Why the Labour party should split up

The leaks about the Labour party that came out last week have been, I think, largely overlooked, partly because the same media that sympathized with overturning Corbyn and collaborated on the project doesn’t really want to revisit the story. But it is definitely an exemplary story.

The leak shows that the rightwing of the party – the third way people, the Blairites – spent much of their time in the election against Theresa May, which Corbyn just missed winning, doing things like dissing black members of the party, knowingly diverting and wasting party funding, and goldbricking in order to bring about a Tory victory. The thinking was, the Tory victory would then overthrow Corbyn.

Now, every leftist is, by nature, paranoid, for good reason: if you attack powerful forces, it is common sense to think they will attack you back and operate in the sneaky ways they have operated to get, say, tax breaks and shit. But the whole Corbyn moment was premised on the idea that Labour is still a viable party for the left.

In America, this is often viewed in terms of… America. American provincialism, right? So that Labour is the Democratic party, the Conservatives the Republicans, etc. However, this seems to absurdly de-contextualize Britain, which, in spite of its Brexit, still has more similarities, as far as its political system goes, to a European country than to the U.S. In Europe, over the past twenty years, we’ve seen an enormous breakup of the Left. In France, the Socialists have simply disappeared. In Germany, the SPD is now on par with the Greens. In Italy, the Communists metamorphosed into many combinations, all of which packed a smaller and smaller political punch, until the ultimate Third Way politician, Matteo Renzi, a historic failure.

In Britain, the context is rather similar.  Colin Kidd in the LRB in 2012 has argued that Labour without Scotland would be a permanent minority party, and that divorce from Scotland has come to pass. Ross McKibben at the same mag pointed out that Labour dropped from 54 seats in Scotland to 1 in 2015.  Just last week, a Guardian columnist, Andy Beckett, pointed to the ten year run of Tory rule and asked, justly, whether Britain had turned into a one party “democracy”, like the Christian Democrats in postwar Italy.

All of this poses a question: if the center right is so ardent about keeping its Blairite claws into Labour,  and if Labour has no map to victory for the foreseeable future, why continue to contest possession of a moribund property? Why not start a separate party, a Corbynist party, using Momentum’s infrastructure to begin with?  Parties do die. Or evolve into something totally different. Corbyn’s moment in the Labour party looks more like the last hurrah for a once vital Labour left than the future.

One can easily imagine the realigments that would take place while the Tories rule for the next decade, as looks most probable. A green-red coalition with a British Left party – a Center coalition between a Blairite Labour party and the Lib-Dems – and the dominant Conservatives, sometimes allied with various ephemeral fascist parties.

Of course, I am discounting one of the major realignments that could well happen: the further split up of the UK, as Scotland becomes independent and Northern Ireland votes to reunite with Ireland. One thing seems probable to me, though: Labour is dead as a vehicle for the “left”. It will never happen.