The party will have to split if it is to survive
The word from Labour’s front line is so depressing for the party that its sub-Marxist manifesto has largely become irrelevant. For many candidates, the question is now of personal survival, and of what they and others like them do on June 9, having registered a presumably apocalyptic defeat. One activist told me that the vilification of Jeremy Corbyn on doorsteps in a hitherto safe seat surpassed that of Mrs Thatcher or of Arthur Scargill 30 years ago.
It is like the Titanic, except that not only is the iceberg unavoidable but even some first-class passengers can’t find a lifeboat.
A collapse in support for the Lib Dems – if one believes the polls, which, despite endless evidence of Lib Dem irrelevance and ineptitude, I struggle to – has inflated Labour’s ratings lately. However, it has evaporated in Scotland, is failing in Wales and in England is a poor second to the Tories almost everywhere except in its tribal homelands. Even those are wobbly: a former MP asserted that no seat with a majority of less than 10,000 was safe. Only 119 Labour MPs recorded such a majority in 2015.
Nor has Labour been helped by the Tories’ foolishly anti-free-market manifesto, with its talk of workers’ rights and offering little to business and the main drivers of the nation’s prosperity other than sparing Britain the Corbyn terror. It smells like the sort of Tory party that in 1959 and 1970 convinced regiments of natural Labour voters that it was safe to vote for Hugh Gaitskell or Ted Heath, and seemed only to lack a pledge to reopen coal mines.
Some Labour luminaries are talking openly about an insurrection after the election. Frank Field, perhaps the most distinguished in terms of sense, decency and experience, has spoken of having to “remake” the party.
Mr Field’s view is that what remains of Labour’s parliamentary party – perhaps four-fifths of whom would be opponents of Mr Corbyn – should coalesce behind a different leader. This body, which Mr Field implies would still be the Labour Party, would then ask the Commons authorities to pay it Short money – state funding for opposition parties – and be prepared to go to court if necessary.
As our poll today shows, a quarter of Labour supporters want the party to split after a defeat. Nearly a third want it to merge with the Lib Dems. Most candidates say they are concentrating solely on winning their seats. Any lack of a plan would only deepen the chaos on June 9 and afterwards.
Some, however, are plotting. The internet is awash with stories of meetings of moderates from the preCorbyn era, now on the margins of the movement, discussing a framework for a new progressive party after the defeat. Crucially, former donors who have refused to support Labour under Mr Corbyn are willing to fund this: essential because without some infrastructure and a well co-ordinated marketing blitz it would get nowhere.
Reports last weekend that Tony Blair was plotting a political party seemed wide of the mark. Mr Blair is realistic enough to know what his reputation is among voters – our poll also shows that only 22 per cent of Labour voters want him back – and to know that his involvement would risk strangling a new movement at birth.
However, some former associates are known to be discussing such possibilities, including, inevitably, the arch-intriguer Lord Mandelson. As one Blairite told me last week: “Any group requires a leadership not from the Blair years or drawn from his friends. The younger generation must run this.”
It must also drop the Blairite obsession with reversing Brexit, which has proved toxic on the doorsteps for the Lib Dems, or it will remain a minority sport.
Many names are floated – Yvette Cooper, Chuka Umunna, Clive Lewis, Dan Jarvis or even Sir Keir Starmer, whose credibility has suffered from his decision to serve Mr Corbyn as shadow Brexit secretary. First, they must be re-elected. Second, a leader needs the force of personality and logic to persuade others to take the risk of coming, too. Plenty of younger prospective MPs feel there is no future under Mr Corbyn or whomever he might anoint to succeed him.
However, some older candidates may, if re-elected, opt for the quiet life. The fight has gone out of many of them in terms of battling for the soul of their party, and the lure of a salary for five more years and a pension at the end of it speaks more loudly.
Yet there are enough who know that failure to change radically Labour’s present direction would signal not just certain defeat in 2022, but quite possibly at the election after that. And although catastrophe for them on June 8 is predictable, the reaction to it is not.
Mr Corbyn has indicated he won’t resign. It appears he wishes to stay on until Labour’s National Executive Committee has lowered the threshold for nominations for leadership elections, so he can ensure someone as hard-Left as he is succeeds him. With the grass-roots membership still predominantly extremist – and entirely unrepresentative of the country – that will ensure years of continued irrelevance for the party.
For that reason, Labour in its present form will be ungovernable after June 8. However determined candidates are to concentrate only on winning their seats, it is clear efforts to coordinate a response from the mainstream are already under way, because most former MPs who hold their seats will be resolute that they are never going to fight another election such as this again.
The uprising may not happen the weekend after the election, but with a party conference in view that promises only to entrench the hard Left, momentum – if you will excuse the phrase – will grow. The breakaway will come, and it will be far more seismic than the formation of the SDP in 1981. And it will have to come soon, if a reformed, moderate party is to have any chance of being credible by 2022.
‘Most MPs will be resolute they will never fight another election like this’