Given last year’s election was so much about the possibility of the SNP and Labour working together in government, Labour figures will be smiling ruefully at Nicola Sturgeon’s interview on the Andrew Marr Show today, in which she stuck the boot into the party she once suggested a ‘progressive alliance’ with. The Scottish First Minister is of course thinking more about fighting Labour in this year’s Holyrood elections than about the Westminster Parliament, and so she wanted to paint her main challengers as weak and confusing. She told the programme that the party would end up ‘without a shred of credibility’ if it held a free vote on Trident renewal, and ridiculed Jeremy Corbyn’s suggestion of building new submarines that didn’t carry nuclear warheads:
‘I think it’s ridiculous and I think it’s a sign of just how tortured these debates are becoming within the Labour party.’
The Observer reports today that Corbyn’s allies are briefing that Labour will lose all its remaining Scottish Parliament seats in May. This is probably part of an expectations management operation, given Corbyn’s enemies want to make May’s elections the key test for the party leadership. To make out that everything is going to be terrible now means that everyone will have factored in a poor performance by May. It’s interesting that Corbyn’s comrades are even bothering to do this, though, as it doesn’t really matter what the tests that his parliamentary opponents set for him are. It’s what the membership sees as success and failure, and members may blame a poor performance on Corbyn’s enemies bickering too much for the public to take the party seriously, than on the leadership.
That is why the Labour leadership makes so many moves that appeal to the membership, not the voting public or the parliamentary party. The complaint to the BBC over Laura Kuenssberg suggesting that Stephen Doughty announce his resignation as a shadow minister on the Daily Politics was made partly because Corbyn’s team felt that members would wonder why they were letting the BBC ‘get away’ with this behaviour, I understand. It’s best to expect many more moves designed to satisfy the membership’s idea of success over the next few months, and not the tests set by Nicola Sturgeon, Labour MPs, or voters.
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