Strength in division: Left-Right antagonism and the practice of 'split leadership'.

AuthorOwen, David
PositionLabour's Internal Politics

In 'The Discourses', the infamously astute republican thinker Niccolo Machiavelli argued that the strength and vitality of the Roman Republic, compared to other republics, lay in the fact that it successfully institutionalised the inevitable antagonism between the people and the elite. Thus, each held the threat posed to the republic by the other in check, and republican liberty was preserved. Machiavelli mercilessly mocked the pieties of republican thinkers who imagined a harmonious transcendence of this antagonism. He recognised that a sustainable balance of opposing forces could produce something stronger and more resilient than efforts at harmonious unity could realistically hope to achieve.

Machiavelli's insight is one that the Labour Party, in the midst of its current travails, would do well to remember. The history of the Labour Party is also one of antagonism between opposed forces. Simplifying somewhat, we can see the recent implosion as a recurrence of a tension that has structured the history of the party from its inception. This tension plays out between a Left that is focused on Labour as a transformative social movement, and a Right that is focused on the acquisition of parliamentary power (with plenty of folk in between).

When the party functions at its best, the role of the Left is to keep the Right honest, to block its tendency to surrender too much in its electoral pursuit of power, to prioritise short-term tactics over long-term strategy. The role of the Right is to keep the Left focused on the point that principle is impotent in the absence of power, that sacrificing electoral success (or deluding yourself concerning the prospects of such success) for ideological reasons surrenders the field to an enemy who will not advance the interests of the people that the Labour Party is meant to serve. There are, sadly, relatively few points in its fractious recent history in which the organisation of the Labour Party has successfully institutionalised this antagonism. Yet this institutionalisation is vital to its ability to succeed as a political party.

Today it seems that the Labour Party is closer to a split than any time since 1981. The Left, with its leader in place, responded to a rebellion of the vast majority of its MPs by reaching, once again, to its long-established vocabulary of betrayal and plots. It continues to assert its claim to represent the true flame of socialism and to stress the need to rebuild as a social movement, even at times seeming to downgrade the importance of becoming the governing party. The Right draws on its long-practised appeal to electability, to being a credible government-in-waiting. It claims to represent the interests of those who will suffer once more if the field of government is effectively abandoned to Tory rule. This tension came to the fore in the recent PLP revolt against the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and the leadership election in which Corbyn was unsuccessfully challenged by Owen Smith amidst controversial NEC rulings and legal challenges concerning voter eligibility. Corbyn's overwhelming victory in that election settles the leadership question in the short-term but it does not address the underlying problems that led to the challenge. What it may do, however, is provide a space in which the Labour Party as a whole can engage in a process of reflection.

So let us stand back from the field of internecine conflict and ask if an institutional change might help alter the terrain. Suppose, for example, the role of leader of the Labour Party were divided into three roles:

* The Chair of the Party, elected by members, who has the role of re-building Labour as a social movement across the country.

* The Leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party, elected by the MPs, with the role of mounting effective parliamentary government and opposition.

* The General Secretary of the Party, elected by members and MPs (through an electoral college), who occupies the role of organising party campaigns and, with the other two leaders, working out its strategy.

Such a structure aims not to overcome but to balance the tensions between Left and Right--as Labour party structures have generally tried to do--in order to realise the strength and vitality of the Labour movement in a parliamentary form. How might this help? It is relatively easy to see Jeremy Corbyn's real strengths coming to the fore in the role of Chair of the Party without being undermined by his all too obvious weaknesses (and the same would have been true of the late Tony Benn). Similarly, the General Secretary role is a natural fit for figures like Tom Watson and Stella Creasy today. As for Leader of the PLP, well there are several plausible future candidates: Lisa Nandy, Clive Lewis, Keir Starmer and Dan Jarvis would be among those uncluttered by the past. But the deeper point need not be tied to reflection on current individuals: rather it is to acknowledge both that leadership of the Labour Party requires a...

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