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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Muslim independents have shown what is possible at the last election, and left-wing Labour MPs we’re having the whip withdrawn for voting against government policies that would make the poor even poorer.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.
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