Limehouse: so much to answer for. When sensible people in Britain's Labour party wonder what to do about Jeremy Corbyn, their fantastically unelectable leader, the idea of formal separation makes them shiver with memories of riverside east London. There, 35 years ago, a political quartet including Roy Jenkins, a liberal home secretary of the 1960s, left an increasingly strident Labour to form the Social Democratic party.
In the folklore of the left, this project was an act of desertion that fragmented the anti-Thatcher vote. Today, even MPs of a Jenkins-ite bent curse the infidelity and any prospect of a repetition.
Do not tell them that the bend in the Thames at Limehouse was for centuries called Cuckold’s Point. Their absolute commitment to togetherness would make sense if they had an internal solution to the Corbyn problem. They need to remove him, install someone much better and purge the zealots who have changed the texture of Labour’s grass roots for the worse over the past year. The first of these goals is do-able; the second is not because the third is so hard.
No confidence
Eighty per cent of his MPs expressed no confidence in Corbyn last week but, with an eye on those loyal activists, he is toughing it out. If MPs depose him, he or his treasury spokesman, John McDonnell, may be able to stand again and win. That could be enough to finish the party.
Even if the pair are locked out, the new leader will have to be a difference-splitter who squares the parliamentary party with the bolshie members and the conflicted trade unions. And so we are asked to summon enthusiasm for Angela Eagle, a smart and conscientious MP, but one whose 24 years in parliament may have been spent in cryogenic suspension for all the impact she has had on national consciousness. She would offer voters the kind of soft-left politics that earned Labour a beating 14 months ago.
The plot against Corbyn is not just creeping along pathetically, then, it is creeping along pathetically towards a mediocre destination. If the only victim were Labour itself, there would no pity in this. But the party’s retirement from serious politics allows a riven Conservative government on a rightwing trajectory to go unopposed.
It also leaves the 48 per cent of voters who wanted to remain in the EU without a UK-wide party of any stature to get behind. By all means, Labour MPs must try to remove Corbyn and replace him with a plausible prime minister. But if the mission fails, political logic and the national interest both argue for a breakaway, which might unfold as follows.
The 170-plus MPs who repudiated their leader last week would resign the Labour whip and sit as a new party of the pro-European centre left under leadership of their choosing. As the largest non-government group in the House of Commons, they would constitute the new official opposition, with all the privileges that entails. If Corbyn’s residual Labour had fewer MPs than the Scottish National party’s 54, its struggle for visibility would be hopeless.
From its parliamentary base the new party would try to recruit members. Since the referendum, the most dispossessed voters have been the 16 million who wanted continuity. If the party persuaded one in 100 of them to pay a nominal subscription, it would outnumber the Tories. Moderate Labour activists and staff would defect. Business donors, if not unions, would have an incentive to sustain the project in its precarious infancy.
Credible policies
The Liberal Democrats would be invited to merge or associate. With only eight MPs, they would be myopic churls to refuse. The hard left would keep the Labour name and infrastructure, but these earthly things matter less than credible policies and people. The new party would have those. Instead of 200 simultaneous byelections, it would stand at the next general election and ask the new prime minister, who will be chosen by just 150,000 Tories in the coming weeks, to hold it as soon as possible. The trauma of the
Limehouse Declaration
– under which Jenkins and his colleagues
David Owen
,
Shirley Williams
and
Bill Rodgers
signalled their intention to leave the party – has paralysed Labour moderates. But if they are going to be cowed by history, they should get that history right. In the end, the SDP won, and won big.
The past four prime ministers – John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron – have tried to blend a free economy, a substantial state, cultural looseness and EU membership. Jenkins sensed where the country was going, just too early. Last month's eruption has broken his consensus but it still commands half of Britons. A new party must speak for them.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016