I am going to keep the rhetoric short. The political chaos within the government is over and real politics has begun again. Yesterday we had a symbolic debate about Trident, symbolic because parliament had voted already to proceed. It was good party politics and exposed Labour’s divisions. But now the business of Brexit, the economy, international relations, IS, Syria, name it, all push forward for attention.
But not for Labour. For it the summer will be consumed by an election which is also symbolic, because the elected leader is the clear choice of the electorate who put him there, and if the latest poll of it by the Times is to be believed, will put him back there. But the Parliamentary Labour Party is no longer representative of the Labour membership nor of potential left leaning voters in the country. Between the end of Kinnock and the dawn of Milliband New Labour lost 5 million voters. It has been destroyed in Scotland, it will not be back there for a generation if ever. It is now dying in its last bastion, the Palace of Westminster.
If Owen Smith wins he will do so because he convinces the membership that he is as left as Corbyn and will pursue the re-engineering of Labour from the left, not the centre, because that is where the missing votes are. But he will convince them that he has the practical skills of leadership as well as the emotional drive of mission. It will signal the peaceful demise of New Labour once and for all, although a muttering rump will remain within the PLP, with its glitzy tastes and vision empty of anything other than power for power’s sake.
Corbyn will be remembered as the failed leader who nevertheless changed the political conversation in the whole country, moved Labour back to where it belongs in the only soil in which it can grow, the left, and forced the Tories to move left also. The fall of Osborne’s austerity regime is down to Corbyn. May was just the instrument. Labour will try to unite around a new regime but it will be fractious and cracks will open up. Corbyn has increased Labour’s vote in every election at every level since he has been leader, made Labour bigger than all the other political parties put together and Owen Smith would have to hang onto those gains and advance them.
If Corbyn wins it will be bloody but clean, if you can cope with such peculiar turn of phrase. He will invite his detractors to bury the hatchet in the PLP and most will not. He will then withdraw the whip from them or they will resign. He will be left with about 50 MPS and will cease to be the Leader of the Opposition. A new grouping will form in Parliament to claim that role. Labour members will then be free to select new candidates for all the seats the new grouping holds. In 2020 the fate of the new grouping will be the same as the SDP in 1983. Almost all will loose their seats. But the rebuilding of the Labour Movement as the power of the working people will be well and truly under way. Power in the country will not be long delayed.
Of course I could be wrong about all of this. But so far nobody, repeat nobody, has come up with anything better.