There is only one alternative to Prime Minister Boris Johnson

Corbyn may not be a great or even a particularly good leader, but it seems few in the media recognise he is the only viable opposition to the far right we have.

While I have been critical of the Labour leadership’s Brexit stance for some time, and still do not think Corbyn has gone far enough to maximise Labour's chances of General Election victory, he has done enough to ensure one thing: his survival. While his Brexit stance, together with continuing problems with antisemitism, will have lost some members and made others luke warm, there is little appetite to replace him amongst most members. This view will only strengthen as the likelihood of a General Election increases. It is Labour party members who choose the party’s leader.

But what about antisemitism? Could this issue be the downfall of the Labour leadership? The answer is almost certainly no. As the poll discussed here shows, while 66% of Labour members think antisemtism within the party is a genuine problem, 77% think the problem is deliberately exaggerated to damage Labour and Corbyn himself. On the basis of current evidence, and that includes any rebuke from the EHRC investigation, Corbyn’s position among members on this issue is secure.

The only other factor that might raise questions among the membership about their leader is very bad poll ratings. But two factors mean this is not a risk factor for Corbyn’s leadership. First, the new Brexit policy will win some voters back. As Rob Ford notes here, there are signs that the electorate’s flirtation with four party politics is coming to an end, as both Labour and the Conservatives move their own Brexit position. Second, Labour under Corbyn have been there and done that in 2017, such that there will always be the hope of a pre-election surge for Labour.

Could Labour’s continuing antisemitism crisis create another serious split between MPs and the leadership, along the lines of the vote of no confidence in 2016 after the Brexit vote? A split of this kind would only make sense if Labour MPs believed that they had a chance of defeating Corbyn in a ballot of members, and as I have already suggested they would be delusional. MPs may demand this and that in terms of how disciplinary procedures are handled within Labour, but any attempt to unseat Corbyn, or mass defections by Labour Mps, seems unlikely.

The security of the Labour leadership’s position within the party is one of two key factors in which to evaluate the impact of continuing criticism of Labour within the mainstream media and elsewhere. The second is the threat we face from what has become the most far right and dangerous government the UK has experienced for decades if not centuries.

The Conservative party is looking increasingly like the US Republican party, and its likely leader increasingly looks like a UK version of Donald Trump. However the Conservative party has got itself into a far more dangerous position than the Republican’s have ever faced. The Tories have Nigel Farage and a right wing press pushing them to implement a No Deal Brexit that goes way beyond anything Trump might be contemplating with tariffs. Furthermore opposition within the Tory party towards Johnson’s leadership ideas and No Deal looks vanishingly small.

Two recent events have underlined how far the UK government has descended into far right territory. The first was of course Johnson’s failure to stand up for one of our own ambassadors in the Darroch affair. A corrolorary of No Deal is that a trade deal with the US becomes politically essential, and that in turn means that Trump’s not so polite requests become the UK’s actions. This is a President who tells non-white Congresswomen born in the USA to go back to “the crime infested places from which they came”. In practice a US trade deal that UK politicians desperately want will be disastrous for UK agriculture, UK consumers and many more, people already hit hard by the UK leaving the EU with no deal.

The second recent event was Amber Rudd preferring a job in any future Johnson government to her previous opposition to No Deal. It has been an object lesson to those who thought Conservative MPs would always stand up for business and the Union to see how quickly all but a few have chosen political expediency instead. Again parallels with the Republican party in the US are instructive. Just as the right wing media in the US was able to use the Tea Party movement to shift the Republicans to the right, so the right wing press have used Farage to shift the Conservative party in a similar way.

The net result will be the normalisation of a No Deal Brexit over the next few months. Leaving without a deal was not what all of the 52% of Leave voters in 2016 voted for, but virtually no one in the broadcast media will be brave enough to push this point. The lie that the 2016 vote provides a mandate for No Deal will go unchallenged. Broadcasters will balance the nonsense that the impact of No Deal on the UK will be, to quote Johnson, “infinitesimally small” against the truth that it is the biggest act of political and economic self-harm ever inflicted on the UK.

Allowing Johnson to become leader shows that the Conservative party has completely lost its moral compass. All of Johnson’s misdeeds in his past mean nothing, just as Trump’s behaviour means nothing to his supporters and the Republican party. Both individuals lie all the time, but it doesn’t matter to his own side. Johnson encourages a friend to beat up a journalist, but it doesn’t matter. Johnson uses racist language on many occasions, most recently comparing Muslim women wearing the niqab and burqa to letterboxes, but this was deemed acceptable by his party. Johnson gets advice from Steve (“Let them call you racist. Wear it as a badge of honour”) Bannon, and even the BBC does not think Johnson lying about these contacts matters.

