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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » How the Labour Party would split – and why it won’t
Picture the scene. Lord Mandleson hosts a BBQ where “up to” 20 Labour rebels look at their options for a breakaway party. Labour’s Deputy Leader Tom Watson was amongst the group, uniting the remnant Blairite and Brownite camps against Corbyn.
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"Jeremy Corbyn will retire, and a sizeable chunk of the membership will leave when he goes. When he does the party can change shape, organisation, message. Nothing that has been done – despite shrieking headlines of takeovers at local and NEC levels – cannot be undone."
There is a massive assumption in this: that Corbyn and his allies don't realise that it can be undone, and therefore don't put measures in place to ensure it's exceptionally difficult to undo. The Corbynite hard-left takeover is about more than Corbyn - it's about ensuring that a sane centrist Labour party (e.g. Blair, Brown, Miliband) can never get the reins again.
The heinous attacks by so-called 'Labour' supporters against other Labour MPs are a classic example. Their moderate views are no longer wanted within the party.
People like me sick to the back teeth of Corbyn and the dross that surround him will wait him out, as happened with Michael Foot.
Where is the Denis Healey of the Foot days to give you confidence that the patriotic Labour party more worried about the people of Paisley than the people of Palestine is still there?
I've no doubt there are plenty at Branch level, but the Labour Party in the HoC 'that owed more to Methodism than Marxism' appears AWOL.....
Actually, that's only a secondary nightmare. The real nightmare would be for his beloved Labour party to win a stonking majority under Corbyn, and for him to see it implement policies against 'others' that make the Conservatives seem like puppy-loving naive little girls.
I can't see the Labour party going back to pro privatisation or shying away from nationalisation as much as it did pre Corbyn (for a couple of decades). I can't see the Labour party going back to being as pro war as it was under Blair.
Politically I feel like the Labour party has shifted, there are things that are just accepted within Labour now that were not before and I can't see that suddenly shifting after Corbyn. A candidate who made a pitch to go back would not be successful IMO.
I can't see the changes to the method of electing a leader brought in under Corbyn changing too suddenly either, it will probably remain a member driven party.
The plans to base the British economy on a natural resource whose price will fall below what it is worth to extract will probably be shelved, but to be honest I always thought the turn Britain into Venezuela project was a bit too ambitious and there hadn't been any real planning done just false promises from unreliable sources...
Edit: Those who would expect a dramatic departure from the last manifesto (as in well to the right) under a new leader would probably be very disappointed. Those who think Corbyn is evil for various reasons but haven't actually got a problem with his policies may be pleased. Although I would expect the right wing papers to come up with hundreds of reasons why the new left wing leader is also evil for various reasons so I'm not sure there is much difference in the end....
Just don't expect the voters to be so sanguine.
And the activists of other parties will be doubly determined to point out that even Labour's own members are "sick to the back teeth of Corbyn and the dross that surround him". And doubly determined to keep them from power.
Yes. Like anti-Semitism.
I don't expect the next election to be a re-run of 2017, but the anger that a lot of voters have with how the country is being run is not going away.
A bit of redistribution sounds very good if you are a graduate in Generation Rent, struggling to make ends meet without any savings, unable to afford social care, or merely being fleeced every day for a poor rail service.
There are some nasty pieces of work on the hard left, but Left Populism has probably more electoral potential than Right Populism, particulary if Brexit fails to deliver for the people of Hartlepool, South Wales and Cornwall.
An unexpected outcome of the fall of Salmond may also be the return of SLAB to electoral success, at least at the Westminster level.
It's a nice idea that the far left will voluntarily leave. I fear it's fanciful, however. Why would they? They've got the whip hand, and wish to rewrite the leadership rulebook to all but guarantee there's some brand of hammer-and-sickle fruitcake on the ballot. Changes to constituencies may very well prompt the friend of Hamas to have a purge, sorry, mandatory reselections which may sadly result in some Blairites losing their seats.
Trying nothing and hoping the far left just toddle off into the sunset is like communism. A nice idea that doesn't survive contact with reality. In the real world, it doesn't make any sense.
Meanwhile, Labour MPs who just hang around until the next election are going to go in to bat for Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister.
I hope you're right, and I'm wrong.
But I think you've got a comforting delusion to cling to, which bridges the cognitive dissonance between liking Labour and loathing Corbyn. It removes the need for you, and moderate MPs, to make a choice. But this isn't masterly inactivity. It's sticking your collective head in the sand.
Agree that the next election won’t be a re-run of 2017..... elections rarely, if ever, are.... the nearest I can think of was 2001 being a re-run of 1997 and also that a lot of people are very unhappy with what is happening........ what worries me is that the unhappy will think that direct action is more likely to achieve a result than voting.
