

With Mrs May sitting four-square in the electorally rich centre of politics and in no mood to budge – indeed formulating ‘‘ blue-collar’’ Conservative policies to appeal to Labour’s formerly core voters – Labour is faced with an existential crisis all too historically similar to that list of now-long-deceased political parties mentioned earlier. Our first-past-thepost system is not kind to new parties, but brave Labour MPs with a sense of history realise that another generational realignment is needed sooner rather than later. Great issues spawn great realignments, as the Corn Laws, Irish home rule, free trade and nuclear disarmament all showed. Brexit will be no different.