Re-arranging the Deckchairs

Three months or so after Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn appointed his initial Shadow Cabinet, already an upheaval is under way as that entity is being reshuffled at this very moment.Some has already happened, no doubt more is to come. A running 'blog is being run here.

As many expected, this has become an exercise in removing at least some of those who voted against the Dear Leader's wishes in the free vote (i.e. not Whipped) on military intervention in Syria – although the initial perceived threat to Hilary Benn (who made the strongest case for intervention, from the Labour side of the Commons) was later dismissed but has today re-appeared.

My feeling is that he has to go if the Corbyn leadership stance is not to be weakened, especially during this reshuffle. We shall find out this afternoon!

Barnsley East MP Michael Dugher has written about what he and others have termed a 'revenge reshuffle', calling it neither good politics nor the supposed Corbyn 'new politics'. He is right – and in fact his piece is (perhaps surprisingly) well worth a read, though one does need to grit one's teeth when reading the predictable references to the supposedly 'wicked Tories' and just ride over all of that.

However, the point of it was – as Dan Hodges has long been aware, and has written about – for Corbyn to stamp his personal authority on his leadership of the party, and in the process eliminate most if not all of the significant dissent that had been occurring in recent times. It is useful to read Dan's piece to realise just how effective this has been.

This is not to say that the whole was handled well, especially by 'Jez' himself – unless his intention was to produce the exact side-effects that Iain Martin documents here. As one sometimes finds when looking at something sideways-on, there might have been a deliberate purpose to handling all this the way he has done, camouflaged by the broad perception that he was botching it as usual. Perhaps yes, perhaps no...

Overall, this is a moment in the Labour party's long history that will be marked as a turning point, one way or another, and whether it survives as a viable influence could very well be being determined right now. That old saying about 're-arranging the deckchairs on The Titanic' springs to mind: whatever is done on the inside, without regard to the world beyond, will make no difference to the party's sinking below the political waves.

Just the Business!

I have been thinking about the shift away from central government funding for councils – which is a good change as it will remove the historic tendency of certain-flavour governments in particular to manipulate the funding formula (along with 'tweaks' and suchlike) to favour those councils their party runs – and how it will affect us here in Medway, Kent.

The change to retention by councils of Business Rates in their entirety, instead of a large chunk of those funds going to central government for re-distribution, as has been the case for decades, makes local government much more truly 'local' and less susceptible to (largely-hidden from public view) control from Westminster and Whitehall.

It will, however, necessitate sufficient business rates income to make up the difference, and perhaps could even exceed the original overall council income including Council Tax revenues. Not all communities or council areas as a whole have the same level of local businesses as, say, a typical London borough or other notably commercial area.

Here in Medway, we do have a lot of business, from retail (two shopping centres, dozens of shopping parades, several standalone shops & stores, plus a few retail parks) via offices to a good chunk of commercial and industrial businesses.

Apart from all the industrial and similar enterprises on the Hoo Peninsula, especially at Grain and by Hoo St Werburgh, we also have Gillingham Business Park, Medway City Estate, Rochester Airport Industrial Estate, Second & Third Avenues in Luton, and the Knight Road area of Strood.

We also have a considerable tourism sector, primarily but not exclusively in Rochester.

 

Overall we should be set fair to pull our own weight, and once we are settled in to the new arrangements we might well find we are much happier in this regard than we have been for many years, ever since the Blair government really started manipulating the grant funding they controlled back then, which was the largest chunk of income that council's received.

 

Readers might not be aware that, for example, the very similar to us (in council terms and needs) Brighton & Hove received over £50 million more than Medway in central government grant every year. They, of course, were a Labour-run council.

 

Such gerrymandering will not be possible from 2020, so expect Labour to find ways to complain about this change being 'unfair', 'discriminatory', or one of their other favourite labels for things they don't like. In this case, it will be because the councils they run will have to perform much better than many of them have tended to endemically, and they will no longer be bailed out.

 

Interestingly we saw an example of that here in Medway when Labour ran our council's finances some 16 or 17 years ago. The council was bailed out by the then Labour government because their local bods messed up hugely – even delaying paying bills until after the end of the financial year – and needed several million Pounds.

 

Their replacements have consistently produced balanced budgets ever since (though it wasn't easy with that gerrymandered funding I mentioned above) so it could have been done by a competent council administration – and that is what will, over time, come out once these new funding arrangements are fully in place.

 

A lot of Labour-run councils are going to come under the spotlight, and their profligacy and incompetence will become very public. They will have to either shape up or in all probability be voted out of control of those councils. Thus much of the rot within local councils will be excised, along with its subsidy by the rest of us – and that will be good for everybody in the long term, also in restoring confidence in local government.

Divide and Not Rule

Further to the Corbyn/Labour situation, this short item at Political Betting shows how dire things already are. Bearing in mind that it was the public who overwhelmingly selected Corbyn to be the new party leader, not Labour MPs, and it is that same pool of people who are polled for both leader approval polling and voting intention surveys, this makes it even worse than could otherwise have been the case. That initial broad support in August/September is no longer there.

Though, as it says at the linked post, "things can happen", and there is a long time to go until the next scheduled General Election in May 2020, the conclusion at the end is unambiguous: another Conservative majority seems almost certain.

In fact, it might not work out that way, but unless there is a drastic change to Labour, they at least look set to become either the third or possibly even fourth largest party group in the House of Commons after that election.

