What Happened to the Parliamentary Labour Party?
by Eamon Dyas, Labour Affairs, September 2016
Blair’s legacy in the Parliamentary Labour Party
Nothing prepared the Labour Party for the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. It came
as a complete shock not only to the party establishment but to the political culture to
which the party had become acclimatised. His appearance on the ballot paper was an
aberration only made possible by the play-politics which had come to dominate the way
the party did business. Twelve of those among the Parliamentary Labour Party who
proposed him did so merely to enable him to reach the required nomination threshold
without which he was not eligible to stand. They held no brief for his polices or belief in
his prospects of winning. As they admitted at the time, they proposed him as leader just
to ensure that the procedure had the appearance of a contest. In so doing they were acting
true to their belief that politics was first and foremost all about appearance, all about the
show – something that the party, in all its years under Blair as its ringmaster, had
managed to become. Those who nominated Corbyn in defiance of their belief did so as a
matter of duty – a duty to the smoke and mirrors of the performance. Corbyn was to be
cast in the role of the honourable loser, the impractical idealist put there to act as a foil
for the more pragmatic realism represented by the other three candidates. While he might
offer principles that elevated the people above the dominance of the market everyone
knew the world was now a place where the power of the corporations had long since
buried such possibilities and what the modern world demanded was a continuation of the
moderation, accommodation and compromise that had become the hallmark of New
Labour. While he spoke a language that was based on humanity and common decency –
something that might resonate on the streets - the others spoke a language that could be
understood in the real power centres of the land – the corporate boardrooms and media
editorial centres. Corbyn’s old-world socialistic views had been left behind by the
advance of the sociologically derived perspectives that had been blended with the
showmanship of Blair and had continued to fill the vacuum of his departure during the
Brown and Miliband years. Consequently, the Labour Westminster elite knew in their
bones that if they could not be certain of the winner they could at least know that it would
not be Corbyn.
And even if the ordinary Labour member’s sense of reality faltered the mathematics of
the election procedure was stacked against Corbyn. Although the ballot paper had four
candidates the script said that the real contest was between Andy Burnham, Yvette
Cooper, and Liz Kendall. In reality Corbyn was pitched against a coalition of the other
three candidates within which the vast majority of their second preference votes would be
distributed in the event of nobody getting more than 50% on the first round. In that
situation the only way that Corbyn could possibly win would be by gaining over 50% of
the first-preference votes – something that was so outrageous that it wasn’t even
considered a remote possibility.
Then the unthinkable happened. CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW (PLP ARTICLE0.DOC) TO READ THIS ARTICLE IN FULL.