Keir Starmer is only a year into his job as Labour leader, but could his time in charge soon come to an end? Starmer is under increasing pressure following his failure to revitalise Labour. A bad set of results on 6 May could mean the final nail in the coffin.
If Starmer is ousted – and that remains a big if, given the lack of viable contenders for the job – Corbyn’s critics within the Labour party will quickly find themselves in a difficult position. With no heir apparent on the Labour right, Starmer’s departure could easily mean the left taking control of Labour all over again.
Yvette Cooper has been touted by some as a ‘compromise candidate’, in the event that Starmer does depart. But it seems unlikely that many on the Corbyn wing of the party would be willing to accept Cooper. What’s more, whoever gets chosen as the candidate for the Corbynite left would be the clear favourite if a leadership election happens this side of the next general election. Corbyn’s supporters are well aware of that: so why should they compromise, and accept a candidate like Cooper who they can’t stand?
This is the hard left’s one, big weak spot
All this adds up to a miserable picture if Starmer is ousted. It should also serve as a clear warning for those not enamoured with Starmer but who don’t want to see a return to the dark days of Corbynism to hold their nerve.
But if Starmer is forced out, there might be hope for Labour supporters who don’t like Corbyn. If a new leadership contest were held this year, they could opt for a candidate on a vocally pro-EU platform. A recent poll about viewpoints on EU membership within Labour’s membership revealed that 59 per cent of members would like the party to campaign to re-join the EU; only 15 per cent of these voters thought this would be a bad idea.
For better or worse, the Labour party is now a pro-EU membership party. It may even be the one policy that glues Labour together as a group more than any other.
This is the hard left’s one, big weak spot when it comes to the membership. Indeed Rebecca Long-Bailey’s comment about Labour holding a referendum ‘of sorts’ on the EU question, in contrast to Starmer’s ‘Nobody is ruling out remain as an option’ comment was what ultimately swung the leadership contest for the latter.
With Brexit having now happened, the hard left have gone even further in a Lexiteer direction, providing the moderates with their one and only opening. With a commitment to re-joining the single market under the next Labour government in place, the right’s chosen candidate could win the next leadership campaign.
Of course, that would leave Labour with a troublesome policy going forward. Starmer has tried to be clear about putting the European question behind the party in the hope of winning back Red Wall seats; this would open up the wound all over again. It would also make winning back those constituencies lost in 2019, at least partially due to the party’s stance on Brexit, much, much more difficult.
But it might not be impossible. Picture the next Labour leader in fishing towns, talking to locals about how let down they are by the details of Boris’s deal. See that same leader talking to small business exporters whose livelihoods have been decimated by the terms of our new trading arrangement with the EU, and you start to envisage a way through for Labour’s next leader.
Yet if Labour did adopt a position that involved moving Britain much closer to the EU again, that would add even more pressure on them to change on other issues in order to pass this off. They already need to move to the right in several policy areas anyhow – the culture wars, patriotism and tax, to name a few – becoming more pro-European would only add to this requirement. There is probably an electoral alliance out there that might be interested in a Labour party that pledged to reverse parts of the current Brexit settlement, but it would be very different from Labour’s traditional voting base.
This is at least partly why it seems unlikely that the Labour right would ever adopt a pro-EU strategy in a new leadership contest. They aren’t prepared to give up on the Red Wall and create a new electoral alliance; they aren’t prepared to chuck in the towel on what the Labour party has been for the last half-century and do something different. Yet whatever they are prepared to do, this could become a big dilemma for the Labour right in a matter of weeks: either pick a platform that will probably allow them to keep the leadership of the party but lose the next general election, or simply give up the Labour party to the hard left, probably this time for good.
They would most likely pick the latter, not out of any lack of Europhilia on the part of the participants in that decision, but simply out of fear. Let’s hope for their sake that Starmer stays where he is for the time being. For Corbyn critics in the Labour party, the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
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