Why Field & Co. must be deselected.

Reading this New Statesman piece about the deselection of MPs Graham Stringer, Frank Field, and Kate Hoey, it struck me that there is a much better way to understand most things about the Labour Party than you are usually offered.

Here goes. The most important thing Labour people are disagreeing about is which of two strategies to pursue. You might think of it as something like the WW2 debate about whether to concentrate on Germany or the Pacific, if you enjoy historical hyperbole. The first can be summed up as “Stop Brexit!” and the second as “Tories Out!” Handily, you can get them both on a placard.

The first strategy is predicated on the fact that Brexit is the top issue, and therefore the priority is to do something about it. The something ranges between reversing it entirely through a second referendum (or not) and steering it into a safe EEA-type relationship. Having successfully achieved this, the argument runs, Labour would be well placed to win a subsequent election. Also, it’s possible that losing control of the Brexit process would cause the fall of the government and bring the election about. It’s worth noting that a lot of politicians seem to think an election would follow close on the heels of an agreement.

The second strategy’s supporters hold that Brexit is a symptom of Tories, and not the only one, and therefore the priority is to topple the government. There is a range of opinion, again, from those who believe that Brexit is not even the worst symptom of Tories, through those who simply think you need to be in government to do anything useful about it, over to those who believe that bringing in a Labour government with a strong program would be enough in itself to address the demand for change that got us here, and therefore create the space needed to stay in Europe.

This last almost amounts to a third strategy, or rather a synthesis of the two. Zoe Williams makes a cogent case for this in Prospect. It’s worth noting that the European Commission side has occasionally suggested they would be more sympathetic to some other government than this one.

Sometimes, the two strategies conflict. At other times, they converge.

The essential conflict would arise in the event that the Government signed something that is broadly acceptable. The problem would now be getting it through the Commons past the Tory Brexiters. If you hold to the first strategy, you should seriously consider giving the Government a hand, at least to the extent of calling a free vote. If you hold to the second, though, the conclusion would be to send all the Labour MPs through the opposition lobby to kill it and hopefully bring about a general election.

Although I personally lean towards “Tories first” or rather “Stop Brexit via Tories first”, I do think the possibility of the UK being unable to sign or ratify an eventual agreement is a serious threat that needs more attention. It seems to have become an assumption that if the Government wins a division by relying on opposition votes, the prime minister must resign. Nobody wants to discuss this, but we are not being well served by this pseudo-American convention.

We’re not there yet, though, and in the meantime the convergence of the two strategies tends to dominate, because the government is still bringing things to the Commons that are unacceptable to Labour and to enough Tories that the votes are winnable. On the customs union vote, both strategies would give you the same tactical advice, as winning the vote would advance both aims.

The conclusion, then, is just that the floppy five need to be deselected because they have managed to let down both sides of the party. They have betrayed the hard-Remain centrists as much as they failed the Corbynites. There isn’t a Labour pool they haven’t shat in, and that’s why they need to go. If you can’t show up to vote against the Tories or against their most cherished and radical project, in what way are you even in Labour?

14 Comments on "Why Field & Co. must be deselected."


  1. Well said.

    Been really surprised at the weird outpouring for Field in the press, b/c in fact he has, through he career, dumped on everyone.

    Also, really important point further up, assumptions like “if the Government wins a division by relying on opposition votes, the prime minister must resign” need to *Get In The Sea.* The whole story of both US and UK politics in recent times is assumptions like that never work out, because the people in power have no shame and they’d like to hang on to power.

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  2. “The most important thing Labour people are disagreeing about is which of two strategies to pursue. You might think of it as something like the WW2 debate about whether to concentrate on Germany or the Pacific, if you enjoy historical hyperbole. The first can be summed up as “Stop Brexit!” and the second as “Tories Out!” Handily, you can get them both on a placard.”

    But, wait, that doesn’t work at all. That implies that “Labour people” would all like both those things to happen, and are simply disagreeing about which to concentrate on first. The “Germany First” faction still regarded Japan as an enemy that needed defeating, after all. They just thought it was more important to beat Germany before switching fire.

    But many “Labour people” actually think that Stop Brexit! is a bad idea, full stop. They didn’t hide their views on this topic; they wrote about them in the Guardian.

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    1. Can report confirmed sightings of these people too.
      There was a fella in comments on Alex’s previous post. Although as yet he’s not got beyond copy and paste.

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    2. Except I think that those people are outnumbered by those who put “Stop Brexit!” first, and are agnostic – at best – to “Tories Out!” if the alternative is “Corbyn In”. They don’t hide their views, they are fully represented across the media.

      Not so say that there aren’t those who think ‘Stop Brexit’ is a bad idea.

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      1. I think there’s still a cohort that’s somewhere in the vicinity of “well, PMs can be replaced, though not as easily as in Australia” while thinking that Whatever Brexit Happens shits the bed so that it can’t be unshat for fifty years.

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      2. “Except I think that those people are outnumbered by those who put “Stop Brexit!” first, and are agnostic – at best – to “Tories Out!” if the alternative is “Corbyn In”. ”

        That’s a strong statement. I suppose it depends how you define “Labour people” but 32% of Labour voters in 2017 said they had voted Leave. So you really reckon that 32% of Labour voters – as in, people who voted in a way that would have made Corbyn PM – would actually rather have May than Corbyn, or at best don’t really care?

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  3. Can you explain “pseudo-American convention”?

    I would have said a distinguishing feature of the US system is that there’s no escape and everything grinds on until the next scheduled election almost no matter what happens.

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    1. I think he’s vaguely associating it with the Hastert Rule, which says that nothing gets to the floor of the House for a vote without the support of a majority of Republicans.

      And I think it’s slightly misrepresenting the situation. Look at it this way: it seems quite sensible that a party leader who can’t get her party behind her on an important vote should resign as party leader. She isn’t really leading her party any more. It’s just that, in our system, you can’t really resign from one post without resigning from the other.

      Are there many examples from, say, the last hundred years of a prime minister with a majority in Parliament having to rely on opposition votes and still staying on?

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      1. Yeah, the Hastert Rule is really just one party addressing its internal dynamics in one chamber, i.e. the assumption that no matter how ideologically pure you are there’s always someone crazier waiting in the wings next time there’s a primary, so it’s better to kick the can down the road than rely upon opposition votes to get things passed. That can only happen in the weird American cosplay-republic where “lack of supply” is a movable feast instead of a reason for new elections.

        I do think it’s worth looking at the “Frank Field function” in post-1979 British politics — if he didn’t exist, both Labour and the Tories would want to invent him — and why that function is no longer as useful.

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  4. All this factionalism is awful and entirely their fault.
    All this shoehorning of Brexit into a factional framework is awful and entirely their fault.
    Anyone fancy giving the corpse of Blair v Brown a good kicking later on?

    Reply

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