And so, as the Conservative party loses its moral compass, the chances are that large sections of the country’s elite will do so as well, and our standing overseas will plummet even further. Although Tory party members may find Johnson’s insults acceptable, don’t expect other countries to take a UK run by Johnson as more than a bad joke. Don’t expect other countries to do business with a UK that proposes to destroy its trade relationship with the EU and many other countries at a stroke. An elite that treats threats to prorogue parliament as acceptable will not be respected by countries that value democracy, although some others will welcome the development.

Yet those who say not in my name need to ask themselves whether they are prepared to make the choice required to stop this happening. There is only one realistic opposition to a Johnson led government. Believing the Liberal Democrats could ever play that role was unrealistic, because Labour has enough loyal voters to ensure that the anti-government vote would be split. Farage along with the LibDems might also take away votes from the government, but it would be foolish to rely on an English vote split four ways just happening to go against a Conservative government.

The awkward truth for those who for whatever reason dislike Corbyn’s Labour party is that Labour is the only party that can defeat this government, and its leader in the next election will be Corbyn. Voting is always a choice between the lesser of two evils. Supporting smaller parties when that lets the Conservatives win, or supporting none, may make those who dislike Corbyn’s Labour feel better, but it is in effect a statement that Corbyn’s Labour party would be just as bad for the country as a whole as out current government, and that is simply not a credible belief. Corbyn is not going to leave the EU with no deal, and in practice will be unable to leave the EU in any way. Corbyn is not threatening to prorogue parliament, is not desperate to do a trade deal with Donald Trump, does not lie all the time, does not get friends to beat up opponents, and does not have a history of using racist language. Whereas Johnson promises tax cuts for the rich, a Corbyn led government would help the many, not the few.

Yet there are few in the mainstream media who seem prepared to recognise the choice we face for what it is. Even wise and perceptive commentators like Martin Wolf, who lament the situation the Conservative government has led us to, often feel it necessary to balance their piece with a derogatory remark about the Labour leadership. Those remarks may or may not be accurate, but a plague on all your houses just allows this Tory government to stay in place.

Worse still are those in the centre or centre-left who refuse to give up hope of getting ‘their party’ back and will do anything that in their view helps that cause. In the first year after Corbyn was elected many MPs and journalists waged a constant war against the left in the media. I said at the time it was utterly futile and self-destructive, and I was right. It led to an attempt to unseat Corbyn that everyone on the left calls a coup, and a clear majority of members saw it the same way. Polls suggest the same is true today. Those in the centre and centre-left need to realise that for all Corbyn’s faults and mistakes he will be Labour’s leader going into the next election, and if they repeatedly attack him they are helping Boris Johnson do terrible damage to our country.

Of course the right wing press will do anything to discredit Labour: that is what their owners pay them to do. But often their task is made easier by the non-partisan media who think they are making choices using simple journalistic criteria, such as going with the story. What we are in danger of seeing with 24/7 criticism of Corbyn is a repetition of what happened to Hilary Clinton in the US elections. As I showed here, the mainstream media spent much more time talking about her email server than any of the sins of Donald Trump, or indeed all those sins combined. In that sense the US media chose Trump over Clinton. It was of course not a thought-through or considered choice, but just the outcome of lots of individual decisions that seemed to make sense in journalistic terms, but were disastrous in political terms.

Of course the constant tunes the media play matter. One of the incredible poll findings of that US election was that more people trusted the serial liar Donald Trump more than Hillary Clinton. That makes no sense unless you note the constant stream of media stories suggesting Clinton had something to hide. No one is suggesting Labour’s failures over antisemitism should not be exposed, just as no one was suggesting that Clinton should not have been criticised for using her own email for government business. What is missing in both cases is a sense of perspective, as here for example, or here. Without that perspective constant attacks on Corbyn will have an impact. The impact will be to keep a destructive far right government in power.

Why an anti-Corbyn party is a terrible idea

Within a few months of Corbyn’s election, I wrote about what I called the anti-Corbynistas: a smallish group of Labour MPs and many in the media who were happy to attack Corbyn for the sole purpose of bringing him down. I wanted to make the simple point that their efforts were counterproductive. If, as they kept insisting, Corbyn’s chances of winning any election were zero, it was better that members find that out without their efforts. If they carried on, most members would put down any negative performance to the activities of the anti-Corbynistas.

