Kinnock’s words were true, of course. The trust of the electorate is secured not by gimmickry, soundbite or hoping the other lot mess up, but ultimately through the demonstration of competence and the methodical process of crafting a cogent policy programme that appeals to sufficient numbers of voters.

So I’m not convinced that the forthcoming by-election in Hartlepool will be quite the litmus test for Labour that some are suggesting. It is, let us not forget, only a little over a year since the party suffered its worst general election defeat since the 1930s. Hammered in many of its heartlands and abandoned by huge swathes of once-loyal voters, the task of reconstruction was always going to be slow and painstaking. And potentially more than three years out from the next election, the result in Hartlepool, whatever it be, is unlikely to alter the broader electoral landscape in any profound way.

But modern politics has little time for such nuance. Whether the party likes it or not, the by-election will be seen as an interim assessment of Sir Keir Starmer — both the man and his leadership. And while Hartlepool may not prove pivotal to the party’s longer-term electoral prospects, it is undeniable that the “direction of travel” is important. Labour must be able to demonstrate that progress is at least being made in the job of reconnecting with its core vote, that it understands it cannot be an organisation only for student radicals, social activists and middle-class liberals living in our fashionable cities, but must also be seen by those in working-class, post-industrial Britain as their natural home. If that is the mountain to be climbed — and it surely is — then the party is barely beyond the foothills.

A by-election in a Red Wall constituency such as Hartlepool at a time when the Tories are in government would once have been a walk in the park for the Labour Party. Since its creation in 1974, the seat has returned a Labour MP at every general election. But now things are far less certain.

Last time out, Labour held on — but with a much-reduced share of the vote. Unsurprisingly, given that the place voted heavily in favour of leaving the EU, Brexit Party heavyweight Richard Tice swept up support from over a quarter of the electorate, eating into the vote of both Labour and the Tories. Tice has hinted that he may stand in the by-election under the banner of the Brexit Party’s new incarnation, Reform UK — though, with the flames of the whole Brexit debate somewhat dampened, it is doubtful he will secure the same level of backing this time round. How those Brexit Party votes from 2019 are divided may therefore prove decisive.

The ideal candidate for Labour would have been a local person who, while imbued with Labour values and passionate about challenging economic and social inequality, understood working-class Britain and spoke its language, voted to leave the EU, perhaps — God forbid — had a job in the private sector and knew what it was like to take a shower after work rather than before, didn’t obsess about trans rights and wasn’t ashamed of the national flag. Finding such a person would have been something of a fool’s errand, mind. Those matching these criteria are these days in short supply within the party’s ranks — and that fact alone stands as testament to all that has gone wrong.

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Why is the Left calling me a fascist?

By Paul Embery

So Labour has plumped instead — following a process that some are calling a stitch-up — for what appears to be an identikit candidate: Dr Paul Williams, a Remain-voting, university-educated member of the professional and managerial classes who banged the drum very loudly for a second referendum and subscribes to a liberal-progressive worldview. And a budding retread MP to boot. The very opposite, in other words, to what is needed.

The problem for Labour is that it has stopped looking and sounding like a large chunk of those it was created to represent. A survey of the party membership carried out in 2017 found that 77% fell within the ABC1 grade (occupational middle-class), with nearly half of all members living in London or southern England. Fifty-seven per cent were graduates.

For all his creditable efforts to reconnect the party with its old base — accepting the Brexit war as over, and focusing his messaging on the value of family, community and nation — Sir Keir is shackled by a party that, in the main, doesn’t want to go where he is trying to take it. The mix of globalist liberal progressives and toytown revolutionaries that still holds so much sway in Labour’s ranks view any expression of patriotism or the politics of place and belonging as unenlightened and reactionary. Witness, for example, the slings and arrows some among these groups hurled at the leader for his terrible crime of having given some speeches in front of the union flag. On the continent, to give a speech in front of the national flag is, even for politicians of the Left, viewed as an entirely normal thing. To many on the British Left, it is a harbinger of the new fascism. And then they wonder why they lost the working-class.

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What Labour learned from a year of Boris

By Paul Embery

With the acute impact of the economic crisis triggered by Covid beginning to be felt, and with the likelihood that the working class will, in the end, take the biggest hit, Labour should be Hoovering up the support of hard-pressed Britain. But from the Red Wall, the Labour Party still looks like that unappealing blend of 1960s hyper-liberal and far-Left ideologue that actively despises working-class values and culture. Those residing there continue to see an organisation dominated by middle-class activists preaching the gospels of cosmopolitan liberalism and social revolution. And the selection of Dr Williams as the by-election candidate in Hartlepool will not do much to disabuse them of that view.

Hartlepool is emblematic of blue-collar Britain. It should be safe territory for Labour. But instead the by-election could turn out to be a knife-edge battle against the Tories. The era when Labour could expect anyone wearing a red rosette to win in this type of working-class constituency is gone. Peter Mandelson was three times returned by the voters of Hartlepool. But that was in the days before the acute effects of globalisation – in the form of widespread deindustrialisation and intense demographic change – started to be felt in such places.

Mandelson and his New Labour chums were the cheerleaders for the new global market and all that came with it. They lectured provincial Britain about the benefits to be gained through improved GDP and cultural enrichment. But the people in these communities felt no better for it financially, culturally or spiritually. They yearned for something different – something that went beyond economic justice and was rooted in the concepts of place, stability and social solidarity. And when Labour showed itself unwilling to provide it, they began to look elsewhere.

To win back these places, Labour needs a radical overhaul. It must start focusing on the things that people want to talk about on the doorsteps in working-class communities — not only economic betterment, but law and order, immigration, national security and family.

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Whose side is Labour on?

By Paul Embery

I argue in Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class that, at its best, Labour is an electoral compromise between (coincidentally) Hartlepool and Hampstead – a coalition that fused the party’s traditional working-class base with a layer of more middle-class liberals who were attracted to its vision of a fairer society. But that coalition has become seriously unbalanced: Hampstead has come to dominate while Hartlepool has been sidelined and taken for granted.

This by-election presents an opportunity for Labour to demonstrate how serious it is about pushing the pendulum back the other way. I fear the party is nowhere near ready to seize it.

Orphaned chicks never survive. They go from one penguin to the next, begging for food and shelter, but are cast away. Eventually, they weaken and die from starvation or exposure to the harsh cold.

The radical Left in the West, especially after the decisive defeat of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, has a great deal in common with these unfortunate penguins. The collapse of Left populism is today final and irrevocable; the rejection and abandonment not only coming from the working-class that these Leftists claimed to speak for, but also from the Left-of-centre parties that the they tried to sell their services to as electorally useful “tribunes of the people.”

