It should go without saying that true moderates would never hire a firing squad to dispatch of their enemies, much less turn the guns on members supposedly of their own party, nor would they set fire to their shared accommodation and squeal with delight as they found themselves immolated by the flames. But the self-described moderates of today’s Labour Party have secured both themselves and their colleagues firmly in the stocks, and kick with self-satisfied pleasure in spasms at the penetration of the blade.
For at the end of last week the Labour National Executive Committee somehow won its bid to overturn a High Court ruling which would have allowed recent party members to vote in the upcoming leadership election. The NEC had imposed a freeze on all who joined the party after 12 January, requiring them to pay an additional £25 to restore their right to vote. These members had signed up and paid the usual entry fee under the explicit understanding that their membership already came with full voting rights.
When five new members took the matter to the High Court, The Hon. Mr Justice Hickinbottom described the NEC’s actions as a clear ‘breach of contract’, and reinstated the voting eligibility of recent members. But the NEC appealed the verdict, with secretary Iain McNicol spending £250,000 and standing against party leader Jeremy Corbyn in a last-ditch attempt to disenfranchise those whose support he would rather do without.
The successful appeal entitles the Labour NEC to lie to its own members, to break its own rules at will, and to do away with any pretence of a fair and transparent leadership election. It says that whatever rights you think you possess, expect to wave them goodbye at the whims of a politicised and partisan executive. 130,000 recent members have been left without a vote, while the five members who challenged the NEC must now pay the executive £30,000 in costs.
The process initiated by the NEC and carried through the courts by McNicol has one aim, which is to disenfranchise a body of voters who are thought to back incumbent leader Jeremy Corbyn. Desparate to wrest control of the party from someone who they would variously characterise as unelectable, radical, anti-semitic, or Trotskyist – but whose only real crime is that he troubles their vested interests while winning overwhelming grassroots support – a coterie of Labour politicians have made the demise of Corbyn their sole ideology. But in the process they have severed their party’s last ties to democracy, and risk killing the Labour movement at least for a generation, if not for good.
Those who would still identify with old New Labour cast themselves as moderates eager for power in the name of some unspecified cause. But their battle with Corbyn isn’t a case of them chasing their own left-leaning shadow, for over the past six years those in the alleged centre of the Labour Party have shown themselves content to bask in the shadow of modern Conservatism, pro-business, anti-welfare, anti-immigrant, culturally shallow, and increasingly right wing. The centre ground that old Blairites seek to recover no longer exists.
The legacy of successive Labour governments under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – even if it was sometimes unintentional – was to exacerbate domestically and especially internationally the shift to the right which ran rampant in the 1980s under the twin leaderships of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Light regulation in the banking and housing sectors contributed directly to the financial crisis and left the young floundering hopelessly at the thought of ever owning their own home. And warmongering in the Middle East created a more volatile and violent world, while inevitably spurring the sort of mass migration which the right whips up into xenophobia and racism for its own gain.
Jeremy Corbyn is the only prominent figure in the Labour Party who seems to stand for anything solid, and what a boon that he happens to stand for those principles which can offer the UK much-needed change. Many of his policies – on spending and taxation, on the renationalisation of public utilities and the railways – are supported unknowingly by the majority of the populace. And as the right of his party vies to cut off much more than its nose to spite its face, his reelection as leader seems more vital than ever.
