Jeremy Corbyn cannot end Brexit

There is a cheap jibe that responds to the title of this piece by saying that Corbyn does not want to end Brexit. It is cheap because what Corbyn wants above all else is power. It is difficult to imagine this government surviving the collapse of Brexit, so ending Brexit is a means to that power. 

Another idea that some Remainers have is that if only Corbyn had campaigned against Brexit from the moment the vote to stay in the EU was lost, the Labour party could have somehow swung enough public opinion such that support for Brexit would by now be collapsing, and the resultant pressure on Remain-at-heart Tories would be so great that they would have been prepared to bring down their government just to stop Brexit.

To see why this makes little sense start with the 2017 election. May wanted this campaign to be about Brexit. She would have wanted nothing more than Corbyn to oblige by supporting Remain. The reason is straightforward. The Brexit vote divided the electorate on social conservative/liberal lines, with social conservative (anti-immigration) Labour voters supporting Leave. May knew that in a general election right wing social liberals would return to the Conservative fold, but left wing social conservatives could have been persuaded to vote Conservative, or at least not vote for an anti-Brexit Labour party. As a result of all this, the only choice Corbyn had before the election was to triangulate over Brexit, and it is only because of this that May did not get her landslide.

The only possibility is therefore if Corbyn had campaigned for Remain from the moment Remain lost the vote, and that as a result he had been sufficiently stronger in the polls by the following spring to dissuade May from holding an election. This seems very improbable for two reasons. First, immediately after the poll many who voted Remain believed the referendum result should be respected. Second, the Brexit vote has stayed pretty firm despite a fall in real wages. Once you recognise that, Corbyn had no choice but to triangulate over Brexit. That may have been an easy choice for him to make, but it was also the wise political choice. Had he not done so, May would have got her landslide in 2017. If Owen Smith had become Labour leader he might have made an anti-Brexit campaign work, but that is now irrelevant speculation.

That is why wishing Corbyn had not triangulated is in effect wishing May had got her landslide. Triangulation is why Corbyn has endorsed staying part of a customs union (although he could have done so sooner). As one of the reasons Labour gave for doing that is to avoid any infrastructure on the Irish border they have effectively endorsed staying within the EU’s Single Market for goods: the so-called Jersey option.

But triangulation is a dangerous game, particularly if your core support is not clear that is what you are doing. You have to convince socially conservative Leave voting Labour supporters that you will respect the vote, but at the same time convince your Remain voting core supporters that you will always push for a softer Brexit and take any realistic chance you are given to stop Brexit.

That was why sacking Owen Smith was foolish. The general belief of most Remainers is that they only way Brexit can be stopped is a referendum on the final deal. Sacking Smith because he advocates this just weakens Labour’s support among Remainers for the forthcoming local elections. Maintaining shadow cabinet discipline gains him nothing, while appearing to cast aside the hopes of many loyal Labour party members is a big deal. You do not win votes by shattering dreams.

However Remainers also need to realise another important political fact. The remaining slim chance that Brexit can be stopped requires Corbyn to remain passive. The only people who can stop Brexit happening will be the handful of Conservative MPs that have in the past voted against May’s wishes. They need to support moves that initiate the circumstances that lead to a popular vote on the final deal. Those Conservative MPs will only support such moves if they come ‘from parliament’, and not if they come from Jeremy Corbyn directly. Anything that comes from Corbyn is too toxic, as George Eaton notes here. All that Corbyn can do is leave it to others to do what they can to facilitate that moment, and then go with it if it comes. And he will go with it, because it increases the chances that the government will fall.

Whether that moment will come depends not so much on Corbyn or Labour, but more on the EU. So far the EU have allowed May to pretend that there is another solution to the Irish border question than the Jersey option. They have even gone as far as to set out what any free trade agreement (FTA) between the UK and EU would look like. They must know that the only way that FTA could ever happen is if there was a border in the Irish Sea, and they must also know by now that this is politically impossible for May. To go down the FTA route when May will have to concede something like the Jersey option for the whole of the UK is a waste of their time.

The EU therefore has two options. It could force the issue, and make May choose between the DUP and Liam Fox, or it could allow her to continue to fudge the issue until after we leave in 2019. Remainers should stop using Corbyn as a punchbag for their frustrations as time runs out to stop Brexit, and focus that frustration where it may belong, which is in the EU’s apparent willingness to indulge May’s desire to keep her party together.

Here is why the EU should not allow this charade to continue. Brexit is and will always be a right wing fantasy project. It is an attempt by a small group of newspaper owners and politicians with Little Englander fantasies to persuade the country that by leaving the EU the UK could become more wealthy in economic terms and more powerful in political terms. In reality precisely the opposite is true. In order to keep the fantasy in tact the Brexiters have tried to vilify experts, take power from parliament and intimidate judges, and have called any dissent they face unpatriotic. In other words the attempt to make this fantasy work has required its opponents to threaten almost every aspect of our parliamentary democracy.