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The Left's obsession with subjectivity

By David Goodhart

But not every penguin is born equal. The true nature of the modern Left should be understood as a sort of composite being, made up of heterogeneous parts. In theory, the Left wants to be, or at least thinks it wants to be, a political alliance between various stripes of “professionals” — college-educated, urban, progressive — and a broader base of  “ordinary people.”

But in truth, the radical Left is a cross-section of the lower half of the managerial class — graduates who work in jobs that, according to Michael Lind, “pay modestly but provide both status and a degree of personal autonomy that the frequently better-paid managerial functionaries in more hierarchical occupations (e.g. within large, traditional corporations) do not possess.” Over time, the interests of this group have increasingly aligned with those of the urban, cosmopolitan elites in the Democratic Party.

For those looking to reach the upper parts of that cross-section, radical (an adjective usually followed by “student”) politics is a smart career move for ambitious young professionals. The now infamous video from the 2019 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention, in which attendees objected to clapping and language they found offensive, is often mocked as representing the uselessness and confusion of the American Left, but this characterisation is only half the story.

In reality, even something as silly as a rule against clapping — because it threatens the disabled working-class comrades who are poised to flock to the red banner — is a useful career training tool. Animals play in order to learn how to hunt, and mobilising the “lack of privilege” along with concerns about “safety” among “marginalised groups” is actually how one wields power in a rapidly increasing number of our society’s institutions today.

On top of that, the dour European social democrats of yesterday who warmly ushered in the post-Soviet end of history were at one point — nearly to a man — radical revolutionaries in their youth, such as the young Trotskyist and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, erstwhile Left-wing militant turned mid-2000s German Green Party vice-chancellor Joschka Fischer, and long-serving former Italian President Giorgio Napolitano.

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The American Left is looking increasingly extreme

By Justin Webb

And while Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is a boutique object to be put back on the shelf when you grow up and join the machine you once raged against, the corporate HR-speak and identity politics of the Left is a useful skill that can be utilised in full once you make the transition from Communism to K Street.

These penguins have already spent their time learning how to hunt for lucrative jobs and move up in the world. Some of them have one foot in the proletarian vanguard and another in the liberal NGO world. Others have one foot in a class-first Marxist seminar, and the other in an anti-racist lecture hall, with former US President Barack Obama, who studied the works of Frantz Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks to flirt with girls he found attractive, being the latest example.

But not everyone is this lucky. For other parts of the radical Left, the problem is not so much career advancement as it is forestalling a precipitous slide down into the working-class. These are the people who went to college and “did everything right,” but for whom no doors have opened, no jobs seem available, and no succour is offered anywhere.

But for all their rejection of  “bourgeois” politics, the political programmes of these people tend to begin and end with reforms aimed at rescuing struggling college graduates from the horror of having to join the working-class at the workplace. The hope, according to some debt-forgiveness activists, is to create a near-universal class united by “debt” rather than by job or income. What this means in reality, however, is partial student debt forgiveness; payday loan debt forgiveness, the usurious micro-lending targeting the least among us, is not even on the radar.

This makes sense when you consider the backgrounds of some of the people trying to advance such policies: Meagan Day, one of the co-authors of the recently-published socialist manifesto Bigger Than Bernie, can attribute her family’s considerable wealth to success in the rent-to-own furniture industry, another line of business predicated on extracting high rates of interest from poor people. 

Alas, for the majority of orphaned penguins, rejection and abandonment proves devastating. Unable to advocate for anyone or anything, they are compelled to cloak their interests in universalising language about “the people” or “the working-class.” But when those same idealised groups reject them, the radical suddenly finds he or she has no remaining leg on which to stand.

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Jeremy Corbyn is nothing without Labour

By Giles Fraser

The Labour defeat of 2019, and the subsequent purge of Momentum and Corbyn loyalists from positions of power within the party, must be understood in this context. The purge of Momentum is not the same as a purge of the working-class, because the political wave that swept Jeremy Corbyn into the Labour leadership came from the university towns of Britain. It was a middle-class movement to the bone, and while the new leadership of Keir Starmer’s party may reject Corbyn, they certainly have no plans to turn the party away from its new middle-class and urban base. So with the “true radicals” side-lined, why even bother to humour them?

The same post-election purge can be seen inside the Democratic Party today; although Joe Biden won, the widely predicted landslide did not come to fruition, and talk of socialism and “defunding the police” was seen as a political albatross by grey eminences such as South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn. Days after the election, the House majority whip argued that the “sloganeering” of the Black Lives Matter movement “destroyed headway” made by the party. Which begs the question: if these young revolutionaries can’t actually deliver votes, and if many of the workers actually detest them, then what use do they have for the party leadership?

The project of Left populism, properly understood, was not a revolution of the working-class that ended in ignominious defeat. Rather, it was akin to a conflict within the nobility; a fight between “true” radicals on the one hand, and those savvier operators who used the Left to regain access to the mainstream of the party on the other. The latter, though they might have flirted with “radical socialism” from time to time, could always move on to greener pastures. Thus, the collapse of Left populism and its replacement by something else was never a threat to their fortunes.

Whither these unfortunate penguin chicks that once flocked to “Birdie” Sanders? Their likely destination is probably a continued unwavering course towards utopia — a “uo topos,” no place, nowhere. As they wander in the cold and the dark, like those poor penguins, their political ambitions will shrivel away.

Some of them will reconcile to serving as junior partners in the “woke,” liberal coalition that occupies a liminal space between progressive capitalism and the traditional Left-of-centre parties, where they will be paid little and listened to even less. Others will be forced, by dint of inexorable downward social mobility, to study the working-class up close, day in and day out. In politics, just as in nature, the strong do what they will, while the weak do what they must.

Keir Starmer was victorious because he was the best candidate to take Labour to at least some sort of electoral respectability. His campaign was planned, professional and aimed at Labour members exhausted by repeated defeats. That, for now, is enough to give him a mandate that will last beyond the exceptional politics of the coronavirus crisis. His actions in the first few days of his leadership are already indicating that this professionalism maybe the hallmark of a new era. In this he has been helped by the weakness and division of his opponents within the party.

For the Left this is a cataclysmic moment similar to 1983 when it was blamed for the party’s disastrous performance against Margaret Thatcher. The left had a choice in 1983: move to the centre and support the new leadership or remain outside. Although some Bennites decided to support Neil Kinnock the rump remained defiant — and out of power for 30 years. Now John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn and their acolytes face the same choice. Already Momentum has issued its clarion call to supporters to watch and judge the new leader. The message was sent to its supporters over the weekend:

“We have to be there to hold him to account, make sure he sticks to his promises and advances the socialist cause in the party.”

