Have you ever been to an activist meeting? A proper one, not a cocktail party for potential donors. If Keir Starmer has been to one lately, I suspect he didn’t stay past the minutes or he would have been better prepared for what happens when you try to get a roomful of lefties to point in the same direction.
Starmer’s team have been so busy admiring their enormous majority that it has taken them a while to realise that they are trapped with 400 left-wingers in every shade of red from post-Soviet carmine to the most delicate salmon pink, all of them high on victory and spoiling for a fight. One might as well try to herd 400 cats into formation. In our sclerotic two-party, first-past-the-post system, a majority as large as Starmer’s is meant to give the leadership a free hand. But this depends on internal discipline and the appearance of consensus, which is not easy for Labour. In my experience, the only activist meetings that reach a consensus in under three hours are direct action groups such as Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action, which might explain why the government is trying to have them locked up before they become too powerful, free speech be damned. One suspects that Starmer might deal similarly with Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, if he could.
The MPs for Islington North and Coventry South are apparently going to form a new left-wing party. I’m happy for them. They make sense together. Between them, the former Labour leader and the young rising star have covered the two major modern left aesthetics: Soft Business Attack Femme and Wizard of No Fixed Address. And neither of them, apparently, is happy with purely vibes-based politics. They’re the sort of terrifying people who actually go to meetings, stay until the end and listen.
Rather than ask why this sort of thing is popular with voters, the government’s loyalists are grumbling about how badly Corbyn and Sultana have betrayed the Labour party – which is a bit rich, considering that Corbyn didn’t expel himself.
Modern Labour acts as if only it can protect Britain from being further ravaged by the Bullingdon set. As such, any opinion that might go down badly with centrist dads from Stevenage is by definition a luxury belief.
And there is a place for that sort of pragmatism. There are situations so desperate that ‘you should see the other guy’ is a winning argument. Last summer, just before the general election, someone threw a plastic bag full of raw meat into the building site behind my flat. The construction company had gone bankrupt and the site was fenced off, so we had to watch and smell the meatbag slowly rot until even the foxes wouldn’t go for it. But if you’d decorated it with a red ribbon, I would have held my nose and voted for that rotting meatbag rather than allow the Conservative party another moment’s control over what’s left of the country.
Consensus is difficult among people who, by their very nature, believe some things matter more than power
As it happens, I didn’t have to make that choice. Because I live in Islington North, and Corbyn was and remains my MP. He is also my neighbour. I often see him in the corner shop. I could easily have brought up the rotting meatbag issue in person, but Corbyn does actually try to solve problems for his constituents, and there was a very real possibility that he might have tried to scale the fence himself. And with the greatest respect, he’s 76.
Corbyn was supposed to go away. That’s what party leaders are meant to do when they’re ousted: slink off to a discreet life of lucrative after-dinner talks. Instead, he has carried on standing up for his principles, which remain pro-social and anti-war. Instead of going back to rusticate on his allotment, he keeps on suggesting outrageous socialist plots like raising taxes rather than kicking children off welfare.
When your entire political tradition is based on scamming, spin and weary pragmatism, honesty and consistency are the wild cards. Which is where Sultana comes in. The young MP (she’s only 31) has a rare talent in this anaemic political culture: she speaks clearly and with conviction. ‘Just 50 families now own more than half the UK population,’ she declared in her announcement that she was quitting Labour. ‘Poverty is growing, inequality is obscene, and the two-party system offers nothing but managed decline and broken promises.’
Sultana was one of the first Labour MPs to have the whip withdrawn for voting to scrap the two-child benefit cap. This early crackdown was designed as a warning to newcomers to the Commons about what happens if you don’t toe the party line, wherever the leadership chooses to draw it. Unfortunately, somebody failed to frisk the new MPs on the way in to check they weren’t carrying any concealed principles.
Labour was never going to be able to control its MPs. Consensus is difficult to achieve among people who, by their very nature, believe that some things matter more than power. This is a feature of the left, not a bug. In a sensible democracy, politicians who stand up for their constituents should not automatically be a liability and smaller parties should not automatically be a threat.
Most modern democracies have some form of proportional representation, which is, of course, a boring way to run a country. Proportional requires a lot more careful negotiation with smaller parties, a lot of coalition building, a lot of dull, grown-up compromise. Urgh. First past the post is far more exciting, if you’re the sort of person who likes politics in primary colours. A two-horse race! All or nothing! Win or lose! Goodies and baddies! Adventure, corruption, intrigue, last-minute heel turns! Small men doing dangerous things for money! It’s a game the two largest parties have spent generations learning to master.
This is one of many things that Labour has the power to change in a heartbeat and doesn’t dare. But this is no longer a two-party country, and the voting public can no longer be convinced by an appeal to a stability that barely anyone can remember. Sooner or later, Labour has got to come up with something better than ‘you should see the other guy’.
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