By John Pickard
Following Labour’s election defeat, the right-wing of the party have begun what will be a protracted and determined attempt to roll the party back to the Blair years. Not content with ditching leader Jeremy Corbyn, the party right-wing want to take us back to a small membership party with an programme that is denuded of all the main elements of the radical 2019 manifesto.
The campaign to eviscerate the party of its radical membership and to ‘Torify’ the party programme will be supported over the coming months by all the mainstream media, the BBC and all the lords and ladies of an establishment – those who opposed Labour in the election. This was the ruling elite that had been seriously rocked by the threat of a left-wing Labour government that would have challenged their financial interests for the first time since 1945; they want to ensure that the Labour Party becomes once again a safe ‘second eleven’ for capitalism.
Labour’s right wing have always adopted the fake mantle of ‘centrism’ and ‘moderation’, as if the party has no left, middle and right, only a left and a centre. They have always touted the false claim that while they represent a ‘broad’ church everyone else represents only ‘narrow’ interests.
‘Labour Together’ is a right-wing front
The latest manifestation of this myth is the so-called ‘inquiry’ now being organised by Labour Together, intended, it is claimed, “to represent opinions from across all wings of the party.” It will be no such thing, of course. It will be not be intended as a means of influencing the membership of the party, but as a vehicle to recapture the Labour Party from the membership.
What is this organisation, Labour Together? It is a right-wing group organised around a limited company that was established in June 2015. Its public launch in the New Statesman in October 2015 came through an article by Lisa Nandy and Steve Reed, two MPs who the following summer signed the ‘no-confidence’ motion to unseat Jeremy Corbyn. We had a leader elected by 60 per cent of the Party membership but Nandy and Reed were part of the 80 per cent of Labour MPs unwilling to accept the members’ choice.
A key director of the Labour Together company is Sir Trevor Chinn, listed several times in the register of MPs financial interests as a backer of right-wing Labour MPs (and at least one Lib-Dem MP). Some of those backed by Chinn have since left the party: MPs like Tom Watson, Liam Byrne, Rachel Reeves and Joan Ryan. Chinn is a well-known supporter of the state of Israel and financially supports the offices of MPs with a similar political view.
Inquiry conclusions are already written and waiting a pretext
The Labour Together inquiry, now joined by Ed Miliband, will be headed by the likes of Lucy Powell and Shabana Mahmood, both of whom also supported Owen Smith against Jeremy Corbyn in 2016. It is an organisation and an inquiry, in other words, packed with opponents of Corbyn and Corbynism. It already has its conclusions written and it is now building a ‘case’ to justify them.
We have to say that it is disappointing, to say the least, that former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has appeared to back the Labour Together Inquiry. According to the Guardian, (December 24), he is said to have “welcomed” the review. On the contrary – while it is only to be expected that the Labour Party itself, through the NEC and its general secretary might have a review of the election – it is completely wrong to give an inquiry by this right-wing faction an almost official stamp of approval.
We can already predict what the main conclusions of this review will be: too much radicalism, a manifesto that was too left-wing, a need to win the centre-ground, etc, etc. Actual policies will not feature very much. The real austerity faced by millions will barely be addressed.
We have got a foretaste of the strategy of the right wing from the article Roy Hattersley published in the Guardian (December 21). Hattersley, a long-standing right-wing former MP, in his time an opponent of Michael Foot and Tony Benn, pulled no punches, urging the right-wing of the party to fight back. If the right wing fight back now, he writes, “they will, of course, be accused of splitting the party. In truth they will be preventing, or at worst postponing, the real split that is bound to follow a further drift to the unelectable left….”
Hattersley sees the campaign of the right wing as a long one. “Before the brilliance of Neil Kinnock’s Bournemouth conference speech in 1985 extinguished the hopes of Militant,” he writes, “outriders spent two years preparing the ground for his final assault”. We can regard Roy Hattersley and the Labour Together ‘inquiry’ as ‘outriders’ for a long campaign by Labour’s old-guard right wing to win back the party. Hattersley’s is only one of many newspaper columns, interviews and TV appearances by Labour right-wingers aiming to crucify Jeremy Corbyn personally and to demonise the hundreds of thousands of working people who joined the party after 2015.
MPs should “challenge” members’ decision
And just to make it clear that these people have nothing but contempt for the half a million Labour Party members up and down the country, Hattersley has already written them off. “If Rebecca Long-Bailey is elected party leader,” he writes, “Labour MPs should challenge her authority” There needs to be an “outright refusal” he adds, “to accept the imposition of a leader who does not command their confidence”. That’s it, then. The aspirations and wishes of half a million members, expressed through their votes in a leadership election, amount to the “imposition” of a leader. As the old saying goes, if the electorate votes the wrong way, it becomes necessary to abolish the electorate.
What is notable in Roy Hattersley’s think-piece in the Guardian is that although there are the obligatory references to the left being ‘unelectable’ and to ‘democratic socialism’, there in not one single reference to policy.
Hattersley’s intervention was soon followed by Tom Watson, with lurid headlines about ‘brutality’ in the Labour Party. These people have never understood the difference between being criticised and being ‘insulted’, between being out-voted and being ‘abused’. The idea of ‘brutality’ in the Labour Party debates is at best preposterous and at worst a complete mangling of the English language, not that it matters to Tom Watson.
Let us not forget that Watson was one of the prime movers in undermining Corbyn’s leadership. Months before the election he was demanding through newspaper articles and headlines that Labour support a second referendum to avoid an election defeat. He is therefore one of the key architects of the defeat.
What Labour’s right wing do not understand is that with 14 million in poverty, with homelessness increasing weekly, with the NHS and public services in crisis, with millions living in daily insecurity, there have to be political solutions that will impact on workers lives. Boris Johnson has no intention of making the slightest attempt to alter the daily challenges of working people’s lives, barring a few cosmetic measures. Labour’s right wing have nothing to offer in regards to policy.
What the right-wing want is a complete demolition of Labour’s manifesto. They want to take a wrecking ball to the Labour Party membership, expelling or outlawing as many members as they can get away with. They will happily cut half a million members down to a tenth of that, so long as it means a membership that is deferential and unquestioning towards their ‘betters’, that is Labour MPs.
There have already been dark mutterings about the membership being ‘out of touch’ with Labour MPs and although that it true and the answer should be re-selection of candidates, the right-wing might use their inquiry to propose the disenfranchisement of the membership, by increasing the role of MPs in the election of the leader.
That is the path the right wing will try to follow in the coming months and years. We have a long and hard fight to make sure their campaign fails and the first round of the fight is to discredit the stitch-up being organised by Labour Together.
December 31, 2019
