A New Party? Opportunists wait in the wings to seize upon a Lab-Con governing impasse

This weekend revealed that a number of rich donors are working on putting the pieces in place for a new political party. The revelation did not go over well, with a lot of criticism aimed at a party based on money first, and supporters second.

There is a strong impression among commentators that the plan is for a new party of neoliberalism and vague bureaucratic centrism, to unite the Blairite trend of New Labour with the Cameron and Osborne wing of the Conservative Party.

Is that really where the future of British politics lies?

Well the certainly times haven't been favourable to the Liberal Democrats, for instance, whose Orange Book wing that led them into The Coalition represents this same kind of neoliberal platform. They have largely been forgotten by the electorate - though there are more complex reasons for that.

Is a new neoliberal party the catalyst that will 'remoderate' an electorate that the 'centrists' perceive as being torn apart by the militant division between the Tories turning rightward and Labour turning leftward into Corbynist socialism?

Who would even lead such a party? Are Tony Blair and George Osborne hoping to make a dramatic political comeback? Maybe the plan is to push forward Yvette Cooper, the Labour leadership contender and figurehead of 'moderate' Labour?

This kind of party certainly seems to be a long term aim of Tony Blair, as we previously wrote about the direction he took at the helm of New Labour, steering Labour towards being a sort of big tent, middle ground, Democratic Party.

Blair and New Labour did not, however, complete their 'modernising' project. He and others tried to have things both ways - clinging to left-wing pretensions, and trade union backing and funding, even as they embraced right-wing economics - when an irreversible transformation of British politics was in their hands.

But that moment has passed. How would such a party even launch in the present climate and who could stand for them as a candidate?

The only practical route to such a party would be to rip the Labour Party in two, perhaps with some sort of agreement in place, at least in the short term, to not stand against each other - a possibility even Owen Jones has acknowledged.

The time when this might be a realistic possibility is not now, but in the aftermath of the next election if Labour do not beat the Conservatives. Would those who are anti-Corbyn leave or use the opportunity to topple him?

Whether to stand or walk is a dilemma the so-called centrists have been wrestling with. So far they have favoured staying and fighting. But with the strength of Labour's left-wing - pushing Corbyn to two leadership elections and gaining control of the party - if power isn't a prospect, then maybe the so-called centrists will see exiting as their only way to pursue their electoral agenda.

It has to be noted that new parties have little luck on the British political scene. The anti-EU movement had more success out of Parliament than breaking into it. Ripping current MPs and their seats from current parties, en masse, would increase the chance of success.

So another possibility, that might have more pull with 'moderate' Conservatives, would be for a party to launch in the aftermath of the election if Labour win only a minority government - but with more seats and votes than the Tories.

In that scenario, a new party would be able to prey on the opportunism of MPs on all sides of the House amid what would be seen as a very unstable impasse, with the Conservative Party humbled but Corbynism unable to deliver a majority.

However, there would seem to be little inspiring about a party of opportunists assembling to break an impasse. Would voters be grateful to them or see them as responsible leaders? And does such a 'party of the centre', a big tent Democratic Party, even have much of a vision to offer?

There is nothing convincing in any of this. It is still the view of The Alternative that - far more than a new party - we need political plurality and a Progressive Alliance fighting for a proportionally representative electoral system.

Response by Blair to the Chilcot report illustrates why we need a progressive alliance and the pluralism it is supports

Tony Blair in his final year as PM and leader of Labour, even as the US planned a troop surge in Iraq, four years after the initial invasion. Photograph: Blair in 2007 by Matthew Yglesias (License) (Cropped)

Last night's progressive alliance event, hosted by the Compass think tank, began with a call for progressives to take ownership of the concepts of love and hope. From all sides there was a sentiment that building a progressive future depends on reaching across boundaries and cooperating.

This could not be in starker contrast from Tony Blair's response to the release of the Chilcot Inquiry's report. Following John Chilcot's statement, introducing the report, former Prime Minister Tony Blair spent two hours giving a response and answering questions.

After apologising and accepting full responsibility, Blair sought to justify his actions. At the centre of Blair's explanation is the portrait he paints of a singular leader whose job it is to make the decisions. That is an attitude that underlines the Blair legacy.