It has a core of support of around 30% of the membership who voted for Rebecca Long Bailey but in all three internal elections it was substantially weakened. For the leadership Long Bailey was beaten in both the affiliates section (trades unions) and the registered members (newly joined for this election) not just by Keir Starmer but by Lisa Nandy.

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Why the Labour Left is doomed

By David Kogan

This failure was compounded in the election for deputy leader. Since 2015 the left has unified around single candidates and slates to win elections. Not his time. It was split between support for Angela Rayner, nominated by Momentum, and Richard Burgon, supported by McDonnell. Rayner won her victory; Burgon was beaten into third place.

The lack of unity and failure of the machine was best seen in the elections to the party’s ruling National Executive Committee — centre candidates won all three positions. Along with the replacement of the three parliamentary Labour Party representatives, selected by the shadow cabinet, there will be a switch of at least eight votes on the NEC. As in 1983 the Left will lose its power base and the world of Labour politics will change. As Momentum weakens so two centrist groups — Labour First and Progress — have announced that they have formed an umbrella organisation, Labour to Win, and pledged to support the new leadership in the future.

What will Keir Starmer do and how quickly? Historically, Labour leaders focus on two aspects of leadership: management and policy. Neil Kinnock was the example of a leader who used the party machine to attack Labour’s internal dissenters and show the electorate it was serious. It was his courage in the Eighties that paved the way for New Labour in the Nineties. He brought in new, younger management of the party, most notably in the form of Peter Mandelson as Director of Communications in 1985, but also promoted young new MPs such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and most of the future New Labour government.

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Lisa Nandy can't have her cake and eat it

By David Goodhart

With the NEC under new control the obvious move is the replacement of the General Secretary and other key officers. When Labour is in opposition, the power of the General Secretary is substantial and the cooperative balance between it and the leader’s office is crucial for the internal management of the party. It is very hard to see how Starmer could work with the incumbent, Jennie Formby, and he needs his own person in place. Formby has been locked into a partnership with Len McCluskey, Karie Murphy (formerly Executive Director of the Leader’s Office), and other Unite acolytes of the Corbyn regime. The influence of Unison — which is a bigger union and supporter of Starmer’s campaign — may soon be brought to tell.

The first item will be cleaning up anti-Semitism. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has been summoning evidence from a wide range of Labour members to get into the history of this mess, going back to when Corbyn was elected leader in 2015. There are pending legal as well as political consequences. Labour has to show not just contrition for the past; it has to reveal its managerial and political failures and then prove that it has a defined route to ensure they are never repeated. Action has to happen immediately and be visible.

Beyond that it is a managerial blank canvas for candidate selection, financing and the most important issue which is how to manage a party of 550,000 members as a coherent political force. The new managerialism should mean that there is a new professionalism. Perhaps in the next election Labour’s website will not crash as everyone tries to get the results.

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Unlike Corbyn, Bernie Sanders is not an anti-Semite

By Tanya Gold

Then there is policy development. Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher shows how she spent her four years in opposition developing new policy for the Conservative Party to get her agenda ready for government after 1979. New Labour between 1994 and 1997 was devoted to policy development, which gave it a template for governing.

The current crisis has turned all the normal political rules on their head with more spending, huge government debt, more state intervention in running key sectors, and more state subsidies to keep people employed. No Labour government would have dreamt of these measures. Waiting for politics to return to normal will take time but there are four years before the next election to create a coherent vision for a Britain that may be a very different place after this crisis.

The new shadow cabinet is a good start. Just like Neil Kinnock and Harold Wilson when they became opposition leader, Starmer has promoted a new generation based on available talent. Losing Barry Gardiner (63), Jon Trickett (69) and Ian Lavery (57) for Lisa Nandy (40)  and Anneliese Dodds (42) and Nick Thomas-Symonds (39) is both a generational shift and a talent upgrade. Making Angela Rayner the face of the party and keeping Jonathan Ashworth, who has shown total command of the health portfolio, are both strong moves. The creation of a Covid-19 committee within the shadow cabinet is the right way to focus on the problem.

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The last thing Labour needs is 'unity'

By Stephen Pollard

Yet in this febrile moment of crisis how can policy can possibly be developed  for an election in 2024? It was George H W Bush who in 1988 worried about the ‘vision thing’, or his lack thereof. Starmer is not a man who exudes the vision thing but he does exude the ‘leadership thing’. He doesn’t appear to be Blair or Thatcher, both of whom drove British politics in radical new directions after winning power. His appointments already show he is geared towards talent, competence and rigour. In this he resembles Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, who created teams of the best available talent in opposition and managed them in power.

As questions are asked about the handling of this crisis by current ministers and advisers, Starmer and his new team can convey a greater sense of competence and cohesion. Policy will follow but for now professionalism might just be enough.

Labour leadership contests have always had an impetus all of their own. They are always long, with tortuous rules that make them subject to surprise. Just ask David Miliband in 2010 or Andy Burnham in 2015. Under two different electoral systems the early favourites lost in elongated campaigns that threw up Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. We all know how well they turned out.

Labour’s reaction to the 2019 general election has been analysed by Lord Ashcroft in his “Diagnosis of Defeat”. Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn were the two principal causes for members deserting the party, contrary to the findings of the National Executive Committee’s report last month that exonerated the Labour leader. Among those who stayed loyal most of those polled by Ashcroft said Labour did not deserve to lose. Asked whether Labour had been an adequate opposition since 2015, Corbyn supporters gave it 6.8 out of 10. The public in general gave it only 2.9.

This disparity has also been shown in other ways: 73% of party members in the poll said anti-Semitism was exaggerated or invented, although the leadership should have done a better job in dealing with it. Amazingly, when asked who was the best Labour leader of modern times the largest vote, at 35%, was for Corbyn; over Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and John Smith. Essentially these party members seem to think that 2019 was an aberration based on Brexit.

However, they did accept that the highest priority now is to win lost voters back and win an election, and this may be the start of reality dawning. The choice between the policies and tactics of the past four years and a desire to win is now firmly on the agenda.

The 2020 leadership campaign has now reached its critical point.

by the same author

How Labour's Left has stitched up selection

By David Kogan

The various constituencies of the party have, after different nominating phases, voted to select leadership and deputy leadership candidates for the final ballot of members. On Saturday the candidates were granted access to data on individual members and registered supporters of the party — now remarkably up to as many as 650,000 — and the battle for votes begins. That night the campaigns were already texting and calling supporters; and there are another nine weeks for official campaigning to take place.

In the deputy leadership race Angela Rayner is sweeping all before her. CLP Nominations has been collating nominations from constituency Labour parties; every night anoraks like me read the latest results. Of 640 CLPs Rayner has gathered 365. The four other candidates — Dawn Butler, with 82, the ineffable Richard Burgon, 77 , Ian Murray, 60  and Rosena Alin-Khan, 56 — are way off pace. Even with the historic vagaries of  Labour party elections it seems impossible for Rayner not to be its new Deputy Leader.

