London
The only thing less impressive than the backing for Jeremy Corbyn inside Britain’s Labour Party is its opposition to him. When Corbyn won his shock bid for the leadership of the party in September, it seemed unlikely that a man who started with the support of fewer than 20 Labour MPs would hold the job for long. But now, the chances he’ll be ousted soon are dropping.
Meeting with Corbyn’s opponents inside the party is a dispiriting experience. Blairites all, they give the impression of being short on policy ideas as well as constructive plans for opposition, and of being on a slow journey past anger and denial toward something that looks uncomfortably like acquiescence, though certainly not acceptance. So much has changed that it’s hard to believe that Blair was Prime Minister less than a decade ago.
On the surface, it would seem to be Corbyn who’s in trouble. A oft-leaked and ultimately shambolic January reshuffle of his leadership team demonstrated only that the pool of Labour talent at his disposal is shallow and in need of chlorination. What will likely trouble Corbyn more is that – reportedly because of the threat of mass resignations from his own shadow cabinet — he was unable to sack Hilary Benn, the Shadow Foreign Secretary whose December speech in support of bombing ISIS created a momentary stir in the party that was once the political home to men of character like Ernest Bevin.
Other signs of Corbyn’s weakness aren’t hard to find. His twisting evasions on defense policy would trouble a lesser man: a committed opponent of Britain’s own nuclear deterrent (he has much less to say about Iran, China, Russia, or North Korea), he has resorted to the suggestion that Britain should keep its nuclear submarines on patrol, but without their Trident missiles. Militarily, this is folly; politically, it’s merely an effort to persuade the unions that unilateral disarmament doesn’t mean you need to stop paying union members to build submarines.
But the problem is that there appears to be little Corbyn’s opponents can do stop him. A few months ago, the talk in Labour circles was of the possibility – stated to me then as a certainty – that Labour moderates would jump, or be pushed, into forming a new center party, on the lines of the Social Democratic Party of the early 1980s. But the reality is that new parties rarely succeed, and the fate of the SDLP itself is a warning against further such efforts.
Then for a while the concern was that Labour’s moderates would find themselves under attack from Corbynites in their constituencies – a particularly pressing concern in this parliament, which is likely to redraw Britain’s parliamentary boundaries and give the radicals a better than normal opportunity to challenge the re-selection of current MPs for the new seats. Local challenges certainly can’t be ruled out – one of the over-looked strengths of Corbyn’s hard-left supporters is their fascination with the more machine-like aspects of party politics – but at least now the threat of a deselection war has also faded away.
The reason for this is simple: Corbyn is winning, and therefore has no need to declare war, at least not immediately. Tactical compromises like Benn’s retention don’t affect the big picture, which is that there is no clear way to remove Corbyn, no likely candidate to replace him, and no support within the party members who elected him for supplanting him. The latter irony is particularly potent: for years, the question was whether Labour’s left-wing MPs adequately represented their supporters. Now, the situation is clear: it’s Labour’s MPs who, at least comparatively speaking, are the moderates. The pressure is on them to accommodate Corbyn, not the other way round. The only man who can make Corbyn go is Corbyn himself.
A lot of nonsense is occasionally talked about how loyalty is the secret weapon of the Conservative Party. After the successive defenestrations of Margaret Thatcher, William Hague, and Iain Duncan Smith in the last century, this is clearly rot. Actually, loyalty is the secret weapon of the Labour Party: secret because no one notices it, in spite of the fact that the last time Labour removed a party leader before he lost an election, won one, or died was back in 1935 when it dumped George Lansbury. Unless Labour pulls another Lansbury, the chances that Corbyn will get his crack at leading the party into the 2020 general election are rising.
Corbyn’s odds are improved by the fact that Labour’s process for removing a party leader requires an actual challenger, not just the loss of a vote of confidence. The career prospects of an unsuccessful challenger are poor, but since no obvious challenger exists – with the doubtful exception of Benn himself — this is not a particularly relevant consideration. Indeed, Corbyn won in large part because his three opponents in the Labour leadership race were either second-tier, followers of Gordon Brown, or, in the case of Liz Kendall, a junior Blairite. No new Blairite candidates have emerged since last May, and right now none look likely to do so.