If such tactics are seen to be successful they will only be repeated elsewhere. It is therefore not in the EU’s interest to allow May to keep her party in one piece. Brexit has to be seen as a failure, just as it is essential that Trump is seen as a failure. That has to mean that the Brexiters lose what matters to them most: political power. [1] It is not in the EU’s interests to allow May to appease her Brexiters. The possibility that by not indulging May the EU risks a No Deal outcome is now non-existent.

One thing above all else Remainers need to see. Even if Brexit cannot be prevented in 2019, it is essential that those who masterminded it suffer for the harm they will inflict on the UK. The only way they will suffer is if they lose power, and Conservative party members come to see the Brexiters as the source of their subsequent misfortune. To imagine, as some Remainers seem to do, that this can come about in first past the post UK by some kind of centrist revolution is as mad a fantasy as Brexit itself. [2] Whether they like it or not, the Brexit project will only be seen as a political failure if it leaves its leaders hollow, and the Conservatives out of power for a decade, and that can only happen one way.

[1] The idea that Brexit needs to be seen to fail in economic terms with the Conservatives in power is misguided. Economic failure will be gradual, and as with Brexit itself the government will deflect economic problems by finding scapegoats that play well with social conservatives, and by ramping up nationalism. As Simon Tilford argues, Brexit poses a real threat to pluralistic democracy. This is the strategy that Republicans have followed in the US, and right wing governments in Hungary and Poland are also following with some success.

[2] If centrists are uncomfortable with what Labour has become, think instead about what the Conservatives will become once May finally goes. The top three favourites to succeed may are all Brexiters, and for a good reason.

The total failure of the centre left

We have already begun to hear laments that Corbyn’s second victory means the end of Labour as a broad church. This is nonsense, unless that church is one where only people from the right and centre of the party are allowed to be its priests. Alison Charlton (@alicharlo) responded to my tweet to that effect by saying “It's the soft left, like me, who shouldn't be priests. We're rubbish at it.”

That I think captured my thoughts this last weekend. As Steve Richards writes “The so-called shadow cabinet rebels must be the most strategically inept political group in the history of British politics.” And although they were never the tightly knit group of coup plotters that some Corbyn supporters imagined, their collective thinking was completely flawed. It was self-indulgent folly by the minority group that I call the anti-Corbynistas to constantly spin against Corbyn from the start: as I predicted, it was totally counterproductive. But it was equally naive of centre-left MPs who nominated Owen Smith to believe that all they needed to do was adopt the leadership’s economics policies.

Forget all you read about Smith not being experienced enough, or about how he made gaffes (journalists just love gaffes), how he could have run a better campaign and so on. This is stuff and nonsense. Just as with Sanders in the US, Corbyn’s support is the result of a financial crisis the after effects of which we are still suffering from and where the perpetrators have got away largely unscathed. The crisis came as a complete surprise to the political centre, and only those on the left had warned about growing financialisation. Yet these warnings went unheeded by the Labour party, in part because the left had become marginalised. That is why politicians like Sanders and Corbyn can talk about the financial crisis with a conviction that others cannot match, and their supporters see that. The constant UK refrain about entryism is, frankly, pathetic.

In those circumstances Owen Smith had a mountain to climb. I wrote on 1st August a list of things he needed to do to win. Crucially he failed to back reducing the number of MPs required to nominate a candidate for leader, which in practice excluded any successor to Corbyn from the left being able to run. I wrote “If Smith wants Labour members to trust him, he has to show that he also trusts them in the future.” I also suggested he should now offer John McDonnell the job of shadow chancellor to show he meant to unify the party. How naive I was, some retorted: didn’t I know McDonnell was hated by much of the PLP. Of course I knew, which was partly why it was a good idea: at least I was trying to show some imagination that seemed absent from the PLP. Team Smith even seemed unable to acknowledge McDonnell’s positive achievements, like the Economic Advisory Council (EAC) and the fiscal credibility rule. No wonder he lost.

There is no getting away from the fact that the vote of no confidence is going to be fatal to Labour’s chances at the General Election. Of course Corbyn’s performance had been extremely poor, and he ran a deeply flawed Brexit campaign. But the no confidence vote was a do or die act, and the chances of it succeeding were always minimal. That is political ineptitude: sacrificing your party’s election chances for slender odds. All MPs can do now is help minimise the scale of that defeat, and if some feel that given all that they have said about the leadership that is best done from the backbenches Corbyn supporters should respect that. They should use the spare time to think about how to revitalise the centre left, but keep these and other thoughts out of the public eye. Talk of sacrificing being part of the single market so we can end freedom of movement is not a good start. As Chris Dillow argues, they are not even worthy of the label Blairite.