In fact I understated my case. When Labour MPs voted no confidence in Corbyn after the 2016 referendum, most members read it as part of a plot not only to defeat Corbyn but also to take power away from themselves. And they didn’t want power for powers sake, but just to stop the steady drift to the right among their party leaders with no apparent electoral benefit. I tried as hard as I could to suggest that many MPs had voted no confidence out of frustration at Corbyn’s administrative incompetence and the failure of his pro-Remain campaign, but I have no doubt that that the activities of the anti-Corbynistas meant many members just didn’t get beyond the idea of a power grab by MPs. To put it bluntly, the anti-Corbynistas helped ensure Corbyn’s victory against Owen Smith.

After that the anti-Corbynistas went quiet. Labour fought a campaign where divisions within Labour were not the number one topic, and they produced a spectacular swing to Labour in the three weeks before the election. The argument that Corbyn would always be hopeless at the polls died in those three weeks.

A year later, and it seems that Labour’s real difficulties with antisemitic members has led to the return of the anti-Corbynistas. Here is Chuka Umunna in The Independent. The aim it seems is no longer to persuade Labour party members to give up on Corbyn because he cannot win. Instead the anti-Corbynistas have given up on Labour party members. In the short term that is surely right. Most of the membership do not care that much who he has been ‘linked to’ in the past: the MSM has cried wolf too many times. They know that Corbyn has always stood up for Palestinians and they respect him for it. The more he is attacked in the MSM the more it seems he provides a genuine challenge to the establishment, and that is exactly what members want.

However the leap the anti-Corbynistas then make is far more tenuous. Because they give up on Labour party members now, they may give up on the Labour party forever, and form a new political party. The best time to do that is now, so the argument might go, because Corbyn is under pressure over his Brexit stance and because of the antisemitism row. That logic is no better, and is probably far worse, than their logic after Corbyn was elected. It only makes sense if you think a Corbyn led government of centre left MPs is worse than a government that gave us austerity and Brexit.

Of course it is possible that a new centre party could sweep all before it. But our FPTP system makes it very difficult for new parties to break through in terms of winning seats. UKIP is an obvious example. The most successful new party of recent times is the SDP, and it ultimately failed. If a new party is to succeed, it has to win between 30% and 40% of the popular vote. Yet in our most recent general election in 2017 the third party vote was squeezed, and the two main parties won over 82% of the popular vote between them. Everyone points to Macron, but he won 24% of votes in the first round. That is not enough.

Where will the votes for a new centre party come from? Thinking in simple left right terms, the steady move to the right in the Conservative party, particularly over Brexit, has left a gap which a more right wing version of Miliband’s Labour could fill, although policies like a Mansion tax or higher corporation tax would probably have to go. Equally those voting for Miliband’s Labour who thought it was a tad left wing could be attracted to a new centre party, as could those Remainers who will not forgive Corbyn for accepting the referendum vote.

However if we think in two dimensional terms, with a social conservative/liberal axis, the position looks less favourable. Right wing social conservatives will stick to the Conservatives. Left wing liberals will mostly stick with Labour. So the new party needs to be in the centre on the second social conservative/liberal axis as well as the left/right axis. There are some basic problems with trying to capture both these groups. Most importantly, it is not very clear how being tough on immigration squares with arguing for the softest of Brexits.

So a new party will almost surely fail in breaking through, but I’m not sure that is the only objective. The other objective is to stop Labour winning the next election. There is a strange irony here. A group of people who were arguing with absolute conviction that Corbyn could not possibly win are now arguing that there is a real danger that he will win and therefore must be stopped, which means more Tory government Even if that is not an objective it could well be the effect.

This fills me with anger and dread. Anger that people can convince themselves that what would be in legislative terms a centre-left government can be worse that a party that had inflicted more damage on the UK in the last eight years than any since WWII. And dread at a Conservative victory in 2022 because a new party takes away crucial Labour votes. Nothing suggests the Conservative party has stopped moving in a rightward direction. Alleged Brexit betrayal and a resurgence of UKIP will help ensure that it continues in that direction. If current betting is right, the next Tory party leaders will either be someone whose inspiration is Ayn Rand, or someone who wants to take us back to the 18th century, or a clown who is happy to encourage Islamophobia..