It is unlikely that Labour will regain any of their former seats in Scotland, which is a crucial factor; indeed the SNP might well take the remaining three seats north of the border, making them possibly the third largest group in the Commons, with UKIP (if they are still around by then) gaining a large number of frankly undeserved seats via the back door, as the only remaining perceived to be non-establishment Britain-wide party.

I hear that UKIP are doing particularly well in Wales at the moment, so watch out for signs of this growing over the months and years to come. I personally think that their tactics there will continue to bring dividends for a while, but will falter after next May if they can't turn that into seats anywhere, or in subsequent years as more and more council seats in Wales come up for re-election.

An alternative scenario – and the one I have been anticipating for a while now as being the more likely, despite what some insiders are saying right now – is an SDP-like split and a new party being formed. My thinking is that this is most likely to occur soon after next May's council and police & crime commissioner elections if (as expected) Labour do at all badly.

This new party would probably hold most of the seats that the immediate defection takes with it, come May 2020, and could pick up a number of the remaining Labour MPs' seats as well, reducing the latter group to a very small number of members. This would be a healthy thing for British politics, both national and local, as again a Communist totalitarian-tendency movement will be marginalised, just as has always happened in the past – and that is what they are looking set to become exclusively.

Okay, the whole of Labour is essentially 'mild Marxist', tempered and slowed by its long-standing Fabian practices, but has generally been manageable and has never quite completely wrecked our nation – though it has been close once or twice, including just a very few years ago. A Corbyn-led (and, essentially, selected) set of Labour-labelled candidates is a very different proposition!

Interestingly, all of what has been happening with Labour has been more-or-less inevitable from the moment the Conservatives formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, back in May 2010.
A very few people around these parts might remember that I have been smiling as I told them in years gone by something of what I expected to follow over the period ahead; and most of that has now panned out – actually slightly better than I had predicted back then.

It was so easy to predict, simply because of the underlying nature of the Labour party, its rules, and both its higher echelons and the ordinary and Union-based members – and there is much more yet to come, equally predictable!

Tipping Point

Even a Lefty writing in The Independent has this weekend indicated that Jeremy Corbyn needs 'to be got rid of' as the headline puts it.

The trouble is that it can't be done. Anyone who knows how the Labour Party constitution and procedures operate will already be well aware that it is virtually impossible to topple the party leader. The leader has to step down, realistically, and that generally happens only after a General Election failure – as Ed[ward] Miliband did after his such failure just six months ago.

On top of that, with the huge support the current Dear Leader received when elected to that position – and still receives even today, if not to quite the same degree – both among the Labour party membership and around the country, it would not go down well if anyone were even to attempt to oust him, whether or not it succeeded.

Indeed, the mere attempt would not only impact Labour's support and votes in future elections, it would almost certainly lead to an unrecoverable split and the party breaking into two – something like what the 'Gang of Four' did some thirty years ago when they too broke away from Labour and created the Social Democratic Party (SDP).

This would split the existing Labour vote even more than if Mr Corbyn were to be left in place and his leadership never challenged, and make neither resulting party a strong parliamentary force, as each would have only a few dozen MPs at best – and those would no doubt be representing their own party's heartlands almost exclusively (there might be the odd fluke win for one or the other) so not representative of the majority of the electorate.

 

There are several other bad things that will probably happen, but that will be the overriding consideration, I can well imagine.

Perversely, therefore, it is probably best for the party to leave things as they are, grit their teeth and wait it out until the next General Election in May 2020. They are simply going to write that one off in advance – and I suspect that privately many have already done so.

 

They can meanwhile, in the shadows, and starting right now, be devising and creating mechanisms that they can simply drop into place immediately there is a change, ready to begin re-building the party's electoral (and perhaps other!) fortunes immediately after that almost certain total disaster, rather than losing months during the leadership election that will follow. Remember: it took more than four months to elect Jeremy Corbyn.

They must therefore hope that, after the 2020 election, Corbyn will then do what Ed-M did earlier this year and step down of his own volition (or perhaps with encouragement from party colleagues and others) as soon as the scale of the inevitable rout becomes clear, and certainly once the Conservatives pass the finishing line (326 seats) in the election results.

It is the only way they can now proceed, realistically, in a kind of damage limitation exercise that will last some 54 months.

 

They made their bed – no-one else imposed it on them – and now they must lie in it!

Through at Two

Again I am saying 'months' here, and once more looking at Jeremy Corbyn's career (such as it will turn out to be) as Labour party leader.

It is now two months since he became the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition party, and with a struggle has now even become a member of the Privy Council – which he is required to be in his position, but avoided once (on a flimsy pretext) and apparently didn't conform fully to the accepted protocols on the second occasion – but got away with that.

Rather than present a catalogue of causes of his upcoming (and necessary) departure from his new position, I think this by Iain Martin covers most of the bases, and is thus useful reading.

In practice, there is no reason to believe that Mr Corbyn will either step down from his party leadership position any time soon, or be successfully ousted. It could drag on for years, helped by the Labour party's own rules and procedures. Nevertheless, it should be noted that this was the month when his position became permanently untenable and he was now clearly an irreversible detraction from Labour's electoral and broader public standing.

The longer he remains, the more the public will learn of the true nature of Labour, usually hidden beneath a veneer of apparent respectability, so I am hoping it really does take years to oust him.