What Corbyn needs to do is clearly set out by Owen Jones here. To say he has a mountain to climb is an understatement. He carries the weight of the no confidence vote. Even if the PLP now unites behind him, much of the media will act as if it does not. He risks being outflanked in the traditional heartlands by UKIP: if voters think their problems really would be reduced with less immigration (and which politicians are telling them otherwise?), they will vote for the party that talks about little else. In the new heartlands of London and other cities, anti-Brexit feeling may well find LibDem clarity on the issue attractive. (Corbyn’s margin of victory in London was small.) Corbyn's ridiculing of warnings about the economic cost of Brexit (despite the advice of his EAC) does not set him up well to capitalise on any bad economic news.

In short, if he manages to defeat the Conservatives in 2020 it will be one of the most remarkable achievements in UK political history. Even to come close would be a great success. For what it is worth I hope he does, if only because it would force the centre-left to finally recognise their failure since the financial crisis.

Labour elections: a response to Chris Dillow

Chris Dillow’s post today is so concise, comprehensive and in my view largely correct that I cannot help responding to it.

The case against Corbyn

I only have two comments on this, which go in different directions

C1) A case can be made that Corbyn needs to stay in control for as long as it takes to change the voting procedures for leaders so the PLP can no longer block left candidates. He is, in that sense, a placeholder. That is why I suggested Smith commit to make similar changes, and he has not. The only caveat to that argument is that Corbyn’s popularity may mean he carries on too long: a placeholder who cannot give up his place.

C2) I am much less dismissive than Chris of the polling information we have on Corbyn. I have not found anyone who studies these things who gives Corbyn any chance at all, and they are not all politically biased when they say that. It is hardly a precise science, but there are regularities there that should not be dismissed. There is also for me the killer common sense point: why would anyone who is not a politics geek vote for a leader that 80% of his MPs had no confidence in.

The case against Smith

S1) I’m less worried about the ‘mis-speaking’: you cannot at the same time appear authentic and not do this, and the importance voters place on this is wildly exaggerated. It was trying to avoid this that got us Labour politicians who seem to speak in gaff proof platitudes. 

S2) I am more worried on the policy and judgement side. Alas, I see few politicians you do appreciate the big difference the financial crisis has made. I think the point about Corbyn and clocks is correct: part of the Owen Jones cri de coeur was about this. But equally I have seen little from Smith on any overarching political or economic vision. He has said nothing on the Economic Advisory Committee or fiscal rules: small things but so easy to do I wonder why he hasn’t done them. The one point I would make in Smith’s favour is he has Brexit right. Ironically it is here that Corbyn and his supporters sound like triangulators: we must not be too pro single market/freedom of movement because that will antagonise the traditional heartlands.

S3) The generational divide point is overrated. Also for the reasons I’ve already given Smith is likely to do much better in a general election than Corbyn.

Overall judgement

The way to look at this election is in terms of disaster avoidance. Corbyn risks a split left and a wipe out at the general election. I can see a path where a split is avoided and someone takes over from Corbyn in time and with the qualities required to bring the party back, but that will not happen until after 2020 so we are talking a Tory government for the next decade at least. But there are so many obstacles on this path, like boundary changes, or the absence of a strong successor in the Corbyn group, that I give it a very low probability. In other words a disaster of one kind or another is pretty likely. In short, so much of this is something I have already lived through once before.

One disaster with Smith is a return to triangulation and a drift back to the ways of 2010-2015. But it will not be the same as 2010-2015, mainly because the Conservatives will not put deficit reduction at the heart of their strategy. Brexit has changed that, which is something many Corbyn supporters fail to see. Brexit also stops appeasement on immigration. Partly as a result I think there is a good chance that the centre left have now learnt the right lesson from 2015. Another disaster will be more personal - he is just not up to the job, and Labour will do almost as badly at the polls as they will with Corbyn. Again possible but unlikely: he has passed the Today test. To sum up, I cannot by any stretch of the imagination get these two combined to come close to the likelihood of a disaster under Corbyn.

Which is basically it. If you think that something like the Blair/Brown government was little better than the Tories, and therefore want to shoot for the moon, it is clear what you do. If you do not think that, and want to avoid a disaster for the left, you do the opposite. Doing nothing, to be honest, is a cop out.

Can we trust Jeremy Corbyn over Europe?

I originally wrote this as a companion piece to a post on how Smith could win, but put it to one side as I thought I was writing too much on Labour’s election. However as similar points are now emerging elsewhere, perhaps publishing this will help convince some that this is not just another MSM smear.

