The British parliament now has two Tory parties and two Labour parties. But the Conservatives will find it far easier to heal the breach than Labour.

That’s because the Tory split is mainly about personalities and partially about strategy. By contrast, the Labour split is structural and ideological.

Back in December, I wrote that Labour was in the process of falling apart and that its famous “broad church” could not possibly hold together for much longer. Now it is coming to pass.

Given that the overwhelming majority of MPs did not support Jeremy Corbyn it was inevitable that, at some stage, they would engineer a coup. The Brexit vote provided them with an opportunity.

Replacing a leader is, however, entirely to miss the point. The chasm in the Labour party cannot be bridged by some kind of political fix at Westminster.

MPs who believe Corbyn to be the main problem, and his replacement to be the beginning of a cure for the party’s ills, are fooling themselves. Their newspaper voice, the Daily Mirror, is also wasting newsprint with its call for Corbyn to “go now”.

The Mirror’s front page Photograph: Clipshare

They misunderstand the profound problem across the country among people who are regarded as “traditional” Labour voters (and traditional Mirror readers).



It is an understatement to say there is a disconnect between the bulk of the party’s members in parliament, whether in the Commons or the Lords, and the electorate.

Gradually, older Labour voters are peeling away from the party they used to support as a matter of course. That was clear from the numbers willing to switch to Ukip at the last general election.

It was clearer still from the EU referendum vote, where so many Labour voters refused to answer the party’s remain call. Their opinions about immigration are wholly at odds with those held by the MPs who represent them.

Nor is immigration the only difference between them. Voters do not share the social sensibilities and liberal values of Labour’s MPs, whom they regard as middle - rather than working - class.

If Labour politicians want to analyse how their party got where it is today, they would do well to begin with the modernising project led by Tony Blair. Its initial electoral success masked the fact that it increased the distance between the party in parliament and the people.

It cannot be denied that Blair’s governments pursued policies with the intention of helping the poorer elements in British society, providing substantial investment in public services, such as education and health, alongside the introduction of the minimum wage.

To an extent, those governments sought to re-establish upward social mobility, which had stalled during the Thatcher era. His trick, so to speak, was to borrow from her an enthusiasm for the free market.

So the positive aspects of the Blairite years were offset by a lack of appreciation at the grassroots, where there was also a widespread perception of a professional political class acting in a paternalistic fashion.

Running in parallel, union membership - and union effectiveness - declined as Labour kept its paymasters at arm’s length. Meanwhile, the old left, personified by Corbyn, was sidelined. It kept its counsel, but it did not go away.

At the 2005 general election, the fracture between party and country was becoming more obvious. But the fall in Labour’s vote, and the severe reduction in its majority, was attributed solely to the Iraq war.

By the time Gordon Brown assumed the leadership, having obtained it incidentally through years of back-biting, morale-sapping splitist activities, the modernising project was already running into the ground.

Internal opposition to it helped gain Ed Miliband the leadership in 2010, after Brown’s defeat, in what was supposed to be a shift back to the left. In fact, it was an imperceptible adjustment, noted inside Westminster and among political journalists, but little felt among Labour supporters.

And then came the radical revolt that resulted in Corbyn’s victory. Two major elements were involved: the reawakened old left and the newly enfranchised left-liberal youth who had flocked to join the party with the specific aim of instituting change.

Here were groups without any mainstream media backing. No national newspaper supported them, not least because they didn’t see them coming.

Although “Corbyn’s army” appeared to spring spontaneously to prominence, they were a manifestation of the rumbling discontent for the party’s move to the right and the Westminsterisation of politics generally.

What they were not, however, was representative of the vast majority of people who had been voting Labour steadily since the second world war. The die was cast for a yet another deep division.

There is a now mismatch between what Corbyn and his supporters believe; what the majority of Labour MPs believe; and what the wider community of traditional Labour voters believe.



Nor, of course, are the Labour MPs of one mind. There are still Blairite and Brownite factions amid the newish intake who are not aligned to either side.

In the light of all that, I thought it touching that the Mirror, in its heartfelt front page editorial, appears to believe Corbyn’s resignation would be the precursor to Labour regaining power.

“He doesn’t connect with the Labour heartlands outside the south east,” said the paper, which overlooks the reality that few, if any, Labour MPs connect with those “heartlands”.

Those heartlands are full of long-time Mirror readers. White working class, they are drawn from either a background of union membership or simply a long family tradition of Labour voting, and are very probably a good example of the party’s increasingly disaffected supporters.