Labour party

Monday

Katy Balls

Sparks fly at Parliamentary Labour Party meeting on second referendum

Jeremy Corbyn's announcement that the Labour party is prepared to back another EU referendum to prevent a 'damaging Tory Brexit' was intended to placate Remain-leaning MPs. However, it's also managed to irk those Labour politicians representing Leave seats. Tonight MPs gathered for a fiery meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party. It was standing room only as MPs crowded in to try and make sense of the latest Brexit development. Addressing MPs, Jeremy Corbyn struck a conciliatory tone – and according to a former shadow cabinet member present he gave one of his best speeches to date as he called on the party to come together.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 21 February 2019

The breakaway seven Sir: ‘In both parties there are fools at one end and crackpots at the other, but the great body in the middle is sound and wise.’ One of the magnificent seven speaking this week? Well, the sentiment is surely present day, but rather they are the words of Churchill in 1913 trying to engineer a centrist national movement from ‘a fusion of the two parties’. In those days, it was the Conservative and the Liberal parties, but the history of the middle ground since then augurs poorly not just for the breakaway seven, but for those of us who feel disenfranchised by politics. We can argue who currently represents the devil and who the deep blue sea, but right now neither seems an attractive or palatable home.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 21 February 2019

Home Seven MPs resigned from the Labour party and sat in the Commons (next to the DUP) as the Independent Group, or Tig. They were Luciana Berger, Ann Coffey, Mike Gapes, Chris Leslie, Gavin Shuker, Angela Smith and Chuka Umunna. The next day they were joined by Joan Ryan and the following one by three Tories, Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston and Heidi Allen. The Labour eight said they objected to anti-Semitism in the party, the security risk should Jeremy Corbyn become prime minister and Labour’s lukewarm attitude to a second referendum. Derek Hatton, who had been the deputy leader of the Militant-controlled council which set an illegal budget in Liverpool, was readmitted to the Labour party after 34 years.

Toby Young

Been there, done that | 21 February 2019

I was 17 when the Labour party last split, in January 1981, and for a variety of reasons got quite caught up in the moment. It was partly because my father, the author of the 1945 Labour manifesto, was close to the Gang of Four — the original band of defectors — and was one of a hundred people named as supporters of the breakaway group in a full-page ad in the Guardian. But really I was just swept up by the general enthusiasm for the new party that seemed to affect vast swaths of the middle classes. If you recoiled from the economic policies of the Conservative government, which prioritised reducing inflation over full employment, but were equally querulous about the leftward shift of the Labour party, the SDP was an appealing alternative.

Katy Balls

Splitting headache

The first thing to note about the ‘South Bank seven’ is that they are nothing like the four former Labour cabinet ministers who split the party in 1981, forming the SDP. The Gang of Four were national figures who between them had held every major office of state, bar the top job. Most of the MPs who announced from a swish venue on the South Bank that they were quitting Labour to set up a new outfit have little to no public profile. They’re more likely to be an answer on Pointless than stopped in the street for a photo. While the most well-known member, Chuka Umunna, has high ambitions (his colleagues joke that he sees himself as the UK’s answer to Emmanuel Macron), his most senior role to date was as Ed Miliband’s shadow business secretary.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

The Tory defections to the Independent Group could help Corbyn

After days of bad news for Labour over the decision of several moderates to quit and form The Independent Group, it's now the turn of the Tories. Three Conservative MPs have today resigned the party whip to join the group. In a joint letter to the Prime Minister, Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston and Heidi Allen say they no longer feel at home in a party where the policies are so 'firmly in the grip of the ERG and DUP'.  They will now join eight former Labour MPs in the newly formed group – bringing the total size up to 11. While the news has shocked some Conservatives, these three MPs were the politicians who were seen as the most likely to quit.

Steerpike

Watch: George Galloway compares journalist to Goebbels

George Galloway has just waded into Labour's anti-Semitism row and it is safe to say his intervention won't do much to calm things down. The firebrand former politician said the claims of anti-Semitism agains the Labour party were a lie – and he then compared the Sky News journalist interviewing him to Josef Goebbels. Here's what he said: GG: 'It is really a black-op what is going on here. This is pure Goebbelian propaganda.' Niall Paterson: 'We've just mentioned Luciana Berger, do you think it is entirely relevant to talk about Goebbelian propaganda?' GG: 'I do.' NP: 'We've got a Jewish Labour MP leaving because of anti-Semitism.' GG: 'I don't believe she is leaving because of anti-Semitism, I believe you want people to believe that and the Goebbels is you.