It’s worth noting that the deputy leader race has exposed a deep split within the forces that have run the Labour party in the past five years. When Momentum decided to back Rayner over Burgon it created a split between leading members of the Left such as Jon Lansman — now both chair of Momentum and campaign director of Rebecca Long-Bailey’s leadership challenge — and those such as Laura Pidcock and John McDonnell, who seems to have reverted to a previous political ultra-Left incarnation in the past few weeks. This split will not be healed in the near future especially if Long-Bailey loses the leadership.

If Rayner is a shoo in, then the leadership at first glance looks to be equally one sided. Of the 641 nominating CLPs  374 have voted for Keir Starmer, 164 for Long-Bailey and 72 for the radical and interesting Lisa Nandy. Starmer really hit the ground running. His campaign recruited key figures from across the different wings of the party from the 2015 leadership election — Simon Fletcher and Kat Fletcher from Corbyn’s campaign and Morgan McSweeney from Liz Kendall’s campaign. They are three seasoned political operators. He has gathered wide support from unions and the affiliated societies as well as being dominant in nominations from the MPs and MEPs (in a ballot before they became redundant on 31 January). He has attracted wide ranging support across the party. If the election were held today, he would win it by a landslide. He is also a perfect unity candidate — reasonable, clear, competent, experienced, hardworking and capable of taking on Boris Johnson in opposition as well as potentially running a government. In other words, he is the anthesis of Jeremy Corbyn.

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By James Bloodworth

Rebecca Long-Bailey is more of an enigma. In private she is a lot warmer and funnier than in public, but she is relatively inexperienced as a political performer and has a huge problem shaking off the impression that she is the creature of the Left machine. Corbyn in 2015 and 2016 revealed unsuspected levels of charisma born of 35 years of campaigning for losing causes. He made the other new Labour candidates look boring and formulaic. Long-Bailey is trying to rally the Momentum and unite troops with policy derived from the 2019 manifesto — the Green New Deal — but it’s not quite playing, and she has the real problem of whether she can take on Johnson. Has she got the big enough political personality? Is the need for strong political leadership stronger than supporting the left project? Long-Bailey may be the wrong candidate at the wrong time for the Left.

Which leaves Lisa Nandy. On the last day of nominations Emily Thornberry failed to make the final ballot. Being the warhorse able to beat up Boris Johnson was not enough of a pitch to win support. Nandy is the opposite. Her campaign, more than any other, is rooted in policy aimed at Labour’s lost seats and economic regeneration. She has moral authority on topics such as anti-Semitism where she won the nomination of the Jewish Labour Movement while also being the Vice Chair of Labour Friends of Palestine. She has been on the back benches warning about Brexit for three years. She is surprisingly compelling but that is the problem. She is a surprise. In the race for support she has a tiny professional network and is relatively unknown.

So how does this work? The electorate is all the members and registered supporters, of whom more than 100,000 are rumoured to have joined in the past six weeks. Balloting ends on 2 April. Then the votes for all three leadership candidates are tallied by the single transferable vote method until one achieves more than 50%.

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On this basis Starmer is racing ahead but there are still vagaries in this race. The front runner rarely wins. He has the disadvantage of being the last leadership candidate from London, the last man and the establishment candidate. Despite his attempts to show his own Left-leaning history as a human rights barrister does he appear to be radical enough for the party membership? He is the political adult in the room: but is that enough?

The Labour machine is still dominated by the Corbyn cabal. Those acolytes of Len McCluskey are still there: Jennie Formby as General Secretary and Karie Murphy, previously Corbyn’s chief of staff. They lurk at Labour’s HQ — and already there have been signs of meddling, with accusations against Starmer’s campaign of data breaches, and nasty attacks on Starmer’s staff from leftist websites. As he gets stronger so the attacks will grow.

Long-Bailey also has the advantage of a well-honed machine that is used to winning internal elections and, in Jon Lansman, a seasoned operator of that machine. Her disadvantages as a candidate are offset by the power of organisation. She could take this election, as did Ed Miliband in 2010, by winning as enough supporters from the trade union membership to offset Starmer’s support in Parliament and the CLPs. However, this is not an electoral college, and no one really knows how the upsurge in membership will affect this race. If she is close to Starmer in the first round of the ballot it could be a close-run thing on second preferences.

For Nandy the only way she has a chance is to get into second place in the ballot. What is clear is that the more she is seen the more support she gains. If she can beat Long-Bailey into third place, will there be enough of Long-Bailey’s support to transfer to her to help her challenge Starmer’s probable lead on first preferences? This will be the determinant for her to stand any chance other than coming a gallant third. For her it’s a race to be seen and to get to the electorate with a much smaller campaign organisation.

The good news from Labour is that the factionalism of the past five years is beginning to recede. Most of the candidates for Leader and deputy leader are capable of mounting serious opposition to the government and now at least have a window of a year or two to clean up the party by dealing with anti-Semitism and the internal chaos created by the Corbyn cabal. Boris Johnson owns Brexit and economic policy. If they go awry there may now be a Labour leadership that can take fight to him. There is all to play for in this leadership election as Labour starts its long walk back to electoral competence.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

There has always been a healthy suspicion of jingoism and flag-waving on the Left. However it wasn’t this that Orwell was referring to. Few wrote more damning screeds about the British empire than the former colonial policeman, who was always willing to give the “blimps” who ran Britain a good kicking. Rather, Orwell was referring to a more generalised contempt many on the Left felt towards Britain and — by extension — their fellow countrymen.

Socialism to Orwell meant bread and butter issues of higher wages and more freedom — freedom itself depending to a large extent on how much money one has. Yet the movement attracted its fair share of cranks. It was this penumbra of crankishness that prevented socialism from developing a mass following. A major hallmark of it was its anti-Britishness.

Jeremy Corbyn has been compared plenty of times over the past five years to the “vegetarian”, “fruit-juice drinker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist” oddballs Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier. In Orwell’s time these types seemed to gravitate towards the socialist movement “like bluebottles to a dead cat”, as he put it. Since Corbyn became leader in 2015 something similar has occurred: the Labour Party has been flooded with conspiracy theorists, antisemites and various other subliterate fools. Uniting almost all of them is a profound contempt for Britain and in particular British foreign policy.

By the same author

The Left's long history of antisemitism

By James Bloodworth

This is arguably a major reason Labour lost the recent election. “Such was the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn,” wrote the Labour MP Liam Byrne, “that hundreds of voters I met thought Labour’s leader was a ­communist terrorist sympathiser who wouldn’t push the nuclear button or sing the national anthem.”

