It will be no surprise to many when I say that the Labour Party, the major left-wing party in the House of Commons, is currently going through a pretty serious crisis. The Labour Party was a party set up in 1900 to represent the voice of the common man, and later the common woman, in contrast to the Liberal and Conservative parties, whose support mainly came from the middle and upper classes. However, at the moment there is a real possibility of a major split in the party. I hope to explain in two parts what is happening in the Labour party and how Labour’s current crisis may work out.
For the last ten months, the party has been led by Jeremy Corbyn. As I explained in my last article on Jeremy Corbyn, he came to win the Labour leadership contest last year against everybody’s expectations. This is because his political positions, considered very left-wing, placed him on the fringes of the party, which on the hole is centre-left. It is thought that he managed to win because thousands of young socialists, as well as older socialists, joined the party during the contest so as to vote for him, bringing the Labour’s membership much further to the left than before.
Many Members of Parliament (MPs) have been unhappy with Corbyn’s leadership of the party from day one. However, in light of the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU), in which Labour failed to convince a significant number of its voters to vote to remain in the EU, many Labour MPs are saying they see it as clear evidence that Jeremy Corbyn is not the right man to lead the party into the next general election. In a matter of days after the referendum most of his top team, his shadow cabinet, decided to resign from their posts (whilst remaining as Labour MPs). These include prominent figures in the Labour party, such as Angela Eagle, Maria Eagle and Chris Bryant. The resignations began after prominent Labour MP, Hilary Benn, was sacked by Corbyn after he told him that he had no confidence in his leadership of the party.
And only a few days after the resignations started, there was a ‘no confidence’ vote held by the Parliamentary Labour Party (made up of the party’s MPs) which formally declared that the vast majority of Labour MPs had no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn as their leader. 172 MPs voted in favour of the no confidence motion, only 40 MPs against it. In other words, Corbyn no longer has the support of 80% of his Parliamentary party.
In spite of this Corbyn said that he would not resign as the vote has no practical weight to it, it didn’t mean that he had to resign, and because he was democratically elected to his post by the membership. In other words, he will only quit if the party membership vote to replace him in another leadership election.
Image: Photo: JLPC / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons
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