Janan Ganesh: Moderates have little hope of reclaiming Labour

Today, lots of people will end a romance, or stop fighting a terminal illness, or let an argumentative colleague have the last word, or fold a bad hand at the poker table.

“Nobody likes a quitter” but prudent capitulation is a part of life.

Junior doctors in England have saved their dignity and perhaps some lives by backing down from strike action this week. Would we rather they showed valour for its own sake?

Because our culture accords no honour to the act of giving up, the remaining moderates in Britain's Labour Party cannot be seen to entertain it. Jeremy Corbyn renewed his leadership over the weekend. The left is rampant. A reverse McCarthyism, with socialists doing the interrogation, is the daily lot of critical MPs.

And still they will not resign the Labour whip to form a new party.

That is their decision. It is easy for commentators to will a formal breakaway that others would have to perform. But the least they could do is to spare us another round of their fighting talk. They will “never surrender”, you see. The comeback “starts now”, apparently.

The people who brought you Owen Smith, pallid flatterer of Corbyn's worldview and unwanted alternative to him, demand to be reckoned with.

Their plan, such as it exists, is to outnumber the left by recruiting hundreds of thousands of pragmatic voters to the party while refreshing themselves intellectually.

The first of these projects seems fanciful; the second unnecessary.

The people they want tend not to join political parties. Their participation in real life gets in the way.

An entirely fresh movement founded on the pro-European centre-left could, perhaps, attract those who feel dispossessed by Corbyn and what is shaping up to be a hard exit from the European Union.

Refusable offer

An invitation to an old, tainted party to fight ideologues who know the difference between Leninism and anarcho-syndicalism for mastery of things called the National Executive Committee is, for many people, a refusable offer.

Keeping the wrong people out is easier than bringing the right people in.

Having proven so derelict in the first duty, the moderates should not bank on their own excellence in the second.

They cannot organise their way out of this fix and they cannot brainstorm their way out of it either.

Labour moderates have an unhealthy relationship with abstract thought.

They do too much of it without getting any better at it. They believe that earthly electoral success always flows from prior victory in the meta-world of ideas.

In Smith's second-hand leftism they saw proof of their own intellectual fatigue. So expect some working papers over the next year, with names like Towards a Renewed Social Democracy and findings – be a bit tougher on immigration, for example – that any sentient adult with access to the news could have drafted for them in advance.

It makes you wonder what miracles of thought they believe the Tories have produced to warrant the past century or two of electoral domination.

Conservatives do not think themselves to power and Corbyn did not think himself to the top of the Labour Party. He offers people of great ideological certainty the feeling of communion with the like-minded.

It is what American author Philip Roth called the "ecstasy of sanctimony" and it cannot be defeated by analytic rigour.

If this reads like a counsel of despair, it should. There is a reasonable chance, and it becomes stronger by the day, that Gordon Brown will turn out to have been the last Labour prime minister.

Even if the rebels dislodge Corbyn and install one of their own, the public will remember their party as one that voted for the hard left twice in as many years.

There are such things as lost causes. There is something to be said for giving up and starting again.

They will do no such thing, of course. They will insult our intelligence by talking up a mass harvest of new centrist members and fall back on the wheezing old line they always quote when their steadfastness is in doubt.

Deranged line

In 1960, during another struggle with the left,

Hugh Gaitskell

, the Labour leader at the time, said he would “fight, fight and fight again to save the party we love”.

So much of Labour’s internal culture is contained in that magnificent and deranged line.

In the normal world, you are not meant to love a political party.

It is not your family. It is a machine with a function: in Labour’s case, the material improvement of working people’s lives through parliamentary means.

If it is broken, fix it. If it cannot be fixed, build a new one.

Sentimentality made Labour moderates stick with leaders they should have culled.

It made them open their party to the wider left. And it keeps them in a fight they cannot win.

– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016