Indecision and internecine strife: why Labour's in no position to see off the resurgent right

There is a madness to politics right now in North America, the UK and some parts of Western Europe. Trump ratchets up the racist rhetoric and hatred in the US. And it increasingly seems as if the lunatics haven’t just taken over one asylum, but are on the brink of securing tenure in multiple institutions and setting up a chain.

Indeed, that’s the stated intention of far-right activists. Steve Bannon, for instance, has spent a great deal of time on his European operation and clearly hoped for a more decisive impact across the EU in the Parliamentary elections in May.

Although things may not be moving at the speed some right-wingers hope for, the elevation of Boris Johnson next week – barring an extremely unexpected twist in the Tory leadership contest – sets the UK careering towards a no-deal Brexit and a lurch to the right.

A new Westminster election may be on the cards and it will be the most unpredictable in modern history. Anything could potentially happen if half the Tory vote remains within the grip of The Brexit Party. That scenario is a window of opportunity for Labour. But Johnson’s obvious course of action is to lure his voters back with a fantasy of ‘clean break’ from Brussels. Either Farage then agrees some kind of electoral pact or he sees his newly-founded movement disappear naturally at the same speed it emerged.

If – and this is certainly a big ‘if’ – Johnson does manage to reunite the Tory vote and the general election is fought over the issue of whether we want to go through with Brexit or not, Labour is in an atrociously weak position.

Not only would Corbyn likely go into the poll trailing almost as badly as he did at the start of May’s disastrous 2017 campaign, but he would also have no clear policy on Brexit itself.

To recap, the veteran socialist demands a referendum on any Tory deal or a no-deal scenario and says he would support (half-heartedly, one presumes) Remain. But in an election where he’s campaigning for a Labour victory, his manifesto will tell voters that he will secure a better deal from the EU. And as no one knows the terms of this hypothetical and likely mythical agreement, we are left guessing as to what Corbyn’s stance would be in the event of any eventual Referendum.

In other words, Labour’s policy is still as clear as mud. Not only that, but it will be interpreted and misinterpreted 100 different ways in an election campaign by the likes of Richard Burgon, Emily Thornberry, Barry Gardiner and Keir Starmer.

Attempts to steer the election away from Brexit on to the safer ground of public services or the NHS will, this time, be futile. We will be up against the wire with the future of our relationship with the EU hanging in the balance. This will be no re-run of 2017.

But following Corbyn’s unexpectedly good performance two years ago, he will now be taken relatively seriously. The allotment king has actually become a contender. And that means the spectre of a Labour-SNP coalition rears its ugly head again – something which proved disastrous for Ed Miliband, particularly in the south of England.

It’s conceivable Labour might pull something more coherent together if they were united on other issues, but of course they are not.

Corbyn’s hopeless incompetence has left most parliamentarians speechless with rage and the plague of anti-semitism that has infested the party shows no sign of being eradicated.

As a result, the public is getting more and more of a taste of the modus operandi of the far left and will be drawing its own conclusions about what a Corbyn government would actually mean.

It’s worth noting the sequence of events over the past couple of weeks.

In advance of the Panorama documentary on anti-Jewish prejudice, a memo was sent to so-called ‘digital out-riders’ to go on the attack. We were soon being told that the programme was a stitch-up and that the whistleblowers had axes to grind. At that stage, the instruction to leftist activists was to lay off attacks on Labour’s Deputy Leader, Tom Watson. But no such scruples applied after the show was aired.

Watson was disingenuously denounced as a ‘bully’ for raising issues with the Party’s General Secretary Jennie Formby, who is being treated for cancer. Len McCluskey – a man who epitomises the archetypal dinosaur not just in terms of antediluvian attitudes, but also brainpower – used the Durham Miners’ Gala as a platform to swear at Watson. This was probably a genuine first. Even for what is one of the UK’s weirdest historical re-enactment events.

Since then, we’ve had ridiculous calls for the Panorama programme to be removed from the BBC iPlayer and Corbyn has said that BBC staff must ‘consider their position’, giving a firm indication of his commitment to media independence.

Dianne Hayter – a leading Labour figure in the House of Lords – was dismissed from her role for comparing the culture of leadership team to that of the Berlin bunker in the final days of the Third Reich.

News of Hayter’s sacking was leaked to a cranky hard-left website called Skwawkbox, rather than conveyed to the Labour peer herself. And laughably, her allusion to the Nazis was declared to be offensive to Jews. This is kind of stuff you really couldn’t make up. Or at least you couldn’t have made it up prior to the elevation of the fool Corbyn in 2015.

Meanwhile – no doubt to the horror of McCluskey – unions representing Labour Party workers have been in open revolt over the Panorama debacle. They understandably dislike the vilification of the whistleblowers and also the appointment of a new membership chief who has apparently endorsed the idea that the anti-semitism accusations are ‘smears’.

This is a party in crisis to the point where it can barely function. The idea that within a few weeks it could be drawing in millions of new voters to form a government seems completely preposterous. It’s 2019 though. So can we really rule anything out?  

It is just possible to imagine a very particular sequence of events and peculiar alignment of the heavens which allows Corbyn to enter Downing Street by default. If the gods decreed that we must suffer that fate, we should start preparing for the rockiest ride the UK has seen in generations.