Particularly in the Labour Party, that attitude has opened a drastic separation between the establishment and the people who support a candidate like Jeremy Corbyn. People, active political actors, feeling separated from the decision making reserved to an elite heavily embedded within the establishment and the media.

In his report Chilcot criticised the centralisation of decision making that alienated even the cabinet from the necessary information in a political system that is not, but has become increasingly, presidential. A singular leader was able to take a momentous decision, on his own authority, overruling rules and proper process on the way.

Beneath the idea of a progressive alliance is the principle of pluralism - that decisions should be made with broad consent. It is a poignant criticism of the direction of Blair and New Labour's thinking.

From John Harris - cautioning the audience that it is a priority to speak to those in the most desperate situations and address the inequalities resting upon them and feeding a hopeless view of the future - to Amina Gichinga - calling out politicians for not facing the people, not just for accountability but to build a vision of the future that includes them - the Compass event emphasised the way in which centralisation and majoritarian thinking had alienated people and left them feeling helpless.

Rebuilding trust in politics cannot be done from the top down, without reinforcing an idea of politics being something that is done by elites while the rest wait with ears pressed to the door. The progressive alliance event was adamant on that point - connecting working across party lines with the need for electoral reform and proportional representation.

What Caroline Lucas, Clive Lewis and Vince Cable accepted in their contributions is that the divisions, caused by the ambitions of singular parties to chase majorities, were damaging to the overall aims shared by progressives of all stripes.

As centralising power on the mythical decision-making leader alienates people, so might pluralism empower and energise them. If there are lessons to be learned from the Blair leadership, the Iraq War and Chilcot, it is that decisions must not be made in isolation within the corridors of power. Progressives have to expect a better, broader and more inclusive process and start living up to it.

A new realignment of the Left is underway and Proportional Representation and the Basic Income are at the core

In Castlefields arena, Natalie Bennett addresses protesters from many different movements, who came together in opposition to the Conservative government in Manchester last Autumn.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Liberal and Liberal Democrat leaders Roy Jenkins, Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy followed a course that sought to 'realign the Left' in Britain. Powered by the dominance of Thatcherite conservatism, it sought to change the approach of the left and ultimately lead to co-operation between progressive parties, in opposition to the Conservatives.

First through Liberal-Labour pacts, of which there is an even longer history, next through the breakaway SDP/Liberal Alliance, and then in the form of New Labour-Liberal Democrat talks and cooperation. And Kennedy's 'Real Alternative' campaign banner, even in opposition to a Labour government, reflected the general cohesion of aims on the Left, if not of methods.

That particular movement on the part of the Lib Dems ended with Nick Clegg's leadership. Clegg took the Liberal Democrats back to a policy of equidistance between the two big parties, Labour and the Conservatives.

However, the fall of the coalition and succession of a Conservative to a majority government seems to have triggered a new phase of realignment. The resignations of Clegg and Miliband led to the election of new party leaders, seen to be of very different stripes from their predecessors.

Tim Farron, the new Lib Dem leader, is a campaigning Northern MP and former Party President who stood aloof from, and in polite opposition to, the coalition. So far his efforts have been concentrated on focussing the Lib Dem fightback on the party's roots - in campaigning locally for community issues and nationally on matters of conscience.

Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader seemed to send shockwaves through British politics. Portrayed by the media as a move back to some Michael Foot and Tony Benn, 80s-esque, hard Left position, Corbyn has faced disquiet and malcontent within the Parliamentary party since taking over with a landslide of party members' votes.

After the last five years, the seemingly inevitable alignment of the Liberal Democrats and Labour was shattered. It would be understandable to think finding new common ground would be difficult or impossible between the party Clegg had taken to the Centre, even Centre-Right, and the party Corbyn has been accused of taking to the hard Left.

Yet a new realignment of the Left is under way and the policies that will define the shift are already emerging in the policy debates of both parties.

Both the Liberal Democrats and Labour now seem to be on the same page, finally, when it comes to proportional representation. Both Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, from Labour's Left, and Chuka Umunna, from Labour's Right, have expressed support for PR. And both parties are engaged in consultations over their future approach to policy, including the welfare system - debates in which the idea of a universal basic income is playing a prominent role.

Ahead of the EU referendum, Farron has even called for a progressive political alliance on Europe - making internationalism again a core value across progressive parties. That matches, in a limited way, the arguments that Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, has been making since the last election that progressive parties need to start working together.

