Labour’s losing instinct

It appeared the ultimate summer ‘silly season’ story: that Labour would choose an unrepentant, self-consciously unspun bearded leftie as its leader. But, as ballot papers for the leadership election are dispatched, the story is threatening to close with a nightmare final chapter for the party. This week the pollsters YouGov had Corbyn 20 points ahead of Andy Burnham, his closest rival, and in a position to win the contest in its first round. Labour thus faces the prospect of a defeat in 2020 that could make Margaret Thatcher’s 1983 landslide look small-scale.

But while Corbyn’s rise may not have been predicted, it was eminently predictable. Labour has consistent form when it comes to such self-harming behaviour: after it lost power in 1951, 1970 and 1979, the party engaged in vicious internal warfare and then moved sharply to the left.

In each of these fights, the left has trotted out its hackneyed narrative about the ‘great betrayal’ supposedly committed during Labour’s time in office. In the 1970s and 1980s, Tony Benn led the denunciations of the governments of which he had been a member. After 2010, the condemnation of New Labour’s record was given added legitimacy thanks to its source: the former Treasury special adviser, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and by now leader of the Labour party, Ed Miliband.

Miliband not only provided the intellectual groundwork for the Corbyn insurrection, he also, albeit unwittingly, provided the organisational opening. Desperate to placate the increasingly truculent unions that had helped elect their boss, Miliband’s team, says one observer, ‘gave a free rein and turned a blind eye’ as the unions tried to squeeze their favoured candidates into parliamentary seats.

This had two results. First, the unions managed to ensure left-wing loyalists were picked in a swath of constituencies so safe that not even Miliband could lose them.