By BAGEHOT
OWEN SMITH was never the front-runner in Labour’s leadership contest. But moderates in the party hoped that he would at least begin the process of clipping away at the mighty mandate, 59% of vote, that accrued to Jeremy Corbyn last year. Perhaps this could be shaved to nearer 50%. And perhaps, in one of the three voter categories—full members, registered supporters and affiliates (mostly union members)—he could even be beaten.
After all, the last twelve months have seen Labour wade progressively farther into a moral and electoral swamp. Mr Corbyn was a dismally poor cheerleader for Britain’s continued EU membership. Today the country is without a functioning opposition. The rules of the leadership contest, too, should have helped Mr Smith: some of Mr Corbyn’s supporters had been prevented from voting, either because they signed up too late or because, having made offensive or anti-Labour comments on social media, they had been “purged”—as some of his backers melodramatically describe the party’s vetting processes. Surely, but surely, the moderates could put a dent in Mr Corbyn’s armour?
No, came the answer. In Liverpool, where Labour’s conference begins tomorrow, it has just been announced that Mr Corbyn has defeated Mr Smith with 61.8% of the vote. Labour’s leader won resoundingly in every section of the party’s electorate. In his acceptance speech he talked of unity: “things are often said in the heat of the debate on all sides that we later regret”, he said in soothing tones: “As far as I’m concerned the slate is wiped clean from today.” In their reaction afterwards many Labour MPs—willing, until recently, to acknowledge frankly what an unmitigated car crash Mr Corbyn’s tenure has been—fell dutifully into line; their glassy-eyed waffle about “taking the fight to the Tories” clashing more than a little with the self-mutilating decision their party had just made.
Mr Smith’s defeat speaks to quite how stuffed the party is. Early in the contest he looked like the moderates’ best hope. He hails from the centre-left of the party rather than its right so appeared capable of winning a hearing, at least, from Mr Corbyn’s fans. He was relatively unknown and thus free of the political baggage burdening Angela Eagle, his rival for the moderate candidacy whose vote for the Iraq invasion was particularly toxic among the grass roots. If anyone could broker a provisional cease-fire between the Labour base and reality, it seemed to be he.
In practice it was not. Mr Smith was energetic and had a capable campaign team. He toured the country. He had well-run events and well crafted speeches. But there were three problems. First, he was gaffe-prone: suggesting that Britain should negotiate with Islamic State, for example, and letting slip several disagreeably macho comments, like one in which he looked forward to “smashing” Theresa May “back on her heels”.
Second, his compromise was the worst of both worlds. He pitched too far left to seem conventionally electable but not far enough left to capture some of Mr Corbyn’s idealistic appeal. His criticisms mostly concerned the Labour leader’s lack of managerial and presentational smarts. Why, lefties asked, vote for Diet Corbyn when the full-fat variety is available?
Third, and most fundamentally, efforts in the run-up to the race to recruit new, moderate voters to Labour’s electorate (that is, to do on the party’s centrist flank what the Corbynites had done so effectively on its left-wing one) were too little, too late. Saving Labour, an outfit established to do just this, did not have the time or network needed to rival the Corbynite-Momentum juggernaut. Mr Corbyn’s well-attended rallies around Britain confirmed that, while most voters have a low or no opinion of him, a minority small enough to be near-irrelevant in national elections but large enough to be near-hegemonic in internal Labour ones sees him as a sort of messiah.
What next? For all the talk of unity, Mr Corbyn will certainly press his new advantage. For example, he wants to put more policy-making power in the hands of members. There has been talk—denied by the leadership—of plans to move against one or both of Tom Watson, the deputy leader, and Iain McNicol, the general secretary. A push by Labour MPs to seize control of shadow cabinet appointments will likely be resisted. Plenty of MPs, nervously eyeing coming re-selection battles, will bow their heads and shuffle back into the shadow cabinet. The result: a Labour Party yet further alienated from ordinary voters and a Britain yet further deprived of the effective opposition it so badly needs.
It may be that the party will need to split in the future. While acknowledging that moderates currently have no appetite for it, I have rehearsed the arguments for such a move on this blog before: not least the obvious fact that with every month Mr Corbyn is leader, the task of one day undoing the damage he has caused spirals farther towards impossibility. In a spirited blog post Paul Mason, one of his media cheerleaders, even suggested that my proposals hinted at some new “coup” being cooked up by Labour’s social democratic wing. As will be plain to see in the coming days, no such plotting was ever afoot.
I remain convinced that Labour’s MPs may later be forced by circumstances to take this route. But for now they should make at least one more big push to take back the party and make it moral, effective and electable once more. My view on this has been changed by closer study of the severe deficiencies of Mr Smith’s candidacy—and of the Saving Labour-led recruitment campaign. Mr Smith is a decent man with decent advisers. But it was, in retrospect, wrong to assume that a candidate offering a pale replica of Mr Corbyn’s own policies and a last-minute push for centre-left recruits represented the best challenge moderates could mount. They can do better. That despite these limitations Mr Smith’s candidacy secured 38.2% of votes suggests that there is still a sliver of hope; hope that a better-planned, better-fronted, better-thought-out challenge can succeed before Mr Corbyn has the time and strength to wreck Labour for good.
That means finding a good candidate—or ideally, candidates—and most of all staging the mother of all recruitment campaigns. It means a degree of intellectual and institutional renewal on Labour’s centrist wing. It means forging a deep, broad network capable of attracting to the party the sort of pragmatic, centre-left types who want to see a sensible, competitive Labour capable of winning power and exercising it impactfully. Work on such a network, building on initiatives like Saving Labour, must start today and draw inspiration from (adapting, not copying) primary-winning movements elsewhere like that of Barack Obama in 2008 and Matteo Renzi in 2013. It is not yet clear when the opportunity for a new, good-as-can-be challenge to Mr Corbyn will come: perhaps after the party’s inevitably unimpressive results in the local elections of 2017 or 2018, or after a Labour rout at an early election called by Mrs May. But when it does come, the moderates must be ready.
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