As for the Green Party, in true Green fashion Natalie Bennett is following Caroline Lucas' lead in standing down as party leader once her term is up later this year. So who will lead the Greens through this new realignment, and how they will handle it on into the 2020 general election, is unknown.

But the challenge ahead of the three leaders of Britain's main progressive parties is clear: to stop the Conservatives winning their way to back-to-back governments. Aligning in support of some core common policies is a start.

The next step is to commit to the kind of cooperation on various campaigns and causes that can foster the good will between parties. That mutual respect will be needed to build a real electoral alliance, that stands together behind a limited set of core ideals in opposition to conservatism.

Local Elections: An alternative look Labour's election result, where it leaves them and where progressives go from here

The progressive pitch of the three parties, Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green, who may have in places tripped each other more than the Conservatives in the 2015 UK general election.

"It's a disaster", run the stories. The worst performance in half a century (Rawnsley, 2016). A disaster that, conveniently, demands that Labour change direction away from Corbynism and back toward Blairism.

The trouble with that assessment is that the context is all wrong, and so the conclusion that follows is flawed. The reality is that there are few recent historical comparisons that can be made for the present situation.

Up against an almost unbelievable barrage of negative press and critics of every stripe briefing against him, from almost every direction, the results from the local and assembly elections were, all things considered, pretty impressive for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour.

Labour are leading the executive in Wales, London and Bristol - all of which, if publicised well, could be beacons for re-legitimising the idea of Labour in government. The party also topped the national polls on 31%, ahead of the Conservatives on 30% and the Liberal Democrats, recovering to 15%.

Labour in Scotland

The only major 'blemish' in Corbyn's first major election test were the party's struggles in Scotland. But presenting the results in Scotland as part of a 'Corbyn disaster' narrative is misleading.

In Scotland - where Labour have been outflanked on the Left by the SNP, whose blend of Social Democracy and separatism has rendered Labour nearly unnecessary - Corbyn's Left-wing stance is winning, just not really to the benefit of the Labour Party itself.

They have also been outflanked on the Right by the Conservatives, who have unsurprisingly become the banner-bearers for Unionism (it did used to be literally in their name, after all). In fact, Ruth Davidson's Conservatives, who suffer for connections to the Westminster party, are now the Scottish Unionist Party in all but name.

Essentially, the debate in Scotland has moved beyond the traditional UK divisions. For a useful historical comparison you have to reach a long way back, to the separation of British and Irish politics.

The emergence of the Irish Parliamentary Party, out of what had previously been a Liberal Party stronghold, substantially weakened the party in Britain. As it grew, it limited the abililty of the Liberals to win majorities. That led to a period during which Liberals and their Irish allies, and the Conservatives and their Unionist allies, spent two decades trading turns in propped up minority governments.

While in 1906 the Liberals won a landslide majority of nearly 400 seats on nearly 50% of the vote, the emergence of the Labour Party in England squeezed them. The scales tipped decisively when the Liberals became divided, infighting, and protracted war led to a period of National governments that simply coalesced into a new Conservative majority, with Ramsay MacDonald's Labour as a weak and still growing opposition.

Labour has lost its substantial position in Scotland to the SNP, as the Liberals lost theirs in Ireland. But the lesson seems to be that infighting and splits will do far more damage than adapting to the new reality over the border.

Labour in England

The real crux of the Labour-Conservative battle is in England, where Corbyn's party topped the polls. Response to this thin victory, 31% to 30%, hasn't been especially positive. But when it comes to a general election, how do the numbers compare?

In the 2015 UK general election, in England alone, the Conservatives won 41% of the vote to Labour's 32%, for 319 and 206 seats, respectively. In 2010, Conservatives won 40% to Labour's 28%, for 298 and 191 seats. Further back, in 2005 when Labour won an outright UK majority of 403 seats, the Conservatives won 36%, matched by Labour at 36%, for 206 and 278 seats, again respectively.

Corbyn's support in England falls somewhere between the two, between triumph and disaster (Williams, 2016), between a Labour majority and a hung parliament scramble. In 2015, Liberal Democrat support collapsed and both of the two main parties benefited, though the Conservatives more so. However much Labour might have eaten into Conservative support, the Conservatives simply consumed the Lib Dems to keep themselves afloat.

