Mick Hartley

Robert Harris in the Sunday Times (£) suggests we all join the Labour Party, to help revive a credible opposition, elect a competent leader, and ensure that the party doesn't disappear entirely up its own Momentum:

The issue is not Corbyn’s policies, in so far as he has any. I am afraid it is Corbyn himself (“a sociopathic narcissist”, as one Labour MP politely described him to me last week). He simply cannot do the basic job of leading the opposition in the Commons. He cannot argue or debate. He possesses no spark of originality or wit. His ideas were fossilised more than 30 years ago. He cannot manage his shadow cabinet or parliamentary party. He can only mouth the same old platitudes to audiences who already agree with him. He is surrounded by a coterie of advisers, some of whom are merely incompetent, others downright sinister.

[Sinister? Who could he possibly mean?]

He is where he is mostly because of two monumental pieces of folly. The first was Ed Miliband’s ill-thought-out decision to allow anyone willing to pay £3 to have a vote in the Labour leadership election. (True, Corbyn also obtained a tiny majority among full party members, but most of these joined only in the general atmosphere of midsummer madness that seized last year’s contest, and few had seen him enough at first hand to know his sheer incapacity for the job.)

The second was the ghastly miscalculation of a handful of Labour MPs who nominated him precisely because they believed he was so unelectably useless that they could safely suck up to the left by signing his papers, while privately having no intention whatever of voting for him. No doubt the Germans have a word for what they must be feeling now.

So, as Lenin famously asked: what is to be done?

There will almost certainly be a leadership election some time this summer under the Miliband rules. If Corbyn refuses to resign, it looks as though his name will have to be on the ballot paper, even though there are not enough MPs willing to nominate him. If he wins the leadership again — which he might — it is hard to see a way back for the bulk of the parliamentary party. They will either have to take up some other occupation or form their own group, elect their own leader and insist, through sheer weight of numbers, that they are now the official opposition. Labour will split, as it did in 1931, and the left may be out of power for a generation.

The only way this can be avoided is for Corbyn — or, if he does at last resign, his surrogate, John McDonnell — to be defeated in the mass-membership ballot. And that can only be achieved if sufficient of us who are concerned to prevent the destruction of the Labour party join it to vote for an alternative candidate….

We appear to be entering a new era in British politics. By default, and contrary to the old ways of our parliamentary democracy, we are moving towards something akin to the US primary system, in which registered Democrats and Republicans pick their respective presidential candidates. Sixty thousand new members have joined Labour in the past week. Who knows who they all are? It is rumoured they may be split roughly half and half for and against Corbyn. Once the contest begins officially, Labour sympathisers and voters — more than 9m at the last election — can pay the reduced fee and vote.

I would urge Sunday Times readers who are, or have been, Labour supporters to visit the party’s website and join. I was one of the 16m who voted “remain” in the referendum and who woke on Friday morning with a sense of powerlessness. Something profound had happened not just to our country but to our system of parliamentary government. But here is something one can do. It is clear that in the autumn the battle over the precise form of Britain’s relationship with Europe will shift back to the place where it should always have been determined in the first place: in Churchill’s little room [ie the House of Commons – MH].

It will be no use moaning about the outcome without at least having tried to do something to influence it. The United Kingdom’s democracy cannot function properly without a competent opposition to hold the government to account. Corbyn has shown he cannot provide even a minimal level of that competence.

If he is re-elected, the Labour party, which has been in existence since 1900, and which for all its faults has been a vital engine of social progress, will have been captured by extra-parliamentary forces, many of whom won’t care if the party’s share of the vote halves, so long as it can be portrayed as a “victory for socialism”.

Effectively, Labour as a party of government will have been destroyed. The stakes are that high. Join.

Could be the best £3 you ever spent.