This is officially a summer of madness. It may well be
remembered as the period in which the Labour Party buried any chance of even
remaining a credible opposition, let alone a future party of government.
After the defeat in May, there was an opportunity for some
real soul-searching. Instead, we were plunged straight into a leadership
contest. To the delight of many, Chuka Umunna – the highly credible MP for
Streatham – announced he would stand. Within three days, however, he’d
withdrawn from the race, citing undue levels of media intrusion on his family.
This was the moment the madness first set in. The obvious
candidate was gone and we were left with a field few can genuinely claim to
find very inspiring.
Andy Burnham, the dapper former Health Secretary, who plays
on his Liverpudlian roots rather than his education at Fitzwilliam College,
Cambridge, seems to swing left and right according to the prevailing wind.
His most revealing admission during the campaign came during
a speech in Dublin, in which he claimed that the 2015 Labour manifesto was the
best of those he’d seen in the four elections he’d contested. Bafflingly crazy.
The manifesto which sent Labour to its most disastrous defeat in a generation was
better than the ones that had helped
Blair to win in 2001 and 2005? You couldn’t make it up.
Yvette Cooper hasn’t committed any serious faux pas, as far
as I can tell. But her close personal and political associations with Ed Balls,
Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown are the very last thing that Labour needs. Hers is the steady-as-she-goes,
one-more-heave, don’t-rock-the-boat campaign. But the boat has already been
severely rocked and is taking in alarming quantities of water.
Liz Kendall is the candidate I most admire. She’s asking
difficult questions and providing answers that challenge many long-standing
shibboleths of the Labour Party. For her bravery, she’s denounced on social
media as a ‘Tory’ and seems, unfortunately, to making little headway.
And then there’s Jeremy Corbyn. He’s only in the contest
because of another moment of madness. At the very last minute, when the call
for candidates was about to close, some Labour MPs chose to ‘lend’ their
nominations to the veteran left-winger in the misguided belief that his voice
needed to be heard. David Lammy and Sadiq Khan – both of whom claim to be
serious candidates for London Mayor – were just two examples of lawmakers who
exhibited an incredible naivety.
By this point, acting Labour Leader Harriet Harman had already
extended the franchise to pretty much Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Individual
union members. The general public. Any Tory who can afford £3 and make a
convincing case that they are voting in the best interests of Labour. The
result? A dog’s dinner of a contest in which pretty much anything could happen.
Where will the madness lead us? There are two particularly
frightening scenarios.
The first – and most likely – is that Andy Burnham wins, but
that Jeremy Corbyn runs him a close second. Burnham will then be under immediate
pressure from the left, while the Tories will be in their element. They will
relentlessly use Corbyn’s level of support as a stick with which to beat the
Labour Party. ‘While you claim to be moderate,’ they will say, ‘just look at
how the votes piled up for an old-style 80s socialist.’
The second possibility is one which even a few weeks ago no
one took remotely seriously. What if Corbyn actually won? What if Britain’s answer to Alexis Tsiprias and Yanis
Varoufakis (minus the good looks, academic qualifications and fashion sense),
actually clawed his way to the top?
People are discussing this dystopian vision of Labour’s
future sotto voce and there are some
rather spurious polls which suggest that he may be ahead by quite a margin.
The repercussions would be immense and immediate.
There is no question in my mind that there would be a schism
on a scale not seen since the breakaway by the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ in 1981
to form the SDP. Parliamentarians and ordinary members would leave Labour in
droves to form an alternative power base. Corbyn would find himself in charge
of some kind of Socialist Truth Society, which would draw in disillusioned
leftists, former Green voters, Trotskyists and all kinds of flotsam and jetsam.
My feeling is that this rump Labour Party could command
maybe 20% of the national vote and would be strong enough under
first-past-the-post to have a reasonable representation in Parliament. But it
would never be a party that would form a government. The alternative party of
the centre-left, which we could perhaps imagine being led by a mainstream
Labour politician, would possibly manage 15 or 20% of the vote itself –
appealing to a base of progressive, aspirational voters in the Midlands, London
and the South East.
You don’t need a PhD in psephology to realise that this set
of circumstances would be an unmitigated disaster and a recipe for near
permanent Tory government. It would be history repeating itself in the craziest
of ways. As if we’d learnt nothing from the experiences of the 1980s. We’d
probably even have the spectacle of the newly-formed breakaway party reaching
out to the Liberal Democrats, with a view to forming some kind of alliance.
But the madness doesn’t end there. We have the referendum on
membership of the European Union coming up within the next couple of years. In
the past couple of weeks, there has been a growing sentiment on the left – from
commentators such as George Monbiot and Owen Jones through to union baron Len
McCluskey – that progressives should vote against staying in the EU.
This is truly the world turned upside down. Vote against the
EU? We’re talking about an institution which, for all its faults, has reinforced
workplace protection, imposed higher environment standards, protected consumers
and acted as a champion of human rights. We would vote against being a part of
this multinational institution at a time when all the most pressing issues we
face – on the financial sector, the environment and terrorism – are only ones
that we can tackle internationally?
So what exactly is going on during this insane summer
season? As the Mad Hatter asked Alice, ‘have
you guessed the riddle yet?’
What’s the answer? I don’t think any of us have the
slightest idea.
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