Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

It looks to any casual observer as if the Leadsom campaign for the Tory leadership has gone up in smoke. It is certainly on fire, but fires can be put out before too much damage is done, if there are other powerful forces in play. And there is one force which knows no party boundary, nor is it gripped by a common ideology, but it is spreading like a virus all across the world. It is a rebellion against the political establishment, globalisation, the accepted order of things, faces we know and are bored with; the list is almost endless and grows by the day.

We saw it first in a new anti-political left movement in Greece, but in France it is the Far right which is strident, led by Marine Le Pen. In America, more internally traumatised than for decades, it has given rise to Sanders and Trump. Here it gave us Corbyn, then it drove Brexit. It may now just give us Leadsom. Because May is very political establishment, very sure and very safe. Leadsom is none of those things. That is why the smart money may be on her.

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New Labour, which remains dominant only in the Parliamentary Labour Party, is the stubborn element of this tragic drama. There is talk of a split. In fact the split happened a long time ago, but the dominance of the PLP concealed it. Out in the country the working class vote either stayed at home or  voted  first Lib Dem and later, in England UKIP and as we know so well in Scotland SNP, where Labour has been wiped out as a political force. UKIP estimate that their intervention cost Labour 30 seats in May 2015 it would otherwise have won from the Conservatives. The voting pattern of Brexit confirms this. What Corbyn’s leadership has done is to bring back to Labour not only droves of past supporters, but hundreds of thousands of younger people who are cut out of this idea of booming Britain. I am sure there are young people who do not back Corbyn, but I have not met one and I live in the Tory south.

It is possible for splits to be healed, but not in the way Labour is now engaged. If Corbyn remains on the ballot he will almost certainly win. If he is left off  the ballot, the party will shatter. There will be nothing for the Pyrrhic winner to lead except a cavalcade of misguided MPs to their slaughter at the next general election. Some new force of the left will emerge, but for Labour in England it will be over. The only thing that could change the game would be for Corbyn to lose the leadership election by as bigger margin as he won last time. That seems the least likely prospect of all.