New boundaries won’t hurt Labour like Corbyn
Iwas stopped in my tracks last week when various Labour supporters gave their view of the proposals for the new parliamentary boundaries. These, they told us in a spirit of rage, could cost their party 20 or more seats at the next election. The Commons is shrinking from 650 to 600 members, and the size of constituencies is being equalised. Smaller urban seats that return Labour MPs are chief among those disappearing.
The boundary changes are largely irrelevant to Labour’s prospects. It is going to lose the next election – and it is rare indeed that one can predict such a thing three and half years before the event – because it promises to offer the electorate a combination of extremist, wealth-destroying policies and utterly inexperienced and incompetent potential ministers for which only a nation bent on political suicide could dream of voting.
There is a fading pretence among some pundits, whether in the printed press or in broadcasting, that Labour is on a level playing field with the Conservative Party, and when the contest comes it will be of the usual sort. It isn’t, and it won’t. Short of Bashar al-Assad supplanting Mrs May as leader – something likelier to happen than Labour winning in 2020 – the Tories will romp home by a thumping margin, boundary changes or no boundary changes.
The key to this will be the reelection – by, we are led to expect, an equally thumping margin – of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader next weekend. This, too, is being misrepresented as some great democratic uprising to confirm a man who is truly in touch with the people as Leader of the Opposition, and to cement the base from which he can promote a far-Left transformation of Britain in the years ahead. It is nothing of the sort.
Labour does, indeed, appear to be the largest political party by popular membership. As well as its 338,000 full members, it allowed a 48-hour period in July, when the leadership contest was called, for others to become registered supporters: 183,000 took that opportunity. Some who joined were moderate Leftists who wanted to try to counteract the takeover of the party by the hard Left; but most were socialist workers, anarchists, revolutionaries, communists, Trotskyists, MarxistLeninists and Stalinists who had not yet got around to participating in the far-Left’s entryism of this once reasonably sensible political party.
There is no correlation between the half million thus eligible to vote in this leadership election – perhaps twothirds of whom will vote for Mr Corbyn rather than for his preposterous rival, Owen Smith – and most of the rest of the British people. Because Labour has such a large membership does not mean it is cruising towards power. It does mean that it has attracted almost every loony Leftist in a country of 65 million people to join its ranks: sadly for Labour, but happily for the future of Britain, about 64.7 million of the rest will never in the proverbial million years share the demented political view of Mr Corbyn and his chums.
There have been reports in recent days that, confronting the inevitable, some moderate Labour MPs are thinking of making their peace with Mr Corbyn after his impending victory, in the hope of working with him to take on the Tories effectively. The compromises some may find they have to make to do that would be enough to stop most of us looking in the mirror. The party, like the old people’s parties of Soviet-occupied Europe, has and uses the power to expose members it deems to be thought criminals. One such last week was the MP Neil Coyle, whose name was published on a sinister list of those who have “abused the leadership”. Mr Coyle’s sin was to have branded John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, a “disgrace”: Mr McDonnell is a man famed for his strong and long-held admiration of Sinn Fein and, therefore, the IRA, and is apparently still awaiting the inevitable meltdown of global capitalism so that the Marxist revolution can come.
Also, moderates wishing to become chums with Mr Corbyn and his followers reconcile themselves to a party that appears to be institutionally anti-semitic, and a leadership that happily associates itself with some of the nastiest terrorist groups in the Middle East. What that has to do with securing a better standard of living for people in parts of post-industrial Britain is beyond me, but perhaps where there’s a will, there’s a way.
I hope sensible Labour MPs are talking about a coordinated response to a Corbyn victory, for such a victory must sound the death knell for the party’s electoral prospects. It also sounds that knell for the individual careers of many MPs. The hardliners and bigots around Mr Corbyn call for the deselection of MPs not just at the first sign of disagreement with some of the leadership’s mad attitudes and policies, but even at the suspicion of them. More than one MP has told me of their fear of deselection, despite having kept their mouths shut since Mr Corbyn took over, because of an institutional memory of the support they once gave the hated Blair regime. (The hated Blair who, of course, won the party three elections). If such people will be hounded out of the party anyway, they might as well leave now and get their own, alternative centre-Left party on the road.
When all this is added to the fact that the party is effectively dead in Scotland, and dying in Wales, its prospects look bleak. And, in fact, the Cobynistas don’t care about winning: they care only about a revolution that is never going to come.
Much as I warm to Mrs May and her proper grasp of conservatism, I don’t want to live in a one-party state. However, the way Labour is conducting itself, that is what we shall get – unless those MPs who know the Left only has a future if it is moderate make their stand directly after the die is cast next week.