Britain’s national newspapers are wreaking havoc on the Labour party, some with joy and some with sorrow. Plenty of people would rightly counter that the parliamentary Labour party is in the process of wreaking havoc on itself.

Political correspondents don’t have to break sweat to find Labour MPs and peers willing to criticise Jeremy Corbyn on the record. “We have a duty to speak out,” wrote David Blunkett in the Mail on Sunday. “Failure to do so would amount to a betrayal of the British public.”

Corbyn has “failed the test” to show he can lead the party, Paul Farrelly MP told the Observer. John Mann MP was quoted in the Sunday Telegraph as warning Corbyn not to allow deselection of his colleagues because it would “create a civil war.”



Does he think there isn’t a war already? Saturday and Sunday papers reported war-like plots on each side. Corbyn supporters - aka the Momentum movement - were claimed to be abusing MPs who voted to bomb Isis in Syria and aiming to oust them from their seats.

On the other side, as Anne McElvoy wrote in her MoS column, “fed-up Labour grandees” are aiming to crush Momentum by calling on “former big benefactors” to create a “war chest” ready to mount a challenge to Corbyn in future.

So, she wondered, might the moderates even break away from Corbyn’s Labour altogether? The Sunday Times’s headline, “The week Labour tore itself apart”, suggested the breach was imminent.

And this is but a smattering of the coverage of Labour’s turmoil. Newspapers have been running articles about coups and plots and revolts day by day.

But this is the stuff of the Westminster beltway, the daily dramas on which the national press feasts. More significant than this bitter debate over the effects of Corbyn’s surprise election as Labour leader is the long-run, underlying trend that created the conditions of his emergence.

Far too little attention has been paid by political commentators to the fact that it marks a giant step on the road towards Labour’s eventual collapse.

Political parties ‘exist for themselves’

There are several overlapping internal reasons for that coming catastrophe. But we also need to look beyond the immediate crisis, and even outside Britain, to understand why the party is in the process of breaking down.

It has been inevitable for a long time. I recall a conversation some 10 years after the 1968 Paris événements when one of its young intellectual participants berated me for my continuing faith in parties of the left.

“They’re over,” he said. “They don’t reflect the will of the people. They are things apart... anti-democratic... they exist for themselves.”

I lost touch years ago with Jean-Michel, a professed “situationist”, when he decided to settle in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But his words, so earnestly expressed, have stayed with me, and I’ve come to view them as both prescient and increasingly accurate.

At the time, given our mutual contempt for mainstream parties, we were discussing the splintering of western Europe’s Marxist (quasi-Marxist and pseudo-Marxist) groups: Stalinist versus Trotskyist versus Maoist, all of them split into ever smaller fractions influenced by supposedly charismatic leaders.

Most of these leftwing outfits, seemingly relevant for just a short period in the 1970s, fell apart or, if they now exist at all, linger only in the shadows.



Bullying, dissent and the need for Labour party unity | Letters Read more

We who peopled them grew up and moved on. Some travelled way over to the right; some turned their backs on politics of any kind; some committed full-heartedly to social-democracy; and some, like me, went on to wrestle with their leftish consciences, never fully engaging in mainstream political life.

Along the way, of course, we could hardly help but note the fundamental flaws in the Stalinist parties spawned in eastern Europe by Russian imperialism and in the far east by its Chinese equivalent. These one-party states trampled on their citizens’ human rights and made a mockery of democracy.

As capitalism trumped communism, leftish-inspired parties in liberal democracies, where there were regular free elections, prospered for a good while afterwards.

There was always a measure of internal compromise. For example, in Britain, the Labour party made much of being a “broad church”. In order to hang together - to “exist for itself” as an electoral force - its leaders strove to appease each wing in order to seek power.

The first major turning point

The difficulty of maintaining that equilibrium led to the first major turning point in 1981 with the breakaway formation of the SDP. This third force between the Conservatives and Labour did rather better after forging a merger with the Liberals.