I understand why some within Labour dislike Corbyn, and why they write lists of all the inexcusable (in their mind) things he had done in the past. I know some imagine that he alone is keeping Brexit going. I can see why, because of the rhetoric of some on the left, they can imagine that most of the 500,000 members have become cult followers who will never listen to reason. But is there evidence for that last assumption? Many Corbyn supporters and Momentum members are trying to get the party to change its policy in favour of a referendum on the final deal. This is not a party that will support Corbyn whatever he does: Labour has never been like that and never will be.

To me the anti-Corbynistas look much like those on the left in US general elections who didn’t vote, or voted for a third party, because they thought both candidates were equally bad. They focus so much on why the Democratic candidate is not ideal, they fail to see that they are much closer to their own position that the Republican. Corbyn may well do some things as PM that you do not like, but he will not stoke immigrant antagonism which fuels racism of all kinds. He will not talk about looking up at the closed blinds of their next-door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits. He will not be content to see foodbank use explode after people get sanctioned because, for example, they have a heart attack. If you are content for those things to continue to happen, then creating a new party is a good way of ensuring they do.

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.

Competence and strategic vision

I keep trying not to write stuff about Labour: I think it will be therapy but it just makes me more depressed. But events, dear boy, events.

With Corbyn’s victory now almost certain, both sides (the Corbyn camp and the PLP) have been thinking about what happens next. This piece by Stephen Bush, reporting from inside the Corbyn camp, is very revealing. First, there is an understanding that Corbyn will have to try and bring at least some of the PLP back on board. Here are two direct quotes from the article:

“If we show competence, that will bring some people back onside,” says one senior figure. Another sums up the view: “The reality is that most MPs are not out to get him every day or talking to press. There are 10 or so who are, we could both name them, but there is a winnable middle out there.”

This suggests that there are those within team Corbyn who understand that

1. What I call the anti-Corbynistas - the far too vocal critics of Corbyn within the PLP - are a small minority. This is a very different picture from that held by some Corbyn supporters among the membership, who like to pretend that most of the PLP was always out to get Corbyn.
   
   
2. That the majority of the PLP are a “winnable middle”. Again, on most issues there is no fundamental policy divide between Corbyn and the PLP.
   
   
3. A major problem, as I have said many times, has been the lack of competence shown by the leadership. Once again, I have been told by many supporters that the countless complaints from MPs about this has been an exaggerated sham. Again, team Corbyn do not see it that way, which is positive (although I wish they would tell their supporters)!

As for the PLP, according to George Eaton they are following up a suggestion made by deputy leader Tom Watson to reinstate PLP elections for the shadow cabinet. It seems to me that, if suitably structured (in particular, allowing Corbyn to keep McDonnell as shadow Chancellor), this proposal could do two very helpful things for Corbyn. It would bring some of the talent among the PLP back to the front line, and it would have the possibility of rebooting Corbyn’s attempts to unite Labour. It would also give MPs something concrete to convince themselves, and tell the media, that things have changed since the vote of no confidence. But

“a Corbyn source dismissed the idea when I recently raised it: "It’s not going to happen, they don’t have the numbers to get it through conference." He added, however, that the election of a "PLP representative" was a possibility.”

It is not just about competence, but it is also about having an imaginative strategic vision. What team Corbyn should be doing now, before conference, is working with Watson to ensure that a compromise version of this idea can be agreed at conference.I am more than willing to be surprised.

Entryism and Corbyn supporters

Owen Jones writes “Corbyn’s opponents .. are, by turns, bewildered, infuriated, aghast, miserable about the rise of Corbynism. But they should take ownership of it, because it is their creation.” I have argued the same in the past, but I would go further. If this crisis within Labour does prove as destructive as I fear it will be, it will be a result of the behaviour of many of Corbyn’s opponents. It is their actions and words which make compromise between the membership and the PLP so elusive.

As I argued in my post on the future of the Labour party (the gist is in the title: Mutually Assured Destruction) those who tried to undermine Corbyn’s leadership from the start in a very public way (I called them the anti-Corbynistas) became in the eyes of most Corbyn supporters their opposition. As a result, they see the vote of no confidence as just an extension of this anti-Corbynista activity, and therefore believe they must defend their original choice at all costs.

