A Reflection on the Parliamentary Labour Party
A thought:
For almost the whole of Labour's history, the party's Right has had a deathlock on the leadership, and dominated the PLP. But it didn't use to be totally dominant at the top, and we're now seeing some of the effects of that long-term dominance since 1994.
To take a very obvious recent example, the fact that 36% of Labour voters voted Leave is completely unsurprising; there's always been a stubborn third or so of Labour voters who were Eurosceptic, and at times it's been higher than that. Corbyn's "Reluctant Remain" position actually puts him much closer to the centre of gravity of Labour voters than, say, someone like Eddie Izzard who *loves* the EU and all its works.
(Actually, I suspect that in his heart Jeremy would have preferred to vote Leave, and if he'd taken that position it could have transformed the atmosphere. But his weak position in the PLP wouldn't allow him to.)
Anyway, my point is that there's a very large Eurosceptic chunk of Labour's constituency that is almost completely unrepresented in the PLP. You don't, any more, have leading figures like Tony Benn or Peter Shore in the Brexit camp. You've got some elderly leftists like Dennis Skinner, some backbench mavericks like Gisela Stuart and Frank Field, and that's it. My point being: the PLP is wildly unrepresentative of its voters on this issue.
That's a single issue, but something similar applies to the Left-Right division in the party. Okay, in the 1990s and 2000s the Labour Left was ageing and in serious long-term decline. I wouldn't have expected there to be a hundred MPs in the Campaign Group. The momentum and balance of opinion was clearly on the Blair/Brown side.
But the Blair/Brown duopoly - leaving aside all their feuds with each other - were extremely efficient and ruthless in monopolising parliamentary selections. A few mavericks slipped through the net in 1997, in seats Labour didn't expect to win, but the next three were very tightly controlled, and the only issue was whether it would be Blairites (via Progress) or Brownites (via union-based fixers like Watson) who would get nominated. You only start to see this change in 2015, when Ed Miliband's loosening of discipline again allowed some interesting people to slip through.
So we'd reached a point where, in Parliament at least, the Labour Left was reduced to a small number of mostly elderly MPs. The Right didn't need to fight them any more; they assumed they just had to wait for them to die out.
But at the grassroots things weren't quite so dead, even before the huge influx of new members in 2015. We saw some of this in 2010, when (from the PLP's point of view) the members elected the wrong Miliband brother. Now, Ed was never very far to the Left - at best he did a good impersonation of a social democrat - but still, they were stunningly disloyal to him. Poor, inoffensive Ed Miliband.
The situation now is that the disconnect has reached a real extreme. I have no idea what the PLP majority are going to do next. I don't actually think *they* know what to do next. Complicating things is the fact that, if they manage to get rid of Jeremy, they're split into factions that hate each other so much, they'll immediately be at each other's throats.
I mentioned the Major government, but in some ways it's a bit like the Tory parliamentary party under IDS. Except that there's no Michael Howard waiting in the wings - and if they think someone as notoriously sulphurous as Yvette Cooper can be a unity candidate, they really are bonkers.
Perhaps there's something more to it that the PLP being ideologically and sociologically disconnected from the base. I think a good part of the problem is that so many of them have followed the same career path from the National Union of Students via non-job sinecures in the third sector into Parliament, that they've very limited experience of the real world. Factional infighting is all they really know how to do.
That, really, is it. Corbyn's reheated 1980s Bennism may not be the answer. But I'm pretty sure that a Labour Party led by the 1994 NUS executive definitely isn't the answer. Put those guys in charge, and you may as well hand dozens of seats over to Nigel Farage, free of charge.
My $0.02, anyway.
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