The Labour Party is far from dead

In 1897, a newspaper mistakenly reported that the novelist known as Mark Twain was dead.  He replied that the report of his death was an exaggeration.

This weekend, at least two comment writers have argued that the Labour Party is either dead or at least in serious trouble.  I'm not sure that I find either one of them convincing.

Dominic Sandbrook reflects on how different the Labour Party of today is from the one which was launched in 1900.  He adds that:

No party has a divine right to exist. Exactly 100 years ago, the Liberals were the biggest game in town. They had been in power for ten years. ... But then, when the Liberals fell from power, they never stopped falling. Within ten years, they went from being the party of government to the third party.

I could make many comments here.  First, we cannot know for certain what was in the minds of the founders of the Labour Party.  (As an aside, what was founded in 1900 was not strictly the Labour Party, but rather the Labour Representation Committee.  It was a loose association of interest groups, which did not call itself the Labour Party until 1906, and which did not have its own membership until 1918.)

Maybe the early members of the Labour Party would have admired Jeremy Corbyn, or maybe not.  I will not pretend to know, although I will observe the fact that the first Labour government expressed support for the government of Stalin, even though Stalin was unelected.

Second, the fall from grace of the Liberal Party resulted from several factors, perhaps the most important of which was a split in the party at the 1918 general election. There has been speculation in the press recently that many Labour MPs who dislike Jeremy Corbyn might break away from the party, and I will comment on that when it happens.

Sandbrook notes that Mr Corbyn represents a political tradition that has never come close to winning power in this country, but my third point has to be that every Labour government has to some extent been guilty of great cruelty and injustice.  The warmongering governments led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are perhaps the worst examples of this.  Cruelty may win elections, but it is hardly a good advertisement for what passes as mainstream politics.

By contrast, Peter Hitchens argues that:

Labour cannot win an Election whoever leads it. It is dead in Scotland and the South of England.

At the most recent local elections in Scotland, in 2012, the Labour Party won 394 seats - almost as many as the Scottish National Party, and more than double the number won by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats put together.  I don't call that dead.

The success of the main opposition party depends in large part on the popularity of the party in government, and also to some extent on the popularity of the third party.  If a general election were to be called any time soon, then I would expect the Conservatives to retain power, but that situation may change.

Even if - as currently looks likely - the Conservatives retain power at the next general election, then the Labour Party could still emerge with more than two hundred seats, making it easily the second largest party in the House of Commons.  Jeremy Corbyn would by then be in his seventies, and would be unlikely to want to continue leading his party much longer.  It is too early to say who might emerge to replace him as leader, and so I will continue to regard all obituaries of the Labour Party as premature.

Related previous posts include:
The murder of Jeremy Corbyn