I also note you deliberately confuse 'anti-Semtiism' with 'Israel-Palestine'. That doesn't exactly help your case.
And yes, Islamaphobia is bad - but it's disgraceful of you to try to cover the anti-Semitism issue in your party by pointing out other problems elsewhere, as if that excuses it.
They won't hate Jewish people but that won't be much change from the last 2 leaders. Edit: or several before that probably.
I don't use Islamophobia as an excuse. It is good line for white people to claim they are anti racists whilst voting for the Conservatives and against most minorities. It might not be an excuse for them, I'm sure a good deal of them believe it. Also excellent cover for politicians like Boris, Labour politicians shouldn't call out Boris' dogwhistling because they oppose the occupation of Palestine... excellent politics it must be said.
I can't claim to have made a detailed study and would be happy to be corrected but the 2017 version seemed more of the same in that it made a large series of promises which were incapable of being funded at the same time, did not seek to prioritise amongst them and maybe had just a little more emphasis on nationalisation. In short such changes as there were were probably perfectly acceptable to the vast majority of Labour members.
Of course the right always challenge anything that the left want to do on the basis it is unfunded or unaffordable. That is the nature of politics. In reality our economy has proven much more robust and more capable of funding increases in spending than the right would have us believe. Much though i admire Osborne's economic management in a very difficult situation there was something both ideological and unnecessary in his 35% of GDP target for government spending. It is probably quite possible now for public spending to be increased by 2-3% of GDP (roughly £40-60bn) without doing long term economic damage provided it is done by taxes and not borrowing.
To be clear I don't think that this would be a good thing (the economy will grow more rapidly if the tax burden is not excessive) but it is noteworthy that even Tories seem to have largely given up on tax cuts given the enormous demand for government funded services we are facing. Rather than sharing the proceeds of growth we seem to be getting to the point that all of them will be ploughed back into a public sector desperately short of cash.
If the rational part of the Labour Party are broadly happy with the policy direction the arguments against another disastrous split become compelling because this becomes about personalities not principle. How decent folk work to elect that scumbag at the next election is beyond me but I can see them persuading themselves it is a necessary evil. I therefore think that @RochdalePioneer is right. No split of any substance and a desire to have this unhappy episode behind them as soon as possible.
Has Jezza ever made an anti-semitic comment outside the context of his support for Palestine?
The leadership might be old but the membership is young and still looking for a fight to take to The Man.
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/AlexSalmond
SLAB's problems were much more than 'the rise of the SNP and the Sturgeon pivot to the central belt' - decades of complacency and all the talent siphoned off to London lay behind it - and it won't be easy to turn around.
BTW what do people think of the absolutely excellent suggestion this morning that Physics teachers (along with one or two other subjects) should be paid more?
https://bbc.co.uk/news/education-45341734
You'll need someone who has looked at and remembers the 2015 manifesto to give you that breakdown, I can only remember some of the highlights really of the 2017 one.
In very vague terms it was probably a bit to the left of it, 2015 plus nationalisation and free tuition fees. On the basis of the manifestos alone I don't think you could really declare it a radical departure.
Those who were already against the policy direction under Ed, so wanting a shift back to the right, who don't have strong feelings of loyalty to Labour for various reasons have probably already left.
There is definitely a section of the party who would want a shift back in policy, who probably thought the party started going the wrong direction under Ed to begin with but the fact these people mostly attack Corbyn on non policy areas is telling*, the policy argument isn't a winning one for them within the party.
*Even if we play out a hypothetical where Corbyn is a bad person and they are right about him, if that was the way to take out this bad person they why do it, if you can only take out Al Capone on tax evasion you go for it. It is a losing strategy which is why they don't, or they did but mostly stopped which is why I think a policy shift back is unlikely.
All parties will have racists of all stripes in them. Mostly they will remain hidden. What matters is what happens when they unveil themselves. In Labour's case, anti-Semitism has not been taken seriously even from major figures: Livingstone's comments being an early example where the party was utterly ineffectual for *years*.
Yet if (say Livingstone) had made similar comments about Muslims, or other ethnic minorities, Labour's reaction would be very different.
Whatever it says though about Salmond’s pull, I can’t see this ending well for the SNP or for the Indy cause.
I agree that anti-Semtism and criticism of Israel do get confused, and that some people will try to call valid criticism of Israel anti-Semtism.
However, others hide their anti-Semtism behind invalid and one-sided criticism of Israel.
The IHRA examples are a red Herring. It's perfectly possible to vociferously criticise Israel within them: but that's not what Corbyn and his acolytes do.
The problem is that part comes down to interpretation, if Corbyn secretly meant Jewish people cannot get English Irony because being Jewish stops you being English then that is racist.
That is well removed from what he actually said though.
