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Labour Party Is Poised to Back Jeremy Corbyn Again, Even if Britain Isn’t
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The party is expected to re-elect Mr. Corbyn this month despite
opposition from its legislators and polls suggesting it will lose badly
to the governing Conservatives.
Labour Party Is Poised to Back Jeremy Corbyn Again, Even if Britain Isn’t
LONDON — A recent semi-scandal over seats on a train illuminates the deep problems of Britain’s Labour Party. Its left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn,
made a video sitting on the floor of a train calling for the
renationalization of the railways while claiming that there were no
empty seats and travelers were “ram-packed.”
Virgin
Trains, which operates the service, then released closed-circuit
television images showing numerous vacant seats bypassed by Mr. Corbyn,
who was later filmed in a seat for most of the journey.
That
many of Britain’s privatized railways are badly overcrowded, especially
in southern England, is indisputable. But the episode was another
indication that the Labour Party is a shambles: Its leader and its
members of Parliament are in a virtual civil war, and it is deeply
unpopular with the broader electorate.
Yet
the party’s membership is soaring. Under Mr. Corbyn, some 300,000
people have joined Labour in the last year. Labour has more members,
about 500,000, than all the other British political parties put
together.
The
obvious contradiction is at the heart of Labour’s dilemma. Mr. Corbyn, a
man of the hard left who also wants to renationalize the utilities and
make Britain non-nuclear, is deeply skeptical of the United States and
considers NATO an outdated, aggressive alliance. With his
anti-establishment stands, he has brought many young people and many
hard-left advocates back into Labour, some of whom had been expelled
under former Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Yet
opinion polls show Labour under Mr. Corbyn is sure to lose the next
election to the governing Conservatives and lose it badly, doing worse than it did in May 2015,
which led to the resignation of its leader, Ed Miliband. Mr. Miliband
moved the party to the left, away from the centrist policies of Mr.
Blair, who won three elections.
But
in 2015, the party was essentially wiped out in Scotland and won only
232 seats in all of Britain — down from 258 in 2010 — the worst showing
for the party since 1983. It was led at that time by Michael Foot, whose
election platform was described as “the longest suicide note in
history,” and yet whose policies most closely resemble those of Mr.
Corbyn’s.
Labour’s
members of Parliament, who survived the 2015 debacle, fear worse to
come under Mr. Corbyn, 67, whose election as leader was entirely
unexpected. He was the beneficiary of weak opponents and a strong vote
from new party members and anyone who was willing to pay three pounds to
vote, member or not.
First elected to Parliament in 1983, Mr. Corbyn had always been on Labour’s fringe. He supported Hugo Chávez,
the leftist Venezuelan strongman; has pushed hard for more spending for
the poor; and has been a persistent critic of Israel and supporter of Palestinian statehood.
And while Labour officially supported Britain’s remaining in the European Union, Mr. Corbyn was halfhearted at best.
A former shadow chancellor of the Exchequer, Ed Balls, in excerpts from an autobiography,
said Mr. Corbyn’s Labour leadership was a “leftist utopian fantasy”
that is “devoid of connection to the reality of people’s lives.”
Mr.
Balls wrote: “Refusing to listen to the electorate has never been a
winning formula any more than Jeremy Corbyn thinking the volume of the
cheering from your core supporters is a reliable guide to wider public
opinion.”
Labour
legislators have also complained bitterly about Mr. Corbyn’s
disorganization, his lack of interest in reaching out to centrist voters
and his tendency to moralize and speak only to crowds of supporters. At
crucial moments, they say, he is often unavailable, growing vegetables
or making jam, two of his hobbies.
Fearing another quick general election after the resignation of Prime Minister David Cameron,
the Labour legislators revolted, trying to force Mr. Corbyn to quit.
Many resigned from the shadow cabinet or refused to serve in it, and
when Mr. Corbyn insisted that only the party members could decide his
fate, they forced a new election for party leader.
Mr.
Corbyn won a court case allowing him to run without being renominated
by the legislators. The rebels finally united behind Owen Smith, 46, an
English-born member of Parliament from a Welsh seat, who was first
elected in 2010 after a career as a radio producer and a lobbyist for
pharmaceutical companies.
Mr.
Smith is considered “soft left,” but even he is to the left of Mr.
Miliband. While he has done reasonably well in a series of debates with
Mr. Corbyn, the large influx of new members, enthused by Mr. Corbyn’s
harder left policies, suggest that when the votes are counted on Sept.
24, Mr. Corbyn will be re-elected.
A
likely Corbyn victory has added to the concerns of the Labour
legislators, who fear that they will be challenged in their
constituencies by more militant left-wing Corbyn supporters, a process
known as “reselection.” Corbyn backers have threatened mandatory
reselection for all Labour legislators, but a Conservative change to the
election boundaries is a clearer threat.
Under
Mr. Cameron, the Conservatives pushed through a law that would reduce
the number of parliamentary constituencies to 600 from 650, while trying
to equalize the number of voters in each constituency — the same
reasoning behind redistricting in the United States after a census.
But
as in the United States, the devil is in the details of how the
constituencies are redrawn, and there are already charges of
gerrymandering by the government. A review of the new boundaries has
suggested 200 Labour seats would be affected, with up to 30 seats being
scrapped, because many Labour seats in Wales and the northeast have
smaller populations.
By contrast, the Conservatives face losing only between 10 and 15 seats, according to the review by Robert Hayward, a political expert and a Conservative member of the House of Lords.
New
boundaries will mean a new selection process for many Labour
legislators, which could mean that those opposed to Mr. Corbyn would be
rejected.
So
there is increasing talk of Labour legislators forming their own
parliamentary opposition in the House of Commons, where they would, by
their numbers, become the official opposition.
Some
analysts have suggested that there is a pro-European, centrist party in
the making that could also attract Liberal Democrats and some
Conservatives, too. But the British political system punishes third
parties, and everyone is mindful of the fate of the Social Democratic
Party, formed in 1981 by Labour legislators who revolted against the
party’s antinuclear and anti-European policies.
After a lively start, that party merged with the Liberals and finally disappeared.
Mr.
Corbyn has said he “hopes Labour M.P.s will recognize the outcome of
this election, and not walk away.” More likely, they will hope for an
early election in which the Corbyn-led party is badly defeated but they
somehow survive, resulting in his resignation. But having seized the
party machinery, Mr. Corbyn seems unlikely to give it up, even in
defeat.
In
his view, and that of his followers, he is building a socialist
movement for the future, and he and his followers regard the centrists,
in the words of the former Labour legislator Chris Williamson, as
Conservative “sleeper” agents at war not with Mr. Corbyn but with the members of the party themselves.
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