Brexit Britain: the way forward for the centre-left

The Labour leadership crisis has posed one central question: who owns Labour?

Tony Blair was the last Labour leader to win an overall majority for his party

The realignment of Britain’s left is something that has been much hoped for, long talked about, rarely attempted and never achieved. Could now be the moment?

Certainly the Labour leadership crisis has posed one central question, from which so much flows: who owns Labour?

Ever since its very formation as an uneasy coalition of intellectuals and trades unionists, the Labour Party has had been unable to answer this. Those who believe the party belongs to its members, with policy being decided “democratically” at conference and by the national executive, take the view that MPs, peers, MEPs, the Shadow Cabinet, the real Cabinet and the Prime Minister are variously the servants of the party, taking their guidance from the composite motions and sometimes self-contradictory compromises brokered at the annual beano by the seaside. If Labour MPs didn’t like it, then they can get deselected. End of. That control was fought for long and hard – for decades, in fact – by Jeremy Corbyn and the left generally, from Stafford Cripps in the 1930s to Nye Bevan in the 1950s to Corbyn’s friend and mentor Tony Benn in the 1980s. Benn called it “democratisation”; Corbyn now terms it, with no hint of irony, “a new kind of politics”. It isn’t. It is as old as the party itself.

The alternative view is that the Parliamentary Labour Party is in a unique state of communion with the British electorate, and any attempt to trammel its prerogatives, or those of an elected prime minister, is incompatible with the Burkean principles of British democracy and the unwritten constitution. Parliament, essentially the House of Commons, is sovereign, not the Labour conference or the Labour membership. Not only that, but having the Labour Party run – owned – by its members risks tearing the party off the centre ground, with all the electoral peril that implies. Such a stance has, understandably, traditionally been the majority view of Labour parliamentarians and all Labour prime ministers.

A leadership election between Angela Eagle, say, and Jeremy Corbyn, then, is essentially a battle for ownership of the party. If Eagle wins, then the party does have a chance of repositioning itself and aligning the party membership with the PLP. Just as when the moderate Denis Healey beat Tony Benn for the deputy leadership of the party – and its soul – in 1981 by the narrowest of margins, the crisis will be decided – for now.

However, if Eagle loses and Corbyn is confirmed as leader – with the added trauma of potential mandatory reselections of “rebel” Labour MPs, and most of Labour’s more able national figures sidelined – then the party will have split itself, even if it remains, formally, as one political and legal entity. The electoral consequences would be too gruesome to contemplate.

In which circumstances the possibility of a formal Labour split and wider realignment once again comes into play. In the broad sweep of history, as the late Roy Jenkins used to tell it, this is really about reuniting the broadly progressive forces in British politics, which have been divided fatally since the division and collapse of the Liberal Party and the rise of Labour in the 1920s (Jenkins always took the long view). It is no coincidence that the Conservatives, acrimonious and nasty as they have been for much of their existence, have managed to dominate British politics in the intervening century simply by sticking together, even in the harshest adversity. We now see that the electoral successes of Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair (remarkably the only leaders ever to win overall majorities for Labour) were not much more than aberrations. As Michael Heseltine often reminds us, the British Tory party is the most successful machine in the history of democratic politics anywhere. Usually on its own, sometimes in coalition, it remains the natural party of government.

Today, one can easily perceive a moderate social democratic, liberally minded grouping comprising the moderate wing of the Labour Party and the great majority of its MPs, the Liberal Democrats, perhaps even a few Conservatives appalled by the rightward and Eurosceptic lurch of their party – plus a wider penumbra of the politically unengaged and disaffected uniting behind an agenda of political, social and economic reform.

If that all sounds familiar to an older generation, it should, because it was precisely the pattern of change attempted in the 1980s when Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams, Bill Rogers and much of the right wing of the Labour Party broke away to form the Social Democratic Party, and hitched themselves to the Liberals in the SDP-Liberal Alliance. They almost succeeded in turning their favourite cliché into reality by “breaking the mould” of British politics.

These days the new party might be called “the Progressive Party” or “the Progressives”, maybe with “Progressive Labour” and “Progressive Liberal Democrats” as sub-brands, shorn of doctrinaire socialism, geared to listening to an electorate that feels it has been left behind.

On the other side of the divide is a purer socialist-minded grouping, suspicious of Europe (apart from on workers’ rights), committed to the trade unions, the environment and putting the equality agenda ahead of traditional voter concerns about living standards. So that would be the Corbynites, most Labour activists, the big unions plus the Greens. The continuing Labour Party might also from a strong association with the Greens, and maybe the SNP and Plaid Cymru, adopting their separatist agenda in return for parliamentary support for so long as the UK exists. Jeremy Corbyn stays as leader of this crew.

It almost happened before, after all, in the 1980s, with that SDP experiment. But “almost” is the important word here, because the lesson of history is that the first-past-the-post electoral system punishes split political movements harshly. In today’s climate, that would mean Corbynite Labour and Progressive Labour splitting their vote and letting in Conservative or, more likely in many areas on the east coast and the North, Ukip. Not what they have in mind at all.

What about the unions? The have often been key in determining Labour’s fortunes, but in an era of one-member-one-vote and the £3 supporters, their direct power has waned. At the moment their money and activism helps keep Corbyn and the in power. Yet it was not always thus. During the leaderships of Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell and Neil Kinnock, the big unions helped keep the party loyal to its parliamentary leadership and, usually, kept the left in check. There’s one particular distant echo from history worth mentioning, perhaps. It was Ernie Bevin, leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, who evicted the last pacifist, incompetent Labour leader from office back in 1935. George Lansbury, a nice man, the Corbyn of his day, was popular with the activists, but seemed destined to keep Labour in the wilderness. Bevin, as boldly as Hilary Benn and the Shadow Cabinet today, openly revolted and pushed Lansbury out and replaced him with Attlee, who did rather better for the party. Lansbury is better remembered today for being the grandfather of Angela “Miss Marple” Lansbury.

The last time a realignment of the centre-left was attempted was 20 years ago, when Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair embarked on “the project”, a scheme to reunite the two wings of progressive politics, in which Roy Jenkins rather fancifully believed that these two “children” of his permissive, progressive society would unite to lock the Tories out of power for decades. Blair, whether genuinely convinced or not of the merits of a Lib-Lab coalition, had little need of the Lib Dems after gaining a Commons majority of 179 in the 1997 election, and he had no use for PR either. By contrast, Labour, even before its current crisis, needs all the help to sort itself out that it can get, and the country is crying out for a real opposition and an electoral system where every vote matters equally (just as in the referendum). If the centre-left won’t provide it, then there’s a man called Farage more than happy to oblige. And he is not progressive.