Labour is still embroiled in a decades-long battle to decide what it stands for
Nearly 60 years ago Denis Healey delivered a speech to the Labour party conference that has since become famous among Britain’s left-leaning political activists and commentators.
Labour had just suffered a bruising third-straight General Election defeat, with the Conservatives storming to a three-figure majority under the leadership of Harold Macmillan.
“There are far too many people [in the Labour party] who want to luxuriate complacently in moral righteousness in opposition,” Healey said.
Six decades later, his argument echoes around Labour party circles in the aftermath of last week’s humiliating by-election defeat in Copeland. What is the point of maintaining socialist purity, many in the party are asking, if you never get the power to implement your policies?
The question – to which flailing leader Jeremy Corbyn has no answer – is a legitimate one, but it also masks a greater divide within the Labour party. It is not simply a question of pragmatism versus idealism, but between two fundamentally different perspectives of the world.
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On one hand, you have the likes of Corbyn, John McDonnell, and thousands of new party members who stand under the banner of Momentum. They have little or no appreciation of the enormous benefits that liberalism has delivered across the globe in recent decades, of the way it has allowed hundreds of millions of people to escape poverty; they consider business and open markets to be the enemy, forces that must be restrained; their policies would lead to the kind of ruin seen time and time again, most recently in Venezuela.
On the other hand, you have a considerable number of Labour MPs, councillors and members who understand the unrivalled advantages of liberalism, and the need to allow markets to create wealth – wealth that benefits everyone, and allows governments to fund state-provided services such as the NHS. They favour a bigger and more interventionist state, certainly – but they appreciate the role of business and markets in creating the wealth that pays for it.
Tony Blair confronted this reality during a conference speech of his own. In 2001 he cited a colleague who asked if New Labour, now that it had won another massive majority, could get away with quietly abandoning its election promise to be a centrist, modernising party. “It’s worse than you think,” Blair said. “I really do believe in it”.
Labour’s current stalemate is not just a standoff between pragmatic power-seekers and revolutionary idealists. At its roots is a fundamental ideological clash.
The split is evident even at the very top of the party. Over the weekend, reflecting on last week's electoral capitulation, deputy leader Tom Watson said: "We have to make it clear we are on the side of people who create prosperity, as well as those who need the security of good jobs."
Unsurprisingly, there was no such sentiment from Corbyn or his backers. The Labour leader doubled-down on his failing approach, bizarrely insisting the "time has come" for Marxist ideas and policies. Even more absurd was Baroness Shami Chakrabarti's claim that "people will change their minds" and start voting for Labour's hard-left stance.
With Corbyn insisting he’ll battle on, and with Momentum maintaining its stranglehold on the party, it is increasingly difficult to see how Labour’s crisis will be resolved.