While this characterisation of all of the PLP is wide of the mark, the way the anti-Corbynistas characterise Corbyn supporters is far more bizarre. Their model is Trotsky style entryism. This was very real in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, and my one and only experience of standing for election when I was a student involved defeating them. They were always small in number. [1] Their modus operandi was taking over other organisations through a mixture of subterfuge, strategy and persistence, targeting in particular groups where more traditional support had become moribund.

What has actually happened over the last few year to the Labour party in the UK is very different. Labour’s increased membership is similar to the support for Sanders in the US and the rise of the ‘new left’ in other European countries. Of course those who were previously in far left fringe groups will be getting involved, but in this case they are a tiny minority in an organisation that has become rejuvenated as a result of Corbyn (as his opponent in the forthcoming elections, Owen Smith, has acknowledged). If you really want to know who these new Labour party members are, read this post from the Very Public Sociologist, or this article by Ellie Mae O'Hagan or this from Helen Lewis. These accounts chime with my own experience. Militant entryists they are not. Of course this wave of new support contains a fringe of entryists as well as a fringe of intolerant twitter trolls, but to characterise the whole by this fringe is to wilfully misunderstand it.

As Ellie Mae O'Hagan describes, Corbyn supporters are also a group with few representatives in the media (and I’m talking Guardian not Mail), which allows too many in the Westminster-centric media to dismiss them as Socialist Worker fodder. Of course for those journalists in the right wing press who are not sympathetic to Labour, entryism is an attractive story to tell. For those on the right of the party who know this membership will never support their side, the myth of entryism provides a convenient excuse to pursue measures to exclude them. But if you are neither of those and want to influence this new membership, the last thing you do is go on about entryism. Which is the trap Tom Watson fell into earlier this week. [2]

Just as the anti-Corbynistas are happy to falsely characterise Labour party members who support Corbyn as either entryists or being under their sway, so they also claim that Corbyn and McDonnell never intended to try and work with the PLP. Instead it was always an entryist plot. I am called naive when I have suggested otherwise in the past. What I have actually said is that cooperation with the PLP was the only path that offered the new leadership any chance of success, which is what my MAD post is all about. But of course the anti-Corbynista claim about the leaderships real motives is unprovable: the leadership trying to work with the PLP (as it did) can be put down to pretence, and when the leadership failed it could be put down to deliberate intention rather than lack of ability.

The group whose motives are really suspect are the anti-Corbynistas. With Corbyn’s election in 2015 they saw their ability to influence the party slipping away, and have subsequently done everything they can to ensure it disappeared out of sight. They have publicly undermined the leadership, giving Corbyn supporters a clear excuse to ignore the polls. They have attempted to exclude Corbyn from this new election, allowing Corbyn’s supporters to say that by voting for Corbyn they are standing up for democracy. They have called Corbyn supporters entryists when most are clearly not. If they really wanted to win hearts and minds they have been utterly useless, and as a byproduct have probably destroyed hopes of any kind of compromise. (I have lost count of the number of times I have been told by Corbyn supporters that Owen Smith is bound to come under the sway of the anti-Corbynistas.) It is not clear to me yet whether this behaviour is just incompetence, or whether it is they who really have an undeclared objective, which is to split the left.

[1] Colin Talbot argues that because these organisations had high churn, there are a lot of ‘ex-Trots’ out there. “It is this mass of vaguely ‘socialist’ middle-aged ex-Trots – and there are an awful lot more of them than they or anyone else probably realized until recently – that might explain a lot of the ‘Corbyn’ phenomena. Disillusioned with Blair (mainly over one single issue – Iraq), despondent of Labour ever winning again anyway, they have turned to Corbyn as the political equivalent of going out and buying a Harley.”

But maybe these ‘ex-Trots’ are ‘ex’ because they went off the concept of entryism - like the author himself. Being disillusioned by Iraq and despondent at Labour losing in 2015 are virtues. The implication that by supporting Corbyn they somehow have not grown out of their youthful behaviour is nothing more than an opinion.

[2] He said “There are Trots that have come back to the party, and they certainly don’t have the best interests of the Labour party at heart. They see the Labour party as a vehicle for revolutionary socialism, and they’re not remotely interested in winning elections, and that’s a problem. But I don’t think the vast majority of people that have joined the Labour party and have been mobilised by the people that are in Momentum are all Trots and Bolsheviks.” My italics, suggesting his analysis is similar to mine. But then he went on about “old hands twisting young arms”, which is really not a good way to persuade those with young arms!

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?

The anti-Corbyn militants have failed

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.