High Noon has come early for Labour. Starmer must not waste it
Labour leaders’ High Noon moments are either contrived or unavoidable. Neil Kinnock’s showdown with the Trotskyite Militant faction at Labour conference in Bournemouth in 1985 was forced upon him by Liverpool city council’s attempt to set an illegal budget, using mass redundancies as an eye-catching gimmick in its fight with the Thatcher government.
A decade later, Tony Blair surprised everyone by rewriting the revered Clause IV of his party’s constitution. This was unfinished business: in 1959, Hugh Gaitskell had tried to banish Labour’s historic commitment to nationalising “the whole of light industry, the whole of agriculture, all the shops, every little pub and garage”. But he had failed in the face of opposition from the trade unions and his own deputy leader, Nye Bevan. The issue took a back seat for a while but remained a divisive subject for both wings of the party.
By the time Blair became leader, the Left was almost finished: friendless, few in number and without influence. In this respect it was a perfect time to strike. The public relations benefit was confirmed when Arthur Scargill, the former hard-left president of the NUM, resigned his party membership as soon as Labour conference voted for the leader’s preferred wording of the new Clause IV.
Blair’s successors had no such opportunities thrust upon them, though Ed Miliband attempted to replicate Blair’s radicalism by reshaping the party’s historic link with the unions, leading to a system for electing leaders in which neither unions nor MPS would have a decisive say. Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in September 2015, using this new system, will always remain Miliband’s defining legacy from his time as leader.
Now Sir Keir Starmer has been presented with his own opportunity, and it has happened, as with Kinnock, early in his tenure as leader. And the risks are far greater than those faced by Blair in 1995 because the Left is far stronger. Starmer has wasted no time in doing the right thing – which also happens to be the popular thing – in suspending Corbyn from the whip in the wake of the publication of the EHRC report into anti-semitism. He will understand the short-term consequences of this dramatic move. Many thousands of members who joined up solely to support Corbyn will now resign in as high profile a way as possible: prepare to see many Tweets featuring photographs of membership cards cut in two and an assortment of Corbyn-supporting hashtags.
If he sees this short-term storm through – and, crucially, if he maintains his determination to remove Corbyn permanently from the party – Starmer will surprise many and impress even more. This is his Bournemouth moment: he cannot afford to waste it.