British Labour’s crisis will one day turn to desolation

A gentle reminder: many Britons have no idea what "Zionism" or "anti-Semitism" mean. Some will think Israel is an Arab country – it sounds as exotic as, say, Jordan – or confuse it with Palestine, which they probably assume to be a state. As for where "Jewishness" fits in, expect some confusion on that one as well.

This is a corrective, not a jibe. Respectable citizens with jobs, friends and straight priorities should be excused a haziness about remote events they cannot sway, like the banker from American Psycho who curses the slaughter of "like, tons of Israelis" – in Sri Lanka. Those of us who pore over world affairs as though we have our thumb on the scales are the oddities.

It does mean that the Labour party will not suffer for its apparent inhospitality to Jews just yet. Its performance in this Thursday's local and devolved elections will not be much worse for the spectacle of former London mayor Ken Livingstone reviewing Hitler's early work and testing the faint line between hate for a state and hate for the race it was founded to home. This episode should not wash over voters but, for the time being, it will.

Under Corbyn

The same is true of the technical shambles of

Jeremy Corbyn

as a political performer. And of Labour’s pacifist tilt under his watch. And of its disarray on economics. And of the cold war between the parliamentary party and the bolshier grassroots.

Voters sense these things, but only in the way you sense a bird flapping in your peripheral vision. They are not focused. It is too early in the parliament. None of it impinges on them. There is a bumbling government to bait. To many voters, Labour’s pathologies are, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, a contained squall in a faraway place.

They will worry about it when they have to, but they will worry about it. Almost without their knowledge, clues are building at the back of their minds that Labour under Corbyn has become unmoored from the sensible country they live in. By 2020, these will hover to the front of their minds and they will vote appropriately, dealing the party a rout from which there is no promise of recovery.

This is the rhythm of a parliament: voters make a snap judgment of the political leaders, mentally tune out for five years save the occasional scrap of news, and then, in time for the general election, tune back in to go over evidence that mostly firms up their original instinct.

We are in that middle lull. The 30 per cent that Labour still scores in the polls is both historic in its awfulness at this point of the cycle and unrealistically flattering. Deduct seven points for a truer picture of its destiny in 2020.

What feels like a crisis will not fully register in electoral outcomes for years yet, and certainly not on Thursday, when victory in London should cloak failures elsewhere and give Corbyn his told-you-so moment. The sun has not even dawned yet on Labour’s landscape of desolation.

When it does, recriminations should not target the hard left, which is only what it has always been, but the party “mainstream” for decades of forbearance. All parties brook too much nonsense on their fringes, but Labour is something else.

To anyone willing to see, Livingstone's stewardship of the Greater London Council marked him out as a liability 30 years ago. When Tony Blair tried to keep him off the Labour ticket for mayor in 2000, members flouted their leader's better judgment.

And it is not just a London thing. Ask Labour grandees how their party plays ethnic politics in northern English towns, and it is obvious that they do not know or wish to know.

As for Corbyn, he should not have been in a position to become Labour leader because he should not have been a Labour MP. The obvious disqualifiers were his politics (a pacifism that equivocates on terror) and his devotion to voting against his own party.

Founding Labour

The Labour Party was founded to improve the material condition of working people through parliamentary means. It does not reject capitalism or war in principle.

If these standards are loosened to include men as strident as Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, then strays from the Green Party, the Socialist Workers and other deservedly marginal concerns were always going to try their luck.

A party should be open and heterodox. It should not encompass everything. Decades-old failures of political hygiene brought the Labour Party to its present fix. Its consolation is that things could be, and will be, much worse.

– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016)