06 July 2017
Milking the Money Tree
Will Labour split?
by J.R.Thomas
A cruel radio skit on Radio 4 suggested that Mr Corbyn’s ambition is to visit a range of constituencies around the country this summer. And why should that be so cruel? Because they are all the locations of major music festivals over the next few weeks. Mr Corbyn, the subliminal suggestion was, longs to hear the roar of the crowds, not the muttering of back benchers in the House of Commons. (Who says the BBC is biased towards the left?)
Jezza may be soon advised to don his multi-coloured backpack and get pedalling to the Isle of Wight; his party has had three weeks of fun and jubilation at its unexpected electoral success, but already the trouble is starting. It started as soon as the Loyal Address and Vote on the Queens Speech last week, where a group of pro-Remain Labour M.P’s had backed an amendment calling for Britain to remain in the EU single market after Brexit (code for “let’s try not to Brexit”). Forty nine M.P’s voted for this, in spite of their leader’s strict instructions that they were not to. That led to four of them being sacked from the new Corbyn front bench team, an echo of the troubles of last year which led to Mr C. losing almost the entire shadow cabinet. Such dramatic events are unlikely in the newly reinvigorated Parliamentary Labour Party (not least because electoral success has brought in a number of new Corbynite supporters) but it shows that party unity is a fragile plant and one liable to get uprooted if and when trouble comes. That may be soonish if Mrs M cannot consolidate her hold on power; though as we suggested last week she might be able to, given the lack of possible leadership candidates able and willing to handle red hot potatoes.
Labour was always a broad church, but is now one where the ideological purists are increasingly out of sympathy with the New Labour pragmatists. “Blair” is still a dirty word in the Old Labour Party (as it is not called), the Momentum tendency preferring purity of thought to the compromises needed to win votes; but they are now starting to wonder if (in their only similarity of belief with Boris) they can be both cake havers and cake eaters.
Whilst this is not the first time that the left of the Labour movement have got their hands on the tiller (Ramsey MacDonald was thought pretty wild in his time, though not for long, and Clem Attlee and Harold Wilson were both seen as lurchers to the left when made party leaders), but all those gents were also politicians and knew that to keep things together, and to win elections, they needed to form internal coalitions. Mr Corbyn, and more so Mr MacDonnell, seem at this stage determined to avoid any dilution of the brand, and, having got this far with a product every commentator said was unsaleable, who is to say they are wrong?
Nevertheless, we will stick our necks out and say that selling this product will be very tricky; the Corbynistas are still a minority in the Parliamentary party (Commons and Lords) and also among leftward leaning voters in the country. But there is certainly a mood abroad which wants change. These changes of fundamentals come along perhaps once in a generation or so, the last one being the tide on which the Thatcherite revolution rolled in in the early 1980’s. Then the country had had too much government, too many restrictions, too high taxation, too much central ownership of the commanding heights of the economy. That carried Mrs T into power for four elections, albeit the last under John Major, and then through three Blair victories too – a sort of Labour Thatcher-lite. But there is a feeling now that the mandarins in Whitehall really might be better at things and the time has come for more central control and intervention, higher taxes, more government spending. Among the young that mood seems very prevalent indeed, assisted no doubt, as we argued last week, by the fact that Mrs May herself seems not hugely keen on free markets and the virtues of capitalism.
That philosophical vacuum on the right allows Jeremy and Momentum to seize the moral high ground of politics – friendly, relaxed, caring, generous, for the Many, not the Few.
Much of the Labour Party though does not think that the Momentum programme would really achieve those wonderfully idealistic objectives; they can still remember a bit of history and also, having seen the effects of quasi Marxist programmes elsewhere, prefer a more pragmatic approach to life and adherence to conventional econometrics; they are what historically might be called the Methodist/Cooperative heritage of the Labour Party. That basic divide in the Labour Party, present since its foundation, has not gone away and one suspects it is not even sleeping; it is pondering how best to reassert itself.
And then we have the extra overlay of the party position on leaving the European Union. Mr Corbyn is believed to be fundamentally a Leaver, though this is one subject on which he is keeping his powder well locked up. Most of his Parliamentary party though are Remainers; so too Labour voters in London, unlike the party faithful outside the south-east, who are Leavers, to a greater or lesser extent – some sufficiently unfaithful at one point to vote UKIP, though they seem to be back on message now. Europe though is at the moment not nearly such a problem for Labour as it is for the Tories. It is a lot easier to ignore the cracks when in opposition and delighting in tormenting those in government who have to deal with the problem. But if Labour has the advantage here, the party has a potential problem that the Conservatives do not have, which may soon come, once again, to the fore.
Which is the possibility of the pragmatists deciding that they would be more likely to get power by creating a new party of the mild left. If M. Macron can do it in France; why not in Britain? The first retort to that is that Labour does not have a M. Macron. But there are potential ones, perhaps, starting with the brother over the water, David Miliband, who keeps on saying he is an ex-politician. Not a retired politician; an ex-politician. People can unretire, especially at age 51. But like those flouncers-off, Messrs Cameron and Osborne, he has no parliamentary seat and that would create a major early obstacle with Jezza in control of the candidates list. Splitting has been done before, by the Gang of Four, and whilst that was pretty much a failure at one level, it did succeed in one very major way – it dragged a left leaning party back to the centre and to winning elections.
The trick might be to form a new alliance that looks fresh and radical and populist, and to present the current management as old and establishment. Somehow Mr Corbyn and his team have managed to present some very old ideas as fresh and new and exciting; an open target for the Conservatives but one they seem to have so far missed. (Tory M.P’s: a hint – stop fighting for ties in the chamber of the Commons; the revolution will not be of neckware. Try ideas.) Maybe the grumbling backbenchers behind Mr C can rubbish their party’s programme and attract the young and the dissatisfied and built a new movement of ideas and excitement.
Is this likely? Perhaps not; but many unlikely things, indeed impossible things, have happened recently. Ambition may become a real spur to action soon; a government teetering all the time on the edge of collapse, a Prime Minister weakened and, it seems, flawed; constitutional negotiations of immense complexity and sensitivity. Whoever leads a left-leaning vote winning party has a real chance of moving into No 10 within a couple of years. That noise you can hear? It is not building works on the Palace of Westminster; it is the sharpening of knives.
If you enjoyed this article please share it using the buttons above.
Please click here if you would like a weekly email on publication of the ShawSheet
