The Labour party has never been a stranger to internal turmoil. Since it was created, differences in outlook on the left have been managed by successive leaders without these tensions destroying the party’s electability.



The exception was in the 1980s when a hard-left attempt to capture control sparked the creation of a new party, the SDP, and threatened to capsize us altogether.

The reason many Labour parliamentarians are worried now is that Jeremy Corbyn’s actions suggest he does not understand or respect the fact that Labour is a broad church, and that seeking to impose a hard-left blueprint on the party will end up disqualifying Labour from office.

Corbyn’s key instrument of power is unique in the party’s history – a whole new membership and set of registered supporters who are massively outnumbering longstanding members in very many constituencies.

Welcoming new recruits is a good thing, and most are principled and idealistic, which will strengthen Labour’s campaigning base. There are former members who resigned, honourably, over Iraq; feeling vindicated by events, they have returned under Corbyn. No one should question their commitment to the party.

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But the affinity of very many others is not for Labour as a party but for the leader as an individual. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong in this but they seem to have little appreciation of the party’s history and, most importantly, the political balances that need to be struck within it.

The reason the leader’s hardcore supporters are backing him so strongly is precisely why he is a problem for the party. It’s not just that his loyalty to far-left ideology and organisation puts him outside the party’s historical mainstream – his devotion to the simple purity of opposition rather than coming to terms with the complex challenge of government means he does not look to ordinary voters like a credible would-be prime minister.

In this, at least he has been consistent. It’s why he has always demanded tolerance of dissent – he voted against the last Labour government no fewer than 500 times – which makes it all the stranger that he should be pre-empting policy debate, notably on foreign affairs, by criticising colleagues before any change of policy has even taken place.

Tony Blair appointed Clare Short, Michael Meacher and Chris Mullin, among many others who were hardly New Labour. This is how Labour’s broad church works.

But Corbyn is now in a position to impose his views on the party, and he is doing so by very unconventional means. To secure his support base and grip within the party, Corbyn has created Momentum, a trade union-funded organisation run in conjunction with hard-left networks outside the party. This differentiates it from the moderates’ Progress organisation, which has no outside allegiances. Nor does it attempt to hold Labour MPs’ feet to the fire through the threat of de-selection, as we saw Momentum doing in the Commons Syria vote, claiming credit for minimising the number voting according to their conscience.

You would expect Corbyn to recruit loyalists to his office in parliament, but this is largely staffed from two further far left entities: Socialist Action, a Trotskyite group most closely associated with Ken Livingstone, and Labour Representation Committee, which was founded by John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor.

For Corbyn, pursuing his own far-left agenda and risking Labour civil war is a higher priority than taking on the Tories



These two groups may have their differences – McDonnell’s people believe Socialist Action should be more hardline in its tactics – but they are united in strengthening Corbyn’s control of the party at every level and seeking to make it into a platform for their own hard-left political views, regardless of what anyone else thinks in the party.

This goes to the heart of the emerging crisis facing Labour. We have a leader who is revealing himself to be an intentionally divisive figure, abetted by organisations outside the party’s democratic structures and intent on splitting the party between the hard left and its centre ground.

For Corbyn, pursuing his own far-left agenda and risking Labour civil war is a higher priority than taking on the Tories. Through him, the hard left is beginning to exert a more suffocating grip on our party.

Party staff are becoming infused with people who will do his bidding, and who owe more loyalty to those outside the party than inside it. Come the party conference, Corbyn’s associates are drawing up new rules designed to keep him in power, which will enable him to use his army of supporters to back his desired policy changes, particularly affecting security, defence and disarmament.

His attitude to the shadow cabinet is that, whatever their judgment and conscience tells them, they must toe his line. On Syria he allowed a free vote only to turn round and threaten to sack those who voted against his position.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shadow chancellor John McDonnell. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

Whether or not the much-vaunted “revenge” reshuffle happens – and I hope for the sake of the party Corbyn drops his plans – allowing two weeks of speculation when he could easily have killed it was clearly designed to remind his colleagues of their vulnerability.

A leader who started by saying he wanted to open up debate now wants to silence it. A habitual rebel now wants to crush rebellion. Straight talking is allowed only if it echoes the slogans and doctrines of the far-left fellow travellers who now sit in the opposition leader’s office. And as far as the public is concerned, they are not interested in people’s views but in telling them what to think.

None of this is surprising. It has always been the ambition of the far left to take over the party machinery, whatever the consequences for Labour’s electability – and they are seizing their opportunity. There is little point simply handwringing in complaint. The question for those Labour MPs and others who can see where all this is leading, and want to stop Labour heading over the abyss, is what to do about it and when.

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Their dilemma is plain: if they make a stand against what is happening, they stand accused of disloyalty by Corbyn’s supporters; but if they go along with it, they are complicit in Labour’s probable disintegration when voters realise the party has been taken over by people they can never vote for.

If I was in their shoes I would struggle to decide on the right course, but I think I would be inspired by history. When in the 1980s Corbyn, McDonnell, Diane Abbott et al first started organising under the far left’s banner, the legitimate left, led by Neil Kinnock, realised it had no alternative but to fight for the party’s future.

It will be harder this time, because then Kinnock was leader and had the structures of the party through which to fight back. This time, these structures are in hard-left hands.

While the trade unions can no longer be relied upon to rescue the party as they helped Kinnock do, it would be a mistake to disregard them entirely, or Labour’s legions in local government, who are a bigger force for sense and moderation in the party than at any time in the recent past. But also potentially on Labour’s side are many ordinary members of the public who do not want to see Britain becoming a one-party state, who yearn for a centre-left alternative they can vote for, and who, if asked, will rally to alternative Labour leaders who truly represent what they believe in.

Is this fanciful? No, not when there are enough people in the country who remain in tune with Labour’s traditional values of equality and internationalism, and staunchly refuse to believe that the Conservatives can or should rule Britain indefinitely. But from now on, with every year that passes, Labour unsaved will be harder to retrieve.