Meanwhle, bubbling away elsewhere were devolutionary, and nationalistic, forces. The Scottish National party was beginning to gather strength, partly because of widespread antipathy to the Tories “at Westminster” and partly due to a gradual rejection of Labour’s tartan Tammany Hall style of local government.

By the turn of the century, Labour appeared to be on the crest of a wave. Its demoralised “socialist” left was reduced to a rump as the party enjoyed the trappings of government under a leader with whom even the rightwing media baron, Rupert Murdoch, felt he could “do business.”

Tony Blair’s success in winning three consecutive general elections, despite launching an unpopular war, concealed some uncomfortable truths. The party’s rightist stance attracted votes from the Tories but it upset those offended by its technocratic, bureaucratic and bland political underpinning.

At the same time, it alienated both old-style leftwingers and also the emergent generation without any cold war memories.

The situation hardly changed when Gordon Brown, infinitely less able than Blair as a leader, took over. Even so, the outcome of the 2010 general election came as something of a shock to Labour’s system.



It watched glumly as the Lib-Dems, foolishly believing they had also turned a corner as an electoral choice, went into coalition government with the Conservatives.

Labour’s response was to turn its back on its rightwing leadership and opt for a vaguely left-of-centre character, Ed Miliband, who lacked the guile or the personality to re-energise a party that did not recognise its glue was coming unstuck.

In May this year, Labour’s fabric was torn apart. It lost Scotland to a party espousing a heady mixture of nationalism and socialism (or, at least, anti-Toryism). It lost England and Wales to a Conservative party that does not conceal its agenda (even if it conceals the effects of carrying it out).

With Miliband having opened Labour’s doors, and its levers of power, to many thousands of people, there was no stomach to return to the Blairite agenda by electing any of the three candidates who carried varieties of his torch.



Immediate confrontation for Corbyn

So, out of the blue (or should that be red?) in walked Corbyn. The ageing figure of the left got a massive majority courtesy of the expanded public membership and found himself immediately confronted by a hostile parliamentary party... and an equally hostile press.

A formal SDP-style split has not occurred thus far. But the party no longer makes any sense in its current form. Despite strolling to the Oldham by-election victory, the party is generally regarded by the majority of its MPs, political journalists and their editors, as unelectable.

Yet, if some way were found to tip Corbyn out of office before he proves the naysayers right about his unelectability, it is obvious that his army of supporters would walk away.

And that cataclysmic event has the potential to precipitate the creation of a new party of the left because they would realise the hopelessness of changing Labour from within and quit.

The Labour party has shown amazing resilience throughout its 115-year history. The broad church has survived any number of past crises. But, as with all parties of the left, it cannot sustain itself much longer. It is now on the brink of complete disintegration.

That is not Corbyn’s fault. Don’t blame him. He is a victim of a process over which he has had no control. As a lifelong Labour loyalist it will appal him to be cast as the unconscious and unwilling architect of the party’s collapse. He is not the cause of it, but a symptom of the party’s ideological instability.

A disconnect between MPs and voters

The internal problem is only part of the story. Outside parliament, in cities and towns across Britain, in places often referred to as Labour’s heartlands, changed demographics and new concerns have fractured old-style loyalty to the party.

It has been noticeable for many years that the there has been a disconnect between the culture, lifestyle and social outlooks of the majority of the party’s MPs and the people they seek to represent.

Note, for instance, Ukip’s level of support in Labour working class areas where its anti-immigrant message has proved a potent vote-gatherer. Ukip may stutter, but Isabel Hardman rightly pointed out in the Times on Monday that Labour continues to have a “problem with English identity.”

To add to the complexity, seen from a different political perspective, it would appear that Corbyn’s new army embodies yet another faction: the idealistic middle classes. Reconciling their views with those who lean towards Ukip is more than a stretch.

It is clear that the church is simply too broad and too battered to act any longer as a coherent united party. The game is up for Labour.

Rightwing UK newspapers may applaud this analysis, of course. They have long sought the elimination of Labour and the eradication of the left as a political force.

That’s the reason I spent days wondering whether I should publish this piece because it appears to support their agenda. Staying silent however seemed counter-productive. The left have to come to terms with what is happening... and going to happen.