Labour is slipping into a coma and no-one seems to care very much

Yesterday Harriet Harman tried to wake the Labour Party up. She suggested that if the party was to begin the long journey back to economic credibility, it would need to show it understood public hostility to the size of the welfare state by accepting a key element of the Government’s Welfare Bill.

Like a grumpy adolescent, the Party told her to sod off and let it go back to sleep. Every leadership candidate but one fell over themselves to condemn Harman, the interim leader got a mauling at a meeting of Labour MPs and, predictably, Twitter lit up with its trademark accusations of betrayal and surrender.

Harman may yet persuade the Shadow Cabinet to back her today but a sizeable backbench rebellion seems very likely nonetheless.

These events confirm something that has become increasingly clear since the leadership contest kicked off: those in the Party who understand the scale of Labour’s challenge and realise that the trek back to government is paved with uncomfortable choices are in a small minority and a pretty tired minority at that.

As a result, it now seems likely that either Andy Burnham or Yvette Cooper will win the election with Jeremy Corbyn possibly beating Liz Kendall into fourth place.

As leader, Cooper or Burnham will make some appropriate noises about being tough on the public finances. But, as with Ed Miliband’s attempts at hawkishness, it will sound hollow because they will not really believe it. Their record as members of a Government that presided over an economic catastrophe will add to the sense of inauthenticity. And as their opposition to Harman yesterday revealed, they will also shrink from taking the big decisions that shows taxpayers their sudden frugality is more than pure rhetoric.

So Labour is about to enter the political equivalent of a coma for at least another five years: still present and alive but unable to influence events or determine its own fate.

The complacency and even fatalism within the Party over this risk is shocking. More than once I have heard influential people who understand the Party’s problems blithely suggesting that Labour needs another election defeat before it gets serious about winning again. Such an attitude reveals how bad and historically unique Labour’s torpor has become.

In 1980, the Party took a terrible decision when it elected Michael Foot as leader and then produced a hard left manifesto that led to the disastrous 1983 election defeat. But that is only half the story. The Party spent much of the 1980s engaged in a high energy and passionate battle for its future fought by big personalities and buoyed by a new intake of members and MPs energised by the radical politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of that new intake morphed into the ‘soft left’ that first backed Neil Kinnock’s far-reaching reforms and expulsion of the Trostskyite Militant Tendency and then Tony Blair’s election winning programme.

By contrast the Party today is split between a majority who want Labour to be an anti-austerity campaign group rather than a contender for government and a minority who can see the challenge but are as likely to shrug their shoulders in resignation as “fight, fight and fight again to save the Party they love”.

The resulting risk is that the Party will never wake back up from the coma. If Labour wastes another five years of opposition by failing to win back public trust on the economy, it is quite possible its vote will shrink even further in 2020. After all, the Conservatives are pushing on with their bold effort to seize the centre ground and out-flank Labour from the left on the issue of low pay and regional growth. UKIP has scented blood in the North. The SNP will stretch every sinew to hold all of its seats in Scotland. And the Government is reforming the electoral system to remove Labour’s in-built advantage.

Maybe the shoulder-shruggers are right and such a defeat would finally rouse the Party from its slumber but equally it could usher in a long period in which opposition to the Conservative Party is split between Labour, the SNP and UKIP leaving the Tories in power for many years. It would be a British version of the Mexican scenario in which a single centre right party ruled for decades but without the need for endemic corruption and electoral fraud to maintain that hold on power.

The only solution to this depressing prognosis is for the serious wing of the Party to get far angrier, far better organised and far more aggressive. They will probably lose this leadership contest but unlike the Miliband years there should be no self-denying ordinance, no self-censorship of dissent for the sake of unity. 2015 revealed how pointless that calculation was. From September onwards, there needs to be a highly active internal opposition to the new leader pressing them to do the hard things involved in winning back economic credibility. And if they refuse to shift, they need to be deposed and replaced with someone who gets it. Nothing less will secure Labour’s future.

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