The Labour Party is in the
biggest mess in its history, which is particularly noteworthy given that we are
only two decades on from arguably its political zenith with Tony Blair's
landslide election victory in 1997.
Currently John McDonnell is
accusing leadership challenger Owen Smith of backing a Labour split, when in
actuality it is the persistence and tenacity of Corbyn as leader that would
most likely cause a split.
Either way, a split would
be absolutely disastrous for the Labour Party, because in terms of obtaining a
majority in General Elections it would hand the initiative to the Tories for the
foreseeable future.
The breakdown of the
party's problems is underpinned by the fact that Labour consists of broadly three
groups. They are:
Group 1) The
Parliamentary party itself
Group 2) The
party members and union members
Group 3) The
rest of the Labour voting population
The first group consists
of the 230 Labour MPs, most of whose primary concern is having a job and
receiving their salary for being an MP, and most of whom are not Corbynites.
Most Labour MPs hover around the centre-left.
The second group are
mostly Corbynites, and really do want Corbyn's brand of socialism brought into
this country. They are campaigning hard and being very vocal in their unbending
support for Corbyn. Naturally, being in their hundreds of thousands, group two
is considerably larger than group one.
The third group, and by
far the largest number of people out of the three groups, consists of everyone
else that votes Labour up and down the country. In the past couple of decades
the majority of this group seem to be more aligned with group 1 than group 2 -
that is, they are fairly socially conservative, and are more likely to want to
embrace a freer market socialism than Corbynites.
All that is quite commonly
known - the members (growing in their thousands) are all-out for Corbyn, and as
they have the ultimate vote, look likely to keep voting him in until the next
election. MPs, on the other hand, feel certain (with justification, I'd suggest)
that under Corbyn Labour has zero chance of winning an election, so will do all
they can to adopt a position contrary to that of their members and oppose
Corbyn.
So it seems we have the
irresistible force of the majority of Labour MPs saying they will not support
Corbyn, up against the immovable object of Corbyn saying he won't betray the
members by resigning. What isn't so clear is quite how the landscape lies in
terms of those that vote Labour up and down the country.
Those voters have seen so
much change to the party's structure and composition in the past 18 months,
it's unclear how the landscape is going to change, particularly as we have at
least seven
classes in Britain nowadays, and the mainstream parties are so alike these
days it's a lot easier to get votes off each other (even UKIP can get votes of
Labour these days).
Jeremy Corbyn wants a full
fat socialist revolution; Owen Smith, his challenger, wants a socialist
revolution-lite. Both have dangerous ideas.
We need a socialist
revolution to about the same extent that biological evolution needs a young
earth creationism revolution; that astronomy needs an astrology revolution;
that the caloric theory of combustion needs a phlogiston revolution; and that
the Copernican view of the solar system needs a Ptolemaic revolution - in other
words, it's not what we need.
What's needed is for
people to have better knowledge of the thing that's true and factual and
beneficial to the world, not more of the thing that puts obstacles in the way
to those pursuits.