This isn’t so much the “demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn” as an accurate summation of the Labour leader’s views. Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray, two of Corbyn’s first appointments as advisers, are communists. Corbyn called members of Hamas and Hezbollah “honoured friends”. He fraternised with the IRA and argued for the abolition of Nato. He has obfuscated shamefully over acts of aggression directed against Britain, such as during the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury. It is not demonising someone to accurately list the things they have said and done.

Many who opposed Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party from the outset did so because of the crude ‘anti-imperialism’ he subscribed to. As Professor Alan Johnson wrote in 2015: “Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘strange associations’ — so widely noted, yet so little understood — are not a personal foible. They are a symptom of the ideological corruption of that part of the Left in which he was formed.”

This ‘ideological corruption’, as Johnson put it, is a legacy of Stalinism — or more specifically, Stalinist ‘second-campism’. This refers to the Soviet Union’s policy of supporting reactionary movements in what at the time was called the Third World, on the basis that they contained ‘progressive’ elements. The cultural theorist Judith Butler summarised this world view approvingly in 2006: “Understanding Hamas/Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important.” Never mind that such movements sought to murder Jews only for being Jews.

This was the milieu — swamp might be a more appropriate term — from which Jeremy Corbyn emerged in 2015. Crude anti-capitalism meant that America and its allies, notably Britain and Israel, were responsible for all of the world’s ills. This worldview is best encapsulated by the Stop the War Coalition (an organisation that Corbyn chaired for many years), whose guiding mantra might be boiled down to “It’s our fault”.

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How Labour's Left has stitched up selection

By David Kogan

The flipside of this ‘anti-imperialism’ is a lionisation of any movement that points an AK-47 in the direction of the West; distinctions in non-western countries are rarely made between the rulers and the ruled. The Iranian mullahs, Hamas, Hezbollah, Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega, Colonel Gaddafi are viewed as historically progressive forces. Those who languish under their tyrannical rule are ignored. This also contains a neat reanimation of Bertrand Russell’s point about the “fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed”. Effete bourgeois intellectuals and activists, softened by the relative comfort available in the western democracies in which they live, pursue their vicarious revolutionary fantasies through fatigue-wearing men of action such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

The assumption that Britain’s role in the world is overwhelmingly negative and that Britain’s enemies “have a point” undermines repeated attempts by Labour over recent weeks to forge a “progressive patriotism”. The implication being that the Labour Party is viewed as unpatriotic by the electorate. The Conservative Party doesn’t need to constantly burnish its patriotic credentials. Labour on the other hand must, partly because its hard-Left flank contains many comrades who cannot abide the notion that Britain has any progressive role in the world.

This is not simply a question of foreign policy, though foreign policy plays a significant part. One burnishes one’s credentials in Labour these days by talking up one’s opposition to the 2003 war in Iraq. It’s as if there were no consequences of isolationism and inaction prior to 2003 (Srebrenica anyone?) and everything since is viewed through the lens of ‘blowback’ from the Iraq war. A profound ignorance reigns when it comes to successive humanitarian interventions in Sierra Leone, Yugoslavia, as well as the no-fly zone over Iraq from 1991 to 2003.

If the next Labour leader is to win an election Labour must change significantly. In selecting Jeremy Corbyn to be Labour leader back in 2015, party members didn’t only consign the party to inevitable defeat while he was at the helm. They probably relegated the party to opposition for several parliaments post-Corbyn. This was their biggest miscalculation. It will take this long to detoxify the Labour brand in the eyes of the electorate. As the New Labour strategist Philip Gould wrote after defeat at the 1992 election: “Labour lost because it was still the party of the winter of discontent; union influence; strikes and inflation; disarmament; Benn and Scargill.”

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Why the Labour Left is doomed

By David Kogan

It was a decade-and-a-half between the infiltration of Militant in the early Eighties and Tony Blair’s victory in 1997. Labour’s climb back to electoral credibility could take longer this time.

There is set of first principles that the Labour Party must adhere to if it is to have any hope of winning back power in the foreseeable future. Central to that is the assumption that Britain is a country that is more good than bad, both as a place to live and in its conduct around the world. This is not to ignore ill-thought out and gung-ho foreign policy decisions such as Iraq — nor to whitewash domestic issues such as inequality and xenophobia. Britain is not a bad place to live, and from its generous developmental budget to successful humanitarian interventions in places such as Kosovo and West Africa, there are examples in its recent history of British governments doing the right thing.

There is a lot more to do of course. There always is. Britain’s obsequious relationship with Saudi Arabia is an easy target for the ire of Labour activists but an appropriate one. As is China, whose human rights abuses the British government seems increasingly willing to overlook for the sake of economic expediency.

But whenever such matters are discussed some perspective is required. And this will not be forthcoming for as long as Labour adheres — even tangentially — to the fly-blown notions that animate Corbyn’s worldview. A break with these sclerotic doctrines is required. And a break with them will do more for Labour’s chances with the British people than any convoluted attempt to forge a gimmicky ‘progressive’ patriotism.

Patriotism needn’t be flashy or tub-thumping. But it does begin with the belief that one’s own country is more good than bad, more right than wrong.

It was never to be. There have been repeated lurches into the political mire, characterised best by Len McCluskey on the Andrew Marr Show defending the Labour leadership’s then position on Brexit by morphing into Corporal Jones. His desperate pleas of “Don’t Panic” to Labour MPs sounded a lot like a Dad’s Army rerun on BBC2. He conjured the unfortunate image of Jeremy Corbyn as Captain Mainwaring, John McDonnell as Sergeant Wilson and Tom Watson as private Frazer – muttering “we’re doomed, doomed”.

This wasn’t the only recent echo from the 1970s. Corbyn, apparently, is reading up on Harold Wilson for inspiration over Brexit.Which is remarkable because Wilson was the subject of constant attack from the Left during his time as Labour Party leader and prime minister. He was party leader for 13 years (1963-76), fought five general elections (defeating the Conservatives in four) and held the party together in a time of huge and competing political egos on both the Left and the Right.

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Is Corbyn doing the country a favour?

By Tim Bale

For the centre-Right of the Party, Europe was the issue – crystallised by Roy Jenkins leading 69 Labour MPs to vote for entry into the EEC against the Party whip in 1971 and the creation of the breakaway Social Democratic Party ten years later. For the Left, led by Tony Benn, it was the fight for a radical economic agenda and departure from Europe.

Wilson was accused by both sides of lacking ideology and being merely a “master tactician”. He held both wings together by leadership skills that are not recognised in today’s Labour Party: compromise, non-ideological responses to problems (often characterised as mere opportunism), and the ability to read the electorate and exploit the weakness of Labour’s opponents.