Its a cult. A personality cult based around the majestic figure that is Jeremy Corbyn. As we read last night from Williamson Corbyn is a man who has never been wrong, always voting WITH the party against New Labour even if that meant voting against the party in the decade before New Labour was invented.
Another meme on Facebook declares him to be the "bravest and finest leader we've ever had". Much braver than Major Attlee who was 2nd last off the beach at Gallipoli, injured in battle yet rejoined the fight, dropped his friend Ramsay MacDonald when he formed a national government, rebuilt the party from 50 seats to win a landslide, built the welfare state AND the atom bomb etc etc.
The talk is about who will succeed him. He will retire at some point, he's already an old man and must feel so constrained by the leadership preventing him hosting another "Why Jews are evil" meeting. If we lose the next election - and all things are possible in politics - why would a 73 year old Corbyn want to wait until he was 78 before having another shot? And if he wins the dampening effects of power constraining his ideas plus the stress of power ageing him suggests he wouldn't last out a full term.
Because its a cult, and an increasingly overblown paranoid one, people will leave when He does. I already know members who say this. They are not interested in the Labour Party or the movement. They are interested in Him. So when the talk is about rule changes or the makeup of the NEC, remember that all these can change again. I do not anticipate - nor do I want - a return to New Labour, nor do I want a wholesale change in policy direction. What we need to be less batshit crazy, and the ending of the cult will go a long way towards that.
One of the major upsides of private education is that pretty much all of my son's teachers in science and maths have doctorates in their subject. This doesn't necessarily make them great teachers of course but they know their subjects and can bring enough extra into a pitiful curriculum to keep it interesting.
Labour's plans to turn the UK into a country which has utterly destroyed itself were "too ambitious". Don't worry @TheJezziah I'm sure if in power Labour will give it their best shot.
Plus that leader is not exactly oozing personality or charisma. He does not seem to be breaking through. And that makes their task harder.
People don't have to vote for anyone. They can choose to stay at home.
I am not sure Richard Leonard is a reason to leave the house on polling day.
In particular, the belief of both keen Zionists and real anti-semites that all Jews identify with Israel (and therefore that being hostile to Israel and in particular to Israeli expansion is the same thing as being hostile to Jews) is itself anti-semitic. Why should all Jewish people hold any particular opinion? They don't.
But I think we've got as far as we're going to with that particular debate - people either believe he is or he isn't, and it's got way beyond the point where accepting the ILHR examples etc. will make any difference. In my opinion he should make one more speech on the issue and conclude by saying that as party leader and potential PM he now has to concentrate on other issues and will not be commenting further (FWIW I don't plan to either). I think all this is a huge oppportunity cost for Labour and our ratings will decline further until we stop giving the issue oxygen by constantly trying to resolve it - and I think that's why some, though not all, of the critics want to prolong it.
I imagine the next leader will probably have a bladder as well so there is a risk that they too would use the toilet.
The key issue for some time has been whether the left should use its strength in CLPs to go for reselection (it doesn't need to be mandatory - the current rules are enough to make it happen). They decided not to, and candidates all over the place are being selected with few successful attempts to push in strong left-wingers. That's why most MPs don't in reality feel their positions are under threat and they can wait things out and see what happens. The downside for the left is that post-2022 there will not be a PLP majority for hard-left policies and compromise will be needed - people like McDonnell have seen that very clearly, but accept it as the price of not pushing large numbers of MPs into revolt.
But Salmond is a little bit different. He's he most charismatic, effective, and in many ways brilliant politician of his generation. Looked at with a cold eye, his achievements are in many ways more spectacular than those of Tony Blair. On its own, winning an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament is an astonishing feat that is not likely to be repeated this side of the removal of the stupid d'Hondt system.
He is also the person who for nearly thirty years has defined Scottish independence - for good or ill. Whether leader or not, he has been the driving force, his vision has shaped the movement, his energy and ideals have been what gave it its vitality and purpose. Even after he has resigned as leader, he has been the one who seems to hold the power in the party. He came back in 2004 simply because no other politician could even begin to replace his profile. Even after 2014, he was a crucial influence in the 'Ajockalypse' of 2015 and for all Angus Robertson's excellence he remained the dominant media presence in the Westminster party. Without Salmond, not only would the independence referendum not even have been close, it would probably never have been held, as Sturgeon's misfiring attempts to replicate his dynamism have shown.
I hope these allegations are wrong, even though I'm increasingly ambivalent about him and his politics. But if he does face court proceedings, the parallels with Jeremy Thorpe - and the way in which he has surpassed Thorpe in crucial areas - are extremely striking.
*Edit - I should make it clear I'm not suggesting such allegations are silly. I'm saying that one reason this is getting more exposure, like Corbyn's humiliation over his racism, is because it is the silly season and there isn't much else to write about.
