The polls close tonight in the leadership election of the UK’s Labour Party. The likelihood is that the party will wake up tomorrow and find its new leader is Jeremy Corbyn, a left-wing rebel on the party’s fringe for the best part of his parliamentary career.
The political salons in the UK are obviously taken up with what the prospect means for the country. But the Corbyn factor has a special relevance for Maltese politics.
Although it’s likely that Corbyn will be elected leader, it’s by no means certain. He has been a runaway leader – far ahead of his three more centrist rivals – in the opinion polls. Since this is an election in which (for the first time) all ordinary members of the Labour Party can vote for the leader, there has been an avalanche of people signing up, with most of them indicating they favour Corbyn.
However, despite the enthusiasm and predilection, as I write this around half the membership still has to vote, which suggests a pause to think about the consequences. Past experience suggests that opinion polls tend to exaggerate the ultimate likely support for Labour radicals in leadership elections.
What would make them pause is the thought that Corbyn is unlikely to lead Labour to a win at the next general election. It’s not a new thought. For the past several months, pollsters have been asking Corbyn supporters whether they think of him as an election winner. Many if not most of them have replied that, actually, no, they don’t. Apparently, they didn’t care. However, once in the voting booth, they just might.
Comparisons are odious – except in punditry. The prospect of a left-wing, anti-establishment Labour leader has excited the commentariat into reaching for colourful parallels – from the popular protest movements-turned-parties like Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, to the electorally suicidal socialist party that British Labour was 30 years ago, to the belligerent right-wing populism of Donald Trump in the US.
None of these comparisons are insightful.
A return to the 1980s? Not really. The culturally radical strand of the so-called looney left (say, ‘gay liberation’) has largely become part of mainstream debate today. Corbyn’s economic proposals are controversial but neither outlandish nor extreme: 41 distinguished economists, including a former adviser the Bank of England, have declared his anti-austerity measures to be mainstream economics.
Corbyn’s unlikely surge like Trump’s? A party leadership campaign is unlike a presidential primary in the US. The latter is long, with a history of front runners being eclipsed right at the finish. Especially in today’s crackpot Republican Party, the early stages tend to favour the anti-establishment candidates.
Besides, the primary is about choosing a presidential candidate, who can afford to be semi-detached from his own political party. If he wins the White House, he can govern whether or not his party controls the House and the Senate. The choice of party leader, on the other hand, is about choosing someone who can organise and galvanise, in the first place, his own party.
The Corbyn factor has a special relevance for Maltese politics
Corbyn’s real problems, should he be chosen to lead Labour, will have to do not with his preferred policies but with his institutional options.
As a backbencher he defied his own party leaders some 500 times: how can he demand party loyalty from his own backbenchers now? He risks leading a divided party. Such political parties, as we know, are never trusted with power.
That prospect is what marks the difference with new parties like Syriza and Podemos. These two have no real history. There is no record that can be held against their leaders. However, if he wins, Corbyn will be taking over a long established party of government, with a long memory.
He has a record that his own party can hold against him.
The comparisons with US, Spanish and Greek politics are distractions. But, on one key point, there is a relevant comparison to be made to the Maltese case.
British Labour is in the situation it’s in today because of its leadership election rules. One of Ed Miliband’s legacies is a change in the rules: for the first time, any ordinary party member can vote. Miliband, it should be said, was following the earlier example set by the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives. The British experience of this rule’s results – say, Ian Duncan Smith, or, Nick Clegg – is not a happy one. Ordinary party members – as opposed to party activists – have shown a tendency to be even more wishful or wilful in their thinking than party activists.
But, in case you’ve forgotten, it’s exactly this same rule that both Malta’s Labour and Nationalists have saddled themselves with. It’s never been used, as it was respectively introduced by Joseph Muscat and Simon Busuttil. But we have something to look forward to.
First, there will be, inevitably, questions about the legitimacy of the election result itself. The surge of people joining Labour has led many to question whether they are all genuine or whether a significant proportion are anti-Labourites who want to select the weakest candidate.
This possibility has been pooh-poohed by Corbyn supporters. But, only this week, a Conservative peer – a Tory minister, no less – was found to be a Labour Party member (since March last year). She’s been booted out. But questions remain about just how many such new members there still are. The Labour machine has been overwhelmed by the effort that is required to find out whether the membership lists have been fiddled with.
Even if Malta avoids such doubts about the legitimacy of the election process, a fundamental flaw in the voting rules remains. Essentially, the rules are meant to keep political parties in touch with independent voters. Leaders are (usually) changed when elections are lost.
Having ordinary members vote in a leadership election is meant as a way of getting the political party to ‘go public’ and get ordinary voters to be a shareholder.
In practice, that’s not what happens. What you get is self-styled independents trying to reinvent an established political party in their own image. That would work with a new party. With an established party, however, you institutionalise a conflict: between a group of people who think of themselves as a start-up and another group that sees them as upstarts.
Instead of grounding the party in the mainstream where crucial votes are won, you get a takeover by newcomers whose thinking can be as wishful as that of any ideologue. Instead of reconnecting a losing party to the electorate, you risk exacerbating the alienation by facilitating division within a party.
It need not necessarily happen. However, the UK experience suggests it happens (or gets perilously close to happening) often enough. Do Labour and the PN really want to risk it?
ranierfsadni@europe.com