OJ has left the building
Is there a future to Labour's left?
Leaving parties seems to be all the rage this month. The former deputy chairman of the Conservative party Lee Anderson dumped his party – 20 points down in the polls - for Reform. Then last week possibly the best known and most ubiquitous Corbynite supporter in the country, the writer and campaigner Owen Jones, loudly departed the Labour party when it was 20 points ahead in the polls. In his version of events it was a case of the ship deserting the buoyant rat.
There is much I could say about Jones’s painful transition from lively debater to rancorous name caller, but James Ball has already written about this for the Sunday Times last weekend and such an exercise easily seems both personal and arcane. The main significance of Jones’s journey may be seen in future as an example of the poisonous effect of a certain kind of engagement with social media.
But it seems more profitable in this post to think about Jones’s call for a realignment to the Left of Labour and whether anything substantial can come from it. And the first thing to say about it is that his “cancellation” of his membership was absolutely inevitable.
Two and a half years ago in his Guardian column Jones wrote this:
There is nothing to recommend Starmer’s leadership. He is, as we have seen, unprincipled. He is not honest. Where Blair and Neil Kinnock were talented orators, Starmer lacks any charisma or warmth. He extolled “integrity” in the leadership election, but… he has none. That more Labour voters than not desire his resignation, that more than six in 10 people do not see him as a prime minister in waiting, and that he lost the Hartlepool byelection – a seat Labour retained even in the landslide defeat of 2019 – shows he is unelectable……he needs to be removed.
Since then Jones’s tone towards Starmer has hardened. And more recently two things have changed. Firstly the claim that “Starmer cannot win because of his failings” has had to become “Starmer cannot lose because of the Tories’ failings”. The second is that Jones has now convinced himself that by not calling for (in effect a unilateral) ceasefire in the immediate wake of the Hamas attack on Southern Israel on October 7, Keir Starmer is a war criminal and complicit in genocide.
So simultaneously - the Tories being “toast”- it becomes safe to call for people to vote other than Labour and also a moral duty for people who don’t like genocide to do so.
But to what end? In announcing his new organisation, We Deserve Better, Jones outlined a scenario whereby a useless, right-wing Labour government led by the even more useless Keir Starmer and buffeted by rough economic winds, finds itself under assault from right-wing populism. Though this next bit is less clearly spelled out (to say the least) Jones seems to imagine a strengthened populist Left outside Labour then riding to the rescue.