The Guardian view on Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour: time to come together
Jeremy Corbyn is cherished by many delegates in his party. He is not held in awe by them. The membership has twice backed Mr Corbyn overwhelmingly as leader despite their views being far more pro-Europe than his own. On the conference floor in Brighton on Tuesday they did so again, putting their trust in Mr Corbyn over their affection for the European Union. It is a sign of his grip on the party that the margin of his victory was so large that the conference votes on Labour’s Brexit policy did not need to be counted. Mr Corbyn’s policy appears smart: it aims to bridge the divide between leavers and remainers by offering them a final say on Brexit in a plebiscite. The trouble is that it is also too clever to sell easily on the doorstep. It is hard to see a pithy way to explain to weary voters how Labour will win an election, get a new deal, decide whether as a party to back it and then get a referendum to offer voters the option of either leaving on Labour’s terms or remaining in the EU. This is an issue of political signalling and sloganeering that Mr Corbyn must urgently solve.
The Labour leader’s policy is not completely satisfactory. Referendums, as our bitter experience has shown us, can be divisive, their campaigns studded with lies and open to manipulation by hidden interests. Mr Corbyn says he is offering voters the final right to decide. The Labour leader wants to emulate Harold Wilson’s approach in winning the referendum on British membership of the Common Market in 1975. Mr Wilson was criticised for offering his party an “agreement to differ”, but this strategy was successful. As Mr Wilson said, it “fulfilled my very confident prediction at the time … that the party would come out of that campaign not weaker but stronger, not divided but more united”.
As his victory on the conference floor suggests, Mr Corbyn is more wily and ambitious than his critics might believe. The question is whether he is winning the battle for the hearts and minds of his party – or simply marginalising his opponents through subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, changes to the party machinery and rules. This can in part be answered by the fact that for all the claims of civil war in the party, Monday’s debate was a spirited one in which delegates on both sides of the argument engaged with each other on civil terms. The trade union vote split and pro-EU constituency delegates from the left and right worked together with some potency, though not enough to defeat Mr Corbyn’s surprisingly disciplined party management. The vote represents the decision of the Labour party and the labour movement. It has the virtue of allowing MPs to run as remain candidates in remain constituencies and leave candidates in leave constituencies at the next election.
Yet there is an open question about whether Labour’s nuanced policy can energise either its voting base or its activists. One of the least appealing aspects of Mr Corbyn’s leadership is his lukewarm support for the EU. The Guardian would have preferred him
to ditch his leftwing Euroscepticism explicitly and promote with vigour a constructive engagement with the continent from day one of his leadership. However, the Labour leader has been lucky in some respects, as his instincts chime with Britain’s Brexit bolshieness. His allies warn him that the Tories want to fight the next election as the Brexit party and paint Labour as the party of remain. This is an election, say Corbynites, that their leader would lose. The left would like the choice to be solely about class. Labour, said one union delegate, did not want to go into the next election representing the 48% against the 52%, it wanted to be the 99% against the 1%. But the 2016 referendum did not create the new tribes, it merely gave them a cultural identity. Winning an election by running on a platform of social division would be a mistake. Mr Corbyn has shown he can win by bringing people together. For the country’s – and Labour’s – sake he ought to continue to do so.