In the frenzy of speculation over Jeremy Corbyn’s supposed “revenge reshuffle” (I’ll believe it when I see it) Labour MP Jon Cruddas offers a constructive perspective on the contribution his party leader is making to politics in difficult times. For want of a better straw, let’s clutch it.

It’s not that Cruddas, one of Ed Miliband’s policy thinkers now on the backbenches, likened Corbyn to George Lansbury – republican, pacifist and much-loved man of leftwing principle (also grandfather to Angela), who led Labour in the dire years 1932-35. Plenty of historically minded voters were quick to spot the comparison, including me.

Lansbury’s contribution, so Cruddas argued on Radio 4’s World This Weekend, was “to save the Labour party” after its fatal split in the economic crisis of 1931, when Ramsay MacDonald led a minority of mostly ministers into the cross-party national coalition. It was committed to what we’d call austerity – not least because the Lansbury wing of the cabinet had opposed any benefit cuts as part of the Keynes-inspired package.

Labour had been reduced to 52 seats in the general election of 1931, but Lansbury’s principled leadership cheered up the party activists and kept the show on the road. He’d never wanted to be leader (at 73 he was even older than Jeremy) and kept offering to resign. After hardheaded unions voted for a more robust stand against Hitler than Christian pacifism, he insisted on going.

But his legacy allowed Clem Attlee, the “interim” leader (1935-55) to triple the party’s MPs to 154 at the 1935 election. It survived to win the next election – the war delayed it until 1945 – decisively and do great things.

And that is really Cruddas’s useful point. Like Lansbury, Corbyn’s principles and essential decency are obvious for all to see. He’s trying to make the best of a bad job when his party has just suffered a defeat arguably “worse for the Labour party than 1931”, chiefly because of the loss of Scotland to the SNP and at a time when many Labour supporters are, as in 1931, under the economic cosh.

It doesn’t sound like a recipe for success, does it? No, and I don’t think it’s meant to be. As MP for Dagenham, Cruddas knows as well as anyone what makes traditional working-class voters tick and that central to them are economic credibility and plausible security policies in a wicked world.

But it does emphasise the important point that, if the party is ever to recover its historic mission as a party of power, it must first stick together, even if that involves an educational period as a campaigning party of protest that fires up 20% (25%? 15%?) of the electorate, one which alienates the winning majority.

That’s where I part company with the redoubtable Polly Toynbee, who shared her pre-Christmas gloom here. Her range of emotions are always wider than mine, which belong to the more boring school that says “nothing is ever as good – or as bad – as it looks on the day”.

But nor do I agree with Tony Blair’s former adviser, Peter Hyman (he went off to teach, not to make millions), who recently called for a split to “save” Labour as a reformist party, something Toynbee knows from SDP experience doesn’t work. Mark Stears, who replied to Hyman the following week, was much closer to my view, even though he’s an Oxford professor who wrote speeches for Miliband, a man with much to answer for.

Stears acknowledges the fear arising from the realistic perception of how uncertain our shared future is. “Sometimes it has the paradoxical effect of encouraging millions of people to stick with what they know. Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative-led national government triumphed in the midst of the depression, not because of voter satisfaction of how things were but because of a deep anxiety that they could still get even worse.”

Jeremy Corbyn, who is expected to announce a reshuffle of his top team. Photograph: PA

Such concern attracts some people to the Corbyn project. Read this from a correspondent (let’s call him Jim) who takes me to task from the north of England. “My girlfriend is a political activist who works in mental health. Unlike myself she had little previous interest in politics and has been radicalised by her experiences of day to day dealings with people who are at the absolute frontline of austerity cuts and who are increasingly demonised by society.

“She has worked as a manager in this sector for 10 years, has never earned as much as the median wage, normally works 45-plus hours a week and, due to cuts in social services, has often found herself in roles that have largely been created to produce a scapegoat buffer between council management that are cutting vital services to shreds and the inevitable tragic results on service users.

“In other words, a person to carry the can if a service user kills themselves because their support has been cut – so it comes back on individual workers not the management hatchet men. Unsurprisingly this led her to the verge of a mental breakdown. Her eventual reward for all of this was to be laid off without redundancy pay (because of the watered down outsourcing deal) and spend 6 months on JSA before finding an equally stressful job in the same sector because she is passionate about supporting people and skilled at doing so.”



I hear plenty of stories like that – as a struggling school headteacher, Hyman’s is not so different – and probably so do you. Jim’s underlying point is that job insecurity is a generational thing people of my age may not fully understand, the “gig economy” as some people call it. No wonder plenty are fired up by Corbynista rhetoric.

The issue is how best to tackle the problems facing us. A former cabinet minister told me last week how he was recognised and ticked off by an airport security guard. “Here was a guy on low pay, who knew his family depended in many ways on having a Labour government, saying ‘How could you let that clown Corbyn become leader? We’ll be stuck with the Tories for years.’”

It’s a useful reminder to the righteous on both sides of Labour’s introspective feuding that neither side has a monopoly of wisdom or a hotline to the voters. No magic wand to re-energise party and people, no “on/off switch”, as Cruddas puts it. Here’s a spread of new MPs’ views.

I never share the view that the Tories are an organised conspiracy, though they are doing some foolish and shortsighted things – as well as a few wicked ones. The poorest usually suffer most, as usual. The same applies to Blair, of course, who did a lot of things Labour activists would be wiser (happier too?) to acknowledge and respect. “Red Tory” is lazy thinking, even for Trots.

So disowning Blairism is a major disaster for Labour, though Hyman’s article concedes that Blair’s disconnect from his party base was pretty ruinous. He and Gordon Brown left a pretty unpersuasive crop of next generation leaders too; hence the choice of the oldest candidate last September.

So there’s a lot of repair work to be done. But I don’t share the pessimism of a younger friend and activist who says: “I can’t see us being back in office this side of 2030. Under Corbyn, the next election will be worse for Labour than 2015. We won’t recover from it by 2025.”

That’s too gloomy. Though we shouldn’t take too much notice of them, polls show the Tories consolidating their grip, but also that Corbyn’s ratings, as a decent man who sticks to his principles, are also holding up, strengthening even among Labour voters. Lansbury would have had similar ratings if polls had existed in his day. In 2016 a new generation will throw up new leadership. Who? I don’t yet know. Few spotted Attlee as a quiet, pragmatic hero.

None of this is great news in the short term. As Mike Smithson notes in his Political Betting blog, Corbyn’s team has allowed reshuffle speculation to drift for too long, a common error. Whatever he has in mind for Hilary Benn he’ll look weak.

Anne Perkins is surely right here to say there is strength in diversity. A serial rebel like Corbyn should know that, but this herbivorous leader is surrounded by middle-class leftwingers who nurse a dangerous conceit about their power to capture the electorate as well as the party. Hence the talk of cults and purges.

Old lefties who have failed to understand the imperatives of electoral politics for 40 years are never going to change their minds. But optimists hope younger newcomers will come to realise that serious politics is about the pursuit of power. Meanwhile, holding his party together in tough times is worth a small new year round of applause. He’ll still be there next year.