Only a couple of years ago the Labour Party was criticised for its silence over the summer recess, with complaints that Ed Miliband’s team had failed to take advantage of the traditionally quiet period to get some much-needed media coverage. Well, never let it be said that Labour doesn’t learn from its mistakes: this year’s seemingly endless leadership election has turned into a nightmare for the party and a delight for hacks.
The cause of all this has been the extraordinary rise of Jeremy Corbyn, and attention is shifting to what might happen if he actually wins this thing. But we already know what will happen if Corbyn wins: it will be a disaster. I’ve been trying to think of another major party leader so far removed from the public’s perception of what it wants in a Prime Minister and the best I can do is Iain Duncan Smith if he had also managed to accidentally kill the entire cast of The Great British Bake Off.
But what happens if Corbyn doesn’t win? Firstly there will be a big sigh of disappointment from the journalists. Then there will then be a bigger sigh of relief from Corbyn himself, who gives every impression of not really wanting to be leader. And then, either Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper will take on the worst job in British politics. And it’s at that point that the fun really starts.
The Labour Party is still nowhere near a coherent, unified position on public spending. This is disastrous at any time, but even more so when it is only political issue that matters. There are actually plenty of serious people offering a good analysis of where Labour should position itself, but no sign that the party overall is ready to sign up. As an example we need only look at the Welfare Bill vote, where MPs found themselves caught between the options of rebelling or grumpily abstaining on a vote that pushed through some policies they, and their members, hated. This wasn’t some new piece of dastardly cunning by George Osborne, it was about as basic a political trap as it is possible to set, but still Labour was unable to escape it.
The answer to this problem looks deceptively simple: have a solid economic platform that allows you to oppose the cuts you feel are wrong without losing credibility. If you don’t have that then your choices are either to play into the Conservatives’ hands (‘same old Labour’) or fail to do the one thing you are constitutionally expected to do: oppose the Government. But gaining that credibility requires a strong leader who will tell some harsh truths to a party that was too prepared to believe Ed Miliband that none of that annoyingly difficult stuff was really necessary. And that brings us back to Cooper and Burnham.
One of those two is going to have to convince the party to do things it doesn’t want to do in order to win, and they are going to have to do it after several months where anyone asking the most basic question in politics – ‘how is this going to be paid for?’ – is instantly labelled a Tory. Nothing in this leadership campaign has indicated they are up to that fight, even if they wanted to have it. Worse than that, nothing in the preceding five years has indicated they are up for much when it comes to opposition. In the two plum roles of Health and Home Affairs they have allowed their opponents to serenely glide through life with barely a wobble.
They will be doing this while managing a bunch of MPs haunted by the knowledge that they have twice allowed leaders to carry on and take them into a general election when they should have been forced out. Outside Parliament there will be a load of Corbyn supporters adopting the SNP stance of numerical losers but moral victors, and who appear to have muscled in on Labour’s constituency parties.
Of course politics can change; Cameron has a tiny majority, there will be by-elections, an EU referendum, a Tory leadership election. But already Labour supporters find themselves imagining how the Conservatives could possibly shoot themselves in the foot in an even more spectacular fashion than their own party has managed.
But it won’t be enough for the Conservatives to join Labour in a political suicide pact if they are still the only party people trust on the economy. As Jon Cruddas has pointed out: ‘the public appear to think anti-austerity is a vote loser’. Either the Labour Party needs to collectively change its mind or the electorate does, and there’s no sign of either of those things happening soon.
Sean Kemp is a former Number 10 adviser for the Lib Dems.
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