Labour’s defeat was their own guilty secret. But Boris Johnson’s matters much more

Andrew Parsons i/Images

Now they tell us. Labour moderates had been watching the growth of the Conservative vote in north east of England council elections for years. But so had the Conservatives’ evil genius Dominic Cummings and he knew how to act on it. Forget  obsessions with social media, go knock on doors. As Tip O’Neill the old Speaker of the US House of Representatives memorably once said,  All politics is local.” And we can add,  it transcends ideology alone.

And Brexit?  Behind Theresa May’s third and final defeat in October, the unintended consequence was that the Remain cause was lost amid the Labour  divisions. Why did they ignore the old mantra, a divided party cannot win?  Boris Johnson took it to heart.  Having replaced May he did what was necessary to impose discipline on the Conservative party and expelled his Remain dissidents. Corbyn tried to string everybody along. Brexit neutrality and an immediate end to austerity would surely do the trick.

Labour and the Lib Dems threw away their  tactical advantage  of opposing a government without a majority. They lost their nerve and granted  Johnson’s heart’s desire to have an election they were always going to lose. And no,not only with hindsight. Listen to the defeated Labour MPs coming out of the woodwork who anticipated defeat without surprise.

The electric moment in the election results programme came in the nimbler ITV show when Alan Johnson, the former Labour cabinet minister (and postman) whom many reckoned could have saved the Labour party had he chosen to stand for the leadership, launched a searing attack on Jon Lansman, the head of the Momentum entryists who even now control the Labour machine

Johnson expanded his theme in today’s Mail on Sunday,  

Corbyn and Momentum (the personality cult created to keep him in power) do not advance the tradition of Attlee, they betray it. They are more concerned with ideological purism than winning elections.

Here is a Thursday night tweet from its founder, Corbyn’s old mate Jon Lansman denouncing somebody who wanted Labour to win: ‘“Winning” is the small bit that matters to political elites who want to keep power themselves.’

There you have it from the horse’s mouth. To him, Labour’s defeat doesn’t matter. Victory is a bourgeois concept. The only goal for true socialists is glorious defeat.

Why didn’t we win?

Nye Bevan said that socialism was the language of priorities, but in this Election, Labour tried to fool the public into thinking that money was no object, which made the manifesto look like the wish-list of a pressure group rather than a serious plan for a potential party of government. But the main problem at this Election wasn’t the manifesto; the main problem was Corbyn. A weak, self-regarding, pious man incapable of leadership.

Indeed, most of his Momentum supporters despise the very concept of leadership. All decisions must be made by the rank-and-file, which effectively means a clique of activists and Len McCluskey.

The working classes looked at Corbyn and saw somebody who was unpatriotic to the extent that the country’s enemies were his friends. They hated his pacifism, his simplistic division of the world between evil oppressors and their victims, his disdain of aspiration.

 

Most of all, they didn’t recognise themselves in Corbyn’s depiction of working-class people as having no individual identity, only a collective role as part of the downtrodden masses. They decided well before this Election and irrespective of Brexit that they would never let him cross the threshold of 10 Downing Street.

Of course, Brexit was an issue. It has created the biggest crisis in our peacetime history, but it served to reinforce the conclusion the electorate had already reached about Corbyn’s weakness. He would negotiate a new deal (we were told) and then hold a gerrymandered referendum during which he would give no indication as to which option he supported. ‘I am their leader therefore I must follow them,’ is not a captivating slogan for a potential Prime Minister.

Caroline Flint was heroic in her pursuit of that outcome and now she’s gone, along with so many other good Labour MPs.

Corbyn has to go now. The thought of him still leading the party on February 27, 2020, the 120th anniversary of its creation, will be anathema to Labour supporters who have been offended by the antisemitism that he allowed to take root. For, make no mistake, this curse began with Corbyn and the extremists who used the £3 membership to infiltrate our party and bolster his leadership bid.

Despite the scale of the defeat the Corbynites still control the party machines and are rushing to protect their own legacy. It will surely take more than the likes of Rebecca Long Bailey with little know ability beyond delivering a scripted Corbynite message to rescue the Labour party. The experienced centrists now need to  fight back at last or break away from the machine.  Their chance of internal reform was probably lost as long ago as 2016, when 172 out of 229 MPs wanted to replace Corbyn  but the National Executive backed by militant membership overruled them. Before that an electoral college of a third each of MPs, Unions and membership chose the leader, with candidates chosen by MPs. But in the election itself,  it’s one member one vote. I spent £3 to qualify for a vote, just the same as a former prime minister. All very democratic? Not so much, when a few hundred thousand spending three pounds can disregard the verdict of millions.

 

A remorseless analysis from Prof Robert Ford

The higher the Leave share, the greater the Tory gain, rising from a modest two-point swing in seats with a Leave vote below 45% to a whopping eight-point swing in seats where 60% or more voted Leave in 2016…

This was total repudiation. Labour returned its smallest cohort of MPs since 1935, and the prospect of power looks more remote than at any time since the early 1980s. Yet even in 1983, the party was suffering just its second successive defeat, and even this could be blamed on a divided vote following the SDP split. In 2019, Labour faced a fourth, crushing defeat in a row to a Tory party that has governed for nearly a decade, yet grown its vote each time it faced the electorate.

The SNP slumped in 2017, when its campaign for a second independence referendum turned unionist and Leave voters against it. Two years later, the imminence of a hard Brexit under Johnson has renewed the appeal of independence, and the SNP has 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats.

The Scottish Conservatives gave up more than half of the seats gained in 2017, but the biggest loser was Scottish Labour, once again reduced to a single seat on its lowest ever share of the vote. The SNP’s triumph makes a new constitutional clash highly likely in the coming parliament, as a party determined to secure a mandate for independence faces a prime minister firmly opposed to a second Scottish referendum on the issue.

There is a lesson in the repudiation of the Corbyn project for Scottish and Irish nationalists, even though its time has not yet come. It is that one day before too long they will have to deliver before their dream begins to pall.  Brexit gave them a new lease of life. The immediate initiative then, lies with the Conservatives who need to do a lot more to defend the Union by consent. They have one asset albeit a temporary one. The SNP is not a revolutionary party like the Sinn Fein of a century ago. Nicola Sturgeon wants to do independence legally. This requires Westminster consent, unlike the more limited Westminster role in calling a border poll for Northern Ireland. This gives Johnson a little time to think up a strategy to replace permanent flat refusal which is untenable long term.  By contrast, Nicola Sturgeon needs to force the pace  for her own deadline of  the Holyrood election of May 2021.

Hints are emerging like the old “Kill Home Rule by kindness” arguments of more than a century ago in Ireland. Launch catchy programmes of public investment freed from the constrictions of EU state aid rules, and you slay the independence dragon, or at least anaesthetise it.

There is a notion going round that it was only fear of a Corbyn government   that has held back an investment bonanza in Britain that the EU cannot afford to impede. This would allow the UK to diverge from EU regulations which impede growth and strike an agreement for free trade. This is still a heroic assumption. It will be put to the test over the coming weeks and months.