Labour's meaningless election

As the only Labour leadership candidate with a spark of personality and emotional verve has pulled out, I’m inclined to switch off until another tiresome Labour leadership contest is over. Jess Phillips last week exited a race that ever since Blair was chosen as party leader in 1994 has been marketed by the Party as about putting power in the hands of the members. Yet Phillips departed not because she had failed to convince Labour Party members, or the wider public, but because she knew she couldn’t be confident of the support of enough Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) (or the support of two big trade unions) to ensure that she’d get through to the next round. It is only when these hurdles are jumped by candidates that the much vaunted ‘one member, one vote’ process will actually kick in and the real leadership election will start as ordinary members get to decide for themselves who to vote for.

Well, them and registered party ‘supporters’, a cheapo membership scheme introduced, in his perverse wisdom, by Ed Miliband for those people who (understandably) can’t endure going to members’ meetings. And among these ‘Labour supporters’ who in April will be determining who the next Labour Prime Minister might be, will be those who bought themselves a vote by registering as supporters as recently as mid-January. All’s fair then.

The absurdities of Labour’s leadership electoral system are a reflection of its spatchcock compromise between Labour’s historical roots as a parliamentary-orientated party paid for by organised labour, and the bizarre contemporary influence of US primaries. This has produced a corrupt charade where all party members are potential voters but some voters aren’t party members (and some of these have simply paid £25 to vote). Success in the election depends on garnering the backing of enough MPs and then the approval of enough CLP meetings or, proving that in the Labour Party the past is always present, a couple of trade union barons.

The actual leadership election this April was always going to include the candidate who wrote Labour’s least successful manifesto since George Lansbury’s poor performance paved the way for the takeover of the party in 1935 by that masterfully bland public school boy, Mr Clement Attlee. Rebecca Long Bailey’s skilled authorship of Labour’s most recent ‘longest suicide note in its history’ was facilitated by the man who had already blessed her prospective leadership. In December Mr Corbyn’s reverse Midas touch meant that party volunteers like me had to knock on doors with an unsellable message from an unconscionable leader. Long Bailey is likely to be among the final two thanks to the imprimatur of the man who led Labour to a defeat markedly worse in seat terms than Michael Foot’s in 1983.

Like the other, current, front runner, Sir Keir Starmer, Rebecca has been in parliament for all of five years. If I am not mistaken, this is the same depth of parliamentary experience enjoyed by Lisa Nandy too. Emily Thornberry though has been traipsing round the Westminster corridors for an incredible decade. Gosh. Better perhaps than Corbyn who’s been there since 1983 but who not only lacks ministerial experience – like every single Labour leadership candidate this time round – but hasn’t even previously shadowed the government minister for office stationery.

Sir Keir Starmer was anointed at birth with the name of Labour’s second most popular leader, and is eager to emphasise that he too has a (relatively) proletarian background in order to offset the knighthood he secured for an indifferent performance as the head of Public Prosecutions.

Thornberry’s disadvantaged Oxford graduate and high-paid lawyer routine probably won’t impress. Lisa Nandy genuinely understands that Labour’s disconnect with its onetime (white) working-class base is almost terminal, but this message is too difficult for the party’s liberal middle class chauvinists to process. Therefore it’ll be down to either Starmer or Long Bailey to bore the electorate over the next five years.

Long Bailey’s seismically dull campaign launch - head down, droning on from a tiresome text - suggests that she will only inspire those for whom having a politically ‘correct’ (i.e. leftist) message is what matters. Not the fact that it’s delivered, like the current leadership incumbent, with all the charisma, style and authority of a deputy borough council leader. 

She told the Party that being a working-class woman means that she’s doubly-disadvantaged. This cynical little routine comes from yet another former lawyer, but one who thinks that the way to reach the working-class is affecting to sound like them. 

So we’ll presumably end up with Keir Starmer. A onetime student Trotskyist with little hope of reaching those parts of the country that began being lost by Labour more than 40 years ago and which now vote Johnson. Still, the brave knight will be good at the dispatch box cut and thrust. And that’s what will convince on the door step, isn't it? 

Labour will never get out of this mess until it restores the election of the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party solely to Labour politicians elected to Parliament. Historically this method didn't always produce the most plausible leaders to contest a national election. However it usually had the virtue of producing someone who not only understood what contesting a national election entailed, but who could authoritatively articulate an inclusive message to the whole of the nation. 

Labour's class coalition coming unstuck over Europe

Labour’s pragmatism (or waffle/procrastination) over Brexit, argues writer Nick Cohen, is both psephologically illiterate and ideologically motivated. Of course trying to bridge different interests has a very long tradition in the party. A compromise among Labour’s class and ideological broad church brought majority Labour governments for at least some of the period from 1945-2010. On Europe, Labour has never been enthusiastic, preferring to try on this, as on many other major issues, to manage (or obfuscate) the deep divisions within its electoral and parliamentary coalition.

