- Wed Feb 22, 2023 12:31 pm
#39738
Herewith a piece displaying remarkable clarity from Danny Finkelstein, otherwise tucked away behind th Times paywall :
he Labour left is facing its moment of truth
If Corbyn’s allies leave him to fight alone they will be admitting that Starmer’s ‘modest social reform’ is their only hope
Daniel Finkelstein
Tuesday February 21 2023, 5.00pm, The Times
In 2015, Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour Party with 60 per cent of the vote. The following year he won it again with 62 per cent. He led the party into two general elections and in one of them he did well enough to deprive the governing Conservative Party of its majority. Yet less than a year after being Labour’s candidate for prime minister, Corbyn was expelled from the parliamentary Labour Party.
And now it has been made perfectly clear that he won’t be allowed back. He will have to fight the next election — if he fights it — against the party he so recently led. All without him having changed his view on anything.
These facts are well known, but I restate them merely to emphasise how remarkable they are. There isn’t, I think, a parallel in British political history. It is true that Labour expelled Ramsay MacDonald in 1931 and fought him in the election of that year. But that was because MacDonald had formed a National Government with the Conservatives. Expelling a former leader of a major party just because they repeated the view they held when they were leader is without precedent. The Liberal Party didn’t even expel Jeremy Thorpe when he was put on trial for conspiracy to murder. And it’s important that familiarity doesn’t dull the sense of how significant this all is.
Keir Starmer has challenged the left of Labour in a fundamental way. And if it does not respond, or responds half-heartedly, it will be broken, broken completely. And I don’t think it will respond. Which means I do think it will broken. Certainly for many years. Quite possibly for ever.
What Starmer has done is settle an argument the Labour left has been having since at least 1961. In that year the Marxist thinker Ralph Miliband (father of David and Ed) published Parliamentary Socialism, a history of Labour over the previous 60 years. He concluded that inside Labour, the left can do little more than act as “a pressure group”. He rejected Labour, saying: “The Labour Party will not be transformed into a party seriously concerned with socialist change.” Instead it would simply be “a party of modest social reform in a capitalist system”.
Miliband did make common cause with the Bennites, people like Corbyn and John McDonnell, and they always saw him as their intellectual guru. When McDonnell was shadow chancellor he advised Treasury civil servants to read Miliband as a preparation for a Labour government. But Corbyn and McDonnell always argued with him about the party. Was Miliband right to reject Labour, or were Corbyn and McDonnell right to see membership as the best strategy for advancing socialism?
And now Starmer has intervened to make the position clear. Corbyn might want Labour, but that no longer matters. Labour doesn’t want Corbyn. Starmer’s party will be “a party of modest social reform in a capitalist system” rather than one “seriously concerned with socialist change”. There will never be another moment like this for the left. Never another moment where they have, outside the party, such a prominent leader, a household name (for good or ill) with a personal following. Someone with allies, someone with a brand, someone able to attract hundreds of thousands of people to join a political party. Someone who had thousands of young people singing his name.
Someone with a clear and unwavering political view, that has a demographic — young educated people — to which it appeals strongly. Someone who can associate himself with big progressive trends, including social liberalism and green economics, just as British attitudes appear to have turned leftwards.
And someone who has enough of a personal following in his own constituency to give him at least a chance — I’d say a decent one — of keeping his own seat.
So if the left decides now to let him be expelled, to let him fight on his own as an independent and not join him in a new political venture, what is it saying? Some big things.
First, it understands that all its rhetoric about being the true representative of working people is hot air. That by itself — without the Labour right and the Labour name — the left would be revealed as a sect with tiny support. That it knows they need Starmer and he doesn’t need them. Even led by the most prominent leader they could ever hope to have, they know they would flop. Quite an admission.
An admission that they do not represent the heart of Labour, even if they seized the leadership briefly, for if they challenged Labour they understand well they would be crushed.
It would mean that all the stuff they say about principle mattering more to them than mere electoral politics is nonsense too. Because when it comes down to it, Corbyn’s allies don’t want to risk their own seats. Principle at the expense of electoral progress is a policy they urge on Starmer, but aren’t willing to live by themselves.
But perhaps the most interesting admission made by standing by as Corbyn is kicked out, is they don’t really believe all they say about Labour’s current leadership. The most solid objection to the creation of a new left party is it might reduce the chances of Labour winning an election. I don’t happen to think it will hurt it much, as the anti-Tory wave is pretty strong, but it’s certainly something for any progressive to bear in mind.
Yet making sure you don’t damage Starmer’s electoral chances only matters if you believe that, in the end, Starmer is not himself a Tory, and deep down believe that having a Labour government under him matters. In other words it makes a lie of the pretence that “modest social reform” is hardly worth having if it is under capitalism.
These are all the things implied by Labour-left MPs not quitting to join up with Corbyn. And not even being able to indicate support for him, because to do so would lead to their own expulsion. They will bravely have to leave him on his own.
They will try to dodge the choice facing them by continuing to call for Starmer to change his mind. But this is a lame response. They know full well he’s not going to and no one is going to force him to.
And then I think they will find themselves still in Labour at the general election, having dithered and debated their way into total irrelevance.
It’s what I hope they do, because I believe their influence over the last decade has been baleful. And it’s what I think they will do. Because in the end, they are the few and not the many, and they know it.
daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk
"The opportunity to serve our country: that is all we ask.” John Smith, May 11, 1994.
- By Youngian