This breakaway could change our country for ever
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CHUKA Umunna put it best yesterday: “You don’t join a party to spend years and years fighting the people within it.” The key to understanding yesterday’s historic breakaway from Labour is that the party of 2019 is not the same as the party of 2015.
Today’s Labour Party is in the grip of a hard-Left coterie of Stalinists, Trotskyites and assorted revolutionary socialists who think parliamentary democracy is a bourgeois irrelevance and who believe mob rule on the streets is where power really lies.
Integral to their world view is the idea that Jews cannot be real victims of racism because they themselves are powerful.
For Mr Umunna and the other six MP colleagues who have formed the Independent Group, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is no longer a vehicle for social progress and sensible reform but a nasty sect that bullies those with whom it disagrees and which must never be allowed to take power.
That is why a split was inevitable once it became clear – within months of Mr Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 – that the Corbynites’ control of Labour was not a passing phase but the new reality.
LUCIANA Berger, Ann Coffey, Mike Gapes, Chris Leslie, Gavin Shuker, Angela Smith and Mr Umunna deserve the highest praise. They have put their principles above their careers and decided that the greatest service they can do as politicians is to provide an alternative to Labour for the many millions of people who do not want to vote Conservative but who cannot bring themselves to support Corbyn’s Labour.
It is an exciting moment. There has been nothing like it since the founding of the SDP in 1981. And although the parallels are far from exact, there are some important lessons from its achievements.
Although the received wisdom is that the SDP failed, it did not. By splitting the antiTory vote it stopped Labour winning the 1983 election under its manifesto, dubbed “the longest suicide note in history”.
Splitting the Labour vote might not sound like much of a grand vision but in today’s politics that is a noble aim. The central task of any mainstream politician has to be to keep the Corbynites from power.
As we can see in Venezuela now, and as has happened everywhere that revolutionary socialists have taken office under the guise of mainstream politics, the moment they get their hands on the levers of power they break free from the shackles of democratic norms.
But important as yesterday’s breakaway is in this context, it needs more than seven MPs if it is to succeed in that task. That is why the onus now is on the rest of Labour’s moderates. They have to examine their consciences. Because from now on, they have no excuses for staying in Labour. There is now an alternative for them. Staying means working to make Mr Corbyn PM.
We will find out over the next few weeks and months if the honourable souls are left to hang alone by their former fellow Labour moderates.
But leaving Labour was almost the easy bit. They now have the critical task of setting up a new party – or a new movement, as they prefer to call it – from scratch. They have issued a statement of shared values, which is fine. But if they are to be more than sacrificial lambs in the fight to stop Corbyn they will need members, foot soldiers, candidates – and, of course, detailed policies.
That leads to another lesson from the SDP, but one where the parallel falls down.
There was much talk from Labour members yesterday of treachery – and plenty of anger directed at the breakaway MPs. That’s what happened in 1981, too. But for all that, the split back then provided a huge wake-up call which led, via Neil Kinnock’s battle against Militant, to Tony Blair. The SDP kept the political centre alive until Labour was ready to embrace it again.
It is impossible to see that happening this time because Labour is now wholly in the grip of the Corbynites.
Yes, Mr Corbyn will not be leader for ever. But the hard left now has total control of the party and whoever replaces him will be from the same ideological pool.
The transformation of Labour from a mainstream social democrat party into an extremist sect is one of the most astonishing and depressing aspects of modern politics.
The moderates who remain in the party think somehow all this can be wished away. But Labour’s structures and the changes brought in by Ed Miliband, which offered a form of associate membership to almost anyone and ushered in the hard Left, mean it will not be. The Momentum group, set up to buttress the takeover of the party leadership with a takeover of local constituency parties, effectively now controls Labour.
The irony of Labour’s existential struggles is that they come at a time when the Conservative Party is itself falling into ideological factionalism. Reselection threats against Tory MPs like Nick Boles and Sarah Wollaston are an appalling selfindulgence. Our nation needs the Tories to be focused on stopping Corbyn’s Labour taking power, not sliding into the Corbynite tactic of ideological purity tests.
British politics is fragmented like never in living memory. Labour’s split is formalised. What happens next – if more MPs join, and what the Independent Group becomes – could change the country for ever.