It was a day of contrasts. Labour MP Sadiq Khan was elected mayor of
London, overcoming an openly Islamophobic campaign against him. The
person who played
a major part in putting together that Islamophobic campaign, Lynton
Crosby, was knighted on the same day for services to the
Conservative Party politics.
It was also the day after many council elections across the UK. As
anyone familiar with mid-term elections will know, expectations are
critical in how a result is received. In this case the agenda was set
(because of their media access) by those within Labour who openly
attack the new leadership. In this post
I called them Labour’s new militant tendency, but anti-Corbynistas
is simpler. The constant anti-Corbynista refrain is that this
leadership is an electoral disaster. So when the council elections
were not a disaster, they looked stupid
and Labour ended up feeling better about the results than they should
have done. (Despite open Conservative divisions over Europe and a
clearly regressive budget, Labour only had a slight national lead
over the Conservatives.)
You can of course be neither a Corbynista nor an anti-Corbynista,
which is where I am, where Sadiq Khan is and I suspect the majority
of Labour party members are. Khan nominated Corbyn for the leadership
because he thought the left should have a voice, but he did not vote
for him in the actual contest. Giving people a choice, and being
prepared to accept when that choice goes against you, are part of democratic politics.
Returning to the council elections, this own goal by the anti-Corbyn
militants is an illustration of how their strategy is flawed. As I
explained here,
constant high profile attacks on the Labour leadership from within
just make it difficult for Labour party members to read the polls:
are bad results because the leadership is poor or because it is under
constant attack from within? That in turn just delays the very thing
the anti-Corbynistas want, because it is only the party membership
that can vote for a new leader.
At one point when I was writing that earlier post, I suddenly thought
I was being stupid. The goal of many anti-Corbynistas is not to
unseat the leadership as soon as possible, but to provide the
momentum for a new centre-left party. You can see that very clearly
in this
article
by Tim Bale. Those making that call know that time is not on their
side, so there is a constant refrain of urgency. To quote Bale, MPs
“are fast running out of options”, they are about to be
deselected, the new leadership is tightening its grip on the party,
and so on. I think in reality time has run out for those that want
(one way or another) to override the views of Labour party members.
Naivety among anti-Corbynistas is only matched by the traditional
left. Those who dismissed the antisemitism issue as just a ruse by
anti-Corbynistas showed no awareness of the structural
problem that Labour has, as both the party that is most critical of
the current government of Israel and the party that many Muslims have
taken a leading part in. Contrast Naz Shah’s genuine apology to Ken
Livingstone’s incendiary remarks. Getting Shami Chakrabarti to lead
an inquiry
is an excellent start in dealing with that issue.
I think Nick Cohen is right
that this is an example of a general tendency on the traditional left
to divide the world into heroes and villains, and choose which side
particular people or leaders are on by a dubious process of
association. Within that framework any leader that opposes US
imperialism gets most of the way into the good guys camp, whatever
the nature of their regime. It is an approach to international
relations worthy of a neocon.
This Labour leadership is generally as hopeless as the last in
combating a generally hostile media. I have not heard a single Labour
shadow minister or MP, in response to yet another question on
antisemitism, counter attack with the nature
of the Conservative campaign for London mayor. (As in ‘at least we
are dealing with this issue. The Conservatives are continuing to run
an Islamophobic campaign’.) It has to be prepared to learn the dark
arts of political spin.
There is a great deal of progress that needs to be made before the
Labour party is able to unseat what is one of the most incompetent,
divisive and ideological UK governments. Good leadership is part of
how that will be done, but it is not everything. The 2015 election
was lost for Labour partly because Ed Miliband was not popular, but
also because the party decided not to oppose the myth about the
previous Labour government’s economic record. To help win in 2020
or 2025 the party needs to completely rethink how it appeals to the
electorate while facing a hostile environment. How it deals with
widespread antagonism towards immigration. How it takes on the SNP.
How it handles the financial sector. How it shifts the economic
debate away from deficits to the issues that really matter. With so
much to do, fixating about a leadership when there is currently
little you can do about it and there is no proven alternative is just
a waste of time that only benefits the current government.
