The Guardian view on Alastair Campbell’s expulsion: petty, foolish and counterproductive

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/28/the-guardian-view-on-alastair-campbell-expulsion-petty-foolish-and-counterproductive

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More than two million people who normally vote Labour voted instead for the Liberal Democrats or for the Greens in the European elections last week. It is clear that many thousands of Labour party members did exactly the same thing. Most of them did so, it is fair to say, for much the same reasons: because they want to stay in the European Union and because they think Labour is failing them by sitting on the fence and not pressing for a second referendum on the issue. Few of them are likely to have done so lightly or with pleasure.

The results of the EU elections were spectacular. Labour crashed to a record-breaking low share of the poll, 14%. The Liberal Democrats pushed them into second place nationally and even defeated them in Labour’s previous electoral fortress of London. The Greens surged to within 300,000 votes of pushing Labour into fourth. If ever a party faced a wake-up call about its disconnection from many of those who would otherwise vote for it, it is Labour over Europe.

Today Labour responded to the result by expelling Alastair Campbell, one of the many Labour voters who had said publicly that he could not support the party’s caution over Europe. It was an astonishingly foolish decision. Mr Campbell was clearly singled out, not because of what he did, but because of who he was – Tony Blair’s communications director. It was a petty and vindictive act. Rather than showing that the Labour leadership under Jeremy Corbyn has thought carefully about the message from their voters, this action does the reverse. It compounds the offence.

The speed with which Labour has moved against Mr Campbell is also revealing. The contrast with the cautious response in dealing with complaints against some of its other members, on issues including antisemitism, is glaring. That it happened on the very day that the Equality and Human Rights Commission began an investigation into that issue leaves a bad taste. It is hard to believe that the Campbell case is not being used as a diversionary tactic to deflect attention away from much more serious problems.

Europe has not just made a mockery of the pretence to party unity in Labour. The situation is at least as bad in the Conservative party. One of the most Tory of all Tories, Michael Heseltine, has had the whip removed for a similar offence. In both cases, machine politics has failed to cope with the more honest politics that the public says it seeks. Expelling internal critics is wholly at odds with the open and inclusive politics that Mr Corbyn said he espoused when he was elected.

Say what you like about Mr Campbell – and there is a lot to say for and against him – he has never been anything other than a Labour tribalist. For someone of such a fanatically pro-Labour mindset to be expelled is absurd. It is less an indictment of him than of the dead end in which both major parties now risk finding themselves. These arguments cry out for magnanimity, not for purges of awkward enemies.