A new book by Guardian journalist Anushka Asthana about the rise to control of Labour of the Starmerite clique reveals that Ralph Miliband was right about the reality of Labour’s Broad Church.
Asthana notes that the concern of Labour fixer McSweeney was not that Jeremy Corbyn was unelectable but precisely that he was electable. If he headed a Labour Government it would undermine the Starmerite Project which was different to that of Corbyn.
The wider point is that Britain’s electoral system brings together quite widely differing groups who might more sensibly be in different parties and then co-operate electorally or not.
Asthana writes:
McSweeney claimed that one of the key problems the group might encounter was “a Labour government” – making explicit that his concern was not whether Corbyn could win, but that if he were to become prime minister it would prevent the renewal they were focused on.
Ralph Miliband author of a history of the first six decades of the Labour Party, Parliamentary Socialism (1961) argued about the Broad Church:
Pious references to the Labour Party being a ‘broad church’ which has always incorporated many different strands of thought fail to take account of a crucial fact, namely that the ‘broad church’ of Labour only functioned effectively in the past because one side – the Right and Centre – determined the nature of the services that were to be held, and excluded or threatened with exclusion any clergy too deviant in its dissent.
The issue for McSweeney was that the Corbynites were not sitting in their traditional place in the pews at the back muttering but were actually controlling the order of service.
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