Thirty-seven people have killed the Labour Party. First, there were the 16 MPs who “lent” their votes to Jeremy Corbyn to get him on the leadership ballot paper even though they had no intention of voting for him. They have learned the hard way what even children know—that it is both stupid and wrong to facilitate behaviour that you think is harmful. They also forgot the iron law of politics: the best way to beat someone is to prevent them running. There is nothing wrong with preventing people from standing in an election—that is how political power is exercised. But maybe this is the problem. Labour has lost any sense of the need to win power.
The next 18 assassins are those members of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee (NEC) who voted to put Jeremy Corbyn automatically on the ballot. They had the power to prevent him standing and they had a reason—the catastrophic collapse of confidence in him among Labour MPs. Instead they chose to guarantee him a place and thereby gift him almost certain re-election.
Of course, the NEC did not act alone and this is where the final three guilty men come in. The General Secretaries of Unite, Unison and the GMB were behind the union vote to endorse Corbyn. Dave Prentis of Unison and Tim Roache of the GMB were cowards plain and simple—they know Corbyn is unelectable and they know the cost of that to their members. The third, Unite's Len McCluskey, has got exactly what he has always wanted: control over an ultra-left political party. It's just that never in his wildest dreams did he think it would be as big as the Labour Party currently is.
Mention of McCluskey reminds me of the one man who is ultimately to blame for the death of the Labour Party: Ed Miliband. Miliband sold his soul to McCluskey and his party to Unite. Without a dirty deal with the unions, his brother David would have become Labour leader. Without Ed's disastrous leadership election reforms there would be no £3 members to surge Corbyn to power.
"The 1983 election will look like a picnic compared to the 100 seats that Labour will lose whenever Theresa May chooses to go to the country"Angela Eagle's challenge to Corbyn was made quixotic by the NEC. It has been rendered futile by the entry of Owen Smith into the race. There is talk of him being made to withdraw, of the need for a unity candidate. In the end, it won't matter. The Labour Party only has one choice: a quick death or a slow one. Survival as an election-winning, national party of government is gone.
The leadership election will be fought and fought hard but it will be lost. Corbyn's unique blend of miserabilist anti-oratory, lack of patriotism and impossible spending plans will define Labour. There will be plans and plots aplenty—and the words “if only” and “just wait” repeated often. Perhaps McCluskey will be beaten in the elections for General Secretary. Perhaps then another leadership election next year will succeed. Perhaps a defeat in a general election will be a wake-up call.
But while they are waiting, the MPs will find themselves under assault in their constituencies. The new activists, organised by Momentum, will be motivated to punish the PLP for their disrespect to Corbyn. One by one the decent MPs will be deselected—some older, more established MPs may escape but they will survive in a sea of Momentum or Momentum-lite candidates. And then there is the real deselection, the one inflicted by the voters. The 1983 election will look like a picnic compared to the 100 seats that Labour will lose whenever Theresa May chooses to go to the country.
The PLP has an existential choice: hang together or hang separately. But staying in the Labour Party will mean the end—first for MPs and then for the Party. The UK needs a party of the radical centre, one that channels the desires of the 48 per cent who voted "Remain." Theresa May sees the need to feint for the centre but her slim majority means she has to manage to the right to maintain her internal coalition.
The electoral space is clear but the political project is vague. When people remember the Social Democratic Party, founded by Labour moderates in 1981, they forget the contribution of Roy Jenkins and, in particular, his Dimbleby Lecture of 1979, which laid out what he thought was wrong with British politics. Does Labour have a figure of similar stature in exile? Yes, David Miliband. Can he be the catalyst for a new party? Yes. Will he, or is he yet another political Hamlet? That is the question.
