Labour surplus row: they fight even when they agree
John McDonnell’s conference speech was a major piece of re-positioning with some calming window-dressing thrown in. It was never truly compatible with the George Osborne new emphasis on a “surplus”, which is itself a piece of positioning in the opposite direction.
George Osborne and David Cameron hope that as well as owning more political common ground (hence David Cameron’s anti-discrimination theme etc in his speech) they can shift the centre ground of British politics. Nailing a commitment to the “surplus” on the church door is not a simple re-statement of what has always been accepted but moving the argument to the right.
But the team around Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell originally judged that they’d split the Parliamentary Labour Party unnecessarily if they went for full-scale opposition to the surplus rule.
Turns out they were wrong. In recent days the shadow chancellor has heard from various non-Corbynista MPs that they think the party should oppose the surplus rule. They include Rachel Reeves, Emma Reynolds and one former MP, Ed Balls.
So the leadership realised they had more room for manoeuvre than they thought. They didn’t want to be out-flanked on the left by the SNP and the Greens and now they won’t be. After a ring round of the shadow cabinet, which revealed no outright opposition (though some distress at the general mess), the policy was duly announced.
Some claim John McDonnell hadn’t quite thought through the surplus rule fully. Allies say that’s not true and that he simply thought it a contemptible piece of game-playing by George Osborne and that he was planning to ridicule it in the debate.
In some ways the bigger story here is not that Labour MPs have found some common ground they can (right now, unusually) unite around. It is the tone and content of last night’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party and what it foreshadows.
Jeremy Corbyn’s team believes there was a coordinated move by the right to ask awkward questions, one after another. “There is a strategy,” one close to the leader said.
But talk to some on the right and they think it’s a strategy that’s not under control. MP Ian Austin was thought to have over-stepped the mark even by like-minded MPs when he compared the current leadership to a “student union president”. Jeremy Corbyn didn’t rise to the bait but that, to some in the room, left him looking weak.
One MP from the right said he came away wondering whether centre left MPs might despair of both sides. He also said that for the first time he thinks some on the right are just beginning to toy with splitting – “in a tiny part of their mind… no more than that … but last night will have exacerbated it”.
The thing to remember is that last night’s acrimonious PLP meeting happened over a policy position (opposition to the surplus rule) where they all (or nearly all) pretty much agree.
Labour has much bigger divisions coming down the track towards it, such as Trident. And it has, in George Osborne, someone who will ruthlessly try to exploit and worsen those divisions. And it has some party rule changes to deal with, starting at November’s National Executive Committee meeting. And when Labour discusses its rules the hackles truly rise.
Many in the PLP think that Jeremy Corbyn’s team is going to dig in with constitutional changes that entrench his policies and open up the possibility of challenges to their position as MPs. You find anti-Corbyn MPs who rail against the “vacuum in the leadership” and the lack of any ability to run a party in the media spotlight on a day to day basis. But in the same breath those same MPs sometimes worry that they are about to be out-flanked by in a battle for the party’s soul.
They see the launch of “Momentum”, the action group for registered supporters of the Corbyn leadership campaign, as a party within a party. They worry that the rule changes being worked on will short-circuit the National Policy Forum and allow Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters to shift policy fast in his direction.
And they worry about re-selection and local associations now heavily peopled with Corbyn supporters moving on them.
As for the Corbyn team, they see plots everywhere, distrust the party machine and are convinced they need to move quickly before right comes back to get them.
UPDATE
At the end of today’s shadow cabinet, John McDonnell thanked colleagues at the table for their comradely contributions. One present in the room said he thought the shadow chancellor had mistaken the mood a bit – “they were saying ‘must do better’.”
Tomorrow up to 20-something Labour MPs, including some frontbenchers, are telling whips they’ll abstain on the three-line whip on George Osborne’s surplus rule.
Quite what the leadership will do about that isn’t clear. Jeremy Corbyn was a freestyle rebelling Olympic medal winner. Practice suggests tomorrow’s frontbench dissenters should be sacked. Will they be? No-one seems to know.
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