A question for Labour’s moderates, however we define the term and assuming they are still sizeable enough to merit the plural: Do you want to see Jeremy Corbyn become Prime Minister?
Specifically, do you think he possesses the character and temperament of a national leader? Does the prospect of a Corbyn-led Labour government fill you with hope? I’m not asking how you’d feel finally to be rid of this hopeless government, with its prodigious incompetences and petty cruelties. I’m not asking about the Labour Party in your heart but about the one out here, in the world, standing before the voters. That is Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and it is the only one on offer. Do you want this Labour Party to come to power?
Answering is not easy but your response is important. Does the prospect fill you with gloom? Do you fear for the impact on economic stability and national security? Do you worry what sinister ideologues would be unleashed on the apparatus of the state and what these men and women, few among them respecters of liberal and democratic values, would do with their newfound power? Do you wonder how British Jews would feel? Are you prepared, mentally, for the sight of some of them climbing aboard Nefesh B’Nefesh flights to make new, safer lives in Israel?
If you are feeling uneasy at this point, that’s understandable, but isn’t it time you did something about it? The common response from moderates is: ‘It’s still our party. They won’t drive us out. We’re staying to fight.’
Those are noble sentiments. If ever there was a party worth fighting for, Labour is it. The party of the NHS, workers’ rights, redistribution, the minimum wage, council house-building, and social equality. Labour has more often than not been the great civilising force in the past century of British life. If its services were too often dispensed with by an impatient electorate, it nonetheless remained the indispensable party.
That party has disappeared from public view. It exists only in memory and yearning and WhatsApp threads of debilitating frustration. In its stead stands an imposter cobbled together from some half-remembered romance that never was. The Labour Party of today is an attempt to revive a Labour past by people who weren’t there, know nothing about it, and consider Tony Benn memes primary sources.
The Times has a poll of Labour members. Just 19 per cent consider anti-Semitism a serious problem that needs to be addressed. The rest are divided on the matter but 77 per cent believe ‘its extent is being deliberately exaggerated to damage Labour and Jeremy Corbyn or to stifle criticism of Israel’. Sixty-one per cent say Corbyn is handling the matter well. Sixty-five per cent of Labour members think Israel is a force for bad in the world; only 59 per cent think the same of Iran. One third want Ken Livingstone’s suspension lifted.
The same newspaper carries a report on the rejection of diversity and equality training by a branch of the Birkenhead Labour Party. The minutes record that ‘proposed training by the Jewish Labour Group is not going ahead due to possible links with Isis and the Israeli government’.
The tireless fightback against anti-Semitism lasted barely a week. Commentators and activists, Corbynista and soft left alike, have already moved on to whataboutery and ‘yeah, but the Tories are the real racists’.
Is this your Labour Party? Because this is the party you are paying your membership dues to. This is the party under whose banner you are sitting in Parliament. This is the party for which you are knocking on doors and delivering leaflets. Come May 3rd, there will be no option on the ballot for Decent Labour or We Hate Him Too Labour. Let us not be naive. We’re all friends here. We know how this works. The results will be spun as a victory for Corbyn and rightly so. He will have ridden out the most serious racism scandal to hit a mainstream political party since Enoch Powell went to Birmingham and he’ll have a lot more council seats to show for it.
You may be able to separate the sheep from the goats, to tell yourself you are campaigning for your local councillor and not the leader, but in practice the difference is minor. Every vote for every Labour candidate in this and all the elections to come is a vote for Corbyn. Every vote for Labour is a vote to put him in Number 10. That’s just politics.
You can’t bring yourself to leave Labour. It’s your family, your heritage, your cause. Fine, then the last remaining option is to remove Corbyn and his acolytes the only way you can: by forming a new parliamentary grouping, the Progressive Labour Party. Sign up enough MPs to dwarf the SNP and you’ll get some short money to tide you over until private donors can be tapped. Progressive Labour should hold the government to account, advance the policies of the 2017 manifesto, and offer a Labour Party committed to social justice, pragmatism, and meaningful anti-racism. In short, don’t just eulogise the Labour Party — revive it.
Yes, MPs, you will be deselected. They are going to deselect you anyway. Yes, activists, you will be expelled. It is a principle worth being expelled for. The alternative is to stay and pretend defiant tweets and open letters constitute action. They don’t. They are a salve to the conscience. The leadership refuses to admit the scale of Labour’s anti-Semitism problem and will do little beyond a few Passover greetings and a photo op or two. That is all they can do because to do anything more — anything real — would require them to admit Corbyn’s culpability and by extension his unsuitability to lead Labour or the country.
Those who know all this and choose to stay are making a moral choice and, however much we might sympathise with their ties of love and loyalty, we must treat them as moral actors. They are not moderates, they are enablers.
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