When the vote of no confidence happened immediately after Brexit, I suspect the thoughts of most Labour Party members were similar to those of MP Liz McInnes: what a stupid and inappropriate time to have another election (as indeed it was). It seemed to fit into the narrative about a PLP obsessed with removing the membership’s democratic choice of leader. Surely we should give ‘the project’ some more time, and allow Jeremy Corbyn more time to see if he could grow into his role. And who was Owen Smith anyway? Journalists saw the support Corbyn has, and started assuming this was no contest.

On the face of it Owen Smith appears on many issues to be quite close to Jeremy Corbyn. A big difference is Trident, which many Labour party members think is a waste of money (and I agree). In addition there is the issue of trust. Owen Smith talks the talk now, but can members trust him not to backslide as Blairite MPs and a hostile media tell him he has to modify his radical programme? Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, seems to be integrity through and through.

But there is another key difference between Smith and Corbyn beside Trident, and that is over Europe. On the face of it the difference is about something that may never be allowed to happen anyway: a second referendum. Smith wants one, Corbyn does not. But for those party members who feel strongly about retaining as strong a link with Europe as we can, not just because of the economics but because Europe represents opportunity and is part of their identity, this difference may be the way they begin to unpick the issue of trust.

The vote of no confidence was the result of Brexit. You can tell yourself that was because the ‘plotters’ thought it would be to their advantage, but why would that be? Forget issues about effort and holidays. The crucial question is whether Corbyn’s heart was ever in the Remain campaign, and whether (perhaps as a result) his campaign was flawed, or perhaps even counterproductive. I do not know the answer to the heart question, except to say that a lot of the points Corbyn supporters make about Smith’s past could be used to suggest Corbyn was in truth more ambivalent than he says he was.

Of course if you are a true Corbyn believer you have to take him at his word. But the flawed campaign I have said something concrete about (quoting from here):

I have written right from the early stages of the Brexit campaign that I saw this as about the benefits that many people saw in being able to control EU migration, and weighing this against the economic cost in doing so by losing access to the single market. It was vital therefore to take seriously the warnings of economists that these costs could well be large. Jeremy Corbyn however seemed to suggest that when these warnings were repeated by the Chancellor they should not be believed because he could not be trusted. I doubt that was critical to the result, but it was nevertheless a serious economic, tactical and political error.

To put it bluntly: Corbyn appeared to be undermining the central part of the Remain campaign.

The context in which this was written is also important. I have recently said that I think John McDonnell’s Economic Advisory Council was an important innovation that he should be congratulated for both introducing and utilising it in formulating policy. Just because I think Owen Smith should win does not mean I do not give credit where it is due. But in our last meeting Brexit was discussed, and I think it was fairly clear what the general feeling was, reflecting the overall consensus among economists. I was not alone in being unhappy that this advice appeared to have been ignored, as the carefully worded statement from all five of us makes clear.

Of course this mistake could conceivably just reflect a speechwriter getting carried away at wanting to have a go at Cameron or Osborne. Speeches on economics should normally be checked by someone from the shadow Chancellor’s team, but then we know about the competence thing. But perhaps we should take Corbyn at his word, and that he did not agree with the almost unanimous view of economists. And then there was this unfortunate howler about triggering Article 50 straight away - again an obvious mistake quickly retracted.

But I know if roles were reversed, and Owen Smith had done these things, Corbyn supporters would be declaring that they just KNEW that Corbyn really wanted us to Leave. Which suggests to me that if we are skeptical about Smith’s radicalism, we should also be at least as skeptical about Corbyn’s attitude to the future Brexit negotiations.

In fact it goes further than this. The 48% of people who voted to Remain, plus any more who voted Leave but are now beginning to wonder that maybe all those economists were not exaggerating about its impact, plus the majority of companies that want to Remain, plus all the overseas governments that want the UK to remain, will be looking to someone or some party to be their political representative over the next few years. Labour under Owen Smith could play that role for sure, but Labour under Jeremy Corbyn? A leader whose heart may not be in it and who has said the costs of Brexit are exaggerated and who only has 20% of MPs who have confidence in him and who isn’t very good at doing the parliamentary thing or the details about Brexit policy thing is hardly a good choice to champion this cause. And if Labour members feel that way, voters will feel the same, and can UK politics persist with the two major parties accepting Brexit and leaving the 48%+ unrepresented?

Just as the coup itself followed Brexit, it may be that members (like Alex Andreou) begin to realise that this event has changed the political landscape in a crucial way. 2016 is not like 2015. Yes there are plotters, but there are also MPs desperate for Labour to become an effective opposition again for whom Brexit was the last straw. For some members the project is everything, even if the project does not include Europe or winning elections anytime soon. I have debated with plenty of party members like that. But if there are others who do care about both winning elections and minimising the harm done by Brexit, we may see support for Smith growing. He will get his own momentum.

