'A bunch of old Trotskyites are not going win political power'
A former minister under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown has warned that civil war will break out within the Parliamentary Labour Party following Jeremy Corbyn’s election victory.
The comments by Kim Howells, Labour MP for Pontypridd between 1989 and 2010, come in this evening’s edition of Week In Week Out, due to air on BBC One Wales.
Asked how he would respond to the current leadership, Howells, who ran the NUM Pontypridd office which co-ordinated the South Wales miners’ efforts during the miners’ strike in the eighties, told the programme:
“I’d be bitterly opposed to the current leadership of the Labour Party.
“I’d be saying things that I believe about the need to win political power and a bunch of old Trotskyites are not going win political power.”
Arguing that the party had to “start speaking in a language people can understand and convince the electorate”, he warned:
“There is going to be a civil war inside the parliamentary Labour Party. It’s nothing new, it’s happened in the past,” he added.
“So the party’s got to make its mind up – does it really think it’s going to win again in the future, with Corbyn as the leader? I don’t think so.”
With crucial elections next year to the Welsh Assembly, the MP for Ogmore, Huw Irranca-Davies, who is co-ordinating Labour’s assembly election campaign, has insisted that in Wales the fight back will not become “the Jeremy show”. Instead, he argues that it is First Minister Carwyn Jones who will be “right at the front” of the party’s campaign.
Richard Wyn Jones, professor of Welsh Politics at Cardiff University, will warn also tonight of tensions and difficulties between an opposition Labour Party at Westminster and a governing one in Wales. He will explain:
“Welsh Labour has been running Wales since 1999 and the kinds of pressures that you face when governing are very different from ones the Jeremy Corbyn had to face as, essentially, a campaigning backbench MP. And it’s easy to envisage that leading to real tensions.
“Now this may well all end in tears. However, I think there’s a really interesting phenomenon here and we need to be very careful before we dismiss it.”
Ed Jacobs is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
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42 Responses to “Former minister warns of ‘civil war’ in Labour Party”
RuthB
What happened in June? I must have missed something!
Very, very tiny numbers of people vote for their MP personally, which I why I say MP’s are no more important than any other member. You said it yourself – 9m people voted for the *Labour manifesto*.
The MP’s were chosen to stand on that manifesto by 200,000 members of the Labour Party at the back end of 2014. A much smaller number of people than there are now, and any sitting MP was 99% guaranteed to have a place with no selection process at all.
That’s what the establishment are afraid of, that they will now be replaced, and that’s why they are so much against Corbyn. By and large – I’m sure some of them must be genuinely concerned and disagree with his policies.
Syzergy_Point
Luckily, #piggate has given Corbo a bit of breather and a chance – hopefully – to think things through. I didn’t vote for Corbo, but I wish him well. He has activated a new generation. My worry though is that will he really appeal to the ‘Tory-lites’ that were so derided during the leadership campaign. Even though he may be able to get some more non-voters to vote (but this will be even harder under the new boundaries and individual voter registration) he needs to appeal beyond the boundaries of EdM’s Labour vote. (Currently, he’s not even holding on to all of them).
RuthB
I’ve lost the figures now, but I read somewhere that about 25% of the people who voted, voted Tory so there is scope to win by persuading the other 75% – probably not quite accurate, but something very like those proportions. In my ward, 1500 people voted for UKIP. Some of them, of course, would never vote Labour but I reckon maybe 1000 of them were just disillusioned and looking for a change from the “old” parties. Not to mention SNP voters, who I’m sure would predominantly vote for a left Labour Party.
What we haven’t got is accurate information and I would like to see the Labour Party putting its new members to work straight away by doing a mass canvass on a marked-up register (i.e. only people that actually voted) to see if they have changed their minds post-Corbyn.
Cole
That doesn’t sound like a recipe for a united and tolerant Labour Partty. Maybe you just want to get rid of people who don’t like JC and have your own ideologically pure sect.
Riversideboy
Pontypridd Labour members can give him some civil war by kicking him out next time selections come around. He’s just another democracy denier, do as you are told you idiot or sod off to the Liberals and stop thinking your opinion trumps 60 percent of the Party members.