Owen Smith: a pale version of Corbyn?

It’s a measure of how far Labour has travelled that last week Jeremy Corbyn casually abandoned a security policy that has been followed by every British government since 1949, said Oliver Kamm in The Times. Asked on the leadership hustings how he would react if a Nato ally was attacked by Russia, Corbyn said he would “avoid getting us involved militarily”, adding vaguely: “I don’t wish to go to war. What I want to do is achieve a world where we don’t need to go to war.” He appeared to suggest that, under his leadership, Britain would abandon Nato – since its rationale is collective selfdefence. “He implied that Britain’s central [military] alliance is not an alliance, that Britain’s word was not its bond,” said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. “That is wild.”

But Corbyn’s rival Owen Smith was not to be outdone, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. Last week he suggested that peace in Syria would come about if we could get Islamic State “round the table”. That sounds dangerous. What table would that be? Would there be “separate dining areas for men and women”? Smith later “clarified” his position, saying that Isis could only be involved if it were to renounce violence. Still, it was more evidence of Labour’s “terrible dissipation. This is the summer the UK lost its opposition party.” Labour now resembles a “vast and imbecilic student union at a recently upgraded poly”.

The party under Corbyn is not “as dismal as it is sometimes made out by the media”, said The Independent. It has had a string of wins in mayoral contests and by-elections, and has been on the right side of the argument about austerity, as the Government now appears to be tacitly admitting. “Nor can the enthusiasm Corbyn generates among people hitherto apathetic or disenchanted about politics be dismissed.” But the hard fact remains that Labour is at least ten points behind the Tories, and Corbyn “has neither the policies, the strategy nor the personal skills to win back the voters”. Sadiq Khan and Kezia Dugdale, Labour’s leaders in London and Scotland, are only the latest to point this out and declare their support for Owen Smith. But Smith himself appears to be making little headway, said George Eaton and Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. Faced with the apparently overwhelming support for his rival inside the party, he has offered a “left-wing, Corbyn-style policy platform”: railway renationalisation, a wealth tax, a ban on zero-hour contracts. The message seems to be: “I’m the same as him but I’m more competent; I look better in a suit.” As a pitch, it seems unlikely to turn the tide.