Probably the most important story from last week was the fact that Labour is a brand new party. It is a New Labour all over again.

Probably only half of those registered to vote when the ballot papers go out next weekend will have been able to vote in 2010 when David Miliband beat his brother in the constituency section, only to fall short in the other sections of the now defunct electoral college.

As Sky News’s Sophie Ridge reported last week, there are about 270,000 full members of the Labour party, of which 200,000 were members before the election. Among those 200,000, as many as 50,000 were recruited since 2010.

In addition, 70,000 have joined as affiliated supporters (mainly through trade unions) and 50,000 have paid £3 to sign up as a registered supporter. That’s a total of 190,000 people joining up since the 2015 election, and 240,000 since 2010.

That means most party members probably did not vote in the 2010 party election.

It is likely these figures for registered supporters will rise still further this week, putting yet more pressure on the party headquarters staff as they try to weed out infiltrators from other parties that have decided Labour is now the true “site of struggle”.

All parties grow after an election contest – a one-month marketing campaign for party politics – and all parties have a turnover of membership, with any new intake normally reflecting the politics of the leader at the time.

But the scale of this Labour increase is unprecedented. Clearly the number of entryists in this impressive increase in membership is likely to be fractional, even if the party is incapable of working at the speed to make all the necessary checks.

Instead many of the new members are old activists returning to a party they left in the wake of the Iraq war, and many are young people enthused by Corbyn’s message. Most have no memory of the 1980s or the Tony Benn years, but are fed up with the compromise of established Westminster politics. In some constituencies, especially in university towns, as many as 400 new members are joining. Many see this as a chance to express their values by voting for Jeremy Corbyn. The electability of Corbyn is, for some, subsidiary.

A supporter wearing a Jeremy Corbyn campaign badge. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

The whole episode has been a political disaster for those mainly Blairites that first proposed open primaries on the grounds it would make the party selectorate more representative of the wider electorate.

There were two models – the long-established US primary system and the 2011 French socialist party open primary for its presidential candidate.

Any French citizen willing to pay a minimum €1 (70p) and sign up to some pretty broad values about justice, fraternity and solidarity could vote for the socialist presidential candidate.

Just under 2.9 million French people voted in the final round, raising close to €3m for the party. The French socialist party membership at the time was about 200,000 so the French contest, conducted in less of a rush than Labour and closer to the actual presidential election, appears to have done better than Labour’s at galvanising the wider electorate, even though voters in the contest had to go to the polling stations on the day of the final ballot to vote.

Many, such as the Institute for Government thinktank, and the New Labour pressure group, Progress, argued the French model was one that Labour should consider. The aim was to engage the swing voters from Nuneaton as much as the ex-Greens of Norwich. The concept was duly a key ingredient in the Labour internal democracy reforms developed by Lord Collins, and embraced by Ed Miliband at a special conference in 2014 with almost no resistance. Miliband, currently on the other side of the world in Australia, has been silent on whether he thinks the experiment in democracy he engendered is going to plan.

His allies admit Labour has not had time to engage with English marginal voters in the election, or to run an effective registration drive.

The recruitment push has largely been left to Unite organisers and the extraordinary impetus provided by the Corbyn campaign, including full-page adverts in the Guardian. The politics of the new members cannot be known for certain, or the durability of their commitment to Labour. But the consensus among party officials is that the left is ascendant.

Whatever the final result, and a Corbyn victory seems to be weeks away, Labour will no longer be the same party.

In the 1981 contest for the deputy leadership between Tony Benn and Denis Healey, the party establishment was saved by an electoral college in which rightwing trade union leaders and Labour MPs – many from Scotland – voted solidly for Healey, defeating the overwhelmingly Bennite constituencies.

Tony Benn, left, takes a picture of Denis Healey during the Labour party conference in 1981. Photograph: Don McPhee/The Guardian

This time no such 7th cavalry is available. There is one Scottish Labour MP and most trade unions for more than a decade have been run by the left, with the only change coming from the far left. The old forces of conservatism inside Labour are in decline, or no longer exist.

That in turn will have permanent consequences if Corbyn wins, as many MPs have said they will not stand in the shadow cabinet elections that Corbyn has said he will reintroduce. But if these MPs refuse to cooperate at all with someone that has been democratically elected leader, they too could face consequences. In the 1980s, the reselection of Labour MPs by local parties, or the threat of it, hung over MPs like a sword of Damocles in the second half of the parliament.

If the atmosphere of the 1980s returns with local parties challenging rightwing parties, the task of the deputy leader – likely to be Tom Watson – in keeping the party organisation united will be formidable. A war between local parties and the parliamentary Labour party is not something Corbyn would relish.

Unity might not quite be his watchword but his aides made clear he does not want to plunge the party into a further debate about rewriting Clause 4 of the party constitution setting out its aims and values. He knows if he is too confrontational in his own party there is a real risk that, if elected, he will have a limited array of talent on which to draw in the parliamentary party. He has promised to reintroduce shadow cabinet elections, but needs candidates to put themselves forward from across the party if the start of a split is to be avoided.

As it stands, Corbyn needs to find a shadow defence secretary willing to advocate British withdrawal from Nato and unilateral UK disarmament. He needs a shadow foreign secretary willing to argue that the UK demand a renegotiation of its place in Europe, and reject war in Syria. He needs a shadow energy secretary to oppose all nuclear power plants and to advocate the possible reopening of some coal mines. He needs a shadow Northern Ireland secretary capable of reaching out to Protestants, given his support for Sinn Féin. Above all, he needs a shadow chancellor willing to put a stronger case against austerity and the City of London than any frontbencher has so far.



If he wins, Corbyn can indeed say he has a mandate from the membership, but would need to reach out to his MPs to have any chance of survival. Simple appeals to party loyalty from a man who has defied the whip 500 times will ring hollow. Both sides will have to decide if the ideological chasm is too big to bridge. Either way, the consequences would be momentous.