'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
42 Responses to “Former minister warns of ‘civil war’ in Labour Party”
WhiteVanMan
Unite maybe able to oust current Mps who you think aren’t left wing enough, or try bringing back militant?, but the Labour Party rules on such things would need to be re written to have trot deselections like in 1981
WhiteVanMan
Yes but several members have left,and.. Many have joined aren’t interested in deselecting current MPs
Tony
Howells was a foreign office minister and opposed a UN resolution on the de-alerting of nuclear missiles. De-alerting of nuclear missiles reduces the risk of accidental nuclear war and is advocated by the likes of Henry Kissinger and George Shultz. Shamefully, the Labour government joined with the Bush administration to oppose this. Before becoming president, Bush had expressed some sympathy for the idea.
This is probably the most shameful piece of behaviour by Howells but I accept that there is much to choose from.
RuthB
I don’t want to deselect my MP – he wasn’t my first choice, but he won the selection contest so I worked for him in the election. Since becoming an MP, he has called for an enquiry into Orgreave, he’s asked about maths and science apprenticeships, he voted against cuts to social security benefits, he nominated Jeremy Corbyn – what’s not to like?
But if I wasn’t happy with him, under the current rules that’s tough, it would be very difficult to prevent him being the candidate in 2020. That’s as I understand it – but Riversideboy thinks it would be possible, so maybe he’s right.
Why are you so bothered about MP’s having a job for life? Why does it worry you so much that they might be sacked like anybody else? What’s wrong with having a normal selection procedure? Or do you think Councillors should have a job for life as well? Is it just any elected representative? Parish councillors? Police and Crime Commissioners? I can’t work out what your problem is…
Lamia
People like Kim Howells just don’t get it. The days of a few MP’s and
Party apparatchiks deciding everything are on their way out. 360,000
members, 90,000 of whom have joined in the last month, are not going be
told what to do by the Westminster elite.
I’m afraid it’s you who don’t get it, Ruth. Howells sees what polls have already confirmed, but which Corbynistas are refusing to face: namely that while Corbyn is very popular within the Labour party, he’s not going to win over the wider public. He’s just managed to become the first ever Labour leader to start with a negative public rating. It is the tens of millions of voters who are not, on current showing, going to listen to 250,000 delusional Corbynites, who really matter.
Labour are on course to lose the next GE by an even wider margin than the last one. How exactly does that fit in with your plan of Corbyn winning it?