Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
Back in 2013, I authored a ConHome series on the Lost Tribes of British Politics. One of those tribes was the Labour Left – seemingly doomed to membership of the Labour Party, but with little influence within it.
And yet within two years, Jeremy Corbyn came from nowhere to win the party leadership. A year later, he saw off an attempt by the once-dominant Brownites to oust him. And a year after that, he came close to winning the 2017 general election, and secured the biggest increase in the Labour vote share since 1945.
Of course, he had a lot of help along the way. Ed Miliband, hen he was Labour leader, relaxed the membership rules and reduced the fees to let in hundreds of thousands of left-wing activists. Then, out of a misguided sense of fair play, moderate MPs fixed it for Corbyn to get on the leadership ballot.
They soon realised their error, but bungled the 2016 attempt to reverse it. In 2017, it was the Tories turn to help out by making such a collective horlicks of the snap election.
Fortunately, that proved to be the highwater mark for Corbynism. The dizzying rise of the Labour left was followed by an equally precipitous fall.
In the years between the 2017 and 2019, the shadow cabinet incubated a cuckoo-in-the-nest called Sir Keir Starmer, who turned Labour into a vehicle for the People’s Vote effort to cancel Brexit. This would have devastating consequences along the Red Wall. Meanwhile, the party tore itself apart over antisemitism and other charges of extremism.
The gains of the 2017 election were thereby undone in 2019, forcing Corbyn’s immediate resignation as party leader. What followed was a bitter internal debate over the causes of Labour’s defeat. The moderates put it down to Corbyn and Corbynism, while the Corbynites blamed the attempt to overturn the Leave vote.
Both sides were right, but the lefties lost the slanging match – not least because it was their own hero who’d allowed Starmer to lead the counter-Brexit crusade from inside the shadow cabinet.
Though he failed to secure a “People’s Vote”, Starmer’s two years of leading the Remain cause put him in pole position to become Labour leader. In the 2020 contest, he secured an easy victory over Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Corbynite candidate, and the soft-left Lisa Nandy.
Starmer did issue a list of ten pledges designed to assure party members that he wasn’t the second coming of Tony Blair; but if Corbyn-supporters imagined that this was firm promise to lead from the left, then that was astoundingly naïve.
Thus far, in his time as leader, he has sacked Long-Bailey from the shadow cabinet and demoted Nandy. He has brought back Brownites like Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn, while promoting Blairites such as Liz Kendall and Wes Streeting.
Worst of all (from a Corbynite perspective) he has removed the Labour whip from his “friend“, Corbyn, and also from Diane Abbott. The man who was nearly prime minister, and the woman who have been his home secretary, are unlikely to be MPs after the next election.
For Labour left cheerleaders like Owen Jones (who I once mentioned back in 2013 as an up-and-coming influencer) it’s all too much. He’s quitting the party after 24 years of membership – and he’s only 39.
Honestly, I don’t blame him. He and his comrades are the victims of a stitch-up for the ages, and it must be unbearable. The Labour left very nearly had it all, but then lost everything.
What makes it worse is that it’s their own stupid fault. The manic obsession with Israel; the knee-jerk anti-westernism; the wacky economics; Corbyn’s self-sabotaging reaction to the Salisbury poisonings; the political correctness; the failure to make the left-wing case for Brexit; and, above all, trusting Starmer. Unforced errors, the lot of them.
Sympathy with the left might not come naturally to us wicked Tories, but we too may soon learn what it’s like to snatch total defeat from the jaws of victory, and to do so within the space of five years at that.
The fate of the Corbynites also serves as a warning as to how not to recover from a devastating loss: the last thing you do when you’re on the floor is stay there.
In 1997, for instance, the Conservative Party was a decade away from recovery, but found an immediate purpose fighting to save the pound. It didn’t help us much at the next general election in 2001, but at least we had a reason to carry on regardless.
The Labour left (or, as in the case of Jones and many others, the ex-Labour left) also needs a reason to exist. One such purpose would be to give voters the option to vote for a genuinely socialist party.
Beyond a few splinter groups, that option does not exist in Britain. We have centre-left parties like Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the SNP. But while these are determined to bleed the market economy dry, they don’t want to replace it, no more than the flea wants to replace the dog.
In this respect, the UK is unusual. In most counties in Western Europe there are sizeable parties to the left of the centre-left. Indeed, there’s enough of them to form a grouping in the European Parliament that sits separately from the mainstream social democrats.
In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise has supplanted the Parti Socialiste as the biggest left-of-centre player; in Greece, SYRIZA even won an election (though was subsequently crushed by European Central Bank). Left-wing parties can make themselves power brokers in coalition governments, as in Spain.
It’s not inconceivable that a British socialist party with big-name leaders could win at least ten per cent of the vote. Of course, our electoral system makes it hard for challenger parties, whether left, right, or centre, to turn vote share into seats. But that doesn’t mean they can’t have an impact: just ask Rishi Sunak whether Reform UK is an irrelevant party right now.
If they were willing to unite and fight, then the democratic left could plausibly shake up British politics. They might at least give Starmer a reason to guard Labour’s left flank. As it is, he has no worries in that direction, which has the effect of pulling Labour rightwards.
There was speculation that Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project was the precursor to a fully-fledged party of the left. But now it seems that he won’t even run for Mayor of London. Meanwhile Jones is urging people like himself to vote for the Green Party.
The problem with that though is that not all big-G Greens are so-called watermelons (i.e. green on the outside, red on the inside). Some of them, especially those vying with Conservatives in the rural South, are mangoes (i.e. green on the outside, but Lib Dem yellow on the inside).
So why are self-described socialists throwing in their lot with an essentially bourgeois party?
It could be that they’re pretty bourgeois themselves these days, more concerned with radical chic than class struggle. Others might just prefer the purity of opposition than the prospect of real power. After all, the reason why they were so easily evicted from the Labour leadership is, perhaps, because they didn’t like it there. Corbyn never seemed to be having fun as Labour leader.
However, there’s a less comforting explanation for the apparent passivity of the Labour Left: not that they’re ready to lay down and die, but instead that they are laying low.
The latest MRP model from Survation shows Labour winning 468 seats, with a majority of 326. On anything like those numbers, Labour could effectively form its own opposition.
There is bound to be much backbench unhappiness given the fiscal limits that the next government will have to live under; the likes of John McDonnell (Corbyn’s shadow chancellor, but canny enough not get himself chucked out) can no doubt see the political opportunities that lie ahead.
Finally, let’s not forget the opportunities for left-wing activism that lie within the workings of the government machine. The radicals have done well enough during the last 14 years of Conservative government. Just think how much better they’ll do with Labour in charge.
The post Peter Franklin: There are lessons for the Tories in the precipitous downfall of the Labour left appeared first on Conservative Home.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Peter Franklin
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.conservativehome.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.