If Jeremy Corbyn wins on Saturday…

This blog was originally posted on Medium on September 19^th 2016.

On Saturday 24th September, Labour’s leadership election result will be announced. Though Owen Smith supporters like me have fought hard to change perceptions, there has been a narrative that Jeremy Corbyn is the favourite. Complacency can be a hell of an Achilles’ heel in politics, as Corbyn’s own opponents found in 2015, so Smith volunteers have been right to keep at it — this may still be on the knife edge. But as we strive for the best, I think we should also still prepare ourselves for the worst. So here I’m going to write to three groups about what happens next if Corbyn does win; any lingering undecideds, Owen-supporting moderates and Labour MPs.

To potential Corbyn voters

As I post this, voting is open for another 36 hours or so. Many of you voted for Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 as a breath of fresh air and out of admiration of what he stood for. You also probably felt that the New Labour right was devoid of ideas and too eager to compromise on matters on principle. None of that, however, is in any way a reflection on Owen Smith and his core of natural supporters in Labour’s traditional middle, the soft-left, who stepped up to try to save their party from what Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has become. I have my issues with them, but they didn’t have a candidate in 2015, when they probably should have. This time the Labour right stood down for them, knowing they were more ready to lead and restore unity in the party we all love. Owen Smith is not perfect — no candidate ever is — but he is decent and as principled as he is practical. He has real life experience outside of politics, working in the BBC, the private sector and for peace in Northern Ireland. He is dedicated to anti-austerity and ethical internationalism, but is also passionate about ensuring that those values are implemented in government, not just talked about from the sidelines where they can’t help anyone. He is backed by 2015 Corbyn supporters, including some of his previous close advisors. And he has announced over 20 fleshed-out, positive ideas, including £200bn of investment to rebuild our services and infrastructure and a more ambitious housebuilding programme than the one Corbyn has put forward.

Jeremy Corbyn on the other hand cannot win an election, and nor can he oppose the Tories properly in the meantime. His incompetence has cost him the support of even some of our most left-wing MPs. He failed to seize the opportunity to attack the Tories over the IDS and Osborne’s catastrophe budget. He squashed Labour’s campaign on rail fares and any coverage of the draconian Tory housing bill with a mismanaged, ill-timed reshuffle. He has no intention of learning how to get Labour’s message out through the mainstream media (key word mainstream — as in, the places where most ordinary voters get their news). Labour has become a morass of abuse and prejudice on his watch. We have not had an average polling lead at any point in his leadership. As a leader he polls not only far behind Theresa May, but routinely gets beaten by ‘Don’t Know’ when voters are asked. In an ageing country he sits at just 8% against May among over 65s, the highest-turnout voting group. We lost the EU referendum, and we can’t keep telling ourselves it was enough that current Labour voters (only 30% of the electorate) went for Remain — that was the most important national campaign we will ever fight, and he couldn’t preach beyond the choir we already have (and he wasn’t preaching that hard anyway, if we’re honest). We lost councillors in May, which happened under none of his predecessors in opposition going back to 1985. We were told he could help us take back Scotland, but his ratings there are worse than Theresa May’s and Ruth Davidson’s even among Labour voters, and Scottish Labour has now slipped into third place overall.

All of this means one thing — if Labour goes into a general election with Corbyn at the helm, we will be buried in that election and will struggle to recover for many thereafter, leaving an unopposed Tory central state in place for decades. With Owen, we might have a chance. But to paraphrase something from another Welsh soft-lefty I admire: if Jeremy Corbyn wins on Saturday, I warn you not to ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. And I warn you not to grow old.

To moderate members

To moderates, especially pre-May 2015 members who are going heavily for Owen — I’m aware anecdotally that some of you will think about leaving the party if Corbyn wins again. I’ll admit I’ve dwelled on it too. Some of you went before, and only came back as members or registered supporters for this leadership contest. And both internal and external, Labour activists have faced elections wall-to-wall for two years now and fighting within our own party has been particularly mentally and emotionally draining.

So I understand — but please stay. Become less active if it’s better for your wellbeing and explore the simpler joys of armchair membership, as I’m probably planning to do. If the financial commitments feel too great, you might economise on any additional internal subscriptions you carry (or alternately if you absolutely must insist on cancelling membership of the main party, do the opposite and stay a member of an affiliate so you retain some connection through a cause that speaks to you). Do what works for you. But don’t leave our movement — your movement — completely.

For a century the greatest force for social good in our country, Labour can still be our home. We might have found ourselves outvoted for now, but nothing is forever and agreement with the current mood of the party isn’t a prerequisite for being Labour. I can stand by what I wrote on the day Corbyn first won the leadership: “As Corbyn has shown for 32 years, it’s possible to be loyal to a party in elections & utterly disagree with its leadership. That’s me now”. His endurance paid off in the end, when many of his fellow travellers on the non-Labour hard-left had doubted his approach, and one day he caught lightening in a bottle. We can too. And if you’re currently dreaming about SDP Mk.2, ask yourself if creating a new party from scratch under FPTP really sounds more doable than winning back this one.

