Sexism row over Labour’s men-only mayoral candidates

The Left’s stranglehold on the party leadership will only be loosened if Corbyn is humiliated in 2020

JEREMY CORBYN was embroiled in a sexism row yesterday after a Labour MP said women in the party were being left to “serve the tea” after women failed to win five contests to select the party’s candidate to be the mayor of a major city.

Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, claimed that Mr Corbyn had refused to meet to discuss gender equality in the party’s nominations for mayors. The criticism came after Steve Rotheram, a parliamentary aide to Mr Corbyn, was picked as its candidate to be mayor of Liverpool – the latest contest in which the party had backed a male candidate.

Meanwhile the GMB union endorsed Owen Smith for the Labour leadership after 60 per cent of its members backed his challenge to Mr Corbyn.

Can the Labour Party be saved? The more optimistic party members and supporters have until recently believed so. They frequently point to the presence of Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader, as the man best positioned to outmanoeuvre Jeremy Corbyn in the name of something more amenable. It was Watson, after all, who played a leading role in getting rid of Tony Blair in 2007.

In contemporary Labour wisdom, Tom Watson always wins. Yet his latest comments – that Labour is at risk of being overrun by “Trotskyist entryists” who are “twisting the arms” of young members – are a sign of Mr Watson’s increasing exasperation with what is happening to his party. Rather than a pre-emptive shot across the bows ahead of yet another factional triumph, these remarks smack of his all but admitting defeat for Labour’s moderate wing – at least for the time being.

Labour may yet be saved as an electoral force, but it is increasingly unlikely to be rescued by one man. Mr Corbyn is set to receive another huge mandate from the Labour selectorate next month, meaning he will almost certainly remain in place until 2020. Labour moderates have run out of options, and Mr Corbyn and John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, are unlikely to give up something they have spent a lifetime coveting. Like Samson, they would rather pull down the temple on their heads before giving the party back to the vacillating Parliamentary Labour Party.

The brutal paradox for Labour moderates is that the further the party falls behind the Conservatives in the polls under Mr Corbyn – Theresa May has now opened a massive 14-point lead – the less appetite there seems to be to depose him. Like Corbyn’s rivals for the party leadership last summer, the problem Owen Smith faces is that Labour members are not convinced the party can win a general election with him leading it either. And if you are going to lose anyway, why not do so with a supposed “man of principle” at the helm?

This reluctance to compromise is one of the main causes of the massive existential crisis Labour faces, even if Smith does somehow manage to take charge.

Labour’s working-class voters want lower levels of immigration, yet even under Ed Miliband, the party’s liberal membership erupted in paroxysms of rage over an anaemic pledge promising “controls on immigration” – something taken for granted by the wider electorate. While pragmatic Labour MPs such as Siobhain McDonagh are tapping into a potentially rich source of discontent with campaigns around lowpaid work at big employers such as Marks & Spencer and B&Q, party members seem more enthused by the ideological abstraction of nationalisation – irrelevant to the average voter.

Even before proposed boundary changes come in, Labour needs a swing comparable to Blair’s 1997 landslide just to win a wafer-thin majority in 2020. As things stand, Labour has a mere 9 per cent chance of forming a majority, according to the political website Electoral Calculus. Mrs May is on course for a comfortable 90-seat majority once boundary changes have been finalised in 2018. Recall the television images of highprofile MPs such as Ed Balls and Douglas Alexander losing their seats last year and multiply that several times. The Corbynistas may try to deselect rebellious Labour MPs in the meantime, but to paraphrase the much-paraphrased Bertolt Brecht, they won’t be able to deselect the people and elect another. Labour may have a record half a million members, but crucially, two-and-a-half million people who voted Labour in 2015 say that they would prefer Mrs May as prime minister to Mr Corbyn.

And so Labour MPs are threatened with deselection, but by the wider electorate as much as by Trots, Tankies and fired-up Left-wing activists. As each day passes, the only force which looks capable of saving Labour are the 45 million people eligible to vote at the 2020 general election. Dire poll numbers will make the Corbynistas dig in further behind their embattled leader, yet a crushing Labour wipe-out is probably the only thing that can now burst Mr Corbyn’s irrepressible bubble.

There will eventually come a point when Labour moderates might as well adopt Lenin’s famous slogan: “The worse, the better”.