No, Labour isn’t a ‘family’. It’s a rotting institution

Moderate members are so loyal they can’t bring themselves to confront the poison within their party

If a teenage girl told you she would “rather die” than switch from being a Beyoncé fan to a Rihanna fan, you would probably take her declaration with a little pinch of salt. This silly girl will calm down in a few years, you’d think, and you’d probably be right. Unless, instead, she joined the Labour Party.

The Labour Party, you see, is an institution whose members are meant to be committed until death, and preferably beyond. As Emily Thornberry, its fully grown shadow foreign secretary, declared recently: “We are Labour to our core and we are Labour to the tips of our fingerprints and we would rather die than join any other party.”

Having whipped up her audience, Ms Thornberry then paused to admonish a supporter who was being rude about the eight MPS who had split from the party. “Be civil,” she said. “Be civil.”

Yes – “be civil”. And also: be prepared to die!

Only if you consider the death part is it possible to understand how upstanding people, not least a good number of Labour MPS, can still remain in and campaign for a party that many of them now know to be institutionally anti-semitic and incapable of reform. For many Labour members and supporters, the party is such a core part of their identity that it exists outside its real-world actions and consequences. The way to judge the Labour Party, in their minds, is not by how its leaders and party machinery behave, but by what it “stands for” in some entirely abstract and idealised sense.

This is how moderate people are able to square the fact that the party which founded the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a quango charged with enforcing human rights law, is now facing an investigation by that very same body for illegally discriminating against Jews. This is how decent people can stay in a party in which senior aides to the leader protected a member from suspension who had shared and endorsed cartoons of an alien-squid stamped with the Star of David suffocating the Statue of Liberty.

This is why the Jewish Labour Movement, the party’s main Jewish association for the past century, decided this week not to disaffiliate itself from Labour, despite having submitted the complaint triggering the potential EHRC investigation and having accused Labour of being “institutionally anti-semitic”.

In their minds, it is not the Labour Party doing these things, but the people who have “taken over” the Labour Party. In this, loyal Labour moderates sound much like unhappy parents or siblings justifying the terrible behaviour of their kin. Their son or sister is “not a bad person”, they might say, yet has somehow “fallen in with the wrong crowd” or been “possessed” by some external force. The problem, of course, is that a political party is not a family and should never command such loyalty.

Too many Labour supporters, unfortunately, have forgotten this fact. As described by Mike Gapes, one of the MPS who finally wrenched himself out of the party to form the Independent Group: “Apart from my relationship with my mother and my brother, Labour is the longest relationship of my life.” He once declared that he would only leave the party “in a box”. Having now left after 50 years, he told me he feels “liberated… like a great weight has been lifted” – in other words, like a person finally breaking out of a deeply troubled relationship.

Meanwhile, the malcontents left behind continue to fret. They are divided into several groups: MPS on the cusp of following Mr Gapes et al out the door (“dozens”, according to one source); women MPS who have suffered the worst anti-semitic or misogynist abuse but still think it their duty to clean up Her Majesty’s Opposition; and a third faction looking anxiously to Tom Watson, deputy leader, for cues.

Mr Watson is ostensibly one of the “good guys” in this row, having been a vocal critic of anti-semitism. But he is really playing a power game, slyly keeping would-be splitters on board by intimating that he has a plan up his sleeve, while forming them – both former Blairites and Brownites – into a sub-faction under his own control. The overall effect is that he is keeping the party together, thereby increasing its chances of taking power and providing moral cover for the whole toxic Corbyn project.

The problem is that too many people, despite reviling Mr Corbyn, share his attitude to the party. “Labour is a family,” he said recently. “Labour, for me, is my life.” Any Tory saying such a thing would be rightly categorised as a total loon. In Labour, this is worryingly normal.

According to Mr Gapes, Corbynism is different from the noble Labour tradition because it’s a “cult”. He’s right that Labour does have a more pragmatic and free-thinking tradition. But it’s also true that the noncorbynite section of the party is itself marred by a deep strand of cultism.

Just look at the celebrated speech made by the “moderate” Neil Kinnock in 1985, extracts of which were circulated recently when the militant Trotskyite Derek Hatton briefly re-joined the party. Mr Kinnock famously castigated the extreme Left who wanted to make “impossible promises” to voters. The way he ended the speech, however, is worthy of the most cultish radical. Labour’s mission, he stated, was “truly to deliver the British people from evil”. The “evil”, of course, being the Tories. This is a deranged way of thinking.

I have never been much of a “joiner” when it comes to clubs, political causes, team sports, collective letter-writing and so on. There is something about allowing oneself to be absorbed and defined by a tribal collective that gives me the creeps. Still, I accept that it must be hard for committed team players to give up on an institution they have believed in, whose warm halo has given them a sense of belonging and even, in Labour’s case, actually defined to them what it means to be a good person, in the way that religion or family values do for many others.

But when a project turns truly rotten, as the Labour Party has, it reveals the folly of letting an institution own your moral core. At some point, you have to turn back to your personal anchor. As Mr Gapes puts it: “I haven’t changed. The Labour leadership has.” Moderates might think they are staying in to liberate the “real” Labour Party from the cultists. In doing so, they are, in fact, letting the cult keep them prisoner.

Mr Corbyn said recently: ‘Labour, for me, is my life.’ Any Tory saying this would be rightly categorised as a loon