Moreover, if you stand for Clause One — for the principle that Labour exists to win public office and wield it for the benefit of the many, not as a mere platform for the righteous posturing of the few — you will always be more Labour than anyone who doesn’t truly share that view, including the current leadership. As Labour members, we walk in the footsteps of giants — Attlee, Wilson, Hardie, Kinnock, Gaitskell, Brown, Smith, Blair, Bevan, Castle and Beckett.

Even in these dark days, we are still blessed with a talented and diverse PLP well over 200 strong, elected by 9.3 million Labour voters in 2015. By that genuine popular mandate to serve as this country’s official opposition, we are still as much the party of Nandy, Phillips, Watson, Jarvis, Cooper, Starmer, Umunna, Alexander, Flint, Johnson, Kendall, Benn and Eagle as we are the one of Corbyn. Though we lost councillors in May 2016 and the budget allocations will continue to be set and scythed by the Tories in Westminster, we are still well represented in local and regional government. We have Carwyn Jones in Wales and Sadiq Khan in London (with the largest personal mandate of any UK politician ever), while other elected mayors like Liverpool’s Joe Anderson and many thousands of unsung Labour councillors still run much of urban England. This is the roll-your-sleeves-up Labour we joined, and it would still be hanging in there.

But these people all need our help and our solidarity as they do the hard yards for working people and the voiceless. As always, our membership subs (and any direct activism we might chose to do) go towards the vital work of getting them all elected to office. But internally there’s a new threat in mandatory reselection, with lists already being circulated. Corbynites on the NEC still don’t have the votes for a rule change, contrary to the oversimplified reporting of the recent NEC elections, but the parliamentary boundary changes could still be a challenge. If we retain our memberships, we can vote to protect our communities’ MPs and councillors if and when any flashpoints do arise. We can be part of a grassroots movement of our own, a Campaign to Defend Clause One. But if we leave, we surrender them and our party wholesale to the hard-left, and with it, our country to the Tories.

To the PLP

As for our MPs, who have overwhelmingly backed Owen and simply want competent, receptive leadership — I continue to feel for them, which is why I want moderate members to stay and use our votes to help.

I suggest they hit pause on any leadership challenges, though, despite the speculation. If Jeremy Corbyn is elected it will have been for the second time. A further challenge would alienate existing members. Anecdotally some soft Corbyn voters voted for him in part out of protest at how the “coup” and subsequent contest were handled, and I spoke to many members thinking of quitting out of general frustration with both sides and the overall state of the party. And though YouGov did find that 56% Smith voters do want a further challenge, almost a third of the cross-factional coalition he rallied oppose one before the next election (29%) and want MPs to attempt to work with Corbyn again (31%). And when Labour loses the general election, whenever it comes, it would make it easier for the Corbynistas to continue to fallaciously blame the PLP for the result. I despair to say it, but “let him fail” and picking up the pieces later may be all that is left for now.

In terms of how we might later change our fortunes, there are two options as I see it — moderates are currently riven between them and both are not without their problems. Labour previously functioned with a clear role for the PLP and trade unions and a committed core membership of 200,000 or so, with a pragmatic soft-left majority and an ethos built around Clause One and a broad church. These members were never representative of the country in and of themselves, but were on the whole inclined to think about being an electable national party and voted for David Miliband as recently as 2010. We have now swelled to over 600,000 in a short space of time, with a majority who were not members pre-May 2015, who are even less representative of the public as a whole (but tend to feel they are, owing to being part of something growing and euphoric) and can appear more devoted to Jeremy Corbyn specifically than to the party’s traditional parliamentary aims. This has left us in the worst of both worlds — the party’s internal stakeholders are neither representative of the world outside, nor able to work to bridge the gap.

The instinct of some MPs is to recreate the previous model by reversing the Collins reforms that gave way to the current one. I’m personally sympathetic to an attempt at reviving the Electoral College, as Tom Watson is said to be considering, but I do fear the observation that it may be a moderate version of the Corbynite PR paradox and it would overall just come across as ‘old politics’ and elitist to many. At best, it would be a tough fight, in which supportive members would need to help make the case for it where MPs cannot, stressing rediscovering the spirit of Clause One alongside a voice for members.

If this is to be the approach, this time I also think no one should be eligible to vote in more than one section. And expanding on the precedent of MEPs voting in the MPs section, I would suggest that that section be broadened out to include AMs, MSPs, elected mayors, group leaders from the top-tier local authorities and maybe PCCs. This could offer a counter-narrative to the inevitable Corbynite allegations of a powergrab against members by a PLP now routinely depicted as remote and self-seeking, instead emphasising devolved communities alongside them and the primacy of Labour’s general mission to win public office. It also reduces our current survivorship bias, which not only blinkers a selectorate slanted towards metropolitan England, but with the best will in the world also encumbers an elected PLP trapped in opposition. With only one MP left in Scotland and few in the English marginals, enshrining input from those still holding onto local offices in areas we need to win back becomes more valuable.

