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The Labour Party? You can’t live with it, and you can’t live without it. Debate about whether progressive change happens with or without Labour is as old as the hills. Since its formation, from the Independent Labour Party onwards, socialists have debated whether to change Labour or replace it.
This eternal debate has been given a shot in the arm by the possible, or even likely, creation of a new left party based around Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. What’s happening, why and what’s likely to be the result?
Politics like nature abhors a vacuum. Since 2020, under Keir Starmer, or more precisely under Morgan McSweeney, Labour hasn’t just veered right in values and policy terms in search of now mystic ‘Red Wall’ voters, but more importantly in terms of their narrow factional goals, have waged a relentless war not just to defeat the left in the party but to eradicate it.
By a miracle of political organising and determination, a tiny faction of hard right operators in Labour’s ranks, who were facing extinction under Corbyn and Momentum, tricked the party into backing their ‘Corbynism without Corbyn’ candidate before turning their fire on the very party members they had cynically courted. Now the job was to ensure that nothing like Corbynism could ever happen again – the tomb would be sealed.
If you are on the left, why would you stay in such a hostile environment? Not least when Greens and Muslim independents have shown what is possible at the last election, and left-wing Labour MPs we’re having the whip withdrawn for voting against government policies that would make the poor even poorer. But while a vacuum in politics is hard to ignore, it’s still a difficult space to fill effectively.
Our democratic system is built around a two-party model. The voting system is designed explicitly to punish any party outside of the duopoly by making it almost impossible for minor parties to turn votes into seats.
This duopoly is further embedded through the way parties are funded by the rich, the way parliament recognises and rewards His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and the way the media reports on politics as a battle between only two adversaries. It all adds up to party brand regime that looks more like Coke versus Pepsi than a genuine democratic choice.
It’s therefore no surprise that since Labour replaced the Liberal Democrats as the main centre-left alternative to the Conservatives almost 100 years ago, that no other party has broken the stranglehold.
The SDP came close in the 1980s but wilted under the pressure of first past the post. Change UK couldn’t resist what they saw as the vacuum to the right of Corbyn and flowered in the polls for a number of weeks before disintegrating. Scotland is of course different; there the SNP have made a historic breakthrough. And of course, Faragism in its various guises of UKIP, the Brexit Party and now Reform has dramatically impacted our nation, but is yet to lead a government.
So, what does this tell us? That the parliamentary two-party nut is very difficult to crack. And to do it requires remarkable levels of persistence and a big enough single issue to galvanise a substantial base in the country, Scottish independence for the SNP, Brexit for Nigel Farage. But then how to build from their gets really tough.
Where would the new left-wing party fit today? There is undoubtedly space to the left of Labour as is, in a host of cosmopolitan seats stocked with uber-liberals, public service workers, the precariat and racialised voters. This could be organised into a voting bloc. But breaking the stranglehold is not easy, not least because of course any new party adds to the fragmentation of left parties, hightening the danger of further splitting the progressive vote. But the first question is not whether socialists can work with others, but with each other.
Because the problem with any left-wing start-up is not so much content but culture. It seems that the underlying sentiment of much traditional left-wing politics is the belief that if only the right people were in charge, and sufficiently held to account, then you can have your revolutionary cake and eat it.
But even before the launch of any new party this urge to control has spilled into the open, as WhatsApp group exchanges have proved. The answer, it seems to disagreement is not dialogue and the development of a new shared consensus, but the deletion from the group of so-called ‘comrades’.
We should recall here that many of the people looking to establish this new party were nominally in control of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2019. They had or in effect were a new party. And not to put it too gently, they totally messed it up.
Yes, dealing with a recalcitrant bloc in the PLP and opposition in the media was never going to be easy – but such challenges were obvious from the start. The test was how to manoeuvre round them. From having the triumvirate of the leadership, the NEC and the then formidable power of Momentum, to losing everything so fast, takes some doing.
And yet there are few signs of self-reflection and learning and a lot of blame pinned on others. And now they go again. If they want it to work then maybe they should spend less time purging people from WhatsApp groups and more time looking at what people like Jamie Driscoll are doing with his Majority vehicle in the North East.
From a remote vantage point this looks like the hard but potentially fertile ground of building trust and relationships up from the community, not looking to further fragment the progressive vote, but working with existing parties and filling any gaps with a new party label that compliments what’s already there.
Negotiating the very real differences between some more socially conservative Muslim voters and uber-liberals, working out how to share and not split the vote with the Greens, these and other tensions, and even paradoxes, are going to have to be deftly handled.
Who knows what’s going to happen to British party politics? Nothing is certain and everything is volatile. Labour can still change, it does so on a now regular basis, a crisis like a war or a pandemic could yet save it or they might enter a Conservative like vortex of changing leaders in a desperate search for better poll ratings.
Farage is popular, but has he reached the celling of his support and given how brittle he is, will he fly or fall? The party system could permanently fragment and even shatter, or voters could be coerced back into the two-party camp with the hard sell of the lesser of two evils.
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But what is certain is that any really new party must be based on really new structures and culture. The model of the top-down party working to run a centralised and technocratic delivery machine is broken beyond repair.
The successful progressive party of the future, whether that’s a transformed old party, something totally new, or more likely an amalgamation and mash up of formal and informal politics, is going to have to mix professionalism and efficiency with pluralism, curiosity and imagination. It’s going to have to be as humble as it is bold.
More than anything it will need to be certain about the agility needed to operate in a highly uncertain world.