The unexpected Labour defeat in 2015 has pushed the party back into its safest – i.e. most left wing – seats, which further weakens the party’s talent pool and insulates Corbyn from challenge: Corbyn may not have much actual backing inside Parliament, and the discontent is obviously real, but its MPs are much more like him ideologically than they were a decade ago. If the challenge doesn’t come by the next Labour Party Conference in September – which is widely expected to change the rules to ensure that, in the event of a challenge, the party’s leader (i.e. Corbyn) would automatically appear on the ballot – it is hard to see how or when it can come.
That’s because, in spite of the fact that Labour is behind in the polls, and Corbyn faces the virtually united skepticism of the press, he’s got the backing of the party members who put him in the job. Their point of view is simple: the Labour Party exists not to govern, or to advance the national interest, or even to defend the working class. It exists in order to not be the Conservative Party. One Labour insider told me that while the party itself found that it lost in 2015 because it was viewed as too profligate, and too generous to welfare recipients and immigrants, its hard core hated above all the accusation that it was ‘Tory-lite.’ They would rather lose in left-wing purity than compromise and win.
There is obviously a comparison here to Donald Trump’s supporters, who when polled claim to care less about beating the Democrats than they do about winning the Republican nomination for their man. But Corbyn’s position is better. His triumph is scaring the remaining moderates out of Labour, while Blairite MPs are likely to stand down even if they are not thrown out. Labour’s system for picking its leader combines the best (or perhaps the worst) elements of both American and British politics: it’s effectively a primary among party members – but it takes very little to join the party, provided you want to do so. Corbyn’s views run off the moderates, while the system limits the right to vote to the radicals he attracts. This is a strong position.
As a result, Labour’s big beasts appear to be coming to terms with Corbyn. A sign of the times came this weekend, when John Prescott – deputy PM under Blair – attacked journalist Andrew Marr for conducting a supposedly unfair interview of Corbyn. If asking Corbyn for his views on matters such as Trident, the Falklands, and the minimum wage is unfair, then Marr was indeed wrong. But for those who think that questions should be a bit tougher than tissue paper, the point of Prescott’s outburst was clear: since Corbyn’s not going anywhere, it’s time to get behind Labour’s leader—not necessarily in agreement, but at least in acceptance.
True, he seems unlikely to win. But with the issue of Europe ready, as always, to trip up the Tories, and the likelihood growing that the next four years will see another recession, it’s actually far from unthinkable that he could pull through. As 2015 demonstrated, you hold elections because you don’t know how they’ll turn out.
Really, Labour’s fundamental problem isn’t Jeremy Corbyn. It’s that, like most of the West’s other social democratic parties, it doesn’t appear to have any persuasive responses to the challenges of globalization. One of the more dispiriting columns I read after last May’s election was by David Miliband (brother of defeated Labour leader Ed), who, by way of making the case for Kendall and after acknowledging the need to respond to globalization, confessed his pride that Labour, after a hundred years of effort, had finally brought in a minimum wage under Blair.
That pretty much says it all: the case for mainstream Labour rests in their ability to enact, after a century of effort, a measure that, if it doesn’t actually destroy jobs, does nothing to address any of the actual challenges that Britain and its people face. A minimum wage, like that other great liberal shibboleth of taxing the rich to pay for more welfare, doesn’t increase productivity, reduce regulations that impede housing construction, or improve education, to name only three of Britain’s actual problems. In the face of such a hopeless plea, perhaps it’s no surprise that Corbyn won. He’s not offering answers, but then, neither is anyone else, and at least he’s angry.
I refuse to believe that Labour will permanently be the party of Corbyn. There is too much in its tradition that says otherwise, and both the nation and the Tories badly need a better opposition – the former because Labour might win, the latter to keep them disciplined. But right now, there is no sign that sensible Labour is going to triumph. Nor, sadly, is there any sign that it deserves to.
Ted R. Bromund is the senior research fellow in Anglo-American relations at the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.