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

Joan Ryan quits Labour and joins the Independent Group

Another Labour MP, Joan Ryan, has tonight announced she is leaving the party to join the Independent Group. This is significant, and not just because it creates a sense of momentum. Ryan is the first Labourite to leave who wasn't involved in the months of secret planning meetings. She was, until fairly recently, arguing that the best thing to do would be to stay and fight to change the party back. Now, she has gone, releasing a potent statement about her reasons. Those reasons include what she calls 'the scourge of anti-Jewish racism', which 'simply did not exist in the party before his election as leader'. She argues that she has 'fought for as long as I can within the Labour Party'.

Steerpike

Watch: Angela Smith blames ‘funny tinge’ comment on tiredness

Angela Smith unwittingly became the story of the day yesterday when she referred to people of a 'funny tinge' on the BBC's Politics Live. Smith apologised – but still the story is dragging on. Today, the MP was asked to explain her comments, and she came up with a new excuse: she was tired. Here's what she said: 'Look, I never meant to say that. I misspoke really badly. I was very tired at that point. I had had six hours of press engagement and I was very tired. I was very tired. I misspoke really, really badly.' Mr S isn't sure that the answer to all this is for Smith to do more 'press engagement'...

Stephen Daisley

Luciana Berger’s departure is the beginning of the end for Labour

Manny Shinwell knew how to deal with anti-Semites. Born in London’s East End, reared in Glasgow, and once jailed for inciting a riot on Red Clydeside, the pipe-smoking pugilist was a tough, proud Jew. During a debate in parliament in 1938, Shinwell (then Labour MP for Seaham) was jabbing at the government when Tory MP Robert Bower heckled: ‘Go back to Poland’. Shinwell got up, crossed the floor and thumped Bower clean in the face, then turned to the Speaker and said: ‘May I make a personal explanation?’.  Eight decades later, his great-niece has delivered another bloody nose to the face of anti-Semitism.

Robert Peston

Tom Watson’s intervention spells trouble for Jeremy Corbyn

The second most important political act yesterday was the impassioned declaration of near UDI by the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Tom Watson. His sorrowful response to the resignation of Berger, Umunna, Leslie, Smith, Gapes, Coffey and Shuker was that they were wrong to resign but they were correct to identify that the party he loves has lost its way, especially over anti-Semitism. Watson was in effect setting himself up as shop steward of a parliamentary Labour Party that feels almost totally detached from the Labour leader and the shadow cabinet.

Monday

James Kirkup

Corbyn’s cheerleaders are wrong to sneer at Which? magazine

First, a confession. Because I try not to spend too much time on Twitter, I sometimes miss “the story that everyone at Westminster is talking about” and struggle to keep up with village gossip. Worse, I lose track of the minor characters the ceaseless opera of poisonous soap, or fail to recognise them for what they are.  For instance, I only recently discovered that Aaron Bastani is actually a real person and not, in fact, someone’s parody of something. Sorry. Today on political Twitter, it seems that “everyone is talking” about Dr Bastani and Which? magazine, in the context of the new Independent Group of Labour MPs.  Dr Bastani suggested that the new group is “Pro Which? Magazine” in a tweeted list of its other supposed crimes.

Alex Massie

In praise of the Labour splitters | 18 February 2019

The first thing to note is that it’s not about policy. The not-so secret seven MPs who left the Labour party this morning have not changed their policy preferences. They have not become Tories. Nor have they even become liberals. They could, with little difficulty, endorse much of the Labour party’s 2017 manifesto without compromising themselves in the slightest.  Because this break, this rebellion, this journey into exile, is not about policy. It is about character and values and so many of the other things the Labour party believes it holds dear to the extent it often behaves as though it thinks it owns a monopoly on these things.

James Forsyth

Will any Tory MPs join the Independent Group?

