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STEPHEN BUSH
september 23 2019, 12:01am, the times
Corbyn revolution has failed to take Labour
stephen bush
Botched attempts by the hard left to oust moderate Labour MPs as well as the deputy leader show the limits of Corbynism
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At first glance, the big story at Labour conference is about the combat between its major players: the successful attempt by Jeremy Corbyn’s allies to limit sharply the powers of the deputy leader, Tom Watson, in the event of a vacancy at the top, and the unsuccessful effort to scrap the post entirely.
Yet the most important story in Labour politics doesn’t involve Corbyn or Watson. It’s a story that can be told in five names: Lucy Powell, Jim McMahon, Bambos Charalambous, Neil Coyle and Vicky Foxcroft. They are just five of the Labour MPs to come through the party’s new-look reselection processes unscathed.
At last year’s conference, the Labour leadership negotiated two small but, they hoped, significant tweaks to the way that the party decides whether or not sitting MPs should be reselected as candidates. Under the old system, sitting MPs needed to pass a trigger ballot — if more than half of their local party branches voted to keep them on as an MP, then they were readopted as the candidate. If they didn’t, then the local party held a fresh contest, with the sitting MP automatically on the ballot paper, but with other candidates free to run against them.
But the system came with an added twist: while the number of local party branches affiliated by members was capped at the total number of council wards in any given constituency, the trade unions and other affiliated bodies could add as many party branches as they wanted. In practice, that gave the leaders of local and national trade unions a veto over any attempt deselect an MP.
Now MPs must secure the votes of two thirds of both ordinary ward branches and affiliated branches to avoid a full contest. At a stroke, Corbyn eliminated the trade union veto over trigger ballots and made it significantly easier for party activists to get rid of their MPs.
The change signalled the final victory of Corbynism over Labour: in addition to its successive landslides in leadership elections, its majority on the ruling national executive committee, its control of the general secretary and the large pro-Corbyn majority on the conference floor, it had secured changes that would allow it to remake the parliamentary Labour Party at will.
Although the change to trigger ballots is not the only reason that seven MPs decided to break away from the Labour Party and form their own new party, for several of them it was the final push. In a very real sense, Change UK was born at the Labour Party conference of 2018.
However, the feared — or hoped-for — defenestration of Labour MPs doesn’t seem to be happening. Nor has the survival of Labour MPs been confined only to those who have adopted a posture of outward loyalty to Corbyn. Neil Coyle, the MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, is Labour’s most vocal and vituperative Corbyn critic — yet he has been reselected. Lucy Powell, the MP for Manchester Central, has committed the double heresy of criticising Corbyn and supporting plans to take Britain out of the EU and into the European Economic Area, in close co-operation with Conservative MPs. She has also been reselected. So far, the only MP to fall foul of the new rules is Diana Johnson, the Hull North MP, a quietly effective backbencher on the right of the party, but she is the victim of bad luck rather than an organised conspiracy, and is far from the scalps imagined by Corbynites.
Why does this matter? A clue lies in five other names: George Eustice, Victoria Atkins, Andrew Murrison, Lucy Frazer and Nusrat Ghani. They are the names of five Conservative junior ministers who are generally acclaimed by both their civil servants and their colleagues for their ability to get projects done and delivered. You know that old saying that behind every great man is a great woman? Well, behind every successful secretary of state is at least one great junior minister who has done a great deal of the heavy lifting, both in managing projects and taking legislation through parliament.
Corbyn has big and radical plans to reshape the state and the economy, and will announce a host more at conference this week. But most of those plans require cabinet ministers and junior ministers who are both ideologically attuned to the project and have the talent to carry it off. Corbyn has barely a handful of MPs in the first group and even fewer tick both boxes. That’s one reason the Labour Party’s radical programme is so patchy.
Added to that, many of his plans will require the support of parliament, and that so many of his vocal critics are being reselected means that he is less likely to get it. Take the plans, announced by the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, to scrap Ofsted. The policy is a longstanding demand of the teaching unions and is regarded on the Labour left as an essential plank of removing what they see as damaging market mechanisms from our education system. But it is also seen by many Labour MPs as a retrograde step that would leave schools unaccountable to parents, leading to lower grades and worse standards.
The other problem is that good junior ministers — and opposition frontbenchers for that matter — are where a party’s future leadership contenders sharpen their talents and hone their skills too. One way or another, this is likely to be Corbyn’s last Labour Party conference as leader of the opposition: whether he goes as a result of electoral defeat suggested by most of the opinion polls or because he again defies expectations and becomes prime minister.
If he loses, then one problem that the Corbynites have is the vanishingly small number of impeccably Corbynite candidates available to replace Corbyn. Of course, Corbyn’s own experience, when he defeated three New Labour candidates to win the leadership, shows that you only need one candidate if the membership find you sufficiently appealing. But his experience as opposition leader shows there is a limit to what you can achieve if you don’t have a large parliamentary core of supporters — something that will be more acute if Labour loses seats, because its Corbynite candidates are concentrated in seats the party took in 2017 and which are vulnerable in the coming election.
And that’s the real story of Labour’s conference: for all the institutional dominance of Corbynism, for all that the policies are undoubtedly a departure from what has gone before, while the parliamentary Labour Party remains broadly unchanged, Corbyn’s revolution will remain incomplete and under threat.
