If Labour’s red rebels don’t come to their senses, the party’s doomed to utter irrelevance
THE long summer break from Westminster couldn’t come soon enough for a fractious Labour Party. The party feels more divided than at any time since the early Eighties when, l ed by Roy Jenkins and David Owen, moderates broke away to form the Social Democratic Party.
Demoralised by a defeat in the General Election that it never saw coming, uninspired by a protracted leadership contest that is being drained of energy by an enervating series of nationwide hustings and divided over how best to oppose a resurgent Conservative Party, many Labour MPs are as despairing as I have known them.
‘We are full of gallows humour and quiet despair,’ writes Wakefield MP Mary Creagh, an early contender f or the l eadership, in t his week’s New Statesman.
On Monday night, 48 MPs defied Harriet Harman, the acting leader, by voting against the Government’s Welfare Bill, which i ncludes measures to i ntroduce a benefits cap of £20,000 for families living outside London, as well as limiting child tax credits to two children.
Defying
Harman had instructed her colleagues to abstain rather than join with the SNP in opposing the Bill.
Among those defying her were 18 new MPs elected on May 7. This was yet another indication of how the party moved Left under Ed Miliband and of how, some say, the selection of parliamentary candidates is being controlled by the Left.
In the run- up to the vote, Harman had a direct message for the party: ‘We cannot simply say to the public, “You were wrong at the election”.
‘We’ve got to wake up and recognise this was not a blip; we’ve had a serious defeat and we must listen to why.’
Adopting a more nuanced position on welfare reform, she believed, was one way of demonstrating that Labour was listening.
Internal party research into the election defeat has revealed ( what some of us already knew, of course) that not only was Miliband not taken seriously as a putative prime minister, the party emphatically l acked economic credibility and was not trusted on welfare and immigration.
More pragmatic Labour MPs despair that they are allowing themselves to be outmanoe uv r e d by Geo rg e Osborne as he sets traps into which the foolish stumble.
The Chancellor likes to gather around him imaginative thinkers and advisers, such as Neil O’Brien, the brilliant former head of the Policy Exchange think tank, and Essex MP Robert Halfon, advocate of ‘white van conservatism’ and deputy chairman of the party.
Osborne learns and listens well and is determined to command the political centre ground, just as Tony Blair did before him, winning three general elections.
So, in its present disarray, what now for Labour?
That 66- year- ol d Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North and a veteran of the party’s bitterest struggles in t he Eighties, has emerged as the Left’s flag-carrier in the leadership contest tells you everything you need to know about what former Home Secretary David Blunkett described yesterday as Labour’s ‘ bewilderment’ and ‘emotional trauma’.
A serial rebel, Corbyn originally struggled to gain the 35 MPs’ nominations necessary to enter the leadership contest.
He began as the 100-1 outsider, but his odds have been slashed to 4-1 after he won the support of powerful unions, i ncluding Unite, l ed by ‘ red baron’ Len McCluskey, as well as the nomination of 71 constituency parties, the most of the four candidates.
Long preferring the purity of ideological opposition to the compromises of power, Corbyn is o pposed to t he UK’s independent nuclear deterrent and supports a 7 per cent rise in National I nsurance to f und the reintroduction of student grants.
Should the next Labour leader try arguing for such a tax rise on the doorsteps of the middle class or in those key marginal seats which the party hoped to win from the Tories in May but lost, the sound of derisive laughter would be loud indeed.
As you would expect of one who has been an MP since 1983, Corbyn i s an accomplished platform speaker. He knows what he knows and no one can persuade him otherwise.
With his clipped beard, Leninstyle cap, beige shirts and brown jackets and ties, he resembles a redbrick sociology l ecturer, circa 1976.
But hi s retro c hi c and uncompromising socialism appeal to the idealistic anti-austerity young, for whom he has become a cult figure, and to those activists weary of the ways of Westminster.
No matter that the London MP was a friend of Sinn Féin in the Eighties or has cultivated alliances with Islamist terror groups Hezbollah and Hamas.
Jeremy Corbyn’s presence as a l eadership c ontender has inevitably dragged the contest to the Left, hence the tortuous flip-flopping of Andy Burnham.
Still narrowly the front runner, Burnham, once an enthusiastic Blairite, has a desire to be all things to all men and women.
I ndeed, t his Cambridgeeducated former special adviser likes to think of himself as the People’s Andy, the boy from outside the ‘ Westminster bubble’, even if he is, in truth, the ultimate insider.
Opportunist
He i nitially abstained on Monday’s vote in the interests of ‘collective responsibility’ and then immediately announced on social media that he would oppose the Welfare Bill with all his power. This was the logic of an opportunist.
Liz Kendall, the candidate of the pro-business, decentralising Right of the party, speaks the kind of difficult truths that most Labour members do not wish to hear.
At times, it’s as if she were appealing to the wider electorate rather than to those who have a vote in the contest. For her troubles, she is routinely denounced as an ‘Uber Blairite’, or — the worst insult in the Left’s lexicon — a ‘Tory’.
Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper cautiously hopes to emerge as the unity candidate, someone of experience and substance who could hold the party together.
But will she be hindered by associations with the old Brownite faction? And she can do nothing about the unpopularity, deserved or otherwise, of the man she married, Ed Balls, who is out of the way, at least, having lost his seat in May.
‘All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,’ wrote Tolstoy. The Labour Party, during periods of contentment, has liked to think of itself as one big extended family.
Activists would address one another as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ as they extolled the virtues of togetherness.
Harsh
But these expressions of fellow f eeling and mutuality were never fully convincing because, from its beginnings, the Labour Party was an uneasy coalition between the organised labour movement and the metropolitan intellectual; between the worker at the coalface and the professor in his study.
Over its long history, Labour’s splits and divisions have i nvariably been between those who, in a resonant phrase from the early Fifties, want to ‘ Keep Left’, and those who believe the only way is to occupy the centre ground and become the party of sound financial housekeeping.
Yes, t he party is f eeling despondent after a harsh defeat in the election and the re- emergence of Corbyn has created new anxieties and fresh frustrations. But let’s remember this is the hysteria of the present moment.
Things are not as desperate as they were in the Eighties and, tempting as it is for some to entertain such fantasies, I don’t believe the Labour Party is about to split.
In time, a new leader will finally emerge and it will not be Corbyn.
One hopes, for all its present unhappiness, that the Labour f amily comes to i ts senses and realises that those who wish to keep on ‘ Keeping Left’ will doom t he party to s omething worse even than perpetual opposition — absolute irrelevance.