Thinking the
Unthinkable
by Les May
As the
delegates left the Labour conference after the result of the leadership
election was announced one of the people the BBC had assigned to cover the event
asked an interviewee ‘How will Corbyn’s centrist MPs react’.
Now
forgive me for asking but does not the whole history of the party, how it came
into existence and where it derives much of its support and funding
indicate that if it is anything at all it is a distinctly left of centre
party? If it isn’t and does not see its
future as being just that, then why does it exist at all?
As I
have pointed out before the whole locus of British politics has moved sharply
to the Right in the past thirty years.
Even Tory politicians like Ted Heath pursued policies which by
contemporary standards would be viewed as dangerously left wing. As William Keegan pointed out last year the
Tory press attacks Labours policies which are ‘far less radical than
those of the Attlee governments’.
One
thing that even Corbyn’s fiercest internal critics cannot deny is that he has
shifted the debate about what policies the Labour party should pursue sharply
to the Left. Both Angela Eagle and Owen
Smith realised at once that there were no votes in promoting or advocating the
Blairite policies. Apart from Smith’s
advocacy of a second referendum on leaving the EU he seems to have set out an
agenda very similar to that advocated by Corbyn.
But I
would urge a note of caution on both Corbyn supporters like myself and the ‘centrist’
MPs in the parliamentary Labour party.
Re-nationalising
the railways is a ‘no brainer’ to many Labour supporters but whether
that would improve peoples’ daily experience of train travel depends upon
whether you think that ownership is the problem or whether you think that it is
more a question of how the railways are run.
Is the
prime concern to run an ‘efficient’ service, i.e. an over optimised
service being run at the lowest possible cost, or is it to run the railways as
a public service. By the latter I mean
trains run sufficiently frequently and with sufficient seating to ensure that
commuting is not a misery, and that the present over complicated ticketing
arrangements will be abandoned and it will once again be possible to walk into
any station and book a train to anywhere in the country at any time.
If the
choice is for ‘railways as a public service’ re-nationalisation alone
will not do the trick. It needs a
recognition that there will be costs to the public purse.
The MPs
who voted to show that they had ‘no confidence’ in Corbyn seem to think
that it his leadership which is the major obstacle to winning the 2020
election. What they fail to recognise is
that we no longer live in a predominantly two or sometimes three party
political world. Like it or not we can no longer rely on a Scottish Labour vote
and in England we now live in a five party world, Labour, Tory, Liberal, Green
and UKIP. Dividing the total vote in
this way and factoring in the likely effects of the upcoming boundary changes
suggests to me that there is a real danger that the Tories will win
irrespective of who is Labour leader.
Preventing
this may mean that Labour MPs and party members have to ‘think the
unthinkable’, and both form a united front against the Tories and abandon
uncritical support for the present ‘first past the post’ electoral
system which it has been argued favours centrist policies designed to attract
‘swing’ voters in a few key constituencies.
I’d love
to think that Labour could get the sort of electoral mandate that Attlee’s 1945
government had, but it’s just not going to happen. Recognising this I can either ‘keep the
faith’ or become a dissenter and run the risk of being called a ‘traitor
to socialism’. As I live in the real
world and not a fantasy world I’ll choose the latter.
One of
the claimed advantages of the ‘first past the post system’ is that it
keeps the link between the individual MP and the voters, i.e. you vote for an
MP first and the party second. But think
on this. I’m likely to be moved into the
Rochdale constituency under the boundary changes. At present the MP is Simon Danczuk and if
Rochdale Labour party endorses him for the 2020 election, pigs will fly before
I’ll vote for him. And I’m not alone.
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