On February
27, 1900, in a Christian meeting hall near London's Smithfield Market, a
group of political activists agreed to campaign for 'a distinct Labour
group in Parliament' which would, they hoped, represent the interests of
the British working classes.
For
the Labour Party, the following 116 years brought plenty of highs. In
1924 the party had its first Prime Minister in Ramsay MacDonald, the
illegitimate son of a Scottish housemaid.
In
1945, a post-war electoral landslide brought to power Clement Attlee,
whose government built the modern welfare state, founded the NHS and
helped to establish the Nato alliance that won the Cold War.
In
the Sixties, Harold Wilson abolished hanging, legalised homosexuality
and set up the Open University. In 1997, another landslide took Tony
Blair into Downing Street, where, for all his faults, he secured peace
in Northern Ireland, devolved power to Scotland and Wales, and staked
his claim to the political centre-ground.
A
deputation of unemployed men from the North of England on their march to
London to protest against the lack of work in Northern England in 1936
At
noon today, barring a miracle, Jeremy Corbyn will be re-elected as
Labour leader. And at that moment, the party set up by those patriotic,
public-spirited men in February 1900 will cease to exist as a serious
political force.
At
some basic level, Labour's leadership campaign, fought this summer in
an atmosphere of staggeringly poisonous bitterness and recrimination,
has been a complete waste of time.
With
the party's membership trapped in an abyss of self-delusion and
self-regard, the result was a foregone conclusion even before the
contest began.
The
challenger, Owen Smith, deserves considerable credit for stepping up to
take on Mr Corbyn at a time when his better-known colleagues shied
away. But he has not really been up to it, and I suspect he knows it.
For
the party itself, Mr Corbyn's re-election will be nothing short of a
tragedy. The miners, engineers and railwaymen who were at that first
meeting in central London 116 years ago would be horrified to see what
has happened to their party.
And
even if you didn't vote Labour in 2015 — in fact, even if you've never
voted Labour in your life — I think you should be horrified, too.
Yes,
the name will live on, as will the remnants of the party organisation.
Most of the MPs, though, remain unreconciled to a man they regard as
utterly unfit to lead their party, let alone to become Prime Minister of
this country.
+4
Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn hold up signs and shout during Momentum's 'Keep Corbyn' rally outside the Houses of Parliament
S till, Jeremy Corbyn can console himself with his army of 500,000 members. And what an army!
Idealistic
students who will never vote, spoiled public schoolboys with more money
than sense, academic professors who rarely step outside the seminar
room, trade union barons whose empires shrivel by the day — it includes
extremists, cranks and cultists of all kinds.
But
then the truth is that, as everybody else in Britain knows perfectly
well, the Labour Party is now further from power than at almost any time
in its long history. Never before has it been so detached from the
values and interests of the ordinary working-class families it was
founded to represent.
Indeed,
yesterday a new YouGov poll emerged which showed that more than half of
the voters who backed Labour in the last general election, and then
voted for Brexit, have now given up their support for Corbyn's party.
In
the past few weeks, every single living previous Labour leader begged
the members to think again. Instead, drunk on their own
self-righteousness and blind to the appalling reality of the opinion
polls, the activists marched onwards towards oblivion.
In
my lifetime, only one man has taken Labour from opposition into
government — Tony Blair. The chances of anyone emulating him in the next
few years strike me as infinitesimal.
In
fact, I genuinely think there is more chance of Mary Berry becoming the
next James Bond than there is of Jeremy Corbyn walking into Downing
Street as our next Prime Minister.
The Labour leader's failings are so obvious that it seems almost cruel to point them out.
As
a speaker he is monotonous, as a parliamentary debater he is feeble, as
an organiser he is useless, as a leader he is non-existent.
For a moment, though, forget his personal stupidity, stubbornness, vanity and incompetence.
Forget
the lack of action on anti-Semitism within the party, the lies about
seats on trains, the antics of his sinister sidekick John McDonnell with
Mao's Little Red Book waved around in the Commons chamber, and the
appalling abuse directed at moderate Labour MPs.
The
fundamental reality is that Mr Corbyn represents a political tradition
that has never come close to winning power in this country, and never
will.
His
supporters peddle a version of history that is quite simply not true.
They claim that he represents the renaissance of a noble Labour
tradition, wiping away the stains of supposedly 'Red Tory' leaders such
as Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and rekindling the
authentic, unspun socialism of Attlee and his contemporaries.
Whenever
I hear this, I am never sure whether Mr Corbyn's cultists are
congenitally stupid, deliberately deceitful or just completely ignorant
of their own party's history.
The
Labour leaders of old were not extremists. They were patriots. Unlike
Mr Corbyn, they happily sang their own national anthem.
Indeed, in many ways they were often strikingly conservative, with a small 'c'.
Attlee
fought in the First World War and only approved the installation of a
Downing Street ticker-tape machine so he could follow England in cricket
Test matches. Harold Wilson could be brought almost to tears by
reciting the Boy Scout code. Jim Callaghan was outraged whenever his
aides made jokes about the Queen.
You could hardly find a more passionate Welshman than Neil Kinnock, and there is no more patriotic Scot than Gordon Brown.
But
Mr Corbyn is in a completely different league. He and his Shadow
Chancellor Mr McDonnell — who is probably the most malign political
presence in Britain since the Thirties — do not like their country. They
hate it.
Oh,
I know they say they love it really. But the Britain they claim to love
exists only in some weird fantasy of their own imagining, a world of
interminable 'anti-racist' rallies and Labour Party committee meetings, a
world inhabited only by evil plutocratic bosses and downtrodden
poverty-stricken workers.
