New Jeremy Corbyn party is just what Keir Starmer needs

Such is the Labour left’s loathing for Keir Starmer and their vituperative rejection of him that they may soon have to leave the party. That could be the icing on the leader’s cake.

Jeremy Corbyn still has some influence. Picture: AFP.

As Sir Keir Starmer used his prosecutorial skills on Boris Johnson in parliament yesterday, did you not find yourself asking, “Yes, but how would Jeremy Corbyn have handled this?” No, of course you didn’t.

That doesn’t mean, though, that the man who led the opposition into the last two elections has gone away and ceased to exercise any influence. Shortly after departing office Corbyn set up a charity, a surprising proportion of whose patrons are former presidents of Latin American countries, laced with far-left celebrities such as Noam Chomsky, the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and the now-retired Unite leader Len McCluskey.

As far as one can tell from its well-designed website, the Peace and Justice Project exists entirely to send Corbyn round the world making speeches to people who agree with him. From the inevitable videos it seems he is enjoying himself and this enthusiasm may be what has led to reports that some of his close comrades are urging him to pupate and emerge from the charitable cocoon as a party butterfly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yahj7MJSpd0

Corbyn is at present in the anomalous position of being a Labour Party member, but not a Labour Party MP. His comments back in 2020 that allegations of antisemitism in Labour under his leadership had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons” led Starmer to withdraw the Labour whip. It will not be returned until Corbyn apologises for these words and, 15 months on, this seems unlikely – the prime minister having cornered the galactic market in insincere apologies.

Even if the Peace and Justice Project has a distinctly contemporary east European ring to it, it is often better, as Milton put it, to reign in hell than serve in heaven. At least you can get stuff done. At present Corbyn is a prophet reduced to a project; a party would mean more speeches in front of more people. More airtime.

Thinking about this I wondered how such an enterprise might fare. Different people I talked to had very different ideas, ranging from the utterly dismissive to the feeling that a Corbyn breakaway might damage Labour by siphoning off votes in critical seats and depriving the party of necessary activists. I was reminded that not so long ago Corbyn was being serenaded at Glastonbury. Could he not become a Farage of the left, exercising the same kind of gravitational pull on Labour policy that Ukip and the Brexit Party managed for the Tories?

US President Donald Trump listens as Nigel Farage (R) speaks during a Make America Great Again rally at Phoenix Goodyear Airport in 2020. Picture: AFP.

So let’s think this through, not least by appealing to precedent. First, could Corbyn hold his own seat of Islington North in an election standing against his old party? He got more than 60 per cent of the vote in 2019 and there can’t be a sentient adult Islingtonian who hasn’t heard of him. And there is plenty of precedent for maverick Labour MPs retaining their seats having departed their party. In 1972, for example, the Labour MP for Lincoln, Dick Taverne, was deselected, forced a by-election and was returned as the “Democratic Labour” candidate. He won again at the next election.

My favourite, though, was the veteran SO Davies, who was deselected for the seat of Merthyr Tydfil just before the 1970 general election. Furious that his 36 years in parliament should be ended in this way, he stood as an independent. He had no campaign machine and put out just one leaflet bearing the legend “You Know Me, I’ve Never Let You Down”. Defying the deselector’s claim that he was too old to be the MP he won handsomely – and not long after died of old age. Labour won the by-election.

My instinct is that Corbyn could do that. Win his seat, that is. But what about a breakaway party? There, an inspection of the chicken gizzards is less hopeful. No party to the left of Labour has prospered in British history. I know this because I spent much of my youth in a party that tried. In 1966 the Communist Party of Great Britain, then very strong in the trade union movement and with 50,000 members, put up more than 50 candidates and earned a radio broadcast by its leader, John Gollan.

The idea was to get one or two communists elected who would work with Labour left-wingers to bring about a leftward shift in the party. It was all very exciting. On election day Labour won with a landslide and the CP lost all its deposits. The comrades between them garnered 62,092 votes.

Filmmaker Ken Loach on set.

For more recent examples follow the recent political career of the filmmaker Ken Loach – also, as it happens, a patron of Peace and Justice. In 2001 he directed the election broadcast for the Socialist Alliance, the “socialist alternative” to Labour. Labour won with a landslide and the 98 candidates from Loach’s party managed 57,000 votes. The Alliance folded; Loach switched to the Respect Party. In 2010 that received 33,000 votes. Then it was on to the Left Unity party. That, according to Loach, was the new best hope for true socialism. In 2015 its three candidates managed 455 votes.

The only far-left organisation that enjoyed any electoral success was the Trotskyist Militant tendency of the 1980s, which it achieved by infiltrating Labour, denying its own existence and getting its members selected under false pretences. Once expelled from Labour its various electoral guises failed with Loach-like totality.

So why could not a new left party act like Ukip, as a vote-splitting threat, even if not one that would actually win seats? And in that way ginger Labour up a bit, socialistically speaking?

Labour leader Keir Starmer. Picture: AFP.

And even if the ill-fated centrists of Reform UK all lost their seats in 2019, wasn’t their existence an electoral problem for Labour? The logic of such a perception is that it might be best for Starmer to find a way to palliate the left and keep them (even if grumpily) onside.

And here we encounter an unpleasant truth. There was something off to the right of the Conservative Party that some voters wanted. There isn’t anything off to the left of Labour that voters find attractive. Labour is green enough, diverse enough, sufficiently in favour of public spending. Voters don’t want to be in endless solidarity with Latin American socialists, strikers and highly selective anti-war movements.

Looked at in the plainest light of day there is no reason why a pragmatic Labour left would leave the party to test out its popularity on voters. They know what will happen. Yet such is their loathing for Starmer and the vituperative character of their rejection of him as evidenced by their leading commentators that leaving will soon make the only sense they have.

So far the Labour leader has had a good couple of months. A new Peace and Justice Party led by Jeremy Corbyn would ice that very solid cake.

The Times