Labour leadership contest: Moderate MPs fear purge by 'aggressive factional nutters' on the left

Moderate Labour MPs fear they will be “purged” from the party by “aggressive factional nutters” around Jeremy Corbyn if he is successful in his bid to win the party’s leadership. Senior figures in the parliamentary party told The Independent that there is growing concern that Corbyn supporters will use “trigger ballots” in Labour seats across the country to eject MPs considered to be too right-wing.

Under party rules, MPs have to win approval from their local party to be reselected to fight the next general election. Normally this is a routine process. But Labour now has 100,000-plus new members who will be entitled to vote for the first time in such elections and are believed to be overwhelmingly to the left of the existing membership.

Those on the right fear union figures around Mr Corbyn will use the process – along with the upcoming boundary review – to deselect those MPs who are not “ideologically pure”.

“There is a complete divergence between the parliamentary party and the broader party,” said one senior MP.

“If Corbyn gets hold of the Shadow Cabinet and the NEC then you’re right back to Tony Benn. There is no doubt about that. I don’t think Corbyn wants to exclude people but there are a lot of aggressive factional nutters around him who do. They want to deliver his mandate no matter what and the only way to do that will be to purge the parliamentary party of those who don’t go along with him.”

Should Mr Corbyn win he faces the tricky prospect of forcing his agenda on a parliamentary party that is overwhelmingly hostile to his plans.

To get around this, the veteran left-winger suggests in an essay for the Fabian Society that the wider party should be given a much greater say on the minutiae of Labour policy.

“We cannot simply make policy at party conference once a year,” he writes. “We need to review our policy-making process to ensure that it is inclusive, accessible, participatory and able to take democratic decisions quickly.” He adds: “Labour has drifted into a presidential model of politics in which the leader and their office comes up with all the policies. I want to change that.”

But MPs fear that Mr Corbyn and those around him will use the new so-called democratic policy-making to force them to vote in the Commons on things about which they fundamentally disagree.

“It is a way of binding those who oppose him into toeing the line,” said one. Another Labour source added that there was a lot of “doom and gloom” among MPs and party staff about the prospect of a Corbyn victory. “It is not so much Jeremy but those around him who are running his campaign,” they said.

“If he does win, those will be the people who are running the party and they are out for revenge again.”

Under the new voting rules, MPs no longer have a decisive say in the result of the leadership contest. In 2010 their votes were weighted so they made up 33 per cent of the electorate. That has now been removed so their votes represent just 0.04 per cent.