On Saturday 24th September 2016, as was widely expected, Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected as Labour party leader. Despite the hopes of his detractors, he increased his share of the vote and has secured himself a substantial mandate within the party. Leadership contests are often bloody and unsettling, and this battle was no different. However, unlike other contests, this result did not lead to an accommodation between the two sides, there was no perceptible ‘feel good factor’ outside Corbyn’s own supporters and the press immediately began to report the obvious signs of mistrust, division and even fear within the party. How can it be that a party with a democratically elected leader and more members than it has had for decades is so utterly split, so at war with itself that many observers believe that it has almost no chance of winning the next general election, or perhaps even the one after that? How can Corbyn, his supporters and his detractors “fix” the Labour Party and make it an electoral force once again?
In many ways, Jeremy Corbyn is not at the root of the Labour party’s problems, he is merely the symptom, the most visible and obvious result of the party’s recent history. The Labour party is often described as a ‘broad Church’, a party which brings together a wide range of people from different backgrounds with different views and opinions. Leaders have often struggled to reconcile those viewpoints, to ensure that the party has remained electorally successful, some with more success than others. Attlee, with his ever faithful Ernie – Ernest Bevin- was generally able to manage the differences between the Gaitskellites and the Bevanites. Upon his resignation as party leader and the succession of Gaitskell, those party differences exploded into open warfare, leading Labour to lose the 1959 general election. Gaitskell’s successor, Wilson, was also fairly successful at managing those differences but his successor, Jim Callaghan, was unsettled and undermined by movements beyond his control. Michael Foot, often compared to Jeremy Corbyn, moved the party more to the left, with the result being the split of the ‘Gang of Four’, the creation of the SDP and the disastrous 1983 general election.
Under Foot’s successor, Neil Kinnock, the party was slowly moved to the centre ground. The detractors of Kinnock and Blair argue that the party was taken into ideological territory that its members did not want to be in and that the party should not have occupied as a left-wing political group. However, this positioning of the party by Kinnock and Blair was not new, and certainly owed a fair amount to the work of Gaitskell and Crosland, not that New Labour was a direct descendent of Gaitskellism. However, it would be misleading to claim that the Labour Party has always occupied a position on the far left of British politics. During its more electorally successful periods it has tended to occupy a more centre-left position, combining traditional elements of Labourism with more centrist policies. While Kinnock and Blair may well have taken this process one step further, Blair reaped the electoral benefits of this, taking the party into power for ten years (thirteen if we add in the Brown years) after eighteen years of opposition. There was even talk of the twenty first century becoming ‘Labour’s Century’. How different things now look.
Corbyn has committed the party to follow a more traditional left-wing line, very much in tune with his own political convictions. No-one can argue that he hasn’t remained committed to his views over his political career or that he has somehow mislead the party regarding his views. Those who support him know his opinions and agree with them. The problem for Corbyn lies in the Parliamentary Labour Party. Many MPs do not share Corbyn’s political views, and despite accusations to the contrary, that does not make them disloyal or unprincipled. Many of these MPs are as committed to Labour as its longstanding activists. They work for the party and devote their lives to the party, with their own careers living and dying on the collective success of the party. As a backbencher, Corbyn was largely immune to the pressure from the leadership to conform, to vote with the party, and therefore it seems a little hypocritical to expect different behaviour from backbenchers than he displayed himself, or for the Corbyn supporters to paint those MPs as disloyal traitors while Corbyn is sold as a man of principle.
Regardless of the political chasm between the Corbyn supporters and the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party, what is required is unity. Voters do not vote for divided parties. The important question though is how is unity achieved? With claim and counter-claim of threats and insults, unity seems impossible to achieve. It can be reached through the actions of the key players on both sides, including Corbyn. The attack dogs from the different groups need to be given their marching orders to allow peace to break out and meaningful discussions to take place. The chances of that happening are remote, and have been growing more remote over the last year. Corbyn’s re-election has entrenched both sides rather than offering a road to conciliation. For all who support Labour, the battles which have been fought, and will be fought in the near future, take Labour further away from power, not closer to it. The lessons of history do not paint a positive picture for those who find themselves engaging in an ideological battle for Labour’s soul.
Victoria Honeyman is Lecturer in British Politics at the University of Leeds. She tweets @VHoneymanLeeds.
Image: Garry Knight CC by 2.0