I'm not saying things 'magically changed': they have, however, got much worse under anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn.
A Labour MP was quoted in the Evening Standard yesterday that it was not enough for Labour to be led by Corbynism it would need the Tories to be led by a hard Brexiteer like Boris or Mogg for a centrist party to really take off. In a similar way it was the polarizing choice in 1981 between Thatcher's right-wing Tories and Foot's hard Left Labour which led to the formation of the centrist pro EEC SDP-Liberal Alliance which got 25% at the 1983 general election (still the highest total ever for a post War UK Liberal centrist party)
The other scenario is of course that the cult implodes. A paranoid leadership cult seeing plots and enemies everywhere, making absurd defensive positions to defend Him (such as backing Willsman) will inevitably eat itself. Momentum dropped Willsman from the #JC9 and was accused of betraying the leader and the membership. Lansman has been moving to get the IHRA definition adopted in full, and people on Facebook are denouncing him, asking how they get him kicked out of Momentum. That he owns Momentum in the very literal sense has passed them by, such as the "People's Momentum" spin been a success.
I might be made redundant soon so if I were to apply for head of PR at the Israeli embassy, I'd make much more of Israel being the only open democracy in the Middle East, the only country with full trades union rights, and gay rights, and one of the few with freedom of religion and rule of law. That is how to persuade his followers that Corbyn is wrong.
We already have different structures for bursaries, golden hellos etc for these people - why not extend it to salary?
I suppose the only possible issue is that if we compared it with the salaries physics graduates could earn in industry, banking or academia, schools would struggle to fund them.
Of course neither Ed nor Jeremy are anti semites, merely opposed to the occupation of Palestinians.
It still almost certainly wouldn’t work because of the absence of ideas.
The end point, staying with Labour, is known. The rationalisation is all that changes.
He doesn't hate Jews. He has a profound suspicion of western imperialists. Of Bankers. Of the oppressor against the vulnerable. The Palestine Solidarity campaign is full of people who are screaming anti-semites wanting to push Israel into the sea. He doesn't say that himself but seems perfectly happy associating with people who do.
On the Corbyn a/s row, I'm coming increasingly to the view that the problem is not that he may or may not be anti-semitic. Personally I doubt it though I understand why some would say otherwise. The problem is that Labour is not taking the position it should.
Labour should be a stridently anti-semitic Party. It should challenge it, just as it has challenged racism, apartheid, mysogeny and the like.
Its failure to take a challenging position on this matter appears to be a failure of leadership rather than a reflection of where the Party stands, or ought to.
We will never know if Jeremy is an anti-Semite himself (we cannot read his heart).
The SNP are not going to lose much sleep over labour and overall I doubt it will shift many votes
Plus Leonard is a Unionist despite being left of centre. He probably still has a better chance of becoming First Minister than Davidson as although she has swept rural Scotland and much of prosperous suburbia for the Tories and win her seat in Edinburgh the SNP remain the largest party as most seats are in Glasgow and the Central belt. Only Labour can really stop the SNP there
I knew a Pharmacy graduate who spent (I think) three years teaching post Uni. Left after the end of National Service and went back to pharmacy.
I'm not saying this will happen, just that for a number of reasons this is a scandal that could have unusually wide political repercussions, whatever the actual outcome.
Corbyn now has many enemies both within his party and outside and this will follow labour all the way to the next election (as long as he is leader)
Under Ed Miliband, the anti-Semites in Labour had a quieter voice. Under Corbyn, they're screaming. And worse, honourable Labour members are excusing anti-Semitism because it's by *their* team.
If we're stuck with parochial local politicians and we can't have Emmanuel Macron, beloved sun-king of r/neoliberal, I'd like to nominate the Olympus ex-CEO and whistleblower, Michael Woodford.
Whilst Labour are picking at the scabs of their own self-harming.
In my opinion the only way the boil can be lanced is for 100 or more labour mps to resign the whip and form their own group within the HOC.
However, I think this is very unlikely so soldiering on may become the only choice but the long term damage to the labour brand is likely to be immense
So we can't adopt the IHRA definition and clamp down on anti-semites. Because the Red Tories want it adopting, and many of the people who have transgressed want #JC4PM.
The anti-Semites were just as loud in Labour then, we were turning Maureen Lipman into a Tory and Harrysplace was kicking into full swing reporting on Labour anti-Semitism.
Ed Miliband just had the cover of actually being Jewish whilst opposing the occupation of Palestine but it still doesn't change his opposition to it.
I use the former as an example as an example of how awesome and versatile History teachers are. Not sure it always convinces...
It seems very odd to me that there are 2 complainants rather than dozens. In the Me Too atmosphere we live in I would have expected others to come forward. It may happen yet of course.