It’s hard to see Corbyn acting in the same ways. In the past two years his leadership has been dominated by rigidity over both Brexit and antisemitism that has turned both into full blown crises. It is the opposite of the way Wilson addressed the issues of his day. It is also reflective of the lessons learned by the Left that have been carried from 1979 into today’s politics of the Labour Party.

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The Left's long history of antisemitism

By James Bloodworth

The generation of young activists of the 1970s and 1980s – Corbyn, McDonnell, McCluskey and Jon Lansman – all earned their political stripes fighting the Right of the party. Lansman had been in the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the campaign to elect Tony Benn deputy leader in 1981; Corbyn had been a trade union official in London during the winter of discontent in 1978-9. McDonnell had been deputy leader and Finance Chair of the Great London Council from 1981. McCluskey had been in Liverpool associated with the Militant Tendency that ran the Labour Party and council in the early 1980s.

From 1978-1982 the young activists were dominant within the Labour Party. They depended on influencing supporters in constituencies, trade union branches and the National Executive to fight the power of the Parliamentary party. It was not to last. Mere Influence was not enough. In 1983 Labour under Michael Foot went down to its worst election result since 1918. It’s still the worst result in modern times and caused by the  combination of the turmoil within the party, the split away from Labour by the Social Democratic Party and the Falklands war, which made Margaret Thatcher hugely popular. It was followed by Neil Kinnock of the centre-Left being elected leader. The Left was now destined for the political wilderness until 2015.

By then the young activists were the grizzled veterans who against all expectations fashioned the victory of the Left by using social media to attract new young supporters and by creating a political campaign based on repudiation of the Conservative’s austerity programme. The Left’s leadership plan in 2015, as in 1978, was to combine radical economic policy with a different form of politics based on listening to the membership. The veterans knew they could leave very little to chance.

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Labour needs a moral revival

By Giles Fraser

When, in 2018, I interviewed McDonnell, he described how he felt about Corbyn winning the leadership, the lessons of the past and the urgency of taking power quickly and effectively:

“Get ready, start preparing now because what happens then is you realise after all those years in opposition on the Left, all those years of defeat and failure, the responsibility is on your shoulders, absolutely on your shoulders. And if you don’t get this right, the Left will be out for another generation. For God’s sake, we’ve got to get ready.”

And they have.

In 2015 McDonnell and Lansman created Momentum to have a permanent force of activists who could reinforce the leadership in both policy debates and in internal elections. By 2017 nine of the 39 places on the National Executive would be elected by the membership and the Left won all of them. This allowed them to take over the machinery of the Party such as the General Secretaryship and the committees running the disciplinary processes. In the clearest lesson learned from the days of New Labour, when parliamentary selections were rigidly controlled, the selection of Labour candidates in winnable seats is becoming the prime target of the Left.

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Why does the Left sneer at the traditional working class?

By Paul Embery

The Left has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams in securing its dominance. It has the power and control over policy that it has always sought. It is creating economic policy that it believes will attract wide support from the electorate. It controls the machine. It has never had an opportunity like this.

So why the nervousness? Why does the fear of history repeating itself hang over it?

Despite three years of successes, the leader’s office have been faced with two issues it thought and hoped would either go away or be blamed on someone else. Anti-Semitism has become a deeper and deeper stain that isn’t being erased. Brexit has demonstrated the failure to demonstrate even a glimmer of Harold Wilson’s masterful tactics. The idea that Labour could push the blame onto the Conservatives and somehow appeal to both leavers and remainers has failed. The party has appeared weak, vacillating and confused. As the criticism has grown so the leadership’s position has hardened. The Left finds itself holding the levers of power but beginning to lose control of the internal authority it needs.

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The dark side of 'socialism'

By James Bloodworth

Everything will depend on a good result when the general election takes place, and the real fear is what happens if the Left is not up to the job of winning that election. If Labour cannot lead in the polls when Theresa May is Prime Minister and if in a European election it comes fifth in Scotland and third in Wales, then the prospects against a Conservative party with a new leader getting a “Boris bounce” do not look good.

If Labour loses, the Left has a huge problem. The veterans will be facing a leadership election in which Corbyn has gone and it has no winnable candidate to replace him. There is a generational gap between the sixtysomethings running the party and the new members of the shadow cabinet who are three decades younger. Rebecca Long Bailey, a protégé of McDonnell, would be the political heir but she would also face competition from candidates who would be much more in the tradition of the centre-Left.

Emily Thornberry, Angela Rayner, Keir Starmer or even Tom Watson could win the leadership as Labour faced five more years of opposition. The greatest fear of the Left is that one of them would be the new Neil Kinnock. The leadership would return to the centre. The Left would lose its influence, power and support. It would be 1983 again and the wilderness would beckon.

A way to do this would be to identify, isolate and attempt to avoid the tactics which have so demeaned our political conversation. There are enough of these for a long-running series. But the one I’d like to single out here is the increasingly prevalent and flagrant insincere offence-claiming. This has run rampant in the age of social media and often rides pillion with its cousin: the wilful misinterpretation of words. Together they form a potent – and quite evidently attractive – combination.

Two textbooks examples of this have recently been provided, from both Right and Left.

At the weekend, the centre-left Labour MP Chuka Umunna gave a speech in which he warned his own party about its decline into incivility. Specifically, Umunna warned that Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was driving moderate Labour MPs like him out of the party. In the course of the speech, Umunna asked Corbyn to “call off the dogs”. It’s a commonly enough heard phrase, and one which might be said to be apt in the age of the grass-roots ‘Momentum’ movement.

You would expect the Labour party leadership to treat such a call from one of its own MPs with some degree of seriousness. At the very least, it might have attempted to make some fact-based excuses for Momentum and the behaviour of its members. But it chose not to. Instead, it chose to misinterpret Umunna’s remarks and then claim offence.

The Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, was the one put forward to counter Umunna’s claims. How did he choose to reply? He condemned the comments as “grossly offensive”. And he went on to make the important point: “Our party members are not dogs.”

This is a beautiful example of the genre. Nobody ever claimed that the Labour party’s membership consisted in small or large part of dogs. But McDonnell’s deliberate misinterpretation meant he could claim that Umunna had – for shame – insulted the grassroots members of his own party. As a result, McDonnell successfully avoided answering any serious questions around why his party is carrying out a purge of moderate MPs.

This is not an approach only favoured by the political Left. The Right wants a piece of this cynical tactic as well.

