Let’s remind ourselves what’s at stake. Unchecked, Theresa May and her government are leading Britain through the narrowest, harshest exit from the European Union, taking the country out of not only the EU but also the single market, and in all probability, the customs union too. In the process they could well jeopardise a two-decade peace in Northern Ireland and trigger a second Scottish referendum that would unravel the United Kingdom.
At the same time, May’s government is presiding over a calamity in the NHS, a crisis in social care, and an eighth year of shrinking budgets for local councils — which means more cuts to already starved libraries, parks and services for the most vulnerable.
The key word in that paragraph is “unchecked”. This should not be a strong government. It rules with a wafer-thin majority. Properly held to account, it could be held back — at least from some of its most extreme decisions. But that requires a strong opposition.
Without one, May can ignore the MPs who face her and the dissenters on her own side. She need listen only to the Tory hard right. Which is what’s happening now. It explains why a once hesitant remainer such as May is currently slamming on the accelerator and rushing us towards a hard Brexit no one voted for. Because her government rules unopposed.
This is the starting point for any discussion of Labour. It’s the reason the state of the opposition matters. And what a state it’s in. The election experts are debating how best to describe the loss of Copeland, a seat Labour had held for 82 years. Was it the worst result for an opposition since 1945 — or since 1878?
From whichever angle you view it, Copeland is a disaster. Some loyalists are trying to offset it with the fact that Labour staved off defeat in Stoke — as if retaining a rock-solid seat against a carpet-bagging, tweed-wearing fantasist counts as some kind of triumph rather than the minimum ask of an opposition party in midterm. Others say Copeland is a special case: voters in an area dependent on a nuclear reprocessing plant were unlikely to warm to a party led by a lifelong anti-nuclear campaigner.
True, but the Tories had a local factor counting against them too: the downgrading of a much-valued hospital. And yet Copeland’s voters shut their ears to Labour’s “babies will die” warnings, waved aside the party’s long decades as the valiant defender of the NHS, and voted Conservative There have been heroic efforts to explain away this failure. Jeremy Corbyn disciple Cat Smith thought the party should be applauded for coming “within 2,000 votes” of the Tories, given the latter are 18 points ahead nationally — a claim that would make better sense in, say, Surrey.
Campaigns coordinator Ian Lavery said the leader couldn’t possibly be to blame because “Jeremy Corbyn is one of the most popular politicians in the country”. Which indeed he is, so long as the choice put to those surveyed is Corbyn, Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.
Compared to politicians in this country he is, in fact, the least popular. With an approval rating of minus 40 points, Corbyn lags behind Paul Nuttall, David Davis and Philip Hammond. And far, far behind May, who is on plus six. But perhaps the most deluded response was that of the leader himself, who decreed that the Copeland result was a protest against the “political establishment”.
Maybe I’m out of touch, but in my day revolutionaries found a more obvious way to shake the system than voting for a sitting Conservative government. Of course that hints at the other approach available to those who refuse to read the writing on the wall, even in letters painted six feet high — and that is to admit the result is not good, but to blame someone else. The obvious targets — in the sights of Ken Loach, John McDonnell and others — were the Blairites, either for what they did in government, which, it’s argued, steadily eroded working-class support for Labour, or for what they’ve been up to more recently.
Perennial refusal to take responsibility
The trouble is, the supposedly mutinous parliamentary Labour Party has been keeping its collective mouth shut and on best behaviour since Corbyn’s re-election last summer. The “mainstream media” has barely bothered with Corbyn over the same period, wrestling with the rather bigger issues of Trump and Brexit. So blaming the PLP and the MSM doesn’t quite bite the way it used to. What’s more, the notion that the voters of Copeland were poised to back Corbyn but were swayed at the last moment by some disobliging comments from Peter Mandelson seems a stretch, as does the notion that disenchantment with Blairism operates on some slow-release delay mechanism, whereby Copeland can stay in Labour hands in 2001, 2005, 2010 and 2015 — with the full anti-Blair fury not truly kicking in until 2017, a decade after the former PM’s departure.
Once, Team Corbyn could not stop telling us about the man’s saint-like modesty and decency. But the perennial refusal to take responsibility, this eagerness to point the finger of blame at anyone and everyone else, hardly fits that noble self-portrait. So what should those desperate for a functioning opposition do?
Inside Labour there is a terrible paralysis. Those who can see the danger — that a few more years of this could end in a Labour wipeout — know that if they move against Corbyn, they will be doomed. Corbyn would relish yet another leadership contest: more rallies, more selfies, and a return to the comfort zone of attacking ‘Blairites’ rather than Tories. His opponents’ only option is to sit tight and do nothing, watching as Corbyn acts as May’s enabler, gifting her the Commons votes she needs to ensure hard Brexit a smooth passage. They could demand a change in strategy, picking up the insight of election sage John Curtice, who notes that most Labour voters are remainers and it is to them Corbyn needs to appeal.
Indeed, the 48 per cent has the makings of a winning electoral coalition. Done right, there’s no reason Labour couldn’t woo Tory remainers alienated by May’s rightward turn. There are several Labour politicians who could persuade soft Tories that they are competent, share their basic patriotism and are fit to be trusted with government. But Corbyn is not among them.
This is the terrible paradox that paralyses the party today: Labour needs Corbyn gone and yet cannot bid him go. The glum truth is, the pressure that counts won’t come from the likes of me, people who warned Corbyn would be a disaster from the start. It will have to come from within the movement that carried him to power. Change will arrive when enough people inside the Labour left, Momentum, or those trade unions that endorsed him twice, conclude either that the experiment has failed or that ambivalence and passivity in the face of Brexit are no longer bearable.
Perhaps, in other circumstances, it would have been fine for Labour to take 15 years off, let the Tories get on with governing while the party reformed itself into a new, radical social movement. But the country doesn’t have that luxury or that time. It needs an opposition and it needs it now. Those who voted in good faith for Corbyn need to ask themselves what they value more — the dreams they projected on to this one man or the immediate need to hold back a government wreaking intolerable damage on this country’s future.
Delaying this choice won’t make it go away — it will only make it starker.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Jonathan Freedland is a columnist and writer for the Guardian.