Mutually Assured Destruction

When I called half a year ago the minority of MPs and associated journalists that was trying, and had tried from day 1, to openly undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership Labour’s “new militant tendency”, I was doing the original militants a disservice. My complaint at the time against these “anti-Corbynistas” was that they muddied the waters for any Labour party member who needed to see how well Corbyn was doing, because bad poll results could easily, and with some justification, be blamed on their activities. If the anti-Corbynistas were right about Corbyn’s unelectability (and unless their aim was to form a new party), they were shooting themselves in the foot and prolonging his period in office through their activities.

I hugely understated my case. The damage they were doing turned out to be much worse than that: they were firing the first missile in a war of mutually assured destruction for the party. The reason relates not to Corbyn’s electability but his competence. As Owen Jones suggests, Corbyn - unlike John McDonnell - has failed to adjust to his new role. He seems to be repeatedly “missing in action” at key points. Both he and McDonnell needed quickly to form a good working relationship with the shadow cabinet, as good politicians can often do with others holding very different views, but they failed to do so. As Neal Lawson writes of Corbyn, “no one with any sense or insight believes he has the leadership skills to craft a majoritarian politics”.

Now many people, including the anti-Corbynistas, will happily tell me that this was obvious before Corbyn was elected, and I was naive not to say so more strongly before he was first elected. But this fails to acknowledge the terrible place the majority of the PLP were in at the time, and that the membership needed to do something about it. To quote Lawson again, he voted “for the wave not the surfer”.The model of how to win elections that the PLP had taken from the Blair years was leading them to endorse austerity and abstain on welfare cuts. They needed a shock to force them to rethink, and Corbyn’s 2015 victory was that shock.

Following his election the majority of MPs did try working with Corbyn, or else stay quietly on the sidelines. They did not spend their days trying to undermine him: they were not part of the group I call the anti-Corbynistas. But then what this section of MPs saw was Corbyn’s failure to lead, or indeed promote the party outside of the membership. There were some in Corbyn’s team, like Neale Coleman, who understood what was required, but he resigned in January (and now works for Owen Smith). Although McDonnell was making progress in some areas, like the adoption of a state of the art fiscal rule [1], there seemed to be no sign of improvement from Corbyn. Each MP has their own individual story of lack of competence and communication (e.g. here, here or here), as do others who had contact with the leadership. The majority of MPs from the middle of the party began to realise that in all conscience they could not argue that Corbyn should be a prime minister.

But try to suggest that to many members who support Corbyn, and it does not compute. For them all 172 MPs are now ‘plotters’, determined to overthrow the power of members to choose the leader they want. In my experience it is not quite the paranoia discussed here, but there seems to be no attempt to understand the diversity of motives within the PLP. All examples of Corbyn’s inadequacy are brushed aside as ‘smears’, again based on the antics of some anti-Corbynistas. The anti-Corbynistas said Corbyn’s policies made him unelectable, a proposition which those on the left with some justification reject. This appears to mean that a very different proposition - that a leader rejected by 80% of his MPs whatever his policies is unelectable - is brushed aside. In other words Corbyn’s supporters have adopted the anti-Corbynistas as their model of what has happened to the PLP, which allows them to dismiss any reasonable criticism. That is the devastating contribution the anti-Corbynistas have made to the current situation.

For many members this election has become about their right to elect Labour’s leader, which they believe the PLP are trying to take away from them. Many of the PLP respect that right, but believe they have to inform the membership that Corbyn is not a competent leader or a credible PM. Yet that more nuanced view seems lost on many members, who seem to regard the majority of the PLP as unfit to be in the Labour party they want.

The ‘coup’ was in my view both mistimed and misjudged, and the attempt to keep Corbyn off the ballot paper bizarre. But the coup is not explained by Corbyn’s supporters as the desperate actions of those who had just witnessed the Brexit vote after the Labour leadership followed a flawed campaign, the last and most important act of leadership inadequacy and mismanagement. Instead, following McDonnell, they believe it shows how incompetent the PLP are at staging a coup.

As in a war, the language being used takes on a righteous tone. Rather than think in terms of the politics of what might happen, we get the morality of what should happen. Rather than contemplate adaptation as events change and capabilities are revealed, we get the defiant talk of no compromise.

A Corbyn victory would be the return salvo in this war of mutually assured destruction. Here is the best outcome I can foresee if Corbyn wins. Most MPs will batten down the hatches, waiting for something to turn up. A few will try and work with him, hoping against judgement that things might improve, but most will not. Polls will stay terrible but show some improvement as some voters forget Labour’s internal divisions, the tabloids will keep relatively quiet because they want Corbyn to stay, and Labour gets some protest votes. Perhaps some electoral setback will result in another leadership challenge.

But come any general election who is going to vote for a party where less than 20% of MPs have confidence in their leader? Any media interview with any of the 172 will ask how can you say Corbyn is fit to be PM if you had no confidence in him 4 years ago, and what does this change of heart tell us about your judgement? If the antics of a minority of Corbynistas can be used to explain Corbyn’s poor poll ratings, using the same logic to think about the next general election means it will be disastrous.

