Deluded and out of touch—and that's just the moderates

Unpublished seven-and-a-half-year-old thoughts about the state of the Labour Party

Introduction

[PHOTO: Coincidentally, this photo of a mural of cows grazing passively, trapped behind bars, was taken in 2016 on a client’s premises.]

[I wrote this blogpost in November 2016, but didn’t publish it then because, even as a decades-long enemy of the crank Left, I thought it a bit strong (though it’s less about them than it is about the soft Left). Rereading it now, I think it’s held up pretty well.

For example, today, the Chief Political Commentator of The Independent quoted the Chief Political Commentator of The Financial Times thusly:

For those of you on my Substack for UK politics, this post is a set-up. I am going to revisit these themes as I explain how, in one sense or another, the Labour Party is going to lose at the next General Election.

I have fixed punctuation and rewritten the last paragraph—which I recovered from my archive frozen at a half-formed stage—but, to preserve the historical perspective, I haven’t added anything of substance. Contemporary commentary appears in italics, like this intro.]

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November 2016

Jeremy Corbyn is a bad man. He has long stood with murderers-of-innocents and with haters-of-Jews. Next to these facts, Corbyn’s stupidity, incompetence, and lack of basic manners are trivial, the Ickean gibberish of his pseudo-socialist policies, such as they are, is noise.

One reason he was re-elected—how absurd this sounds!—as Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition is that Labour Members of Parliament have lacked the courage to admit Corbyn’s degeneracy.

Corbyn’s re-election as leader, with an increased vote share, leaves the Labour Party in the grip of an illiberal, economically illiterate, militant hard-Left bloc. Many of Corbyn’s supporters are themselves bullies and antisemites. He and his personality cult should be beyond the pale for a liberal Left party, not because his politics are broken or because of his and his team’s incompetence and unelectablility, but because of his turpitude and his followers’ complicity.

[It is eerie that, even last month, even after the EHRC report on the party, Starmer’s motion to the Labour National Executive Committee blocking Corbyn’s reselection as a Labour MP says nothing about antisemitism, only about electability:

The motion approved by the NEC states that allowing Mr Corbyn to stand would "significantly diminish" Labour's chances of "winning the next general election".

just as Starmer withdrew the Labour whip from Corbyn, not for Labour antisemitism per se, but for saying that its scale had been exaggerated—a view even an obsessive caller-out of Left-antisemitism like me considers arguable.]

Anti-democratic as they are, his followers own the Labour Party because the rest of the party gave it to them. The Corbynistas have full, legal squatters’ rights because Ed Miliband changed the party’s rules, because the Parliamentary party nominated Corbyn as a candidate for the previous leadership election, and because the party electorate voted for him in properly conducted ballots.

Even now, good people, not just in Labour, have lacked the honesty to accept the truths above. It is precisely because many important actors in this terrible recent Labour story have failed even to acknowledge the enormity of what was happening at each stage of the tale, let alone to describe the central events and people accurately in public, that they have failed to prevent the tragedy being acted out.

I’ve read otherwise-sensible, moderate Labour members and liberal commentators talk of this hard-Left takeover as a “spasm” or a “storm”, and, inevitably, that it “will blow over eventually”—just as they thought Corbyn would never win the leadership election—that, even if he won, his leadership could never be as poor as people feared; that, once his unfitness were clear, he would resign.

Latterly, these same people talk about how apocalyptic defeat in the 2020 General Election will shock the party to its senses, a party now packed with people for whom winning elections is not a priority. They encourage moderates to start a recruiting drive, even as moderates resign in droves. Even more disconnected from reality—as if that were possible—are those who say that Labour’s centre-Left needs a policy renewal to revive its credibility with voters, that calls for a second EU referendum will connect with voters upset by Brexit, that all joining together in a defence of, for desperate example, the comprehensive school system will re-unify the party and people.

[Owen Smith, who challenged Corbyn for Labour leader in 2016 openly called for a second EU referendum (with a view to the UK’s return). Labour’s subsequent landslide loss in 2019 to a platform of “Get Brexit Done” did not deter: Note the contexts in which the word “Brexit” appears in “Labour Together”’s Election Review 2019 and see how many of its other preoccupations you’d expect to be topics of keen debate at your local working men’s club.]

Many of the Labour Party’s “client” members are public sector workers on good salaries and pensions that (even after partial reform) most ordinary British voters can only dream of. The gulf between their circumstances and those of most voters in the private sector is large, but it’s still often invisible to them. These client members can be found in both Corbynist and anti-Corbynist factions of the party—and they can be found in disproportionate numbers online. You can tell from what they say about other voters there that they are not the sort of people who spend much time interacting with those other voters.

But it’s those “other voters” who form the vast bulk of the electorate outside the Labour Party. It’s not just that Labour members are out of touch with “the people” they hope to win over politically; they don’t even know how out of touch they are.

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December 2019

[We all know now how things turned out.]