Labour’s woes: is it time for a new party?

“Credibility is one of those indispensable political qualities that barely rates a mention when it is there,” said The Guardian. “Yet when it is missing, nothing else matters as much.” This is a major problem for Labour. The policies it has published thus far – which include a massive housebuilding drive, a £10 minimum wage and free parking at hospitals – “do not yet add up to a very coherent platform”. Nor, for that matter, do Jeremy Corbyn’s attacks on “greedy bankers” and “rip-off bosses” seem likely to win over many Tory-leaning voters. But the more fundamental problem is that many voters simply can’t take Corbyn himself seriously. The Labour leader seemed not even to have persuaded supporters gathered in Manchester, for the party’s official campaign launch this week, that he is a plausible prime minister-inwaiting. “An applause line about ‘when Labour wins’ was greeted in silence.”

Progressives are looking ahead to the general election with “trepidation”, said Charlie Cadywould in the New Statesman, but some are consoling themselves with the thought that a landslide defeat will at least offer a chance to get rid of Corbyn and set a new course for Labour. They shouldn’t count on it. Corbyn has vowed to stay on whatever the result; and a bad defeat may actually bolster his position if pro-corbyn MPS disproportionately hang on to their seats, thereby increasing their relative influence in the parliamentary party.

The hard-left is not about to surrender its hold of the Labour Party, said Rachel Sylvester in The Times. The best hope for centre-left moderates now is to bail out and set up a new party. “The election of Emmanuel Macron in France proves that the liberal centre can – with the right leader – harness the anti-establishment mood just as effectively as the populist Right.” Macron only started his movement a year ago. People always cite the failure of the SDP as evidence that a new party won’t gain traction, but politics is “far more fractured and less tribal that it was in the 1980s”. And there are plenty of former Labour donors who would gladly shovel money at “any alternative movement that could provide a credible opposition to the Conservatives”. By taking a pro-europe line, such a movement could “cut through party lines”, attracting both Lib Dems and disaffected Tories, said Andrew Grice in The Independent. But its success would almost certainly depend on “a public backlash against Brexit that does not exist right now and might never materialise”. By the time such a new party fought its first election, in 2022, the issue may be a “long-done deal” and “the public may have moved on”.