Jeremy Corbyn’s divided Labour can never win – Brian Wilson

The defections of Labour MPs to the new ‘Independent Group’ will simply split the vote on the left, just as the SDP did during the 1980s and 1990s, writes Brian Wilson.

Jeremy Corbyn should have adopted an inclusive approach but instead unleashed the dogs of war on Labour's broad church, says Brian Wilson (Picture:: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire)

There is no need for a crystal ball when you can read a history book. So nobody need doubt the implications of a new “centre-left” party emerging.

In 1982, when the SDP was formed, one defector from Labour, a good MP named Bruce Douglas-Mann, did the honourable thing and offered himself to his constituents in Mitcham and Morden via a by-election.

Sadly, they declined the offer. The Tory share of the vote remained the same while the split opposition gifted their candidate a handsome majority. She remained there until the 1997 Labour landslide.

The following year the same happened in the General Election. For all the talk about Mrs Thatcher’s triumph on the back of the Falklands War, the forgotten fact is that the Tory vote actually fell. It still took Labour 14 years to recover the lost ground.

Forget the Tory add-ons. This week’s events will be seen as a Labour split and the electorate will judge accordingly. Overwhelmingly, Tories will continue to vote Tory long after the Brexit cookie has crumbled. But what will happen to Labour?

Actually, the Mitcham and Morden parable may offer alternativve lessons. Acting alone, the sitting MP was a dead duck. If his high-profile colleagues had ridden their wave of publicity by creating a mini-General Election, their longer-term impact might have been greater. As it was, the fate of their enterprise was merely postponed.

Labour’s official response has been to call for defecting MPs to stand for re-election. I guess, however, their hope and prayer is they will do no such thing for that really would create the cathartic event which politics in general, and Labour in particular, urgently requires.

I do not particularly blame Jeremy Corbyn for the dire mess that Labour is now in. He never expected to be leader and would have lived out his days in the happy obscurity of fringe righteousness if it had not been for the pure accident of timing.

It is those who created the circumstances for his emergence – notably Ed Milliband and the union puppet-masters who installed him – who bear that responsibility. One unelectable leader obligingly opened the door to another, with the same strings attached.

Having got lucky, if you call it that, Corbyn, McDonnell and co needed to stress the inclusivity of their approach, however counter-intuitive that might have been. Instead, they released dogs of war upon Labour’s broad church and are now reaping the consequences.

The whole anti-semitism dimension is shameful beyond belief. I do not believe that Corbyn is anti-semitic. However, if you invite the dregs of ultra-leftism into the asylum, it’s too late to complain when they daub the walls. The readmission and subsequent re-suspension of Derek Hatton is a case in point.

But then you go back to 1986 when the leading lights of Militant, including Hatton, were expelled from Labour for operating as a party within the party. Who was their leading defender? Well Corbyn, of course. There is simply too much history to escape from even if he wanted to.

It stretches the imagination to believe that, in four years’ time, the British people are going to elect a Corbyn-led Labour Party to Government. However, now a split has occurred, the damage threatened in the interim is as great as in the 1980s and the period of impotency even longer.

That is why Labour, as well as its defectors, need the catharsis sooner rather than later. Those who resigned should welcome the electoral test and opportunity. They should also remember that the alternative is not “breaking the mould” but slow crash and burn, just like the SDP.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the imminent priority must be to avoid a no-deal Brexit, whatever any leader of any party might say. If there is another way of doing it, then fine, but ultimately, that may mean supporting the EU-UK deal that is on offer.

The alternative, as the Irish Foreign Minister said yesterday, is “lose, lose, lose”. No leader worth the name should risk being associated with that place in history.