The hard-left: tightening its grip on Labour?
This should be a “glad confident morning” for the Labour Party, said The Times. It is facing a government with a small majority, and a prime minister with “no personal mandate”. Funding crises in public services are creating a “daily diet of negative headlines”. Ministers are preoccupied with the fiendish Brexit process – something that 48% of voters opposed. You’d think Labour would be riding high; instead, its position is “unprecedentedly weak for this point in the cycle”. The Tories are fully 19 points ahead in the polls. Yet buoyed by his unwavering support from the grass roots, the astonishingly inept Jeremy Corbyn sees no reason to change tack; and Labour MPS, having failed to unseat him once, are just letting him get on with it – clinging to the hope that if they give him enough rope, he’ll hang himself.
Labour is in its death throes, said Kate Maltby in The Independent – so why isn’t Theresa May delivering the killer blow? Why has she ruled out calling a snap election, when there’s every indication that it would result in a Labour bloodbath? The answer is, she is playing a longer game. If she trounced Corbyn this spring, he’d resign, and moderate MPS would then have a chance of nominating an effective, centrist leader; this time, they’d make sure to keep any left-wingers off the ballot paper. By contrast, to delay the election is to give the hardleft activist group Momentum time to tighten its grip on the party – and make Labour unelectable: this week, it was reported that Jon Lansman, Momentum’s founder, wants to join forces with Unite, to secure funding for his group that now goes to the party. He is also rallying support for the leadership rules to be changed at the next conference, so that candidates need the backing of only 5% of Labour MPS and MEPS (down from 15%); if that happens, Labour could be led by a Corbynista forever.
If Labour’s members want a left-wing party, why shouldn’t they have one? That is the Momentum line, said The Independent. Trouble is, having been routed in Scotland, Labour has to appeal to Middle England to have any hope of regaining power – and that means ditching Corbyn. That wouldn’t help, said Conrad Landin in The Guardian. Labour lost two successive elections before Corbyn took over. Social democracy is in crisis across Europe. The “soft Left” should stop trying to thwart the will of the membership, and instead win it over with a new vision for the party. Until they do, “it’s hard to believe they have any more chance of winning a general election than Corbyn does”.