"Left-Wing" Labourism: An Infantile Disorder*

I reckon some left-wing members of the Labour party are probably rubbing their hands with glee - for the first time since 1994, there are actually some left-wingers in the party proactively vying for leadership. After nearly 16 years of the left-wing camp of the Labour party being in the wilderness (that's longer than the Tories spent in opposition, fact fans) there could actually be a left-wing Labour leader. Crazy yet exciting times, if you're one of those people who still believes in socialism despite everything that has happened to utterly discredit that particular ideology.

Of course, the idea that we are about to see a left-winger as Labour leader is rather undermined when you see which left-wingers are running. John "I Can't Even Get On the Ballot Paper" McDonnell and Diane "I'm Prejudiced Against Finnish Nurses" Abbot hardly represent a modern version of Nye fucking Bevan, do they now? The best bet for one of those actually winning is if the vote for the third-rate neo-Blairites is evenly split between Miliband/Miliband/Balls/Burnham - something which seems unlikely, since both McDonnell and Abbot in the contest might also split the left-wing result, and at least two of those four will probably back out and support one of the other candidates before we get to September. As things stand, there's more chance of Gordon Brown being the new Labour leader than there is of the left-wing contenders. And Brown isn't even running.

But actually it isn't just the candidates that is going massively undermine the left-wing in this election. It is also the fact that the left-wing, historically, have been both an embuggerance and an embarrassment to the Labour party. Probably the high-point for left-wing Labour was when they had a passionate, articulate and eloquent spokesperson in the form of the aforementioned Nye Bevan. And you know what? Bevan ended up resigning as a Minister, and never hitting the top spot. The Labour party favoured the far more moderate Hugh Gaitskell. And when Tony Benn became the figurehead of the Labourite left, he never managed to achieve any meaningful level of power, and when he became too influential, he helped force the Gang of Four out of the Labour party, and thus started the process that led, earlier this month, to the political successors of the Gang of Four going into coalition with the Tories.

The only time a representative of the Labour left actually led the party is when Michael Foot became the worst Labour leader in living memory (barring, arguably, Gordon Brown), and led to the first Thatcherite landslide. From that point on, the Labour party realised that their left-wing was something to be expelled or ignored if the party ever wanted to form a government again.

It is true, historically speaking, that the Labour party is a movement of the left. But parties evolve and change. The Labour party has found a formula that allowed it to win two landslides and one very comfortable election victory in a row - and that involved turning its back both on socialism and on being left-wing in any meaningful sense of the word. It involved running to the centre ground which is where the most credible candidates for the Labour leadership now sit. The generation of Labour MPs who feared deselection by the lefties in their local constituencies has been replaced by a generation of Labour MPs who associate political power and political influence with the Blairite consensus - with the middle ground. The Unions may be to the left of Blair, but they also associate the left-wing of the Labour party with the sort of defeats that led to Thatcher's administrations - those administrations that led to the hobbling of the unions. They'd rather have a moderate yet tamed Labour leader who could be Prime Minister than a left-wing one who will lead the party to electoral oblivion. The time of the left-wing - their dubious heyday - is over.

The next Labour leader will probably be a Miliband, and he will be instinctively focussed on the centre ground. Which makes sense, in electoral terms. A full-on left-wing leader could see the Labour party in opposition for another generation. Labour's short-to-medium term future is trying to regain the centre ground. It certainly isn't in selecting a quaint, yet completely out-of-time, leader like McDonnell or Abbot.

*Yep, I'm paraphrasing Lenin. So sue me. And anyway, he wouldn't have rated McDonnell or Abbot either - albeit for very different reasons.