After recording their worst result in a general election since 1935, returning just 202 MPs to parliament in December 2019, the Labour Party is to convene a commission into what went wrong.
The commission will be run by Labour Together, a member’s group with the Canute like task of promoting unity in the party. It will be chaired by former shadow Education Secretary Lucy Powell and will include former leader Ed Milliband.
The commission will report back to whoever wins the leadership contest, the runners and riders for which will emerge early in the new year.
Both Powell and Milliband have the Labour Party in their blood and have shown polite, compared to many of their colleagues, misgivings about the direction under Jeremy Corbyn. Powell was a leadership contender in 2015 and despite his bacon sandwich related misfortunes and the bizarre decision to have the party’s policy pledges carved onto a giant tombstone in the closing days of the 2015 election Ed Milliband owns one of the sharpest brains on either side of the house.
The commission will hear evidence from the 59 former MPs who lost their seats in December and hold focus groups for party members. It is, of course, good to hear what the view looks like from inside the tent, though it might be somewhat obscured given that said tent has just been blown down by a perfect storm.
As a corrective I’d like to offer my own view based on having been a member of the Labour Party between 2001 and 2010. One who was driven away by many of the issues that have led them to this sorry point.
The first thing that must be said is that Jeremy Corbyn made some serious mistakes and so is in many ways the author of his own misfortunes. These include not taking a position on Brexit, failing to respond adequately to accusations of anti-Semitism in the party and relying too heavily on support form the hard left.
This last group, in the shape of Momentum, despite near fanatical loyalty to Corbyn did him few practical favours. Many entered the party by paying their £3 fee as supporters with the purpose of voting in a left-wing leader and then stuck around to pick fights with the Blairites. They also brought with them the familiar political narrative of the far left that winning elections is less important than maintaining ideological purity.
The answer to the mess that has been created is, according to former prime minister Tony Blair, is to reject ‘Corbynism’ and for the party to return to the centre ground. Preferably under a leader cast in his image.
Advice from a three-time election winner is always going to be alluring to a part reeling from losing four elections in a row. The awkward thing is though that making such a journey would be at best a false hope offering only ineffectual mediocrity; at worst it could be the path to disaster.
Many of the problems that boiled over in 2019 could be seen when I left the party in 2010. In fact, they were around long before then, I remember in 2005 the year the saw Blair win his last election that members should ‘hold their noses’ and vote for a party they didn’t much like for rear of getting something worse in its place.
The biggest of these problems is the disconnect between the party elite in London and grassroots members in what the former probably think of as the ‘provinces. It is a relationship based on a mixture of paranoia and paternalism that has seethed out of sight for decades until the pressure got too great and resulted in an explosion.
The paranoid belief of New Labour that if given the slightest say in making policy grassroots members would embrace revolutionary Marxism led to the ideological hollowing out of the party. Unlike the Tories who believe in power and wealth and nothing else the Labour Party must believe in something to have any purpose; when it doesn’t it drifts about in the doldrums desperately trying to catch the wind of whatever is popular now.
On a practical level the control freakery of New Labour led to the collapse of local parties, branches were swept up into tame CLP’s, all the better to be controlled by regional offices who often acted like colonial administrators. As a result, ties with communities that had taken decades to create were severed at a stroke.
Local Labour parties also lost control over the selection of candidates, this led to legions of eager young men and women with impeccable metropolitan credential being ‘parachuted’ into communities they didn’t understand; many went on to compound things by not even trying to do so.
This led to the embitterment of individuals and whole communities who felt their loyalty to the Labour Party had been taken for granted. The 2016 referendum on leaving the EU provided the catalyst for their resentment to be turned into rage.
Now as it reels from another defeat at the polls the Labour Party must accept some truths that will be awkward for all sides of its internal divisions to accept.
The first is that for all his mistakes Jeremy Corbyn got one important thing right, he gave the Labour Party back its sense of being different. If the hard left and the Blairites had been able to have a mature dialogue rather than a squabble for supremacy that might have translated into the purpose the party so badly needs.
Second, this isn’t the 1990’s, today the centre ground will not hold. Despite his love of larking about for the cameras and profession of being a ‘one nation Tory’ Boris Johnson has led his party sharply to the right. An opposition that promises to follow much the same sort of policies, but to do so in a ‘kinder’ way; will be ineffective and irrelevant.
The third and maybe most awkward truth takes the form of a question, in 2019 just what is the Labour Party for? I can get a dozen books out of the library telling me about its past; but neither I nor many people who are still members have a clue about its future.
Whoever wins the leadership election and gets to read the report of this commission might have to recognise that his or her first task may have to be thinking seriously about dissolving the Labour Party and forming a new progressive one in its place.
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