The result will be terrible not just for Labour but also its left. The experience of 1983 marked the beginning of the end for the left of the Labour party. There will be some members who really mean it when they say that Corbyn is the start of a long term project, and that it may take a decade or more to rebuild the party, but most members will grow tired of losing elections during that time. Corbyn’s refusal to back down will harm those that might come after him.

I have looked and listened for a more optimistic outcome. I have read about how 21st century politics will be different because of social media, but as Ellie Mae O’Hagan writes, “78% of people rely on television as their main source of news, compared with 19% who use Facebook and 10% who use Twitter. Crucially, less than a third of respondents regarded Twitter as trustworthy.” I have read about grand alliances (which I support), but not why they save Labour and the left from this fate. I cannot see any plausible account of why things might be better: nothing any objective political scientist would even bother to critique.

The outcome I have painted, awful as it is, is not the worst that can happen, and may not even be the most likely outcome for two reasons. First, if Corbyn gets re-elected he is unlikely to receive a re-election bounce in the polls, so it will be very tempting for May to go for an early election. The means by which she can do so are straightforward.

Second, the idea that members are just refighting 2015 misses how much has changed since then, particularly with Brexit. In 2015 business and finance were 100% behind the Conservatives. With the Brexit vote, and the campaign’s leading lights running the coming negotiations, that has fundamentally changed. [2] With the Brexit vote what I would call the pro-European centre desperately wants an effective voice. With Cameron/Osborne gone, Brexit ministers in charge of negotiations and an expected recession the notion of Conservative competence at running the economy has gone. If Corbyn remains there will be a vacuum where an effective opposition should be, and that vacuum could well be filled by a new party. If there is serious talk of deselecting Labour MPs, that new party will include many of them.

If that happens, I see no reason why the 1980s will not repeat itself. Some Corbyn supporters, immersed in their imagined battle with the PLP, see this as just one more threat from the other side that they should discount (and - morality again - denounce). One even called it Project Fear to me. But the whole point about Project Fear was that it was a way for first the SNP and then the Brexit campaign to avoid talking about the consequences of their side winning. A way of avoiding hard truths.

The horrible irony about this fight to the death between the PLP and the membership is that the membership are fighting the last war which took place in a pre-Brexit landscape that was very different from today. As Owen Smith’s economic programme and this interview make clear, both Corbyn’s original victory and Brexit mean that the PLP has completely abandoned austerity. [3] Can it be that something the membership would gladly have voted for in 2015 is now seen as either inadequate or an illusion? Is it that power once obtained corrupts, or that those used to struggle and defeat can only trust someone who will ensure the same?

[1] Here Owen Jones makes a mistake. It is true that the mediamacro spin was that this new fiscal credibility rule was just like the policy under Balls, but it was crucially different: the rule allows the focus to switch from the deficit to output in a liquidity trap recession. In other words it was a rule that would have avoided 2010 austerity. One journalist described this as a ‘loophole’, but I think having a rule that avoided the austerity that did so much harm is pretty important. If it survives and the coming recession is bad, it will be crucial in allowing Labour to argue for more fiscal support than the Conservatives/Treasury will countenance.

[2] If you have access read the tone of the comments (click ‘most recommended’) to this FT article by Brexiter Bernard Jenkins. Or this.

[3] In this interview Smith does three things which I suggested in this post: he praises Corbyn for increasing and enthusing the party membership, he is highly critical of the 2015 election strategy, and he makes it clear that the UK will get a second opportunity to vote on Europe. Perhaps as a result of this, the line of argument I’ve now heard many times is that because Smith breaks so many Blairite taboos he cannot survive. Here I do think paranoia replaces any realistic assessment. If Jeremy Corbyn after a no confidence vote from 80% of the PLP will not step down, why would Owen Smith just because he was too left wing for a minority of the PLP?

What Owen Smith needs to do

The betting odds suggest Jeremy Corbyn is a clear favourite to beat Owen Smith, even if those are based on thin information. But if comments on my last two posts, and personal conversations, are anything to go by Corbyn will be very hard to beat. People are always reluctant to hear that their preferred strategy is not working. After all it happened to Labour MPs when they believed they had to triangulate to the right to win elections, even after the 2015 defeat. Now it is happening to Labour party members who still believe they can create a mass social democratic party without the support of Labour MPs. Just as hope will not win out against reality for Labour under Corbyn after the no confidence vote, nor will it do so for Owen Smith’s campaign if he does not address the concerns of Labour members. [1]

The first thing Owen Smith can do to change this is to acknowledge Corbyn’s greatest achievement: building an enthusiastic activist base for the party. This achievement was only possible because of Labour’s previous failure to do so. To read some you would think that Corbyn’s support is largely made up of ex Trots or SWP members, but this is nonsense. It is similar to the support that the socialist Bernie Sanders received, and the rise of new left movements elsewhere. It is the activist base that Labour desperately needs to help counteract the influence of the media.

