Left for Dead? by Lewis Goodall

Author:Lewis Goodall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

Matlock in Derbyshire is typical Corbyn territory. Prosperous, semi-rural, relatively well-educated and well-heeled; the perfect retreat for a weekend break. Exactly the sort of place where you won’t find many Labour MPs but you will find plenty of committed activists, on that same weekend, traipsing up the streets happily knocking on doors, talking to residents, canvassing the opinions of people who will generally receive them merrily and then go and vote Tory at the next election anyway.

They were similarly welcoming and kind to me. In an era when so many in politics and especially in the Labour Party are viscerally wary of the media, it was nice not to be treated with McCarthyite suspicion. That night hundreds of party members travelled from across the sprawling constituency to Matlock Town Hall, nestled on the hilly climbs of the East Midlands spa town, to support their embattled leader.

As I spoke to them about their thinking, what surprised me was how little the European question featured and how often the inner workings of the constitution of the Labour Party did. Part of me felt a little frustrated: the country had just had the political equivalent of a heart attack and all they wanted to talk about was the Labour Party rule book and who had a mandate from whom and for what and for how long; the tyrannies of minute differences.

But it neatly illustrated something else the PLP had just not understood. Corbyn had already been successful. He had realised a long-cherished left-wing aim. He had made the party think that its power structure was almost entirely horizontal. There, in Matlock, was the clash of visions of what the Labour Party is writ large; a difference, you could say, of emphasis between those who focus on the idea that Labour is a traditional party and those who prefer to use the phrase ‘the Labour movement’. Or, to put it another way, a disagreement about Clause 1, article 2, of the Labour Party constitution: ‘Its purpose is to organise and maintain in Parliament and in the country a political Labour Party.’

The MPs are of the belief that the emphasis should be on the first bit of that clause and, not unforgivably, of the view that they ought to be at the very centre of the Labour Party’s thinking and efforts. The representation of working people in Parliament is, after all, specifically why the Labour Party was founded. It was not established to be a pressure group or a debating society, they say, its only aim was and ought still to be to swell the ranks of Labour MPs on the green benches and eventually to get as many as is required to form a government.

The Corbyn high command – and many of the new members who have joined to support them – are firmly in the movement camp; as were many of the people in that grand old oak-panelled room in Derbyshire. As Andrew Botham, one of the councillors, put it, anger flashing in

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