Is Corbyn's coalition beginning to fracture?

It’s always heartbreaking when besties fall out.

The Corbynite left is in a tizz over the battle to replace Iain McNicol as General Secretary of the Labour Party.

Essentially, the disagreement is between those who believe that the position should be fixed in the traditional way behind closed doors and others who want it thrown open – at least in the future – to some kind of democratic vote of the ‘movement’.

The two personalities at the heart of the current dispute are Jennie Formby of the Unite union and veteran activist Jon Lansman, who runs the hard-left Momentum organisation forged out of Corbyn’s original leadership campaign.

Moderate MPs are so worried at the prospect of either of these figures taking over the party’s administration that they are pleading for some kind of hustings at Westminster. This would supposedly be an opportunity to seek guarantees that the lawmakers will not be subject to vilification and deselection in the future. There hasn’t been a worse misreading of the political power balance since Theresa May laid down her last set of red lines to Brussels in the Brexit negotiations.

In a way, the open debate about the General Secretary is very pecular, as we’re talking about the appointment of a paid bureaucrat who, traditionally, would have been seen as a servant of the party as a whole rather than a particular faction. Under current rules, it’s the ruling National Executive Committee that will approve Formby, Lansman or whoever else makes it on to the shortlist.

So what exactly is going on and what can we read into it?

The leadership of the party supports Formby and, according to news reports, has actively tried to discourage other candidates from throwing their hats into the ring. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) – a throwback to the Bennite era of left-wing turmoil in the 1980s – backed ‘comrade Formby’ too with a plea that no other candidates came forward ‘in the interest of Left unity’.  (A sense of irony has always been in short supply on the fringes of British socialism.)

Broadly speaking, Corbyn and McDonnell will judge it more important to keep Unite happy than the Momentum movement, which they can take pretty much for granted. There is almost certainly a desire to see the General Secretary’s role filled by a woman too, as they know there’s a perception of a fairly macho ‘brocialist’ culture around the leadership as a whole.

Why would Lansman bother with his challenge, knowing that it risked a rift with Jez? Here, the political runes become rather harder to read. It may be that Lansman believes it to be healthy that a faction born out Corbyn’s leadership campaign eventually creates its own space. Perhaps he is conscious that Momentum is seen as simply reflecting whatever the leadership happens to support and has little raison d’etre beyond the personality cult surrounding the allotment king of Islington North.

It may also be that Lansman views the development of the Labour Party rather differently from Corbyn and McDonnell. The Leader and Shadow Chancellor may speak the language of democracy and participation, but have always lived in a world of behind-the-scenes fixes and caucusing.

Some of the most enthusiastic backers of Corbyn on social media have grown up in a different era and believe in a much more direct approach to decision-making. Aaron Bastani, a controversialist who runs an alt-left media outlet called Novara, was shocked to discover that he’d been blocked by the Dear Leader’s Twitter account for suggesting that the General Secretary’s position should be elected.  Max Shanly, a young Corbynite activist, who gleefully celebrated McNicol’s departure and appears on Novara podcasts, tweeted that he had been removed from the Executive of the CLPD.

There’s an old rule of thumb that if you put two members of the far left in a room together, you’ll come back half an hour later and discover there’s been a split. This theory seems to be borne out by recent events.

As I’ve observed already on this blog, politics is on permanent fast forward in the age of social networks and digital media. Corbyn became Labour Leader in a most unexpected way in the shortest possible time frame. He has consolidated his grip on the party much faster than many imagined. What’s clear from recent events is that we’ve now entered a period of splits and disenchantment much sooner than we might have expected. And who would bet against the whole bizarre experiment imploding more suddenly than anyone ever thought possible?