Stephen Bush is political editor of the New Statesman
@stephenkb
september 23 2019, 12:01am, the times
Corbyn revolution has failed to take Labour
stephen bush
Botched attempts by the hard left to oust moderate Labour MPs as well as the deputy leader show the limits of Corbynism
Share
Save
At first glance, the big story at Labour conference is about the combat between its major players: the successful attempt by Jeremy Corbyn’s allies to limit sharply the powers of the deputy leader, Tom Watson, in the event of a vacancy at the top, and the unsuccessful effort to scrap the post entirely.
Yet the most important story in Labour politics doesn’t involve Corbyn or Watson. It’s a story that can be told in five names: Lucy Powell, Jim McMahon, Bambos Charalambous, Neil Coyle and Vicky Foxcroft. They are just five of the Labour MPs to come through the party’s new-look reselection processes unscathed.
At last year’s conference, the Labour leadership negotiated two small but, they hoped, significant tweaks to the way that the party decides whether or not sitting MPs should be reselected as candidates. Under the old system, sitting MPs needed to pass a trigger ballot — if more than half of their local party branches voted to keep them on as an MP, then they were readopted as the candidate. If they didn’t, then the local party held a fresh contest, with the sitting MP automatically on the ballot paper, but with other candidates free to run against them.
But the system came with an added twist: while the number of local party branches affiliated by members was capped at the total number of council wards in any given constituency, the trade unions and other affiliated bodies could add as many party branches as they wanted. In practice, that gave the leaders of local and national trade unions a veto over any attempt deselect an MP.
Now MPs must secure the votes of two thirds of both ordinary ward branches and affiliated branches to avoid a full contest. At a stroke, Corbyn eliminated the trade union veto over trigger ballots and made it significantly easier for party activists to get rid of their MPs.
The change signalled the final victory of Corbynism over Labour: in addition to its successive landslides in leadership elections, its majority on the ruling national executive committee, its control of the general secretary and the large pro-Corbyn majority on the conference floor, it had secured changes that would allow it to remake the parliamentary Labour Party at will.
Although the change to trigger ballots is not the only reason that seven MPs decided to break away from the Labour Party and form their own new party, for several of them it was the final push. In a very real sense, Change UK was born at the Labour Party conference of 2018.
However, the feared — or hoped-for — defenestration of Labour MPs doesn’t seem to be happening. Nor has the survival of Labour MPs been confined only to those who have adopted a posture of outward loyalty to Corbyn. Neil Coyle, the MP for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, is Labour’s most vocal and vituperative Corbyn critic — yet he has been reselected. Lucy Powell, the MP for Manchester Central, has committed the double heresy of criticising Corbyn and supporting plans to take Britain out of the EU and into the European Economic Area, in close co-operation with Conservative MPs. She has also been reselected. So far, the only MP to fall foul of the new rules is Diana Johnson, the Hull North MP, a quietly effective backbencher on the right of the party, but she is the victim of bad luck rather than an organised conspiracy, and is far from the scalps imagined by Corbynites.
Why does this matter? A clue lies in five other names: George Eustice, Victoria Atkins, Andrew Murrison, Lucy Frazer and Nusrat Ghani. They are the names of five Conservative junior ministers who are generally acclaimed by both their civil servants and their colleagues for their ability to get projects done and delivered. You know that old saying that behind every great man is a great woman? Well, behind every successful secretary of state is at least one great junior minister who has done a great deal of the heavy lifting, both in managing projects and taking legislation through parliament.
Corbyn has big and radical plans to reshape the state and the economy, and will announce a host more at conference this week. But most of those plans require cabinet ministers and junior ministers who are both ideologically attuned to the project and have the talent to carry it off. Corbyn has barely a handful of MPs in the first group and even fewer tick both boxes. That’s one reason the Labour Party’s radical programme is so patchy.
Added to that, many of his plans will require the support of parliament, and that so many of his vocal critics are being reselected means that he is less likely to get it. Take the plans, announced by the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, to scrap Ofsted. The policy is a longstanding demand of the teaching unions and is regarded on the Labour left as an essential plank of removing what they see as damaging market mechanisms from our education system. But it is also seen by many Labour MPs as a retrograde step that would leave schools unaccountable to parents, leading to lower grades and worse standards.
The other problem is that good junior ministers — and opposition frontbenchers for that matter — are where a party’s future leadership contenders sharpen their talents and hone their skills too. One way or another, this is likely to be Corbyn’s last Labour Party conference as leader of the opposition: whether he goes as a result of electoral defeat suggested by most of the opinion polls or because he again defies expectations and becomes prime minister.
If he loses, then one problem that the Corbynites have is the vanishingly small number of impeccably Corbynite candidates available to replace Corbyn. Of course, Corbyn’s own experience, when he defeated three New Labour candidates to win the leadership, shows that you only need one candidate if the membership find you sufficiently appealing. But his experience as opposition leader shows there is a limit to what you can achieve if you don’t have a large parliamentary core of supporters — something that will be more acute if Labour loses seats, because its Corbynite candidates are concentrated in seats the party took in 2017 and which are vulnerable in the coming election.
And that’s the real story of Labour’s conference: for all the institutional dominance of Corbynism, for all that the policies are undoubtedly a departure from what has gone before, while the parliamentary Labour Party remains broadly unchanged, Corbyn’s revolution will remain incomplete and under threat.
Stephen Bush is political editor of the New Statesman
@stephenkb