If you are reading this after Saturday 24 September 2016 please do skip to the next paragraph. If you are reading it before that date, please note the following piece of information when reading the rest of this post: Owen Smith is not going to win on Saturday. Now that that is in place, do read on.
The problem facing the Labour Party has been publically displayed on the 2016 Leadership Election pages of their website: 86 percent of Labour MPs nominated Owen Smith for the leadership; whereas 70 percent of the Constituency Labour Parties who made a nomination chose Jeremy Corbyn. This is by any measure a sign of a very serious organisational malaise. It also illustrates that Corbyn is not Labour’s main problem, but a symptom of a more deep-seated problem.
The fact that such a significant majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party does not want Jeremy Corbyn as leader, and that such a majority of the membership seemingly does, shows just how badly split the Labour Party is. There has always been a divide in the Labour Party between a pragmatic and election focussed parliamentary leadership, and a significant section of the members, with some parliamentary allies, who have been more concerned with ideological purity than electoral expediency.
The fact that the ideological purity tendency in the party has infused so much of the membership and through that the party leadership is arguably partly the result of a membership organisation which has for decades been ignored, manipulated and told to shut up and do what they are told by the parliamentary leadership in the name of electoral success. Blair and New Labour were not the only ones guilty of this, but they did elevate the art of organisational manipulation and control freakery to new levels of sophistication (and occasional brutality) – arguably pushing it beyond what the membership was willing to tolerate. Admittedly, there are sections of the membership party where a firm hand is advisable for the sake of electability, but excessive clampdowns were increasingly extended to anyone who had, even moderate, objections to the leadership’s policy direction. The Corbyn win in 2015 can, therefore, be seen partly as a legacy of a longstanding and growing grudge amongst the members against the mixture of indifference and repression that has traditionally dominated the parliamentary leadership’s attitude towards the membership organisation. There was clearly a huge appetite for something radically different.
If and when the anti-Corbyn branch of the Parliamentary Labour Party manages to get rid of Corbyn and replace him with a more moderate figure (#SadiqKhanforPM2025 perhaps?) the underlying problem of membership resentment that helped create the Corbyn phenomenon is unlikely to simply go away. Any future parliamentary leadership post-Corbyn will have to find a better way to engage with party members than has been the case so far. There are parts of the membership who are wedded to ideological purity whatever the cost. No amount of willingness to compromise will help with that section of the party. However, that part of the party has never been big enough to explain Corbyn’s victory. Clearly otherwise fairly moderate members have been pushed by decades of parliamentary neglect to support a candidate who promised a radically new way of doing things. In the long term, if the Labour Party is to have a future as a moderate government seeking organisation, it has to be based on a new contract between the Parliamentary Labour Party and the moderate, but fed up, members that make up the majority of the grassroots organisation. A contract which allows for more respect for the role of the grassroots organisation, not just in campaigning, but in policy making as well. Obviously, the ideologues need to be kept at a distance from policy making, as has been the approach of the Labour leadership since the party’s creation. However, the near complete exclusion of the grassroots section of the party through organisational manipulation as a solution to the presence of ideologues amongst the grassroots has clearly not worked. Corbyn is the ultimate symbol of the failure of that approach to managing the membership organisation. Dealing with this issue is the big long term issue Labour needs to deal with.
In the short term, there is the question of what will happen in the Labour Party between now and the next election (a question to which ‘Owen Smith’ is an unlikely answer). Five broad paths can be discerned.
One possible future path is a formal organisational split with moderate MPs giving up on Labour and going their own way or joining another party (e.g. the Liberal Democrats). Considering the lessons of the SDP, the current state of the Lib Dems and the unforgiving nature of the First Past the Post electoral system, this is an unlikely path. Splitters will know that they are unlikely to retain their seats under the banner of a new party or a still tainted Lib Dems, especially against what is likely to be a unified Conservative Party. Granted, a great many Labour MPs may view their chances in a Corbyn led party as equally grim and feel they have little to lose by trying to survive in a new party. However, a formal split is still a huge gamble, and one that history suggests is unlikely to lead anywhere good.
Another possibility is all out war between the Corbynistas and the moderate wing of the parliamentary party. This might involve Corbyn opponents in the Parliamentary Labour Party consistently trying to disrupt the current leadership’s policies – and Corbyn supporters in the local parties and some trade unions working to deselect ‘rebellious’ MPs (ironically a label usually used for Corbyn style MPs). This path would almost certainly leave only losers in a severely damaged and (even more) bitterly divided party.
An alternative to all-out war is an uncomfortable stalemate between the Corbyn camp and his opponents. In effect, this is what we have seen for most of the period since Corbyn was elected (I am not sure what we have seen so far is anything like as bad as proper all-out war would be). There have been reports in the press of former Shadow Cabinet member continuing to work on their old briefs – effectively forming a ‘Shadow Shadow Cabinet’, and ignoring Corbyn’s policy stances as much as possible. This is possibly the least-bad option realistically available to the party for the medium term.
There is of course also the possibility that Corbyn and his parliamentary opponents will reach some kind of accommodation that allows the party to move forward to the next election as a reasonably unified force. Exactly what such an accommodation would look like is perhaps difficult to imagine. However, a return to the Labour Party of some modicum of concern for electoral self-preservation cannot be ruled out, despite its evident absence since the 2015 election.
Finally, in the age of Corbyn-being-leader-of-the-Labour-Party, Donald-Trump-being-the-Republican-Presidential-Candidate and Brexit one has to at least mention the possibility of the completely unexpected happening (such as Owen Smith defeating Corbyn, Corbyn agreeing to step down and telling his supporters to united behind a new leader, or Corbyn surging in the polls and defeating Theresa May in 2020). Labour would perhaps be best advised not to rely on this option sorting things out, but one never knows (‘events dear boy, events’).
All told, some perfunctory attempts at reconciliation, followed by a tense stalemate – occasionally slipping into bouts of open fighting – culminating in a painful defeat at the next election is probably the most likely immediate future for the Labour Party.
Robin T Pettit is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at Kingston University. He tweets @RobinPettitt.
Image: Chris Becket CC BY-NC-ND
