Events within the Labour Party are driving it towards a split. The attempt to depose Jeremy Corbyn as leader has pitted the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party against the majority of the Party’s membership. The vast majority of Labour MPs never supported Corbyn, and have wanted to get rid of him at the earliest opportunity. Following the defeat of the Remain campaign in the EU referendum, shadow cabinet members resigned en masse over the weekend of 25/26 June, and on 28 June Labour MPs voted no confidence in Corbyn by 172 votes to 40. A fresh leadership election has been called and two former shadow cabinet members have decided to challenge Corbyn: Angela Eagle and Owen Smith. Neither is likely to win unless further legal attempts to exclude Corbyn from the ballot are successful.
Corbyn won the leadership election in September 2015 on a tide of opposition to austerity. Yet he has failed to turn the Party into a force fighting austerity, choosing instead to instruct Labour-run councils to set legal budgets this year and implement savage cuts to services and jobs. The reason is simple: the Labour Party is an imperialist, racist and anti-working class party, and Corbyn cannot change that. Its purpose is to defend the interests of the British ruling class, an entirely parasitic layer whose enormous wealth is obtained through the ruthless robbery of the rest of the world principally through the City of London. A tiny proportion of this loot is directed to providing a small section of the working class with material privileges to guarantee its allegiance to British imperialism. Made up predominantly of university-educated public sector workers, this section looks to the Labour Party to defend its conditions, and along with the Labour Party saw continued EU membership as essential for this purpose. Now, in conditions of a deep and continuing capitalist crisis, the privileges of the middle classes and better off working class can only be preserved at the expense of ever-increasing numbers of impoverished working class people. (For a more comprehensive argument, see Labour: a party fit for imperialism, Larkin Publications, 2014)
Loyalty to the interests of British imperialism brings with it a commitment to parliamentary democracy – the argument that social change can only come through parliament and the electoral process. Former Labour leader Neil Kinnock made this clear in a speech to Labour MPs on 4 July when he said of those who established the Labour Party ‘In 1918, in the shadow of the Russian revolution, they made a deliberate, conscious, ideological choice, that they would not pursue the syndicalist road, that they would not pursue the revolutionary road – it was a real choice in those days. They would pursue the parliamentary road to socialism.’ He added that ‘the people that joined the party are joining a party committed to the parliamentary road and that makes it crucial to have a leader that enjoys the support of the parliamentary Labour party.’ This means that it is the MPs who count, and because they overwhelmingly supported a vote of no confidence in Corbyn, Corbyn had a ‘duty’ to resign. ‘Obviously there’s no basis on which Jeremy really could or should stay,’ he declared. Kinnock’s view of what he calls the ‘democratic provisions of the Labour Party’ means that the opinions of the mass of the membership who supported Corbyn in 2015 with 59.5% of the vote are now of no account. Kinnock ‘knows’ anyway that members have ‘deep residual doubts’ about Corbyn’s suitability to be prime minister, and that, on the ‘basis of [personal] acquaintance with members of the union’, so do members of Unite the Union. More than a century of pursuing this parliamentary strategy has left the working class without any political representation.
Kinnock’s view of the supposed democratic processes within the Labour Party is shared by those 172 MPs who voted against Corbyn: as a party committed to the defence of British imperialism’s interests, it has to expel or suppress any progressive opinion within its membership. There was no way that the Parliamentary Labour Party was going to accept Corbyn’s victory, based as it was on a wave of anti-austerity sentiment. From the start of his leadership, the behaviour of Labour MPs was shameless: right-wing backbenchers such as John Mann and John Woodcock were given tacit encouragement by Shadow Cabinet members to denounce Corbyn, and the media gave them every opportunity, especially the BBC. Faced with constant mutiny, Corbyn had two options: either compromise with the Parliamentary Labour Party, or confront it and build a movement against austerity. His stated priority, however, was to maintain Labour Party unity, and so he chose the first course. Granting MPs a free vote over the bombing of Syria, and backpedalling on railway nationalisation and NATO membership were examples of this strategy.
