A Case for Mandatory Reselection

Not more centre party rumours. Perhaps it's just churnalism. After all, it's not like British politics is gripped by a major scandal or anything.

Touring the debris of recent weeks, Andrew Grice riffs off anti-semitism, Syria, and the Skripals to argue that relations between Labour's "two tribes" are breaking down and that a parting is inevitable. The only chance of salvaging the situation is, apparently, if Jeremy Corbyn speaks out for MPs who were on that anti-semitism protest and recommend they not be deselected. Given some of the most awful, anti-working class and anti-Corbyn people in Labour politics were in attendance, how about "no".

Let's be quite clear about the balance of power in the Labour Party. Corbyn is strong and immovable. The unions are onside. The central administration is under the left's control. Momentum is a large, growing and inescapable presence many multiples larger than the combined strength of Labour's right, and the membership, in the main, are extremely critical of the activities of our self-described Labour rebels. They might not like Corbyn's positioning on foreign affairs, but the real reason why "the level of despair is back to mid-2016" is because they're utterly powerless. They have no strategy, no way of asserting their former dominance, and only command attention when they're pouring scorn on their leader. Small wonder the fantasy of a new centre party exercises such a pull. It's the nostalgia fever dream of what they have always wanted: a technocratic outfit sans the hideous trade unions and a membership who expect a say over how things are run.

This is not a "tribal" issue, as Andrew and tedious Westminster commentators like to style these things, but a matter of interest. Should the Labour Party reflect the lives and articulate the interests of the working class as it exists now, in 2018, or pursue the austerity-happy, business-friendly, elite-embracing strategies that have proved such a success for centre left parties elsewhere?

The sad truth is there's no reconciling with these people. This is not a broad tent issue, it's a matter of fundamentally being at odds with what the Labour Party has become and is becoming. Until they do the decent thing and follow the logic of their politics out of the party, they will use their position as official Labour representatives to attack, undermine, destabilise and wreck the party's chances. Their powers may be depleted but their access to the media is not, and they are willing participants in, as Owen notes, their efforts at delegitimising the left as a whole. And they will keep at it until, at a time they think is right for them, they'll decamp to cause maximum damage.

Enough. The membership are not powerless to do something about this. At Labour Party conference this year mandatory reselection of MPs will be debated and voted on. It's in our power to select constituency delegates who support the policy and get it through. And if we're successful, it will force the hand of the hostiles to put up, or spend the next few years scrabbling around their constituencies begging for reselection. We will see what stomach they have for opposition then. Meanwhile, we can be confident that whatever outfit they come up with isn't going to be much trouble - unless you seriously think an alliance of Blairists, Woke Soubz, and the Liberal Democrats will be a goer among Labour's left-minded electorate more so than Tory voters.

Remember, Jeremy Corbyn and the leadership have bent over backwards to accommodate the self-designated core group hostile, and at every turn they've made their contempt clear. It's about time the membership showed them their contempt as well.