Watching Labour self-destruct puts us all in peril
Corbyn yearned for failure. He hated those not complicit in his fantasies
It is an anxious time for the former Labour Party voter, watching a once great movement fall to squabbles that will not move an electorate. Irresponsible Tories mock Labour’s anguish, but an effective opposition is necessary. Without it, Britain is essentially a one-party state. What fool wants that?
Labour is 120 this week and Tony Blair, the saviour they loathe – the only living Labour leader to win an election – rose to plead with his party not to occupy a country of its own imaginings, but to deal with the Britain that is. Can we ask any less of politicians, who are not allowed the emotional freedom of novelists, and should not seek it?
No one is more dangerous than a failed artist, and Corbyn always struck me more as an artist painting a utopia than a politician. He seemed to yearn for failure. And how he hated those who would not be complicit in his fantasies. Hatred is not an effective political weapon but, despite this – or possibly because of it – many people were hated out of the Labour Party.
Labour’s potential supporters deserve better but sometimes I think we are, to much of the Labour leadership, either something to be despised or something they have invented, a foil to their own personal fantasies of renewal.
They talk about socialism. I do not know if they mean it, or if it is another castle on a cloud – and if they don’t mean it, it is mad to say it – but it is anathema to the electorate. Is socialism possible in the United Kingdom, a constitutional monarchy? I can imagine social democracy thriving, and progressive taxation gaining majority support – but socialism?
There is a point when idealism becomes vanity and Labour chose that when it elected Jeremy Corbyn. It was a kind of madness. Now he is defeated, but still fantasises about being made foreign secretary, as if seeking a new definition of hubris.
Much of the party remains in similar denial, preferring to lament the conspiracies that felled them in their own minds, rather than admit to failure. This is terrifying for the reluctant Tory and the would-be Labour voter, who would defend the BBC and the judiciary and views immigration as a benefit. They do not even blame the defeat on Corbyn himself, but on centrists, the media and Jews (or, rather, Zionists).
Jess Phillips MP, who could have reached floating voters – she is practical and exudes decency, which is taken for impurity by the Corbynites – quit the contest. Rebecca Long-Bailey is a blank, mouthing Corbyn’s stale words. She recently supported a bill of trans rights, which was too violently worded to convince the unconvinced of its reasonableness; rather, it led to another crisis as some Labour women called on the party to #ExpelMe for non-compliance.
Lisa Nandy is more promising, but she will fail, as is Sir Keir Starmer, who is careful to pay tribute to the lunatics. This may bespeak the kind of realism that Labour needs, but if he is successful, it may turn into a prison yet; what leader can have agency when he is held hostage? For the faithful, only Long-Bailey, who gave 10 out of 10 to Corbyn’s leadership, will do, and I expect she will mark herself just as kindly.
It is almost too obvious to write, but successful political movements draw support from beyond a base; activists and voters are not the same thing. I write this only because many Labour activists seem to have forgotten it, and practise instead their competitive purity, which is more suited to the psychoanalyst’s office than a parliamentary chamber.
For many of these bourgeois socialists, the election was unserious. They should have campaigned in winnable marginals. Rather, they tried to unseat Boris Johnson in Uxbridge. They don’t care about controlling the country, as the writer Nick Cohen says; perhaps they have just enough self-awareness to be frightened of it. They only care about controlling the Left, and that is, when you consider the people who need them, wicked.
Much of the competitive purity is to do with the fashionable wokeness and I think that is lazy. Convincing your enemy to support you is hard work. It requires empathy and a searching of yourself. It requires sacrifice.
It is true that Labour must do more to convince the media that it is fit to govern. It is also true that much of the media treat politics, as the Corbynites do, as a game, but it is not a plot. The media is more reactive to its readers’ desires than they think; if there was appetite for socialism, we would cover it.
Benjamin Disraeli said the state moves slowly. He moved from radicalism – he was the only MP to support the Chartists – to a High Toryism that passed great reforming legislation, to the benefit of many, so he would know. If many look to Labour now, they look in vain.