Corbyn’s conciliation policy was never going to work.With Labour committed to a Remain position in the EU referendum, the Brexit victory came as a shock for the mass of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Blaming Corbyn for the result, and terrified that an early general election might be called with devastating consequences for their careers, they swung into action. On the day after the referendum, 24 June, Angela Eagle’s political adviser surreptitiously registered a website, angela4leader. On 25 June, Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn told Corbyn he no longer had confidence in his leadership. Corbyn sacked him, triggering a mass of carefully-synchronised resignations (which Benn had organised) from the shadow cabinet over the next three days: 20 in all, together with 28 ministers and 11 Parliamentary Private Secretaries. This culminated with the vote of no confidence on 28 June. Eagle then stated that she would stand against Corbyn in a leadership election if Corbyn did not resign.
Unexpectedly for the plotters, Corbyn refused to fall on his sword. On 29 June, the general secretaries of 10 of Britain’s largest trade unions including Unite, Unison and the GMB, signed a joint statement supporting Corbyn, stating that their members would be ‘looking with dismay at events in parliament’ and calling on Labour MPs to ‘respect the authority of the party’s leader’.Attempts over the following week by Unite general secretary Len McCluskey to broker talks between Corbyn and Labour MPs to find a compromise were scuppered on 9 July by deputy leader Tom Watson; McCluskey describing Watson’s actions as ‘looking like an act of sabotage.’ Watson claimed that there could be no progress unless there was a commitment by Corbyn to resign; McCluskey said that the explicit precondition for the talks was that Corbyn would remain in post. There was nowhere for the conspirators to go other than launch a formal leadership challenge, and Angela Eagle committed herself on 11 July.
Attention then turned to whether or not Corbyn needed the nominations of 20% of the Party’s MPs and MEPs in order to stand. There was no doubt in Kinnock’s mind that he did, nor in Eagle’s; she told ITV’s Robert Peston on 10 July that ‘he will have to find the nominations’. The key lay with Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), which decided by 18 votes to 14 in a secret ballot on 12 July that he didn’t. This was a further shock for the plotters: they had demanded a secret ballot in the hope that it would raise the chances of them excluding Corbyn from the election. One NEC member, Johanna Baxter tearfully complained after the meeting that Corbyn had opposed such a ballot and so ‘endorsed bullying, threats and intimidation, by the fact of that vote’. This demand for secrecy did not stop her from splashing her views about in a lengthy interview with The Guardian. The same NEC meeting however arbitrarily decided that anyone who had joined the Labour Party after 12 January would not be eligible to vote unless they paid a £25 supporter fee in the two days from 18 July. It also suspended all meetings of local Labour Party and Constituency Labour Parties for the duration of the election campaign because of ‘possible intimidation’. Democracy only matters when it serves the interests of the Labour Party bureaucracy.
Both Eagle and Smith claim to be able to unite the Labour Party, but both are now fighting each other like cats in a bag to be Corbyn’s sole opponent. Smith has defended PFI in the NHS, supports a Trident replacement, says he does not know how he would have voted on the Iraq war, and said when Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary he was in favour of an overall benefit cap. Eagle supported the Iraq war, also supports Trident, and abstained along with Smith on the Welfare Bill in 2015. Neither candidate can claim to oppose austerity, and Eagle, who offered no political programme as she announced her candidacy, will struggle to differentiate herself from the new Tory Prime Minister Theresa May and her opportunistically declared ‘vision of a country that works not for a privileged few but for every one of us’.
Wealthy Zionist Michael Foster, who has given £400,000 to the Labour Party, is now threatening to take the Labour Party to the High Court in an effort to get the NEC’s decision allowing Corbyn to stand overturned. Rich people can get round democracy to buy the result they want. Whether his action succeeds, or more likely, fails, the crisis within the Party will deepen. If Corbyn’s nomination stands, he will most probably win again. The vast majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party will reject the result. If Corbyn loses, he along with the left in the Party will have to decide whether they want to build a party committed to struggle against imperialism, austerity, racism and war, or stay in an imperialist party which will promote all of these. There is no other option.
Robert Clough
