Jeremy Corbyn was always going to win the latest Labour leadership contest. Less than a year after his first victory, Corbyn and his people have again captured the commanding heights of Europe’s biggest political party and they have done so fair and square.
In large part, the Labour Party is now controlled by people who have dedicated their political lives to fighting and campaigning against it. An extraordinary development, unprecedented in any western democracy, but ‘them’s the rules’…
Corbyn’s successive victories are the legacy of Ed Miliband’s leadership: a toxic bequest that has yet to be fully revealed. For Labour, there is every reason to believe that the worst is yet to come.
A riven party is now assessing calls for ‘unity’ from all sides. Such calls are legitimate and to be expected, yet how ‘unity’ in the Labour Party today can be achieved, what it would look like and what it would mean, is as difficult to define as Brexit.
Having always rejected loyalty and party unity as an unknown backbencher, it’s hard for the general voting public, let alone Labour Members of Parliament, to take Jeremy’s calls for unity seriously.
Combined with a 12-month track record of saying one thing and doing the precise opposite, the awkward and embarrassing emergence of an ‘enemies list’ of Labour MPs produced by his office and the nods and winks towards deselection after three decades of mutiny that never elicited the same threat, Labour MPs can be forgiven for treating such calls with suspicion.
Unity is possible, it is desirable, and, for both supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith alike, it will surely have to be conditional.
For the mainstream wing of the party encompassing Attlee/Bevan/Wilson/ Healey/Crossland/Castle/Callaghan/Smith/Kinnock/Blair/Brown, this condition is shadow cabinet elections in which the PLP is the electorate. Jeremy Corbyn’s call for unity will be clearly authenticated should this happen.
Come what may, there will be no split in the Labour Party. Many of the thousands who have joined the party to support Corbyn will be persuaded that the traditional parliamentary, social and democratic traditions of Labour are the party’s best (and only) route back to power. How long this will take, none can be certain.
Indeed, it is precisely those people who will be critical in ensuring that the party doesn’t split.
Undoubtedly, those who joined the party to pursue the corrosive purity of a Socialist Elysium built upon the broken bones of purged and hated Blairites have no regard for the mainstream Labour voters switching their support from the party in their millions. But thousands of those who joined to support Corbyn will care and sooner or later – should they hang around – they will want to arrest the decline. These people are critical, central, to the future of the Labour Party as an election- winning force.
The truth is that Harold Wilson’s ‘broad church’ is Labour’s winning template, but right now, the party isn’t a broad church, it’s a coalition of what appears to look and feel like two separate political parties.
In the maelstrom surrounding Corbyn’s latest victory, a critical fact has gone largely unacknowledged. This is that those Labour members who supported Owen Smith represent what can now be described as the second biggest political party in Britain: a progressive centre-left body of 200,000 people who do not subscribe to the worldview of Corbyn and McDonnell.
To all intents and purposes, this is the pre-2015 Labour Party. This section of the party will not disappear; as new party members gradually learn the value of electoral victory and the futility of protest, this section will only grow. As a result, the ‘coalition’ will once again become the ‘broad church’.
How long before this point is reached is anyone’s guess. For now, no matter. Unity is there for the taking; but Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonell have to want it.
The election of the shadow cabinet by the PLP is a litmus test. Watch this space.