Gaitskell feigned ‘little Englander’ anger at a prospective ‘end of a thousand years of history,’ while Wilson only tentatively sought to get beyond De Gaulle’s ‘Non’ in response to Macmillan's speculative application. It was Tory PM Heath who forced through the UK’s membership of the then Common Market (with the backing of some dissident Labour MPs) in an exercise in executive chutzpah. Three years later Wilson foreshadowed Cameron by putting political convenience before national interest and held the UK’s first referendum on whether to leave the European project. In the 1950s and early 1960s Jim Callaghan had reflected the Labourite conservatism of the Party’s trade union base in being instinctively unenthusiastic about the Common Market. However, as foreign secretary and then Prime Minister in the 1970s, Callaghan understood that as a middle-ranking post-imperial power, the UK was either in the club or it was irrelevant. 

Labour leader Michael Foot had to swallow many of the ideological stances of a hard left that - as a parliamentary socialist, intellect and pragmatist - he usually had little time for. However Foot tried his best to manage the then intra-party coalition that was rupturing over Europe – and over much else. Kinnock and Smith took Labour back to its broad church position on Europe, defence, and the economy. Blair in turn maintained that traditional Labour pragmatism on Europe. However the desperation of party that, in Austin Mitchell’s famous words, was ‘prepared to eat shit to get a Labour government,’ meant that Blair and Brown could get away with upholding the neo-liberal abdication of national interest they inherited from Margaret Thatcher, even if much of the country baulked at their unprecedentedly supine and ill-considered Iraq policy. Blair was arguably an outlier in Labour’s tradition, although on much social and welfare policy, and on Europe, he was pragmatic. 

Corbyn though is the first ever Labour leader who's not a genuine managerial pragmatist. He’s also the first Labour leader since George Lansbury to have little interest in leading. Corbyn is rooted in the late 1970s and early 1980s hard left Labour ‘activist’ myopia that favoured ideological correctness over class compromise. Back in the day, a half-baked perversion of cod Marxist theory led the polytechnocrats and bourgeois militants of the Bennite left to believe that, from the ashes of the dialectical clash of the differing class interests that have characterised the Party from birth to government, a truly socialist (ruling) class could emerge to finally deliver socialism.

The spectacle of a Labour Party, a Labour Party, run by middle class activists purporting, Leninist-style, to lead the proletariat into the light, didn’t convince many of the working class, then or now. Nor did it attract many of the middle class: the support of sufficient white-collar workers has always been a necessary and important part of Labour’s coalition. 

Today, the ideological heirs of Labour’s early 1980s deviation into political irrelevance are prioritising their own version of the party’s historic pragmatic alliance. In their case however it’s a very unholy union of bourgeois leftist disdain for a ‘capitalist club’ (the EU) with the appeasement of Labour’s disappearing white working class voting base who are angry over immigration and the loss of national sovereignty.  

Labour might now decide that the middle class electoral swing to the pro-EU Lib-Dem centre (and the Green left) is so out-stripping the loss of (white) working class Labour voters to the Brexit Party, that it can no longer maintain the party’s historic fudge on Europe. However a firm Labour embrace of another referendum – because Tories aren’t going to vote for an early electoral Christmas, to paraphrase aspirant Labour Party leader McDonnell – could mean JC jettisoning his misguided version of Labour class pragmatism in favour of a stance that hardly convinces anybody.

Corbyn cannot seek to persuade 'decent moderate Tories' (to paraphrase Baroness Chakrabarti on the ‘Marr’ show) to back another national referendum if he doesn’t make clear how he wants actual or prospective Labour voters to vote. Likewise, he cannot present himself as the nation’s prospective PM in the event of a short-notice general election if he can’t say whether he wants Britain to be in or out of the EU. So, unless Corbyn intends to approach the next fork in the road with the response he’s maintained ever since the last EU referendum, he will be forced to break the Party’s historic class coalition and to prioritise the winning back of liberal middle class voters. However unless they are convinced by Corbyn's 11th hour decisiveness, then Labour might have kissed goodbye to the white working class and to the prospect of ever returning to power.

Corbyn threatens to unleash activists on elected Labour MPs

If I was remotely waivering about NOT voting for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader, the latest pronouncement of the man has clinched it for me. Corbyn is threatening to discipline elected representatives of the people (i.e. MPs) with the pressure of un-elected activists if Labour MPs don't back him as leader. 

If this sounds familiar it is partly what the neo-Blairites thought they could achieve by setting up the registered supporters scheme a couple of years ago. It is absolutely what Benn unleashed in the 1970s and '80s. 

Remember "extra-parliamentary action"? Benn used it, and the force of his acolytes and Troskiyite fellow-travellers in the Party, to try and force his way into the leadership of the party against the wishes of many elected Labour MPs and of the then party leader Jim Callaghan and then Michael Foot (both far greater men than JC could ever dream of being). 

It was Foot who, as leader, told the Party Conference in 1981 that "Labour Party democracy" has to be a marriage of what the members want and what the Parliamentary Labour Party wants. Foot knew his history - Labour history and British democratic history. The semi-Burkean in him didn't believe that MPs were elected by the public to be told what to do by party activists accountable to no one but themselves.