Over the same weekend, the former Foreign Minister and perennial leader-in-waiting Boris Johnson fired another salvo at the Prime Minister and her handling of the Brexit negotiations. In a piece for the Mail on Sunday, Johnson wrote that Theresa May’s current plan for Brexit approximates her having “wrapped a suicide vest” around the British constitution and then “handed the detonator” to Brussels. Whether one agrees with it or not, it is certainly a vivid and memorable image.

Of course there are some people – even in his own party – who do not like Boris Johnson, do not want him to become leader of the Conservative party, and who will do everything they can to prevent him getting the top job. There are well-founded criticisms that can be made of him. But how unsurprising that his opponents decided to go down the the fake criticism route (the mishearing and offence claiming approach).

The normally sensible and sane Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee has long been anti-Boris. Just as McDonnell has long been anti-Chuka. And so the “suicide vest” comment came as manna for him. His response:

https://twitter.com/TomTugendhat/status/1038535110482698240

It is quite possible that Tugendhat genuinely finds Johnson’s choice of metaphor utterly unforgivable. It is possible that he, and anyone else who has ever experienced a suicide bombing, should be the guardians of that metaphor – choosing when it may be tactfully employed and by whom.

But it is more likely that Tugendhat – as someone who has been anti-Brexit and anti-Boris for a long time – simply saw his opportunity and took it: claiming that Boris had used suicide bomber in the same literal sense that Umunna had used “dogs”. He decided to take offence on behalf of all victims of suicide bombings, just as McDonnell claimed to be offended on behalf of non-canine members of the Labour party.

But this utterly transparent technique isn’t nearly as smart as the politicians like to think it is. And every time it is used, it increases ever so slightly, yet again, that feeling of generalised contempt that much of the public feels for the political class as a whole.

There’s an easy way to halt this unhappy trend. The fastest way to stop this rash of insincerity and cry-bullyness is simply be to call it out. For members of the public to say, we don’t believe you misunderstood the phrase; we don’t believe you’re genuinely offended; now behave like adults. And please, for a change, treat the electorate like adults too.

Further reading

John Milton: smug liberal and free-speech warrior

By Polly Mackenzie

After all, socialism is supposedly about true egalitarianism. And as a lifelong campaigner for women’s liberation, I am well aware that male Leftists think of themselves as feminist allies.

Conservatism, on the other hand, is not so friendly towards us. It often favours a commitment to so-called traditional values and ideas, isn’t so keen about change. And let’s not talk about Thatcher – she was certainly no feminist. She was a classic example of a certain type of right-wing woman who espouses the view that women are to blame for holding themselves back; it’s not the patriarchy’s fault, and they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps as she had done.

And yet, in recent years, I have experienced far more direct sexism from these so-called feminist ‘socialist’ men than Tory ones. When they speak about fighting for equality, more-often-than-not they mean ‘among men’. They are actively supporting activities and industries that harm women and girls. They are calling feminists bigots and they are waving the flag for fundamentalist religion.

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Why are so many left-wing progressives silent about Islam's totalitarian tendencies?

By Julie Bindel

Do I exaggerate? Let’s look at a perfect example of the shift in attitude on the Left, as epitomised by the new brand of hard-left brocalists that surfaced with Corbyn’s cabal.

Owen Jones, a hard-left journalist, campaigner, and one who should attacking the exploitation of women, is a classic example of the socialist hypocrites I’m talking about. In an  article for the Guardian back in 2015, the Corbynista poster boy defended a serving member of Parliament, Simon Danczuk, who was exposed as a prolific pornography consumer.

And yet, only a month earlier, Jones had lectured other men about why they should do more for feminism. In the article defending Danczuk’s use of porn, Jones also criticised the fact that three judges had been dismissed from their positions because they “watch(ed) porn on the job”. They had, he said, been “publicly embarrassed and dismissed”. Instead of recognising that pornography directly harms women and girls, Jones sided with the male public servants who were enjoying women being exploited instead of doing their jobs.

He’s not alone in this view. His Leftist chums in the Labour leadership agree with him about the rights of men to consume women through pornography and prostitution. Corbyn and John McDonnell  both  believe in decriminalised pimping, brothel owning and sex buying – all in the name of women’s liberation, of course.

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Slaying dragons: Corbynism and its cabal of thugs

By Julie Bindel

Jones is also notorious for  lecturing  women about who actually  has the right  to decide who is female or not; he regularly berates anyone who dares suggest that people with penises are not actually women. In one of his  articles, he declared that the group of people he terms ‘transphobes’ (who refuse to accept men as women) will be consigned to the “wrong side of history” for their views.

This wasn’t how it used to be. Remember Tony Blair? Hard-line Leftists may despise him, but many feminists did not. He was the one who introduced women-only shortlists in order to successfully address some of the massive imbalances in parliament. What has the great socialist leader Corbyn done? Decided that the base-line criteria for being included on a women-only shortlist is to have self-identified as a woman

There is no clearer way to dominate and disenfranchise women than to insist that we don’t even know what one is!

The Tories, on the other hand, no longer the reactionaries of old, are more open to the idea that women are full, equal citizens than those macho Momentum types who act like thugs around female MPs who refuse to toe the hard-left line.

As the typical Leftist male gets his boxers in a twist, crowing his support for everything from stripping to legal brothels, the Conservative Human Rights Commission is holding an urgent enquiry  into the harms of the sex trade. Meanwhile, the kerfuffle over men who define as women being allowed on all-female shortlists is being challenged by men writing for right-of-centre publications.

Further reading

Can we reform our rancid political debate?

By Douglas Murray

Even stranger, though, is the Left’s new attitude towards religious fundamentalism. Once the Left baulked at the idea of hardline religious doctrine because of the inherent misogyny and homophobia. Not any more. Now the political Left is full of men defending the ‘right’ of women to be covered in a full-face veil in the name of modesty but some on the Right are respectfully challenging.

I do think this shift has come about as Leftist men have latched on to a distortion of feminism that is all about individual ‘empowerment’, and nothing to do with challenging male power. This ‘fun feminism’, in which baking cupcakes and pole dancing are deemed liberating, lets woke dudes off the hook.

But as far as I’m concerned, if men like a particular brand of feminism, it means it is not working. And it is hardly surprising that there are certain men would rather cheer on the idea of a woman walking around in a basque rather than dungarees; men who prefer the ‘slut’ marches to the angry Reclaim the Night demonstrations. Rebrand feminism so that men are no longer threatened, and everyone’s happy. Except the actual feminists that is.

It seems to me that when it comes to feminism, and defending the rights of women to live as equal citizens, the categories of Left and Right don’t imply what they used to. Politics has been turned on its head. Let’s face it, if Corbyn and his henchmen believe that it’s fine and dandy for a man to decide he is a woman, and shout ‘bigot’ at those of us that refuse to accept this madness, we may as well go to the Tories for a little old-fashioned courtesy.