Is this a split in the Labour party or something more? At today’s launch, Chuka Umunna was clear that the Independent Group want to attract MPs from parties other than Labour. Tory party sources admit that they ‘would not be surprised’ if some Tory MPs were to join this new group. Right now, the values of this group seem fairly—for want of a better word—Blairite. The addition of any Tory MPs would make this group more ideological heterodox; and show if it can carve out a distinctive intellectual position. Politically, it would also mean that it was not just Labour who are split.

Thursday

Jess Phillips

Diary – 14 February 2019

‘You OK?’ was the message I sent to Luciana Berger last week. As I scroll back through our previous WhatsApp chats I can see that I’ve sent this same message painfully frequently. I’ve sent it each time someone is jailed or charged in court for abusing her and threatening her for being Jewish. I’ve sent it every time the anti-Semitic abuse she receives reaches fever pitch, such as the time last month when she asked for our party to put down a vote of no confidence in the Tories. After which she was attacked as ‘the member for Liverpool Haifa,’ an ‘Israeli shill’ and more merciless racial abuse. We live in backward times.

Henry Newman

John McDonnell’s mask is slipping

One of the more interesting developments over the last year is the attempted transformation of John McDonnell from a hard-left activist who joked about “lynching” a female Conservative MP, towards a softer, more jovial, chancellor-in-waiting. It seemed to be going quite well. I appeared with McDonnell on Politics Live last year and he laughed heartily as I teased him about coveting the Labour leadership. SW1’s water-cooler chat is that McDonnell is a far more effective advocate of a Corbynite Labour position than Jeremy Corbyn himself, particularly because the Labour leader often looks so irritated at being asked relatively normal questions on television. But could that be about to change?

Nick Cohen

Corbyn’s crack-up

To say that the May administration is ‘the worst government anyone can remember’ is to abuse the English language. It isn’t a government but a collection of factions so far apart I am surprised they can stay in the same cabinet. On the backbenches the European Research Group operates as a separate English nationalist party. Everywhere Tory politicians are scrambling to position themselves to succeed Theresa May, rather than holding on to any notion as quaint as putting their country before their careers. Yet faced with this ungoverning government, a maladministration that is so exhausted it is running out of Conservative MPs who can serve as ministers, the opposition is behind in the polls and Jeremy Corbyn is the most unpopular Labour leader ever.

Sunday

Matthew Taylor

Sunday shows round-up: A no deal would be ‘potentially devastating’ for Northern Ireland, Blair says

Tony Blair - No deal 'potentially devastating' for Northern Ireland Sophy Ridge began the morning with a wide-ranging interview with Tony Blair. The conservation inevitably turned to Brexit, something to which the former Prime Minister has long been opposed. Blair strongly criticised those politicians calling for a 'no deal' outcome after March 29th, arguing that they had 'played fast and loose' with the Northern Irish peace process from day one: https://twitter.com/RidgeOnSunday/status/1094525776861581312 TB: If we have a hard Brexit - no one could responsibly propose this. It would be economically very, very dangerous for Britain, and for the peace process in Ireland, it would potentially be devastating...

Thursday

James Forsyth

Corbyn’s offer weakens May in Brussels, but helps her at Westminster

One of the main messages that Theresa May is taking to Brussels today is that significant, legally binding changes to the backstop are needed to get the withdrawal agreement through the House of Commons. Jeremy Corbyn’s letter to her undermines that position. In it, the Labour leader sounds less hostile to the backstop than he did after meeting May last week. Instead, he suggests that the way to deal with the backstop issue is through a political declaration that makes it much less likely that it has to be used. This is the EU’s preferred solution too, and so Corbyn’s offer undercuts the message that May is trying to take to Brussels.

Wednesday

Stephen Daisley

Labour and the banality of anti-Semitism

Is there a name for the moment something objectionable becomes so mainstream that those responsible can solemnly lament it as a fact of life? I propose that we call it the Formby Point. This week, Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby reportedly told a parliamentary party meeting that it was ‘impossible to eradicate anti-Semitism and it would be dishonest to claim to be able to do so’. Note the sly wording, the subtle distancing; you can almost hear the affected sigh of resignation. The woman who runs an institutionally racist party that refuses to challenge its institutional racism can, with a straight face, regret the inevitability of racism.  As a matter of fact, it is possible to eradicate anti-Semitism from a membership-based organisation.