As socialist Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn addresses enthusiastic mass meetings across the country it appears clear — despite attempts by Labour right to sabotage the vote and deny as many Corbyn backers the right to vote as possible — the anti-austerity leader will easily be returned as leader.
The new elections were sparked by a coup by right-wing MPs, but Corbyn retains huge support among rank-and-file members. Various factors reinforce the strength of Corbyn and the left. These include official support for Corbyn against his opponent Owen Smith from Britain's two biggest unions, Unite and Unison, as well as a large majority of Constituency Labour Parties (271–41 on August 11).
Also, left-wingers swept the board in the elections to the Labour Party's national executive committee on August 8. The Centre Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA) slate won all six of the seats set aside for constituency party nominees. The slate was endorsed by Momentum, the grassroots group that organises in support of Corbyn's socialist politics.
However, the hostile Labour establishment scored a win of its own on August 11, with what The Guardian called “an unexpected Court of Appeal victory for the party's ruling body that will bar thousands of the leader's supporters from voting”.
The decision means about 130,000 new members who joined less than six months ago will not be able to vote in the forthcoming poll.” Corbyn's campaign team called the decision wrong “both legally and democratically”.
But even with such moves to deny members a vote, Corbyn is considered almost certain to win. Given the hostility to Corbyn and his supporters from most Labour MPs, whose anti-Corbyn campaigns have been strongly backed by the media, questions have been raised at the prospect of labour splitting. In the early 1980s, right-wing MPs hostile to left-leaning Labour leader Michael Foot split and formed the Social Democratic Party, which helped ensure Margaret Thatcher remained in power.
Below, Michael Calderbank looks at the prospects of a split. It is abridged from Red Pepper.
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The stand-off between the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) majority who tried to perpetrate the anti-Corbyn coup on one side, and the elected leader, majority of members and most affiliated trade unions on the other, has led some commentators to speak of a looming “existential crisis” in Labour. An apocalyptic tone suddenly began to colour the debate about the future.
In reality, while the possibility of some form of significant split has certainly increased, it is by no means certain, or even likely. There is a desire for a united and effective opposition to a Tory party driving through negotiations over Brexit.
Added to this is an emotional reflex to preserve the party that generations of our families have helped to create and build. The history of left-wing breakaways is also not auspicious.
The Labour mainstream has always put pragmatism before political clarity. The first instinct of many is to keep the “Labour family” together — to conciliate, negotiate and broker a deal between the conflicting parties.
This presents the Corbyn leadership and Momentum with a strategic dilemma. If the tactic of the Blairites is to paint the left as divisive and destructive, do we respond by emphasising our willingness to be inclusive and unifying?
This is problematic, not only because it means bringing people who have sought to publicly insult, humiliate and remove the left leadership back into the fold, but because it assumes the aims and objectives of the party's rival wings are fundamentally reconcilable at some deeper level. But is this the case?
If some of the coup-plotters believe that Labour needs to chase votes lost to right-wing populist group UK Independence Party by talking about tougher immigration controls, appeasing the right-wing press and pushing ahead with the renewal of Trident nuclear weapons (strongly opposed by Corbyn), what kind of compromise is possible?
In such circumstances, a “unifying” approach would seem to involve giving ground on questions of fundamental principle. In this scenario, the left might survive the short-term crisis but only at the price of sacrificing some of its credibility and demotivating its support base.
Attractive policy
An alternative approach would begin not from the need to unite the different forces in Westminster, but to proceed on the basis that the leadership's existing platform is already uniting mass support across the country. Labour's policy agenda under Corbyn has been clear, principled and attractive.
The party is now anti-austerity and opposed to attacks on the welfare state. We are committed to defending workers' rights and opposing the scapegoating of immigrants and asylum seekers.
We want to end the housing crisis, defend the National Health Service from privatisation and bring rail back into public ownership. We want to combat human-made climate change, and work for an end to war and for justice and human rights across the world, not least in Palestine.
It is an agenda that unites the overwhelming majority of Labour members and supporters. Indeed, thousands of new recruits have poured into the party precisely because such a political alternative is finally being articulated by a mainstream political party.
Labour MPs are trapped in a Westminster bubble, where what counts is who made the most wounding response at the dispatch box, or who bested who in debates at departmental questions. The ups and downs of different personalities get blown out of all proportion, while the bigger picture can get lost.
This is nothing new. When Ian Mikardo, later an MP but then a young left-wing candidate for an unwinnable Tory seat, successfully moved conference policy in favour of taking key sections of industry into public ownership, he was told by leading Labour figure Herbert Morrison: “Young man, you've lost us the next election.”
This was in 1944, less than a year before the post-war Labour government was elected with a landslide. Today's MPs are similarly out of touch with what makes for popularity and electability.
Mandatory reselection
Throughout the 1960s and '70s, party members became increasingly frustrated at the failure of Labour MPs in parliament to implement policy decisions voted on at the annual conference. When then-Chancellor in a Labour government Denis Healey went to the International Monetary Fund and started imposing spending cuts in 1976, he faced howls of anger from party members. They saw this as flying in the face of the policy commitments they had voted for.
Supporters of left-wing MP Tony Benn's Alternative Economic Strategy realised they had to ensure that Labour MPs could be held to account by party members in their constituencies. This led to calls for the “mandatory reselection” of Labour MPs. This meant that MPs who did not enjoy the confidence of their constituency parties had no automatic right to continue as party candidates.
If today's party leadership was to reject attempts to compromise with the Blairites and instead pursue a strategy of confronting and defeating their opponents, the question of across-the-board reselections would be posed sooner rather than later.
The only way of avoiding this is to assume that the survival instincts of MPs would kick in: that, given time, MPs would be aware of how popular the present policy direction could make Labour and therefore drop their resistance.
The difficulty here is that the level of internal divisions being played out through the media risks making the dire predictions of electoral wipe-out a self-fulfilling prophecy. Policies risk getting drowned in a tidal wave of talk about a dysfunctional party and an inability to command authority in Westminster. This would embolden the right for further trench warfare.
Assuming that right-wing MPs would dig in and fight steps to deselect them rather than leave to form a new party, Labour would then effectively move into all-out civil war mode. It would be ugly. As Labour tore itself to pieces in full public view, the Tories could call a snap election and possibly win a landslide.
The first-past-the-post electoral system does not deal kindly with splits in the vote. The danger is that if centrist Labour MPs foresee the Corbyn leadership taking this direction, the ground would be prepared for a “unity” candidate to emerge and peel off a significant element of the left's support and trade union backing.
More questions than answers
There are suddenly more questions than answers. If Labour “unity” can only be bought at the expense of the Corbynites having to make serious concessions to the right, or by replacing him altogether by a soft-left “unity” candidate, then the question surely poses itself of whether it is time to abandon the fetish of the “unity” of the Labour Party and pose instead the unity of the social movement against neoliberalism.
Left politics in Britain for over a century has been dominated by the ideology of Labourism. This holds that Labour is the sole party capable of giving political representation to working-class interests, and that social change can be best delivered by returning Labour MPs to parliament to govern the country in our interests.
But as Labour's wipe-out in Scotland and the Brexit vote have also shown, voters in huge swaths of Labour's former industrial heartlands no longer buy into these traditional assumptions.
The Corbynite project gestures towards a new left politics that does not begin and end in Westminster. Rather, it brings forward political demands from the struggle outside parliament.
Plenty of people still want to give Labourism a new lease of life. But minds are also starting to turn to whether, should Labour become a casualty of this war, new forms of political organisation might emerge from the ashes. In the meantime, we must keep Corbyn and stiffen our sinews for the battle ahead.
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