Ten
years ago Gordon Brown was Prime Minister and David Miliband was his main rival.
In 2018, Mr Brown is speaking
out, against his party’s leadership, to warn about the threat antisemitism
poses to the Labour Party’s soul. While David Miliband resides in New York in self-imposed
exile after leaving the Commons in 2013 for the presidency of the International
Rescue Committee. When he lost the 2010 Labour leadership election to his
brother it was by just over one percentage point. If today David stood again
for the leadership the defeat would not be so narrow given the change in the
party’s membership. In fact, if he wanted to make a British political comeback he
would struggle to find a constituency party eager to nominate him to fight a winnable
parliamentary seat! How did it come to this?
Tom
Harris, the ex-Labour MP for Glasgow South, seeks to explain in his book Ten Years in the Death of the Labour Party.
Ten Years describes the key events from Brown’s elevation into No.10
to the rise of, fringe far-Left backbencher, Jeremy Corbyn. It includes every key
election, vote, decision and bar brawl which led to this fundamental
realignment.
While
the change has been huge it should not have been a surprise, according to
Harris, given the party’s determined efforts to shift away from New Labour after
Tony Blair ceased to be its leader. As Harris puts it:
“The contention of this book is a simple one: that the definitive moment
that sent Labour into its self-destructive spiral can be traced back ten years,
to Saturday 6 October 2007, when Gordon Brown, having blatantly encouraged speculation
that he would go to the country, beat a humiliating retreat and tried, implausibly,
to make his U-turn look like firm leadership.”
However, it was the leadership
of Ed Miliband (the Brownite preference)
which really aided the ascent of the party’s far-Left. It was not just revisions
to the party’s rulebook, that changed the way a leader was elected, which caused
this but also shifts in policy. On tax, rail renationalisation, Syria and Iraq Ed
Miliband sought to distinguish himself from Blair. Each step, a step further to
the Left of the party.
Once
again Harris does not mince his words: “It
is Miliband, not Brown or even Corbyn, who must shoulder the largest share of
the blame for what has happened to the Labour Party.”
In
the preface, Harris declares that the book is not neutral. However, much of its
content is simply a factual account of events - although naturally the events
of the past decade which he picks fit his narrative and overall argument.
Where
he chooses to make a specific argument, like in the case of Brown’s failure to
call a snap election in 2007, he does so convincingly. It is also a book not
without self-criticism (or rather criticism of the party’s ‘Right’). The
failure to challenge Gordon Brown for the premiership and David Miliband’s complacent
leadership campaign are two early events which Harris highlights as consequential
failings of the party’s progressives.
Some
would argue that the Blairites bear more responsibility for these failings and
others. These same people would no doubt cut Ed Miliband, and his team, more
slack. Meanwhile no one book will ever resolve debates about the 2007 election
that never was. Future histories and biographies will help answer these
questions but for now Harris offers his thoughts on ten transformative years
for the Labour Party.
The issue
currently confronting the party is whether it can stay together and survive.
Here too Ten Years offers some
insights.
While
the question of Corbyn’s electoral viability remains open, after Theresa May’s terrible
election campaign and loss of the Conservatives’ parliamentary majority.
However, Harris’s disgust at the return of Militant-style politics, the leaderships
response to terrorism and the far-Left’s open alliance with anti-Semites suggests
he already believes the Labour Party has already died morally.
If this
moral decline results in splits and electoral devastation, Harris has pre-emptively
written the post-mortem: “And if, in the next few years, Labour’s death
certificate needs to be issued, the cause of death will be a single word:
suicide.”
Review of Ten Years in the Death of the Labour Party by Tom Harris (London, Biteback, 2018).