Why the Labour party matters and how to save it

In John Bew’s biography of Clement Attlee he describes the efforts of the Labour leadership to get the post-war America administration fully engaged with the concept of defending Western Europe from Soviet tyranny. Ernest Bevin, trade unionist and Foreign Secretary, acted when George Marshall, appointed US Secretary of State in early 1947, spoke in June of that year of the need to assist Europe in its economic recovery.

“Bevin,” writes Bew, “seizing the opportunity, became the champion of what was known as the Marshall Plan. Attlee believed that it was his foreign secretary’s greatest achievement to run with, and reinterpret, Marshall’s ideas in a way that suited British interests.”

Bew the historian is an Atlanticist who now serves as Boris Johnson’s advisor on foreign affairs.

Under the Marshall plan, the US gave European countries flattened by war more than £12bn of aid and assistance. Britain received the largest amount – some $2.7bn compared to the $1.7bn that went to West Germany. But the Bevin strategy really came to fruition with the formation of Nato, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the mutual defence pact under which the signatories agreed to stand together to ward off the Soviets. It worked and in the end the West and the forces of liberty won the Cold War.

This defence of Western Europe did not happen by accident. It had to be fought for and relitigated decade after decade, with Communist parties standing for election in free European states and the Soviet Union attempting an infiltration of our institutions, sometimes with considerable success. Nonetheless, Nato was a success and it might not have been so without those giants of the Labour movement who were there at the inception.

The far-left and various varieties of British communists hated Nato from the start, understandably. Their underlying sympathies lay with the Soviet system and the Marxist analysis, and they still do. True social democracy was always the real enemy of the revolutionaries, because it was potent and won elections when the far left never could. The social democrats in Labour believed in a mixed system of state investment working alongside property rights, the rule of law and democracy. While they placed far too much emphasis on central planning and state control between 1945 and 1979, economic fashions change. Their economic agenda was of its time and of a piece with the faith placed in that era in scientific solutions.

Until the post-9/11 wars of the early 2000s, the Labour position on security and defence mainly held. There was a brief and similar interregnum between 1981 and 1983 when the hard left took control. After Iraq and the financial crisis, the multilateralist, Atlanticist wing of Labour lost its confidence and lost power.

The result, incredibly, is that Labour has ended up in the hands of a crew of Marxists who reject Nato and think the West is too tough on Putin, the heir to the Soviet tradition. Where Attlee and Bevin were great British patriots, the Labour Party is now controlled by a group that has always – always, every single time – taken the side of Britain’s enemies. And to think those of us on the free market side of the argument used to think that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were left wing.

There are opponents of the Labour party who unwisely celebrate this state of affairs, although those who celebrated with such glee Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in 2015 and even signed up to vote for him to become leader to discredit the party, are noticeably less triumphalist now. Nervousness is justified. While it is true that the opinion polls have shown a Tory lead in every single poll conducted since this general election was called, a surge in young voter registrations, differential turnout and freak results could land Britain in hung parliament territory and even put Corbyn in Number 10.

My working expectation three days out is that this will not happen and the Conservatives are set for a working majority. My best guess is in the region of a 25 seat majority, although I see usually reliable psephologists setting a frame so wide – somewhere between a Corbyn coalition and a Tory landslide – that they might as well admit it: nobody has a clue.

If Labour does lose its fourth election in a row – having headed further left each time – the question of how Britain is to get a reasonable opposition to stand up to the Conservatives becomes urgent, however. The Tories cannot – and will not – be in power in this country in perpetuity. A monopoly on national power is not a sensible idea, as they have proven at various points in their history. Parties need a rest to replenish. At some point someone else must win and it is far better that when it happens the victors are patriots, as heirs to Attlee and Bevin or Blair and Brown, and not Corbyn and McDonnell.

For that reason alone, the Labour party is worth saving and rescuing from the far left which, at the moment, controls all the levers of internal power.

Can it be done? Few seem to think so. Millions of words have been sacrificed in worthy essays detailing how various strands of centre-left philosophy might be woven together to… oh never mind. The moderate MPs left in the party after Thursday will be urged to do… oh never mind.

The answer seems more obvious (although not easy) to me than that. The only truly viable answer is surely for several hundred thousand, moderate, patriotic, non-deranged, mainstream non-Tories in this country to join the Labour party and to steadily outnumber the Marxist infiltrators and interlopers. They can then in Constituency Labour Parties (CLPs) and at conference set about out-voting the Marxists and extremists who have invaded Labour. They’ll have to tackle the trade union leaders and among the membership pursue expulsions, as happened in the 1980s. It will take years. It will be worth it if the country gets back a mainstream opposition and potential alternative government.

Luckily, more Britons are rediscovering the habit of joining parties. The membership of the Tory party is up by more than 50% and no they are not all Ukip renegades with Union flag tea-towels wrapped round their heads in the manner of warrior dress. Just a few of them.

Those patriotic non-Tory affluent folk wondering where to put their money, now they cannot donate it to Corbyn, should launch a giant marketing push with social media and cinema advertising lasting month after month, urging moderates to join Labour. Spend millions under the banner of Real Labour. Imitate Momentum’s organisation. Match the trade unions, who have spent millions in recent years destroying the party’s middle-ground appeal.

If the solution is not reviving Labour, what other options do non-Tories have in England and Wales?

Perhaps the answer is the Liberal Democrat party, although I do not think so. Yes, theoretically the nation’s non-Tory moderates could wrest the Lib Dems back from the extremists currently running the show but they are not a potential government in-waiting. This is not all Jo Swinson’s fault. But quite a bit of it is Jo Swinson’s fault. In this election campaign, at a moment of maximum opportunity, Swinson has undertaken a kamikaze run at the country – lecturing voters on the need to cancel, not rerun, the Brexit referendum and now denying the existence of women as a biological sex, so in hock is she to the radical trans movement that is on course to collide with the good sense and practical resolve of the British working class.

No, the Liberal Democrats are not the droids you’re looking for, to paraphrase Alec Guinness in Star Wars.

An entirely new party remains possible, although the experience of the People’s Vote farce where the factions fell out in the fight for a second referendum, and in the process managed to make a harder Brexit more likely, does not bode well for such a venture.

Once the options have been whittled away, those who want the prospect of a viable non-Tory government that will avoid marmalising the market economy and not sell us out to the country’s enemies have to dig in for a historic long-haul. Non-Tories must take back the Labour party for the good of the country.