The second option is to grow to become a genuinely broad-based Labour Party that incorporates millions of our more moderate core voters, which was the original intent of the ‘modernisers’ who pushed for the Collins reforms. But there a huge challenges here too. The Registered Supporter scheme was better administered in 2016 than in 2015 and through Saving Labour, moderates tried harder with recruitment this time, so I am sceptical (though not unpersuadable) about the idea of ‘expanding the selectorate’. A starting issue is that moderate candidates have appeal to the majority of ordinary voters who are casual about politics and prioritise competence when general elections roll around, but the intense minority drawn to a fringe phenomenon like Corbyn are more likely to sign up and outvote you (“no one pays £3 to be sensible”, someone suggested to me recently — Rafael Behr wrote well around these dynamics and Labour’s incomprehension of them). This problem would be further exacerbated if the first Saving Labour attempt had been seen to fail, which could discourage 10s of thousands of burned moderates who parted with £25 from signing up for a future push — we would need to mobilize 100s of 1000s in place next time.

It is true that there is a promising pool of politicised Remainers, and this time Owen only had 48 hours to mobilise them when he was unknown and not yet the unity candidate. But a firm line to rouse them also has implications for the existential crisis Labour already faces in its Leave-voting working-class heartlands. There would also need to be a single, eye-grabbing standard-bearer agreed within the PLP this time, making the rounds far in advance — an unpublished GQR poll showed that in theory a plurality of 10% of voters might sign up as supporters, but only the right person and vision might unlock them and it would need to be clear who and what it is. The NEC would have to relax the rules again, and we know from 2015 that this involves major trade-offs in terms of administrative costs and the plausibility of any real vetting. And someone should do some proper analysis of what exactly the oft-cited Hollande and Renzi primary models involved and whether those continental experiences are readily transferable to British party politics, rather than just trendily name-checking them as we seem to do at the moment.

What is clear to me is that Labour cannot continue to flounder on the barren ground it currently occupies, conflating deepening with widening and gradually losing its reason for being. I am torn between the two options for breaking out, but it’s hard not to feel that the toothpaste can’t be put back in tube — this would suggest the expansion route, for all the current issues it throws up. But either way, the PLP and supportive members and devolved officeholders would need to organise clearly around one approach.

Another frustrating reality of a Corbyn reelection would be journalists, the Tories and voters on the doorstep alike routinely tackling MPs with a devastatingly reasonable line of questioning — “how can you work under Corbyn/present him as a potential PM when we know most of you voted no confidence in him?” Disavowing Corbyn could earn them further ire or deselection from the members, pretending to back him is phony and damaging with the electorate at large, and dodging and obfuscation pleases no one at all.

But there is an all-purpose answer Labour MPs could learn, provided by none other than Corbyn himself — “he is the leader, it’s not going to change. Frankly it’s not a terribly relevant question”. That was Jeremy Corbyn’s reply to Vice magazine when they asked if Ed Miliband was the right man to be leading Labour in April 2015, mere weeks before the election (for good measure, the interviewer writes Corbyn “sighed” the answer and describes it as “about the least ringing endorsement” they’d ever heard). For Labour MPs now, it could do everything needed — it doesn’t attack the incumbent leader, but the public won’t mistake it for anything its not and it denies the Tories quotes to exploit. It’s just a resigned, honest statement of the bleeding obvious — no more, no less. And if there are complaints that it’s an insufficiently enthusiastic answer, MPs will be completely within rights to point out it was only what Jeremy said about his own predecessor, to the media in the middle of the short campaign. One rule must bind all, surely?

As for what they’ll do in 2020 or if Theresa May drops a snap election on everyone, this is where that “not a terribly relevant question” part comes in — MPs would need to make it so. The Tories and Team Corbyn would be oddly unified in their choice of framing for a general election — ‘vote Labour, get Corbyn’. But while the faint notion of Corbyn as prime minister would repel voters at a visceral level, they will also sense that it’s for the birds anyway, against an overwhelming narrative of Theresa May cruising to a majority. So MPs would have to use that. They would need to guide as many people as possible away from the red herring issue of leadership and hit the doorsteps to tacitly reframe the election as a series of local referendums on whether the likely May government faces any opposition at all. Unchecked Tory rule, with its dire implications for the NHS for example, would still trouble even that frighteningly large share of 2015 Labour voters that now somehow find themselves preferring May individually as PM — that threat might just be enough to keep some of the waverers in the Labour fold. Even one or two more patriotic Conservatives are starting to voice concerns about the total lack of scrutiny.

A model here could be the one the Tories themselves used all too effectively in Scotland this year, where they used “Ruth Davidson for a strong opposition” as a slogan. MPs should keep nurturing their personal votes and exploit them to the hilt. Though admittedly they didn’t have to run in a general election with Corbyn visibly topping the ticket, Jim McMahon and Sadiq Khan showed that to some extent, candidates with their own profile can outrun the spectre of him. I cede this would not work for new PPCs, and even for many incumbents exposed to the full force of the Tory attack machine. This would be Dunkirk, not D-Day. But it might be the least-worst strategy available to keep the Labour Party vaguely intact — a residual opposition for the short and medium term, and some base to rebuild from for the future.