The
real Britain — the Britain of supermarkets, suburbs and market towns,
of garden centres and video games, Poldark and Victoria, after-work
drinks and Sunday league football, Harry Potter and the National Trust —
is a complete mystery to them.
They think it is a capitalist invention, an illusion propagated by the wicked mainstream 'Zionist' media.
+4
At noon today, barring a miracle, Jeremy Corbyn will be re-elected as Labour leader
They
know nothing of how ordinary people in Britain live and think. They
prefer to associate with monsters such as Gerry Adams, whom they invited
to the House of Commons only weeks after his friends in the IRA had
murdered five people, including one of their fellow MPs, in the Brighton
hotel bombing.
The
great Labour-supporting writer George Orwell would have recognised such
repulsive characters straight away. The hard Left, he wrote in 1941,
were characterised by 'their generally negative, querulous attitude' and
their 'complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion'.
For
all their emotional outpourings, Orwell thought, the high-minded Left
had the 'shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have
little contact with physical reality'. They felt it a 'duty to snigger
at every English institution'; they were 'sometimes squashily pacifist,
sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British'.
Almost
incredibly, every word of this is still relevant today — even the bit
about being pro-Russian. (Mr Corbyn, remember, once advised his Twitter
followers that Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine Russia Today was
'more objective' than the British media.) A particular line in Orwell's
essay, though, sticks out like a sore thumb. 'There is little in them,'
he wrote of Mr Corbyn's Left-wing predecessors, 'except the
irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to
be in a position of power.'
The
problem, of course, is that Mr Corbyn is now in a position of power —
something Orwell could never have anticipated when he was writing in
1941.
In
that respect, the Labour leader is merely the extremely unpleasant
symptom of a more profound condition, the political equivalent of a
suppurating boil.
T
he truth is that the Labour Party has been in deep trouble for years.
As far back as the Seventies, it was caught between, on the one hand,
the demands of winning and wielding power in a modern, prosperous,
pragmatic democracy; and on the other, the half-crazed fantasies of its
own activists.
For
decades, the more sensible Labour leaders — such as Wilson, Callaghan
and Blair — publicly indulged their own members' emotional spasms while
privately dismissing their infantile dross about socialist revolution.
The
problem, though, is that over time, the ordinary working-class men and
women who supported such leaders gradually fell away. By the dawn of
this century, the engineers and railwaymen who had founded the party
back in 1900 had long since disappeared.
In
their place came middle-class teachers, university lecturers and
public-sector employees, infused with a sense of their own cosmic
self-righteousness.
They
didn't want to hear about the reality of modern Britain. They didn't
want to hear about the inevitable compromises of power, the difficulties
of governing a major industrial nation or the importance of maintaining
international economic confidence.
Nor
did they really want a leader. They wanted a mirror: someone just like
themselves, who would reflect their own sanctimony and self-interest,
their colossal vanity and self-absorption.
And
then, in 2015, they found him. For the first time, thanks to the
ludicrous Ed Miliband, the members alone would decide the Labour
leadership. Bearing in mind the many hard-Left extremists, it was as if
the lunatics were invited to take charge of the asylum.
Today,
on almost every issue you care to mention — Europe, immigration, law
and order, even our national defence and relationships with our allies —
they have taken their party so far from the political mainstream, so
far from the instincts of most ordinary people, that it would take years
for them to row back again. If you're not a Labour supporter, perhaps
you're wondering why you should care. But we live in a democracy, and
not a one-party state.
Our
political culture is made of more than one strand, and a government
without decent opposition is, almost inevitably, much weaker for it.
+4
The challenger, Owen Smith (right),
deserves considerable credit for stepping up to take on Mr Corbyn at a
time when his better-known colleagues shied away
Yes, Labour's history has more than its fair share of disaster and delusions.
But
you surely don't have to be a tribal Labour voter to recognise that the
party founded that day in 1900 was, at its best, a noble and
responsible institution, representing values — co-operation, community,
fairness, tolerance — that millions of people instinctively share.
But that history is over.
It's true that Labour danced on the brink of oblivion once before, in the early Eighties.
But back then there were people of real talent — the likes of Denis Healey, Roy Hattersley and David Blunkett — to drag it back.
N
ow the party is a hollow shell of its former self. And in any case,
what sane, pragmatic MP is ever going to win the support of the
political obsessives who twice backed Jeremy Corbyn?
In
the short term, therefore, Labour MPs should probably follow the advice
of Wilson's battle-hardened press chief, Joe Haines, which he set out
in the Mail yesterday: they should break definitively with Mr Corbyn,
and declare themselves the official Opposition.
The
more sensible ones, at least, could present themselves as a patriotic
centre-Left party, inspired by the example of Clement Attlee.
It would be a gamble, of course. But if, just once, they can't show some guts, then what's the point in their even being there?
Whether
the MPs break away or not, though, Labour seems condemned to a slow but
inevitable decline. The days when it once piled up majorities in
Scotland, the Midlands and London are now long gone.
I don't expect to see another majority Labour government for a decade at least, and perhaps not in my lifetime.
No
party has a divine right to exist. Exactly 100 years ago, the Liberals
were the biggest game in town. They had been in power for ten years.
Their
leaders, Herbert Asquith and David Lloyd George, were the best-known
and most respected men in the land. They were the big beasts; everyone
else walked in their shadow.
But
then, when the Liberals fell from power, they never stopped falling.
Within ten years, they went from being the party of government to the
third party. Today, you could comfortably fit their modern-day
successors in the Commons into a people carrier.
Labour's
decline will probably be slower and certainly bloodier. But unless
something radically changes, which seems highly unlikely, the end may
well be exactly the same.
For Labour, the party is over. And British politics will be the poorer for it.
