What next for the Labour left?

The dramatic suspension of a former leader of any mainstream political party is bound to be a traumatic event. There are few precedents for it – the last example of anything like it goes back to Ramsay MacDonald. Labour’s first prime minister had decided to form a “national” government with Conservatives and Liberals in 1931, to deal with a financial crisis, leaving most of his colleagues and the party behind. That was a bit much for his old comrades, who kicked him out, though MacDonald was apparently disappointed with their move.  

MacDonald, though, was hardly loved by his party after his historic betrayal. Jeremy Corbyn, by contrast, commanded almost religious, cultish devotion among his followers. He was, in his own way, the leader of a populist insurgency, broadly speaking the Momentum movement, and some of that magical appeal touched the wider country at the 2017 general election, which boasted the biggest swing to Labour since 1945. The election of 2019 was a disaster, but few would argue that that justifies suspension.  

The treatment of Corbyn seems almost designed to rile the left, and so it has proved. Sensible commentators warn that such macho displays of strong leadership as Keir Starmer is currently engaged in merely lead to civil war and the impression of a divided party – electoral poison, as the Tories came to discover over Europe.  

There are good historical examples to illustrate what can go wrong. Neil Kinnock, for example, waged open war on the leftist infiltrators in the Militant movement in the 1980s, and won respect for his bravery; yet it took years more to extirpate them and Labour, visibly split, went on to lose two more general elections. Much the same might be said of Hugh Gaitskell’s struggles against the left and the unilateral nuclear disarmers of the early 1960s. Better, the argument runs, to just ignore Corbyn’s stubborn refusal to accept the realities of antisemitism and allow him his personal fantasy that it’s overstated by enemies: let the sleeping dog lie.  

Yet the counterfactual is instructive. If Starmer chose to leave Corbyn alone, he would be attacked day in day out as a weak hypocrite by the Tory press. Every Wednesday lunchtime Boris Johnson would find some excuse to taunt the right honourable gentleman for talking the talk but failing to walk the walk on Labour’s own racism scandal. Every time Labour tried to raise the sort of issues the Black Lives Matter movement has begged to be heard, the antisemitism affair would just be lazily lobbed back to discredit Labour.  

The point about the struggles by past and present Labour leaders to drag the party back to electability is that it is worth it because it works. Gaitskell and Kinnock never got to be prime minister, but if they had not begun a process of reform then their successors, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair would not have had the opportunity to enjoy unprecedented electoral success and political dominance for years to come – periods when Labour was securely in power and the left firmly marginalised. Starmer could easily enjoy a quiet life, fudge the EHRC Report, put everything through some futile internal review (as Corbyn did with Shami Chakrabarti’s complacency report), but you may as well not bother being leader if you’re going to do that. Starmer is there – and was elected on a strong mandate – to change things. The Momentum people and the bulk of the membership learned the lessons of last December’s defeat remarkably quickly, and faster than the membership of the 1950s or 1980s did after similar setbacks. 

Aside from anything else though, leaders do sometimes have to do the right thing. Expunging antisemitism isn’t just some game of political posturing and tactics. It is not simply or principally a convenient opportunity for Starmer it show how decisive and tough he can be; it’s about resetting Labour’s moral compass. It’s wrong, surely, that Jewish people no longer trust the party when the party can do something about that situation.  

So there will be some trouble, and some members will resign and some union leaders make ominous noises about funding. But, in the end, the left really hasn’t got anywhere else to go. The only halfway successful leftist split was the Respect party which grew out of the Stop the War movement after the invasion of Iraq and was allied with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. Led with some panache by George Galloway as a modern red-green alliance it enjoyed some electoral success, winning the first hard left seats at Westminster since 1951,  a score of councillors, and some union backing. Yet it faded and split itself in due course, as is the inevitable fate of left splinters such as Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party and its offshoot, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). A lifelong Labour man, it seems unlikely Corbyn would willingly team up with anyone outside Labour, at least voluntarily, just as his mentor Tony Benn never would. But then again Ken Livingstone, Scargill and Galloway all ended up, one way or another, standing against official Labour candidates.  

Whether Starmer would feel happier with Corbyn and his diehard supporters inside Labour or outside in some reborn red-green coalition is not known. From appearances, he seems indifferent to their fate.