The exclusion of the left

 The news that Graham Bash has been threatened with auto-exclusion is quite revealing of the motivations of the current purge. The grounds for auto-exclusion provided by the Party are flimsy: his signature appeared on an open letter from Labour Against the Witch-hunt, before that group was banned from the Party. Far more significant than Bash’s supposed offence is his history in the Party. Bash has been synonymous for decades with LabourBriefing, a key publication on the Party’s left which, in the 1980s, acted as an organising focus for the grassroot forces behind the left ascendancy in the Greater London Council. He is a leading figure in the Labour Representation Committee, currently acting as that organisation’s political secretary. There have been few initiatives on the Party’s left in recent years in which Bash has not been involved, and he is associated with support for MPs such as John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn. This, then, is the attempted exclusion of a central figure in the Party’s activist left. It is quite deliberate, and speaks volumes about the attitude of Labour’s bureaucracy towards that left: they don’t want us in the Party.

To understand these exclusions you have to understand the mindset of the Labour right, who dominate the Party’s bureaucracy and are calling the shots over auto-exclusion. At the forefront of their approach to politics is electability. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, it would be a perverse member of a political party who didn’t want to get that party elected. But for a section the right, electability becomes something like an end in itself, denuded of political ambition. Moreover, the major threat to Labour’s electability, from this perspective, is the Party’s left. ‘Elections’, as Hilary Benn once confidently put it to me, ‘are won from the centre’. The electorate, which is treated as a static mass of opinion, is mostly situated in the political centre, and is suspicious of those who stray too far from it. So the Corbyn leadership was an electoral disaster (the 2017 result will need to be explained away somehow), and the presence within the Labour Party of left-wingers, to whose existence attention can be drawn by the media and by political opponents, is an electoral liability. A leaner, more centrist, Labour Party is the key to winning elections.

There is a lot wrong with this view of the political world, not least that it cannot account for the millions of votes lost by Labour, led from the right, in the past two decades. But it is important to realise that the view is a dominant one in places that matter in the Labour Party. The left is viewed as a barrier to victory, and it must be dealt with. The current threat to the Labour left is, then, existential.