'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
Didn’t Kim Howells admit in 2004 that n hearing that miners had killed Taxi driver David Wilkie in the strike he’d gone back to his office shredded evidence that he’d sent them to that bridge,of course he wasn’t to know what they did,but he was arrested for attempting to pervert the course of justice,maybe sir should be an inquiry into him,like oRgreave, as for not having jobs for life, Scargill was happy to have. A job for life as NUM boss it was trade unions fighting to keep jobs for life at the dockers,strike too.
RuthB
Labour aren’t going to win the next GE whoever’s the leader, if they get the boundary changes through (and there’s no reason to think they won’t). Sadly, I may never live to see another Labour government.
But be that as it may, we don’t have any concrete evidence either way as to whether people generally support Corbyn or not. We’ll see at the next elections – I can’t remember what they are – is it the PCC elections?
I can’t understand two things, though – firstly, as the more moderate Labour policies have lost us two GE’s so far, why would you think a continuation of those policies would be any more successful now? and secondly, what is the point of having a Labour government if it pursues the same policies as the Tories?
Lamia
I can’t understand two things, though – firstly, as the more moderate Labour policies have lost us two GE’s so far, why would you think a continuation of those policies would be any more successful now?
I don’t believe that “more moderate Labour policies” lost Labour the past two GEs. Realistically, the 2010 election was lost for a variety of reasons, including a wide public feeling that they had lost the plot and made some big mistakes.
One can argue about the justice of that charge, but it is a fact that from time to time the electorate tends to ditch governments that have been in for a long time – it happened to the Tories in 1997 – and give the other side a go. Also, catastrophes aside, I think there is now a feeling after the long period of Tory rule and a long period of Labour rule that the government of the day probably deserves two cracks of the whip. Not everyone thinks that, of course, but there is a section of floating voters who seem to think that. So I suspect that counted against Labour even at the last GE.
On top of that, Ed Miliband just never quite clicked with the wider public. I don’t think it had so much to do with the policies on offer – you consider them moderate and I would broadly agree, but of course there were many who thought them too left wing. Now whether those people were objectively right or not, it’s objectively more true to say that that perception counted more against Miliband than the (supposed) perception that people went over to UKIP and even the Tories because they didn’t think Labour was left wing enough.
Labour could possibly have won the last election with a much stronger/more convincing leader than Ed Miliband, and I think the actual policies would have been a lesser matter.
I don’t believe the Tories got in this time on the appeal of their policies so much as the perception that Cameron would on the whole make a better (or if you prefer, less bad) prime minister than Ed Miliband.
I have noticed that when this kind of point is made, the response of a lot of Corbynistas misses the point completely: they angrily protest that of course Ed Miliband would have made a better prime minister, and the Tories are dreadful etcetera. But what they have failed to do is to persuade the broad public. It hasn’t helped that a lot of the reaction after the GE was to fume that the wider public are just selfish/stupid/evil Tories. Well, again that may or may not be the case but it sure as hell is not the attitude needed in a party that would like the public to elect it again. The Tories went into a ‘the public just weren’t listening properly to our message’ bubble and it kept them out of power for years. Many Labour supporters are being much more open in their contempt – in some cases outright hatred – for the electorate than those Tories were. It is suicidally stupid and arrogant. Telling someone they are hideously ugly and nasty… and then expecting them to go out with you, is not a clever approach.
and secondly, what is the point of having a Labour government if it pursues the same policies as the Tories?
Milibands policies were not just the same as the Tories’. Nor were Brown’s, nor Blair’s. They may not have been your ideal of Labour policies but they were not the same. It is deluded self-comforting purism to imagine that people chose the Tories because they really wanted to vote Labour but just considered Labour to be just fake Tories. It just does not stand up.
The advice I would give – which Labour activists will ignore or angrily dismiss – is this: first get out of the mindset that:
1. you have a right to be in power and wwre somehow cheated
2. that the general public is dep down crying out for a left wing government and has either become stupid or brainwashed or deceived (by the media of course; they don’t actually live in the country and experience the effects, good or bad, of government.
What the public wants is good government, and it a large section of it will accept a Labour or a Tory government depending on how they measure its competence and sanity compared to the opposition. If you can persuade them that you’ve actually listened, then you may get there, and in office parties have more freedom to develop and extend their vision.
But to be really convincing would probably entail genuinely pausing to reflect on whether maybe for various reasons Labour just didn’t deserve to be in government, and that these reasons may not have been – or at least not all have been – connected to Labour not being left wing enough. i.e. maybe admit you cocked some things up – and apologise for them and show you have learned your lesson. You have to earn that trust again.
I don’t think Labour is capable of that for a few years yet – too many of its members are too proud and delusional to think they have the slightest thing to apologise for you. And so you will lose the next GE and possibly the one after that. You don’t have to, but the way you are going, you will.
PS, for what it’s worth, I’m sure you will see another Labour government in your lifetime, Ruth. The time will come when the Tories seem utterly incompetent to the public and Labour looks a much safer pair of hands. And so on.
robertcp
Lol! They even hate each other!
RuthB
We must agree to differ. As I said earlier, there is no evidence as to what the public think until the next set of elections. But it is nice to have a reasoned response from you rather than gloating about the deaths of “Islamists” and British soldiers as you have done elsewhere.