What unifies PM Theresa May’s Brexit strategy with shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s planned “mammoth listening exercise” with uneasy Labour MPs? To understand the answer, you have to comprehend that the important number that matters to the Labour Party is not the seven MPs who broke away on Monday morning, the eighth MP who broke away on Tuesday evening, nor any of those who may follow behind. The number that matters is 100.
That’s the number of MPs who essentially agreed with everything the seven original splitters said in their resignation statements — that Jeremy Corbyn is at best indifferent to institutional anti-Semitism and at worst a practitioner of it; that he is facilitating a disastrous Brexit; that his economics are dodgy and his foreign policy ideas are dangerous — but, thus far, are yet to join their colleagues in the new grouping.
What do Labour’s stay-behinds want? In no particular order, they want the party to remain “a broad church”, they want the party to do more to tackle anti-Semitism, and some of them, like the splitters, want Corbyn to oppose Brexit entirely.
“Broad church” is a phrase Labour’s Corbyn-sceptics are fond of: what it means in plain English is that they want him to pretend his landslide victories in successive Labour leadership contests did not really happen.
That extends both to who is allowed into the Labour Party, and who is ushered out of it.
As far as new entrants are concerned, Labour MPs don’t want to see the likes of Derek Hatton, who has been allowed to rejoin after a 34-year ban, back in the fold.
Hatton is a figure of great symbolism due to his position within Militant, the Trotskyist grouping that ran Liverpool council for much of the Eighties.
Corbyn opposed the expulsion of Militant during that decade and, not unreasonably as the party’s twice-elected leader, he has a mandate to reverse that decision.
It’s not just who joins the Labour Party that worries its MPs but who might have to leave it — or at least, who might have to give up holding elected office in it.
In a triumph for the leadership last autumn, changes to party rules made it significantly easier for Labour activists to begin the process of deselecting MPs — though the party leadership still retain considerable powers to prevent deselections if it so chooses.
When Labour MPs advocate a broad church, what they mean is that they want a sturdy wall keeping the likes of Hatton out, and another equally impenetrable barrier keeping them safe in their parliamentary seats.
Corbyn’s political project is first to reverse Thatcherism and then to erect a new economic model in its place: to have a counter-revolution in his first term in office and a revolution in his second.
To do that, he will need to replace at least some sitting Labour MPs and be able to hold the threat of replacement over the rest in order to pass his reforms.
They need to accept that the price of remaining within the Labour Party is fealty to a leader they don’t like, the return of members they would rather see banned, and a response to anti-Semitism they find derisory.
That’s the price of staying in: and if they find it is one they are unwilling to pay, they should find the stomach to risk life outside the walls of the party’s broad church.
- Stephen Bush is political editor of the New Statesman.
