The Corbynistas are already preparing their alibis for defeat

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/24/corbynistas-labour-alibis-for-defeat

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I can reveal that I have had an exclusive leak of the Labour party’s official inquest into why it lost the general election of 2020. Dame Margaret Beckett was chosen to author the report after her inquiry into the 2015 defeat demonstrated an outstanding talent for blaming anyone but the Labour party itself for an election loss. Just as she did about the 2015 contest, so Dame Margaret again argues that Labour was defeated in 2020 because it was the victim of Tory media attacks on its leader, Tory lies about Labour’s economic record and the country’s failure to see this for the wicked Tory propaganda that it was. Dame Margaret is understood to be willing to write the same all over again for the inquest into why Labour lost in 2025.

I mock her a little, but not as much as some of her colleagues. One member of the shadow cabinet describes the Beckett analysis of May 2015 as a “whitewash”, which depicts what happened to Labour as “an act of God that no one could have prevented”.

This was not what Harriet Harman hoped for when, as deputy leader, she appointed Dame Margaret to perform the official autopsy. The idea when the inquest was commissioned was that a frank analysis of why Labour failed in 2015 would give an electric shock to the party about what needed to change if it was to become electorally competitive in 2020. But a lot has happened since then, not least the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn as leader on a manifesto based on the premise that the only thing really wrong with Ed Miliband was that he was not leftwing enough. So instead of administering some shock therapy to her party, Dame Margaret mops its brow with a damp flannel.

If you wade deep into her report, it does occasionally point a tentative finger towards some of the factors that left Labour 2m votes behind the Tories when the country was asked to choose a government. Labour went into the election with a leader that too few of the public regarded as a strong candidate to be prime minister, Labour lacked credibility on the economy, and the party failed to “connect” with the public on welfare and immigration, which is the polite way of saying that voters didn’t trust Labour with those issues either. These have already been identified, and in rather more robust terms, as the root causes of the party’s defeat by a variety of Labour sympathetic institutions such as the Smith Institute.

She is correct that the Tories rubbished Ed Miliband and the last Labour government’s economic record. Trashing Labour is what the Tories do. Wishing that it were not so is a futile activity. It has been a fact of political life since the birth of the Labour party. The winning leaders in its history have been successful because they have grasped that, if you want to achieve power in order to do things for the people you say you care about, moaning about the Tories and their media allies is less useful than finding ways to beat them.

I put it gently when I say that Jeremy Corbyn has yet to reveal a master plan for doing that. His approval ratings are so dismal that they make Mr Miliband look wildly popular with the British public. Labour is now even less trusted with the economy than it was under its previous management. Many Labour’s MPs have already mentally written off the next election, succumbing to a terrible fatalism of the kind that is self-fulfilling.

Relations between the leader and his senior colleagues have taken another lurch downwards in the past week. For some members of the shadow cabinet, it was the answers he gave about the Falklands, bringing back secondary picketing and sending nuclear submarines to sea without any nuclear weapons. For others, it was the resignation of head of policy, Neale Coleman, from the leader’s office. To the outside world, this will mean nothing: a man they hadn’t heard of has quit a post that they didn’t know existed. But it has caused a minor earthquake within the shadow cabinet. They might have not shared all of his politics, but senior Labour frontbenchers regarded Mr Coleman as thoughtful, straightforward and sensible, not the adjectives you usually hear associated with the Labour leader’s circle when you are talking to the party’s frontbenchers. One of them describes him as “the one person in Jeremy’s office that we could work with”.

An associated row revolves around Mr Corbyn’s speech to the Fabian Society in which he revealed a new policy of banning companies from issuing dividends if they don’t pay the living wage. This conflict is not just about whether the policy is practical. It came as a surprise not just to the man supposed to be in charge of developing policy. There was also no consultation at all with Angela Eagle, the shadow business secretary, who is understandably infuriated to be saddled with a policy she doesn’t believe in.

Those who like to see a conspiracy in everything that comes out of Mr Corbyn’s office regard it as a deliberate attempt to bounce a new policy on the party. I think it more likely that his scriptwriters were desperate to get a headline out of the speech and so the announcement was bunged in at the last minute.

Among Labour MPs, one popular interpretation of what is unfolding is that there is now a power struggle within the inner court of the crimson king. In the one corner, there are those close to Mr Corbyn who want to stick with the big tent approach that he generally adopted when he first became leader and appointed a shadow cabinet broad enough to include friends of Tony Blair. Those who know their history of the Russian Revolution sometimes refer to this wing of the Corbynistas as the Mensheviks. The other faction – sometimes labelled the Bolsheviks – want a much harder line taken against any dissent and plan to take out all the internal opposition gradually. There is clearly some tension, though it is more nuanced than is often reported, between different elements of the Corbyn regime. But the more prosaic explanation for many of their mistakes is that they are overstretched, understaffed and undermanaged. So-called Team Corbyn is “more like three men and a dog” in the characterisation of a person very familiar with how it works. There is an enormous load on a tiny group of people.

While the leader remains liked by most of his party’s members, his parliamentary colleagues have to be careful about how rude they are about him. So it is convenient for internal foes to displace their discontent with him on to his office. Good tsar, bad advisers. Seumas Milne, his director of strategy and communications, is currently the most popular whipping boy. But if a leader’s team is not functioning, the ultimate reason is always the leader.

If things are chaotic around Mr Corbyn, the chaos is essentially down to him. There are evidently management issues in his office that he is not grasping. One of the things we are discovering about this Labour leader is that he has an aversion to personal confrontation. Talking with individual members of the shadow cabinet, he will often divert the conversation to inconsequential things rather than address areas of contention.

One of their number remarks: “He is a master of not engaging. Whenever we meet, he never raises any of the politically difficult issues between us.” This is a frustration to those on his team who want him to impose his writ on dissenters in the parliamentary party. It is also, funnily enough, frustrating to members of the shadow cabinet themselves, some of whom think it would be better if they thrashed out their differences in the hope that it might result in finding some way of working together – or at least mounting a better pretence that they are doing so.

All eyes are now beginning to focus on the first major electoral tests for Corbyn Labour, the May votes for the Scottish parliament, Welsh assembly, London mayoralty and many English council seats. Kezia Dugdale, Labour’s leader in Scotland, will brief the shadow cabinet this week on the party’s prospects north of the border. If her account is honest, this will be grim listening for Labour’s top table. Very level-headed people think it is entirely plausible that Labour will lose every one of the constituency seats that it currently holds in the Scottish parliament.

It is also feared that Labour will lose its majority in the assembly and suffer serious reversals in the English council contests. But the Corbynistas are already preparing their alibis. We’ve been in power for a long time in Wales, they will say. The party’s problems in Scotland are deep seated, they will argue. The last time those English council seats were fought was a high-water mark for Miliband Labour, so they’ll contend. They will have more of a struggle explaining it away if Sadiq Khan fails in his bid to become mayor of London, a city with demographics and political inclinations that ought to make the capital naturally Labour. I suppose if that turns out badly as well, Dame Margaret Beckett is always on hand to compose another report explaining why it wasn’t really Labour’s fault.