Starmer thinks he’s defeated Labour’s hard left – but the fightback just started

The Labour leader has marginalised the Corbynites, but he should expect more attacks from both his own party and the Tories

The spectre of Corbyn remains – but how much power does it hold? (PA Wire)

Keir Starmer’s marginalisation of Jeremy Corbyn and the former leader’s supporters has been so complete that it was a surprise when one of them fought back.

Jamie Driscoll, the mayor of North of Tyne who was prevented from standing as the Labour candidate for the new, larger mayoralty of the North East, has announced that he will stand as an independent against the official Labour candidate.

He has a good chance of winning – a northern version of the Ken Livingstone manoeuvre, which captured the new office of mayor of London when the Blair government created it in 2000. Livingstone was denied the chance to stand as the Labour candidate by Tony Blair, who fixed the selection system. He gave one-third of the votes to Labour MPs and MEPs, who chose Frank Dobson, Blair’s candidate. So Livingstone stood as an independent and won, later being readmitted to the party and allowed to stand under the Labour banner for re-election.

Driscoll could do something similar in May next year. He is popular in the region and can run as an anti (Labour) establishment candidate. Starmer didn’t go to the trouble of designing an electoral college that was weighted against him: Driscoll was simply excluded from the shortlist and Kim McGuinness, the Northumbria police and crime commissioner, was selected as the Labour candidate instead.

Starmer never said why Driscoll was excluded. In that respect he is different from Blair, who condemned Livingstone in public: “I believe passionately that he would be a disaster –  a disaster in terms of crime and police and business.” So we are left to deduce that Starmer did not want Driscoll because he espouses Corbyn-like politics and was a member of Momentum, the Corbyn supporters’ faction.

If Driscoll does win, that would mean another directly elected mayor seen as being to the left of Starmer, along with Sadiq Khan in London – although the ultra-low emissions zone is hardly “left wing” – and Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester. The Conservatives will no doubt use him to try to invoke the spectre of the “hard left” waiting in the wings to hold a Labour government to ransom.

They tried it against Blair with the “New Labour, New Danger” poster, not very successfully. Partly because Blair was so patently not a secret revolutionary, and partly because he had such an effective rebuttal operation. “Get me a bishop,” cried Peter Mandelson, and lo, the Bishop of Oxford was obtained and wrote an article condemning the use of “demonic” imagery in negative political advertising.

A similar attack on Starmer might be more credible, given that Starmer served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and that Starmer’s own leadership platform, much of it now disowned, was so Corbynite. I imagine that work is being done on it now in Conservative HQ, developing the idea that Starmer will pose as a Blairite to gain power, but once in office will give free rein to his true “left-wing” instincts.

Expect to hear more about Starmer’s membership in his twenties of the International Revolutionary Marxist Tendency, and about the 32 Labour MPs who are members of the Socialist Campaign Group. This ancient faction, formed in 1982 to support Tony Benn’s expected leadership challenge after the 1983 election, has been a stunning failure for most of its 41 years in existence. It fell at the first hurdle, when Benn lost his seat in 1983. Until Corbyn won the leadership in 2015, Livingstone was its most successful member, but he had to leave parliament to continue as mayor of London.

For the five years of Corbyn’s leadership, though, members of the Socialist Campaign Group controlled the commanding heights of the shadow cabinet. That power has vanished almost as quickly as it arrived, as the Great Self-Purging Corbynite Show has removed most of them from the Labour front bench, and in Corbyn’s own case, from the Parliamentary Labour Party.

But they are still there, the Tories will insist. Thirty-two of them, and four of them still on the Labour front bench, albeit in junior positions (Paula Barker, Rachel Hopkins, Imran Hussain and Navendu Mishra).

Before the 1997 election, Tory commentators – what Professor Tim Bale calls the “Conservative Party in the media” – warned that although Blair himself might be so right wing that Margaret Thatcher approved of him, he would be at the mercy of the Socialist Campaign Group if he ever got into government.

So we can expect to see a similar case against Starmer as a second line of attack: even if he is not really Ed Miliband in Tony Blair’s clothing, the argument will run, he will need the votes of the Socialist Campaign Group if there is a hung parliament or Labour has a small majority.

In the end, though, this scenario is implausible. This is not so much a question of the size of Labour’s majority – or the absence of it in a hung parliament – but of politics. Even if Starmer were in a position where he needed the votes of the Socialist Campaign Group’s MPs in government, they would find it hard to make common cause with the Conservative opposition.

It took the Tories eight years last time to work out that they could embarrass Blair by voting with Labour rebels on civil liberties. The first time Blair was defeated in a Commons vote was on the 90-day detention of terrorist suspects in 2005. There are not going to be many such issues on which Zarah Sultana, the chair of the Socialist Campaign Group, and Kemi Badenoch, if she is leader of the opposition, will be able to unite against a Starmer-led government.

If Driscoll wins the North East mayoral election as an independent next year, it will be an embarrassment to Starmer. But it will not be evidence that a Labour government would be dictated to by resurgent Corbynites.