The Labour Party- partition could be the answer.

In my day job, part of my role is helping organisations think through how they might best align themselves with the public good. This has meant working with a range of public services, the media, business as well as professional associations. In each of these cases, the right path forward becomes visible. What is never certain is whether the advice is too bold and whether the organisation will stay the course. But there is always a way.

It is partly through this lens that I have been observing the Labour party with increasing horror. The party is currently an amalgam of an unholy alliance of a supporter base that is underpinning weak leadership and a strategy that is for a different age.

At this point I would normally undertake an analysis of the external environment, speak to insiders and a wider group of supporters and members, and then produce a set of design principles for change. The problem in this case is that I can’t see currently how the Labour party gets out of the situation in which it finds itself. It might actually be game over for the party as a serious contender for power.

In the past week, this has become increasingly clear. To question ‘shoot to kill’ in the midst of a terrorist attack as the Leader of the Opposition did this week is so far beyond common moral and political sentiment that it doesn’t seem recoverable. The sensible response would be for the Leader to step down immediately or be removed. Yet, that doesn’t seem likely as a result of his support base. The party is locked in a downward spiral.

There’s always the magical unforeseen scenario – the Micawber scenario. We struggle to imagine what we can’t see. There may be a scenario where the Conservatives so monumentally muck things up that even a pacifist socialist might become Prime Minister. Jeremy Corbyn might be removed as his supporters shift to another candidate amidst Labour chaos. But these scenarios are in the ‘highly unlikely’ box. If Jeremy Corbyn is removed, he’s likely to be replaced with someone with fairly similar views. Ken Livingstone? What happens when major institutions have few means of recovery?

In the 1980s, a section of Labour’s centre-right split away and formed a new party, the SDP. It was blamed for keeping Margaret Thatcher in office for two more terms. This is self-serving history, of course. Labour was unelectable in 1983 and 1987 with or without the help of the SDP. Nonetheless, the historical precedent is a barrier. So Labour is locked. It has little or no prospect of an election victory next time around but nor can something be started afresh. Or can it?

Professor Colin Talbot argues in an enlightening blog today that a split may now be desirable for Labour’s ‘refuseniks’ (people like me) when viewed from a vantage point in the future. They could just get on with it to salvage a credible centre-left in the UK. The Labour Party has not been a socialist party for some considerable time (see ‘Left without a future?’ Chapter Eight for a discussion of this- where I agree with Tony Benn on Labour and socialism). Its reformists could just stop pretending and split away from the disastrous revolutionaries.

Instead of asking ‘what about the SDP?’, Labour’s refuseniks would ask, how could we make a mainstream party of the centre-left work? You’d have to accept that the next election was lost because the new party would take time to build. It is lost in all probability anyhow. You’d need a very sizeable cadre of parliamentarians on board – in excess of one hundred or so to deal a decisive blow. They would have to be leaders prepared to risk everything in the interests of the wider good. Well, many seats are at risk currently.

You would have to outline some basic principles of the new party without being prescriptive. Innovation and experimentation with new democratic forms would be key if the new party was not to be too technocratic and elitist. You’d have to build a funding and membership base from scratch and that could take time. The party would be very dependent on short money at least until it started to demonstrate a gathering of support. It would be hard. But if these conditions of success were met would it have a better chance of succeed than the ‘stay’ strategy? Perhaps. It’s certainly worth giving this deeper thought.

In fact, the only reason for not considering this nuclear option would be if there was a reasonable chance of turning the Labour party around. There seems to be little hope of that currently. So why is this alternative approach not being considered more seriously? Labour’s moderates are both frightened of the past and frightened of the present. So they are stuck. Day-to-day humiliation and small procedural wins replace leadership and direction. Not daring to think ‘the unthinkable’ Labour’s moderates dig trenches to nowhere rather than bridges to somewhere. None of the options currently on the table work so some creative thinking is needed.

I’m afraid the last few weeks have shown the ‘broad church’ mentality to be what it is – cant. Labour is a number of churches on a single site. And while they have coexisted previously, their quite fundamental divisions are now in the open. Tristram Hunt and John McDonnell share little politically. Anti-Toryism is not enough; there needs to be some common gel of shared vision for a party to work. That is not today’s Labour party. And it may never be again. Deeper thinking and courage are now needed.