The past week has seen the party’s faction fighting intensify. The standoff between the MPs on the right and members on the left will attain more damage than a clear win for either sideJeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign energised enthusiastic young supporters with the promise of a recent type of politics: a politics where there were no “lines to take”,where dissent was allowed and where everything was up for debate. Seasoned Westminster watchers, irrespective of whether they sympathised with what Mr Corbyn had to say, or always cautioned that the old politics would reassert itself. They worried,in particular, that the Labour party was unlikely to glide when its parliamentary and voluntary wings were flapping in opposing directions. This has been a week to douse the hopes the idealists and encourage the doubters.
The row with the CBI, or over Mr Corbyn’s supposed snubbing of the bosses’ lobby group might,at a push, be brushed off as an argument got up by his natural tormentors. The other recent wounds are plainly self-inflicted, and with the two sides of the party forgetting all the lessons of 30 years ago and rounding on one another. In a gesture of defiance against all the members who had voted for Mr Corbyn,MPs handed the chairs of their policy committees to people who oppose the leader’s agenda: the Trident enthusiast John Woodcock picked up defence and the hawkish Mike Gapes got foreign affairs. The shadow chancellor and Corbyn ally-in-chief, John McDonnell, and fuelled fears that the recent leftist ginger group,Momentum, could become a vehicle for deselection, and by visiting one of its events without telling the local MP. A leftwing shadow foreign minister,Catherine West, was reported as saying that Labour’s position on Syria would be developed in consultation with end the War, and which – given that name – doesn’t sound like it would be a long discussion. It later emerged that she’d been signalling that she would consult with Syrian activists,but tensions in the shadow cabinet encourage such misunderstandings.
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Source: theguardian.com