Another day, and another court is asked to adjudicate on Labour’s woes. It’s no place for resolving the politics of deep schism, but that’s how it is. The agony – maybe even the death rattle – of Labour keeps the political pages and social media alive in the long August days of the parliamentary break.
Tonight Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith slug it out again in Gateshead, the gigantic chasm between their visions of the future of the party curiously muted by an apparent similarity in policies, apart from on Trident. To the uninitiated in the history and chemistry of the party, the split might look puzzling. Smith says he’ll spend £200bn and build a zillion homes, the Corbyn camp doubles the stake and raises it again to £500bn and a gazillion homes. Corbyn until this contest had few policies beyond an amorphous “anti-austerity”, so when Smith put flesh on the bones with strings of new policies, he jolted Corbyn into producing some too. The great divide is less visible to the uninitiated – Corbyn’s incompetence in the basics of opposition as the country faces nation-threatening Brexit decisions.
Whether or not the entire 515,000-strong Labour membership gets to vote, the practicalities have become near impossible. If another 130,000 now have to be vetted in under two weeks before ballot papers go out, that puts intolerable strain on local parties. Local officers are volunteers, expected to vet all new members, maybe 500, by Friday to check they are who they say they are on the electoral register, and not members of rival parties.
This election should now be delayed until after the party conference, with speeches there from both candidates. An appalling state of chaos? Yes, but that’s likely to be Labour’s fate for the foreseeable future. If there is indeed a chance of the leftwing group Militant being allowed back in, its leader Peter Taaffe a toxic blast from the past, then battle lines are even more clearly drawn between those who see Labour as a rebellion – where Corbyn has spent his entire political life – and those who know its mission is to seek power to govern.
“It’s clear I’m the underdog,” says Owen Smith candidly. His team thinks the trend is in their direction, cheered by the vote of the grassroots GMB union membership in his favour. Corbyn’s supporters sweeping the board in the national executive committee elections is not as bad it looks, they say, as Eddie Izzard siphoned off some of the votes and they say phone-bank calls to members are more encouraging. But this feels like whistling in the dark.
The bitter truth is that in the current climate, the case for social democracy sounds dull, compared with great far-leftist rallies. The Corbyn believers have the best of it, buoyed by pure conviction. Faced with the roiling upsurge of left- and rightwing passions, social democrats across Europe and the US fail to inspire. Like Hillary Clinton, the 172 Labour MPs refusing to back Corbyn are accused of being boring, mediocre, weak material for the 140-character blast of politics now.
What a miserable role to be the realist pricking the balloons of those free spirits. To argue for the necessity of winning is to be a cynical compromiser. Those Labour MPs are seen as greedy power-grubbers hanging on to their seats at all costs, as current polling suggests some 90 will lose theirs. That’s not their personal tragedy: it means Labour in parliament will be so depleted that it can never pass a single amendment to whatever an untrammelled Tory government wants to do. Nothing will matter more to the country’s future than the Brexit decisions ahead. Theresa May would be mad not to seize her honeymoon moment to sweep those seats from Labour before those bitter decisions must be taken.
How much easier to go with the romance of the impossible, in the warm embrace of like-minded dreamers. Those I most admire are those on the left, who started out with Corbyn, who have now seen the disaster ahead. Those who know that abandoning all hope of power is to abandon those who benefit most from a Labour government that the party exists to champion. The bookies give Corbyn an 18% chance of being the next prime minister. That matches the pollsters’ finding that only 18% think he would make the better prime minister, against 52% for Theresa May, as 2.5 million of the too few who voted Labour last year now say May would be the better leader.
However much this Labour self-slaughter feels like a reprise of the 1980s, there will be no split, learning from that failed SDP attempt. The electoral system that binds Ken Clarke in the same grip as Liam Fox must force Labour’s irreconcilables to stick together. Until our monstrous electoral system is reformed to free people to form parties that better reflect voters’ wishes, the two old parties must remain as bitterly dysfunctional factions locked in a deadly electoral embrace by first-past-the-post.
Labour realists talk of the long haul. How long? Another three or four elections? If Corbyn crashes in a general election, he may stay, or another only slightly more electable may take his place. There is no point is looking for silver linings, and lights at the end of this tunnel look far away. A pall of gloom hangs over the party’s MPs as they watch the whoops and thrills of Corbyn rallies, signifying nothing. Labour’s apparently “huge” new membership is only a homeopathic drop in the ocean of the great electorate out there.
A new stoicism has descended on them: they will stay resolutely on the back benches, fighting their hardest against every damned Tory act of meanness to the poor, gifts to the rich and shrinking of the public realm, knowing they themselves may not be the ones that see their party back to power. But they know democracy always rights itself in the end. And there is still just a chance that Owen Smith could win, an outside chance.
