14 Dec 2016

Missing, Presumed Dead? The lamentable state of the Labour Party has wider implications

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There will not be much sense of Christmas cheer in the Parliamentary Labour Party this Yuletide. Indeed, there may well be turkey farms where morale is higher than it is in the ranks of the PLP.

The Sleaford and North Hykeham by-election saw the party come in fourth place. A week earlier in the Richmond Park by-election, created by the resignation of Zac Goldsmith, the Labour contender lost his deposit. The opinion polls (for what they are worth after the past two years) suggest that the Conservative Party has a double-digit lead over the official Opposition and that Theresa May has an advantage over Jeremy Corbyn on the question of preferred Prime Minister of a truly vast scale. In Scotland earlier this year the party which had historically so dominated politics north of the border found itself pushed into third slot behind the supposedly reviled Conservatives.

The one bright spot in what has otherwise been an awful 12 months was the victory of Sadiq Khan in the race to be Mayor of London, but even there that win was achieved by Mr Khan all but disowning his own leader.

Yet for Labour MPs matters are worse at Westminster than the above snapshot might suggest. They tried and failed to bring down Mr Corbyn in July and as a result have entrenched him in his office. The Shadow Cabinet consists of characters who are largely unknown nationally and there is clearly more talent on the backbenches of the House of Commons than amongst those who are supposed to hold Her Majesty’s Government to account.

Local Labour constituencies and branches across the United Kingdom are finding moderates being usurped in favour of those aligned to Momentum, a success that has now apparently led to Momentum, itself a pretty hard left organisation, being subject to infiltration from even harder left associations, some of whom are Trotskyite in character.

This raises the serious possibility that by 2018 a number of mainstream Labour MPs will be under the real threat of deselection. Some of them will leave politics rather than await that fate. Others may stand down and force by-elections at which there will in effect be two rival Labour contenders.

If that was all not bad enough, the party finds itself largely an irrelevance on the principal political issue facing the country, namely UK withdrawal from the European Union. Mr Corbyn is manifestly disinterested and indifferent about the subject and is determined not to do anything that could be viewed as obstructing the implementation of the referendum outcome. If Labour’s position was that which is being taken by the Liberal Democrats, namely that it would throw the political kitchen sink at ensuring that the public had a second opportunity to decide what it thinks on Brexit, then with the Conservative Party divided on the matter and now holding a majority of just 10 seats in the House of Commons, the stance taken by the Opposition could actually be consequential.

But it is not and so ministerial lives are much easier than they might be. In fact, the only opposition force whose line on Brexit is significant for the Prime Minister is the Scottish National Party: one calculation that Downing Street has to make as it settles its line on executing Article 50 and sets out its initial negotiating position is whether or not the choices it makes result in giving Nicola Sturgeon a politically plausible path toward asking for, achieving and triumphing in another independence vote.

Although it has not (yet) actually split, the Labour Party is arguably in a worse state of affairs today than it was in the 1981-1983 era when a faction within the PLP split to form the SDP, Michael Foot assumed the leadership, and the party entered the 1983 General Election with a manifesto described by one of its own senior Shadow Cabinet members as “the longest suicide note in history”. Labour are plainly not on the political pitch at present and as a result the Government is far stronger than it should be in current conditions, particularly at Westminster where opposition is close to nominal.

Will anything get better for Labour in 2017?

Probably not. It could get worse. The speed with which the ultra-left is taking over the structure of the party organisation is such that by the time of the 2017 conference, Mr Corbyn and his allies will probably be in a position to rewrite the rulebook for future leadership contests and recast policy across the board in his preferred direction (his one dilemma in this regard is how hard to push for a change of tack on Trident).

This means that even if Mr Corbyn were to stand down as leader voluntarily at some moment in the middle of this Parliament (which is highly unlikely), his successor would almost certainly come from the same section of the party and would thus be scarcely more electable. The hope of the moderates that the trade unions might come to the rescue and align themselves with the PLP looks increasingly desperate and is certainly not helped by the decision of Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite union, the largest in the UK, and a key backer of Mr Corbyn, to step down and seek re-election for a fresh five-year term next Spring, which would mean that he stayed as the single most important actor in trade union politics until 2022, rather than 2018 which would have been the case if he had stuck to the original schedule and retired after a second term in charge. If Unite is not prepared to move against Mr Corbyn then it is improbable that others will try to do so.

How bad could it get for Labour in 2020?

Very bad. The review of constituency boundaries will have the impact of shifting another net 15-20 seats into Conservative hands before a single ballot paper is cast. The party could fall below the 27% of the vote which was its nadir in 1983. The chances of any kind of recovery in Scotland look minimal. Deselections could yet trigger either a formal division or several instances where a sitting Labour MP has been deposed by what he/she would regard as swivel-eyed entryist fanatics and opts to stand for re-election as ‘Real Labour’ or ‘Independent Labour’ and splits the anti-Conservative vote in a fashion that allows the Conservative contender to win by default.

The only saving grace for Labour in May 2020 is that the Liberal Democrats have to come from such a very long way back after their crushing defeat in May 2015, UKIP appears to be engaged in permanent fratricide and so may not be able to threaten Labour in its northern heartlands as in different circumstances it might, and it only has one more seat in Scotland which it can lose to the SNP. This means that even if it suffers a sizeable loss of votes in 2020 compared with 2015, the impact on seats will not be quite as seismic. The downside of this, though, is that the defeat may not be so heavy as to convince even the likes of Mr McCluskey that they must not only dump Mr Corbyn but take on and take out Momentum too.

Can anything be done to make Labour more relevant to UK politics?

Not much on the face of it. The moderates are too weak and internally divided on strategy to do anything that might make a difference to Labour. The idea of another attempted coup d’etat and a third leadership election in three years is close to farcical. The only way that Labour might become more relevant to UK politics, therefore, is if, either for reasons connected to Brexit or because of other unrelated international factors, the domestic economy was to suffer a meteorite strike in the form of another version of the global financial crisis of 2008.

Such a shock might create an electoral constituency for Mr Corbyn which does not exist for him or his version of the Labour Party today. Such a meltdown does, however, seem a very high price for the UK to pay for competitive politics. Absent such an event, it seems more likely that Labour will become more irrelevant in Parliament and that all the action that really matters in British politics will occur inside the Conservative Party. The real official Opposition to the Prime Minister will be not Labour but simply the course of events.

Tim Hames, Director General, BVCA


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