Let me begin with a political fantasy. I suspect it was shared by many in the early months of 2020, after Corbyn had been replaced by Keir Starmer as Labour leader and a leaked internal report had disclosed the extent to which party officials had tried to sabotage Corbyn’s leadership—and after Starmer settled a libel claim with them, even though lawyers had advised the party had a strong case. The political fantasy went something like this. Corbyn, now a humble backbencher, seizes the initiative and leverages his considerable political capital to lead a small group of left mps out of the Parliamentary Labour Party and in doing so overcomes at a stroke the huge start-up barriers to a new political party which our firstpastthepost system imposes. In the first instance, such a breakaway would be a pole of attraction for a significant chunk of the membership who were inspired to join Labour as a result of Corbyn’s leadership (let us say, 100,000 people).

There was in this period a window of opportunity for the new party to eclipse the hapless Lib Dems as the third uk-wide party at Westminster in both number of mps—the Lib Dems have eleven—and possibly membership base. It would establish scale, and with scale comes a presence in the mass media—or at least sections of it—and esteem and credibility (not with the establishment, but with the people). It would be in a position to change the terms of the debate, shift the parameters of political conversations, just as the Corbyn leadership managed to do in a number of areas, in their best moments. In short, it would be in a position to engage in the battle for hegemony, for moral and political leadership, something which most of the Labour Party for most of its history, has been singularly unwilling to understand or contemplate. Just as importantly, the new political formation would have solved the psychological problem that bedevils small left-wing groupuscules of attracting people to a project that seems condemned to remain on the margins of public discourse. The new set-up would almost certainly have encouraged the more adventurous unions, such as Unite, under the leadership of Len McCluskey, to begin at the very least to diversify their political funding portfolio and unlock additional resources to help it grow. The result could have been electrifying in my view.

But it remained a fantasy. A collective inertia prevailed, a lack of independent initiative and agency, a lack of leadership and a failure to learn the lessons that the recent history lays before us. A veil has been cast over events by those who ought to have the greatest interest in scrutinizing what has occurred. Even the subsequent suspension of Corbyn from the plp in October 2020, on the most spurious grounds imaginable, did little to disturb the fundamental assumptions.footnote¹ ‘Stay and fight’ came the cry from Labour mp John McDonnell, formerly Shadow Chancellor, as many ripped up their party cards in disgust. ‘Unite against the real enemy, the Tories’, cried the left as it appealed for Corbyn’s suspension to be rescinded, reduced to begging for re-admittance to a house that does not want it.

Nothing it seems has been learned. That the Starmer leadership is more bent on crushing the left in its own party than taking on the Tories and Liberal Democrats is barely discussed. The analogy would be the Scottish Nationalists offering the party leadership to fervent unionists. Post-Corbyn, the left bows its head and hands back the keys, as acquiescent to the status quo as the Labour Party’s tradition of Labourism has been vis-à-vis the institutions of the British state.footnote² Clinging to Labour or orbiting around it guarantees political paralysis. Yet the absence of a debate on the strategic lessons to be learned is not something the left can afford.

Corbyn’s defeat was not some swing in the pendulum of alternating power between the left and the right. Corbynism did not represent the beginnings of a revivification of the Labour Party as a progressive force. Instead it was both a last-gasp attempt to wrest the party away from the neoliberal trajectory it has been pursuing with ever greater velocity since the rise of Blair in the 1990s and a definitive historical experiment, designed to answer the burning question: can the left win inside the Labour Party? Could the party be transformed into a vehicle for socialist advance, having elected its most left-wing leader since George Lansbury in the early 1930s? The answer is now in, and it is flatly, I think, a resounding No. There is unlikely to be a next time, but even if there were, the same fundamental weakness in any such project would reappear as abundantly and as fatally as it did for the Corbyn experiment: the left cannot fight and win against the political establishment and the media establishment, still less the concentrated power of capital beyond those guardians of the social order, while it is also fighting the right-wing majority in the upper ranks of its own party.

That ‘right’—a term which we must shortly abandon for an analysis more attuned to the heterogeneity of forces at work—inside the party now inhabits the same ideological universe as the Conservatives (and the Liberal Democrats) and feels happier with the Tories in government than with Labour under a left-wing leadership. Blair articulated the collective sentiments of the Labour right very clearly during the 2015 Labour leadership campaign, after Corbyn unexpectedly became the front runner: ‘Let me make my position clear: I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it.’footnote³ And neither, it turned out, would much of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Thus electoral sabotage, to engineer a shift back to power for the right following defeat, is a default strategy that will eventually succeed against a traumatized party membership. And the willingness to force it through will never change because a breach with the social-democratic past is baked in. The right’s commanding position within the party apparatus gives it all the tools it needs to mount blocking and sabotage campaigns.

A leader such as Corbyn can never launch the honest conversation about the past history of the party that is required or articulate a thoroughgoing critique of present party practices, such as the role of Labour-controlled councils in austerity or gentrification of the cities.footnote⁴ A left-wing government, should it ever come to pass with a small majority, would immediately be held hostage by the Labour right over its legislative programme. Additionally, the plp’s attacks on the left and their smear campaigns of the leadership, magnified at every turn by a hostile media, carry much greater weight with the public than they would if they came from political opponents formally outside a left-party vehicle. Labour’s ‘broad church’ and calls for unity are always on the terms of the right; the left must accept the right’s dominance, but the same loyalty to party over factions will never be reciprocated in those brief and highly irregular moments when the left grows in strength. Something has to give. So far it has been the Labour left’s backbone.