Labour has no choice but to split

I WONDER when the bookies will start offering decent odds on a Labour Party split? I’d bet a tidy sum on it. By split I don’t mean the current simmering tensions between Corbynites and the centre-Right, I’m talking about a full-blown parting of the ways along the lines of the formation of the SDP in the early 1980s when the so-called Gang of Four – David Owen, Shirley Williams, Bill Rodgers and Roy Jenkins – formed their own breakaway party. Labour under its new leader Michael Foot had lurched violently to the Left and plunged over the cliff – it was patently unelectable. Just like Labour under Corbyn today.

With hindsight the Gang of Four could have sat tight. A couple of years later Labour crashed and burned at the polls, Foot was out on his ear and Neil Kinnock began Labour’s long march back to the winnable centre.

But today Owen and Co would be well advised to fold their tents because there is zero prospect of a moderate such as Kinnock, let alone Blair, ever leading the Labour Party again. Last year’s insane three-quid-a-pop membership offer handed control permanently to the fringe Left. They’ll never give it up now. That’s why talk of a successful coup against Corbyn is utter fantasy: in any run-off he would simply stand again and be a shoo-in to win.

So Labour has got itself into a dreadful bind. The grass-roots extremists who now call the shots are not remotely serious about the business of actually winning elections. Maintaining ideological purity comes first, second and third, every time.

You hear the authentic sound of their self-righteous puritanism in calls to phone-in programmes such as Radio 4’s Any Answers: posturing middle-class types who fantasise that they are right-on socialist workers. Their blind worship of Corbyn and reflex hatred of their party’s centreRight has finally condemned Labour to oblivion. All parties reach their sell-by: the oncemighty Whigs, the Liberals.

At some point Labour’s moderates will be forced to face up to this. They’ll have to accept that the Corbynite bunker is impregnable and that the only solution is to get out of the bubble and form a new party, somewhere along the lines of the SDP. The logic is inescapable.

Place your bets.

Such a Relief to heaR Some honeSty