Sometimes this realisation comes suddenly, with some shocking event.

In the UK, the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox in June 2016 was just such a moment. Britain had been in the middle of a heated national debate about its membership of the European Union. Cox’s brutal murder reminded people that the use of terms such as ‘traitor’ among others might have effects beyond the realm of the rhetorical. And so, for a moment, the dial was turned down. Not on anyone’s orders, but through the agreed restitution of a common custom – not least manners.

Less tragic and dramatic attempts to do the same have included the occasional calls from leaders of the opposition (including Ed Miliband) to put a stop to ‘Punch and Judy politics’ such as that practised at Prime Minister’s Questions.

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Activist journalism is feeding us fake news

By James Bloodworth

Recently, the feeling that the debate has gone rancid has begun to grow, without there being any specific trigger event. And a striking development is that broadcast media (not before time) would seem to be recognising that it bears some responsibility for this.

For years, the business model for political television and radio – in the UK as well as in the US – has been a search for the ‘gotcha’ moment. Not just the exposure of a guest for not knowing what they are talking about, but the search for almost any memorably awful or triumphant moment. This has turned political discussion and debate into a kind of performance art in which the interviewer as much as the guests are auditioning to become the star.

It is programming in search of the YouTube excerpt; it is discussion in the hope that a couple of minutes of the show will go ‘viral’ on social media. If whole careers could be lost, or at least deeply damaged, from such moments, then the incentive is that whole careers can also be made.

Only recently, Ash Sarkar, a contributor to a fringe blog leapt to some form of media celebrity for shouting “I’m literally a communist, you idiot” at Piers Morgan on morning television. Programme makers are always on the hunt for these moments: searching not to find compromise, but rather to provoke fiery antagonism.

From the same author

Why you can’t rely on the news media to understand… Abstract principles

By Douglas Murray

Programme makers, over the past decade, became desperate for people to discuss their programmes on social media, to ‘get in touch’ and become engaged. By doing so they encouraged the idea that interaction – any interaction – was a good idea. They invited guests on who they knew would not throw any light on the situation, but would be able to throw a great amount of heat around.

Before Ash Sarkar, the same programme makers gave us Katie Hopkins. Hopkins would be invited on in the hope that she would create a ‘scene’ that would then trend on social media. Whether viewers liked it or not wasn’t so much the point. The point was to provoke a reaction.

Now the bubbling concern at this form of performance art appears to have surfaced at the head of various news organisations. And one result of this was revealed this week when the BBC unveiled its new lunchtime political discussion programme. The presenter of ‘Politics Live’ is Jo Coburn. She is one of the best in the business and provided expertise as well as continuity – she also presented the predecessor show. But the programme did have a stated intention of doing something different. And the way in which this was most visibly demonstrated from the outset was that the entire panel consisted of women.

Aside from Coburn, there was the former Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, the current Shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry, as well as journalists from the Telegraph, Guardian and BBC. The line-up was a statement in itself, hidden away in which was the never quite articulated suggestion that women are a civilising influence and can – simply by their presence – help ‘detoxify’ matters.

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There's a moral vacuum in public life. We need a set of standards that we can agree on

By Douglas Murray

Though this idea was unspoken, the show did state at the outset that it wanted to make a point against the toxicity of the present debate. All of the panellists agreed that things had got worse, and the main evidence for this was that a lot of people get a lot of horrible messages sent to them on social media.  There also appeared to be consensus that their treatment was particularly bad because they were women.

Bemoaning the low state of political discussion – let alone bemoaning the state of political discussion on social media – is exceptionally easy. What is far harder is finding a way to work out meaningful political disagreements in a way which is not antagonistic. And that was something which the new show understandably failed to do. It was inevitable the cosy consensus would have to be broken at some stage.

Both Rudd and Thornberry are experienced politicians. Both are also ultra-partisan hacks. That isn’t to insult them, but simply to state the obvious. They are programmed, or have programmed themselves over the years, that when in discussion with their political opponents, they first refute any meaningful allegation of their opposite number and then try to score a political point of their own. Both have spent recent years bound by ministerial responsibility (in the case of Rudd) and its shadow cabinet equivalent, which means that ministers (and shadow ministers) cannot throw colleagues to the wolves: rather they must always defend everything and anything done by one of their colleagues, and attack their political opponents.

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Communism's forgotten victims

By Douglas Murray

Rudd broke the consensus of the BBC’s new programme – as someone was going to have to do – when she finally fingered a specific culprit.  She pointed out that the atmosphere of intimidation and more around MPs has got far worse since the creation of the Corbynista grass roots group Momentum. Naturally Thornberry could not agree to this. And so she said so, in the process opening herself up to accusations of partisan point-scoring

On one level, what Rudd said was unarguable. The party conference season is coming up again and this year, as last, one thing can be said with confidence (as the Conservative MP Kemi Badenoch pointed out in her warm-up speech for the Prime Minister at last year’s Conservative conference): it is inconceivable that young Conservative activists will be standing outside this year’s Labour party conference waving placards at attendees, spitting at them in the street and shouting ‘scum’. Yet it is very likely that this year, as last, Labour party supporters will be outside the Conservative party conference doing just this.

So how do you make the point without being partisan? You could perhaps pretend that incivility has no especial drivers but that it is just something in the atmosphere. You might identify some actual causes of the breakdown but cite others which are slightly specious in order to demonstrate some degree of even-handedness. Or a third option would be to make your points – and more importantly concede similar points – whether they are politically advantageous to your own political side or not.

Further reading

Why you can't rely on the news media to understand... ordinary people

By Liam Halligan

The trouble with breaking the current discussion paradigm is this. The first of these options cannot be sustained for long. At some stage people have to get specific. The second option allows for a type of noble lie to be practised (on the one hand we have Momentum, on the other hand aren’t those young Conservative activists just as big a problem?). And the third, which is the only one that would allow anyone to get anywhere, seems to be impossible in a two-party system.

There is one extra layer to this complexity, and that is this. The viewing public now see things that the politicians cannot admit. So the viewing public would have known that Thornberry probably has serious reservations about Momentum among other things going on in her party. But they know she has chosen her side and cannot let go.

Likewise, they know that Amber Rudd most likely feels very sore about having to resign earlier this year and is currently appearing on the media to maintain her profile in order to be able to return to cabinet as soon as possible. So the likelihood is that she will concede nothing major and want to make some partisan gains.

All of which returns us to the problem that broadcasters like the BBC, despite this relaunch, still cannot address. Which is how do you inform the public when the public are free to say more than their elected representatives? Unless that issue is addressed no broadcaster can get near the problem they are trying to grapple with.