One very real reason why this base does not want to let Corbyn go is their fear that without him they will lose all influence. Corbyn’s nomination in 2015 was an act of generosity by some MPs, and members fear with justification that this will not be repeated. As a result, they believe any prospective candidate from the left will never be on the ballot. When I wrote earlier that the left within Labour would be in a better position after a poor general election loss in 2020 if that loss occurred under Smith rather than Corbyn, this point was quite justifiably made. Owen Smith could counter this fear by pledging to lower the number of MPs required to nominate a candidate for leader, or by some equivalent means to ensure that members can always vote for a candidate from the left.

Many of those opposed to Corbyn will be horrified at this suggestion, which is precisely why it would be a strong move for Smith to make. My impression is that most Corbyn supporters regard all the 172 MPs as essentially tainted by the antics of the original anti-Corbynistas. In that sense, my warning that the tactics of this group of overtly anti-Corbyn MPs would completely backfire has proved correct. Many members also see all those MPs as deeply sold on New Labour triangulation, and are reluctant to believe that only a year after the 2015 defeat and Corbyn’s victory, and because of recent events, that election strategy has become history. Smith should disown this election strategy explicitly, but by making it easier for a Corbyn successor to become leader again Smith will effectively be saying to members that they can always be in a position to prevent any future backsliding. If Smith wants Labour members to trust him, he has to show that he also trusts them in the future.

The other area where Smith needs to clarify his views is on immigration. At the moment he seems to be living in the same land as some leading Brexit campaigners: saying we need to stay in the EU single market but also that immigration in some areas is too high (although he has also condemned Conservative type controls). There is a real debate on whether Labour needs to advocate controls on unskilled migration to preserve its working class vote (see my short dialog with Martin Wolf here). As I suspect most Labour party members care a lot more about staying in the single market than they do about controlling immigration, it is important for Smith to signal where his priorities lie.

Smith has already outlined a series of measures on economic policy. There is a lot to discuss and a lot to like here, and I suspect it is not very different from what policy might have been under a Corbyn leadership. Which suggests an obvious move, which is for him to say that he would offer John McDonnell to continue as Shadow Chancellor. (See his newsnight comments on any offer to Corbyn.) If that position has already been promised to Angela Eagle in exchange for her stepping aside, then some equivalent offer should be made.

There is a common theme to the first and last points. To defeat the Conservatives, Labour needs to be a broad church. It has to have a strong, effective and largely united set of MPs, but also a vigorous activist base. (Labour membership rose substantially around 1997.) It needs to develop policies that can appeal to both left and right in the party, which has to mean both left and right being involved in policymaking. Smith needs to convince party members that he believes in that and can implement that to have chance of winning in September.

[1] Just to be clear, I think Labour members should vote for Smith whether he takes up these suggestions or not, because under Corbyn after the no confidence vote Labour are heading for at best a disastrous defeat in 2020 and at worst a split party.

Labour: times change

For Labour party members

When it looked like Jeremy Corbyn might win the 2015 leadership election, I was asked to both endorse and condemn. I did neither. I criticised one of his proposed policies, but I was also highly critical of the way Labour had been run over the previous 5 years. It was a superficial focus group style of policy making that led to decisions like not defending the Labour government's fiscal record, which ultimately was an important part of the general election defeat.

For a Corbyn led Labour party to work, the new leadership had to bring on board the majority of its MPs. There would always be a minority - I called them the anti-Corbynistas - who would oppose Corbyn come what may, but it is a gross error to imagine all the MPs who did not vote for Corbyn were of this type. Some were prepared to work with him, and some were content to remain on the sidelines, pursuing their own particular interests.

I think many in the new leadership understood this, and attempted to involve MPs in key decisions. One successful example which I was involved in was the adoption of a new fiscal rule which would have avoided both 2010 and 2015 austerity. But ultimately this process failed. The rock that sank this ship was the Brexit vote: whether it could have succeeded otherwise is for another day.

There is a degree of unity between the Corbynistas and the anti-Corbynistas about the vote of no confidence: both agree that it was inevitable. But to concede this means that you think the Corbyn project was about remodelling the party over the long term, rather than trying to win the 2020 or 2025 elections. I do not believe most Labour party members would endorse such a project.

If this is true, then what these members need to resolve is whether it would be possible for Corbyn to successfully lead the party in 2020. One posibility after a 2016 Corbyn's victory is that those who expressed no confidence accept the verdict of members and start cooperating with the leadership. This is the possibility discussed here by Steve Richards, but it seems close to wishful thinking. The trust that is required to make that happen has disappeared. Again we can debate at length whose fault that is, but that debate should have no impact on how people vote. What is done is done.

