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Defeat to bring Labour civil war back into the open


As the scale of Labour’s defeat sank in during the early hours of Friday morning, the former Labour home secretary Alan Johnson launched a blistering attack on Jeremy Corbyn and the leftwing movement that has seized control of his party.

Sitting alongside Jon Lansman, a key ally of Mr Corbyn, on live TV Mr Johnson let rip, attacking the party’s radical agenda. “Go back to your student politics . . . I feel really angry about this, that we persevered with Corbyn,” he raged. “It’s Corbyn. We knew he was incapable of leading. We knew he was worse than useless and lacked all the qualities to lead a party.”

Mr Johnson, a former MP, was a senior cabinet minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, when New Labour was in power from 1997 to 2010.

But for the last nine years the party has been floundering in the wilderness: today’s result represents Labour’s fourth general election defeat in succession and a leap backwards from 2017.

In the aftermath of the defeat — set to be Labour’s worst result since 1935 — the 70-year-old Mr Corbyn declared he would not lead the party through another election, triggering a leadership contest that will determine the future course of the party.

Will Labour now tack back towards the centre ground — by selecting a more moderate “soft left” leader — or continue its pursuit of a quasi-Marxist utopia involving mass nationalisations, huge levels of extra state borrowing and a quantum leap in annual tax and spending?

Mr Corbyn emerged from nowhere in 2015 as the reluctant leftwing candidate for the leadership and his hardline views caught the imagination of the membership. Labour has been flooded by vast numbers of new members who share Mr Corbyn’s politics.

By contrast his personal ratings with the wider UK public have plumbed previously unseen depths. Helen Goodman, who lost her seat in Bishop Auckland — one of the so-called red wall seats targeted by Boris Johnson’s Conservatives — said Mr Corbyn should go because “he doesn’t command the confidence and trust of the British public”.

Many Labour MPs have always loathed Mr Corbyn for his long-held world view — hostile to the US, Eurosceptic and sceptical about the UK’s nuclear deterrent — and were doubtful about his radical leftwing economic programme. In the summer of 2016 he faced an unsuccessful rebellion by the vast majority of his own MPs who called on him to quit.

On the day of that victory over three years ago, one aide confided that it felt like Cinderella going to the ball: “Part of me feels like it won’t be long before . . . the wheels fall off.” Thursday night seemed to mark the moment that Mr Corbyn’s bandwagon finally crashed.

In the 2017 election Labour confounded the critics — and there were many — when Labour seized 30 seats. Now it is set to lose about 70.

“I feel sick to the pit of my stomach,” said one pro-Corbyn candidate as the news sank in. “What a bloodbath,” said one aide. “Jesus wept.”

“This is a devastating night,” said Lucy Powell, a Manchester MP.

For longstanding critics — including Mr Johnson — the result is proof that they were always right to be sceptical of the party’s shift to the left since 2015.

“Jeremy Corbyn has been a handmaiden to a Boris Johnson landslide,” said George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor. “He’s never been a viable prime minister. Every Tory I know was cheering when Jeremy Corbyn was elected as leader of the Labour party and has been cheering ever since.”

The sheer scale of the setback on Thursday night left staff at Labour’s headquarters on Victoria Street speechless. Bottles of “Corbynista Victory Ale” remained unopened.

Karie Murphy, who ran the day-to-day campaign, had pushed for an approach based largely on going on the offensive: Labour poured resources into scores of seats held by the Tories. The party only stepped up its defence of existing seats in the closing days of the election.

The results, as they came through in the early hours, showed a sea of red seats — mostly in Brexit-backing areas of northern England — turning blue. They included Darlington, Leigh, Stockton South, Workington and Wrexham.

Ian Lavery, chair of the party, only just held on to his seat of Wansbeck with a majority slashed from 10,435 to 814. He said the public had been “angry” because Labour had “reneged” on its promise to support Brexit. Others, by contrast, thought the party should have taken a harder Remain stance instead of sitting on the fence.

There were only a handful of bright spots for the party, such as its gain in the wealthy Remain-voting London borough of Putney.

On Thursday night the most loyal pro-Corbyn figures were blaming Brexit for the party’s severe reversals. Owen Jones, a leftwing commentator, said it had been impossible to maintain an electoral coalition of Remainers and Leavers. “Brexit just smashed us,” he said.

Others suggested that Labour had been unfairly undermined by a biased, billionaire-controlled media.

Neither Mr Corbyn nor his closest aides will be keen to relinquish their grip on Labour, allowing a possible slide back towards the centrist New Labour movement when the party won elections but — to their horror — millionaires were tolerated, private involvement in the public sector was encouraged and the US invasion of Iraq endorsed.

They will be pushing younger, less familiar left-wingers such as Rebecca Long-Bailey and Richard Burgon. Laura Pidcock, who was thought likely to win the support of the union Unite, looked in danger of losing her seat of North West Durham amid the political carnage.

Yet other party figures will now be seeking to force Labour back in a less radical direction. Strong contenders from the “soft left” could include Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, Keir Starmer, shadow Brexit secretary, or backbenchers such as Jess Phillips or Lisa Nandy.

Alastair Campbell, former head of communications for Mr Blair, said Labour needed to face some hard truths. “This was not just about Corbyn but the broader worldview and an economic plan that so many people did not believe,” he said.



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