What seems totally clear to me is that given recent events a Corbyn led party cannot win in 2020, or even come close. I was highly critical of the anti-Corbynistas who wanted to argue that their antics were having no impact on public opinion, so it would be absurd for me to pretend that people would elect to power a Labour party that had voted no confidence in its leader.

This has to be the bedrock on which voting decisions in the coming leadership contest should be based. Once you accept it, then various things follow almost automatically if Corbyn were to win again. One is that the likelihood of a split is strong. History tells us that it takes only a few to make this happen, and if a few think they will lose their seats anyway they have nothing to lose. Even if no split occurred, the constituency wanting to vote for a committed pro-European party of the centre-left is likely to remain strong while the Brexit negotiations continue. History also tells us that a divided left in a FPTP system cannot succeed, a fact that is built into the DNA of the Conservatives.

Another consequence of a bad defeat in 2020 is that the left within Labour will again lose its influence for a generation. Defeat and a divided party will not be the springboard on which a successor to Corbyn, such as those mentioned by Justin Lewis here, can win. Ironically their chances if Owen Smith wins in 2016, then reverts to the pre-2015 strategy and fails are much better. Keeping Corbyn until 2020 simply delays the date of his departure, with nothing achieved and much lost in the meantime.

The concern that most party members about Owen Smith is that, once elected, he will slip back into the disastrous form of right wing appeasement that led to Corbyn's election last year. Smith's support for Trident adds credence to that view. But there are important reasons why this may not happen.

The political landscape after the Brexit vote has changed substantially. May's cabinet appointments effectively put the Brexit side in charge of negotiations. That might be clever politics by May as far as her position in the Conservative party is concerned, but it is bad for the UK. Smith can provide a convincing pro-Europe opposition to that, which has to include headlining the benefits of immigration. This position will be supported by most of UK business, which cannot trust the Brixiters with looking after its interests. Labour will no longer feel tempted to temper policies to avoid offending 'business leaders'.

The other main area, besides immigration, where past Labour appeasement was so damaging was austerity. As I argued in the New Statesman, 2015 austerity - cutting public investment when interest rates are very low - has now been disowned by senior Conservatives. 2010 austerity - fiscal contraction rather than expansion in a recession where interest rates are at their lower bound - may still happen in a Brexit based recession. In these circumstances it is difficult to imagine that Smith would endorse this austerity, but he could confirm this by commiting to follow John McDonnell's fiscal credibility rule.

Those who voted for Corbyn only a year ago will naturally ask why they should, only a year later, change their minds. One important point is that the 2015 vote itself changed things: any leadership now knows it ignores its membership at its peril. But in addition the hopes of many of those who voted for Corbyn, which is that enough of the parliamentary could unite behind him to form an effective opposition and a potential government, have proved false. If that reality is ignored or wished away, the implications for those who oppose the current disastrous and incompetent Conservative government will be devastating.

Linking tax credits and the fiscal charter

I have made fun in the past about Labour politicians and supporters who in public trip up once the word borrowing is mentioned. An interviewer only has to ask ‘but if Labour reverses this cut it will mean more borrowing’ and the interviewee stumbles around in a way that shouts to anyone watching that Labour have a vulnerability here.

It is a vulnerability that helped lead to the disastrous decision under the interim leadership not to oppose Osborne’s cuts in tax credits, and to McDonnell’s embarrassing initial decision (now reversed) to support the charter. But now that Labour has sorted itself out on both issues, it needs to stop avoiding the borrowing question. Take this otherwise assured performance by Owen Smith on Newsnight last night (27 minutes in, HT Owen Jones).

Here is what Owen Smith should have said when asked whether reversing the cuts to tax credits would lead to more borrowing.

“The Chancellor has said he needs to cut tax credits to meet his new fiscal charter. Labour oppose this charter, because it makes no economic sense. Osborne cannot find a single economist who supports his plan. Imposing a work penalty to pay borrowing off more quickly is just counterproductive, because discouraging people from working makes the economy weaker. This was supposed to be a government that encouraged work, yet here is the Chancellor doing the opposite in order to meet a charter that only his MPs support.”

If the interviewer persists with “so you will borrow more”, say

“Labour would not need to cut tax credits because we would balance current income and spending, leaving room for the country to invest. Labour would borrow to invest, whereas Osborne is paying for the little public investment he is doing by cutting tax credits. What matters is government debt in relation to GDP, and our policy would mean that debt relative to GDP would fall under Labour.”

I am sure those skilled in spin could sharpen this, but you get the idea. The days when deficit fetishism gripped voters are coming to an end. Labour needs to change its rhetoric to reflect this, and paint Osborne into the ideological corner he occupies.