For the Conservatives, everything depends upon their strength in England, particularly in the South. So when a, supposedly, weakly-led Labour wins victories in London, Bristol, and holds Southern councils like Southampton and Hastings, Conservatives should be worried, because when push comes to shove, they have no where else to turn.

It could certainly be said that Tony Blair pressed the Conservatives hardest on this weakness. Blair managed to match the Conservatives for votes in England, while Brown and Miliband did not. And Blair beat them in a general election, while Brown and Miliband did not. However, Blair also had the advantage of facing a weak and disorganised Conservative Party, that Brown and Miliband never did.

In its brightest days, and also the Conservatives darkest, Blair's Labour won 44% of the vote in England to the Conservatives 34%, taking 329 seats to 165 - against weak and disorganised opponents, struggling everywhere except their South and East heartland, and versus weak third party opposition.

Labour's 400+ seat majority under Blair included some 80 seats in Scotland and Wales. A boundary review in Scotland reduced the number of seats, mostly Labour, in Scotland by thirteen. Heading into 2005, the heights of 419 and 413 seats were reduced to 403. 56 seats in Scotland was now approximately 46. And in Wales, where Labour won 34 seats in 1997, support has reduced over time to 30, to 26, to 25.

For all praise for his achievement of eating into Conservative support in England, by even 2005, if Blair's Labour had not been able to rely on Scotland, its majority would have evaporated. The party, even under Blair, would have been reduced to 315 seats - even including 30 seats in Wales - and the party would have had to turn to around 50 Lib Dems in order to govern.

For two elections, 1997 and 2001, Labour were able to win majorities in England, but they almost immediately fell back into large minorities of support as their primary opponents recovered and stronger third parties began to challenge. Labour's brief four years of winning majorities in England came against weak opponents in London, the West and East Midlands, in the North, Yorkshire and Humberside, and by encroaching on the Conservative heartlands where they could.

And in that fact, the Conservatives can usually take comfort in Labour's own weakness in England by comparison. Numbers past past and present make clear that there is a well of potential Conservative support in England, in most parts of the country, that can put the party over the top - even in supposed Labour territory.

Almost decisive since 1997 has been the Conservatives incursion into Labour territory. Between 1997 and 2010 there have been 15 seats in the North West, 10 in Yorkshire, 20 in London, 15 seats and 20 seats in the East and West Midlands respectively which saw a complete reversal of positions - 80 of the 329 won in England in 1997.

Before talking of taking seats from the Conservatives in the South East, in a New Labour master stroke, figuring out how Labour might win its own backyard seems like more of a priority. Ed Miliband won maybe 10 of these seats in 2015, only to lose several others from the same regions back to the Conservatives - with numbers propped up by the Lib Dem collapse.

Reality Check

Harold Wilson, at his peak, only won 285 seats in England to 216 for the Conservatives. Without Scotland, even the headline victory of Wilson's Labour would have been reduced to a majority of just 2 seats. Against the historical background, Blair's approximate, and astonishing, 140 gains in England in 1997 - lifting Labour from around 190 to 330 - looks more the result of extraordinary circumstances than the profits of a particular campaign.

Labour's support has, since it broke out from being the trade unionist representative ally of the Liberals, always been a coalition of fellow travellers - from moderate reformers who might have been liberals in other times, through trade unionists and the industrial working classes the party claimed to represent. In 1997, Blair tried to expand that alliance into the affluent South and East with a pitch to swing voters that did not produce lasting gains and alienated the party's core in the process (Mason, 2015; Mason 2016).

At the moment, Corbyn is maybe only on par with Brown or Miliband in terms of support across England and seems intent on making gains back mainly in areas Labour has lost ground. Without some new political earthquake discrediting the Conservative Party and creating an opportunity to delve into the South East and pitch social justice - smotheringly Conservative in its representation as the South East is, with the second place party now usually UKIP, who are even more conservative -  the best case scenario for the Labour Party in England would seem to be 250 to 280 seats, supported by maybe 25 in Wales.

With a Britain-wide best case for Labour, for now, of 275 to 305 seats - short of finding a way of forcing Britain's provinces to readopt the old two-party politics - the Left, and Labour in particular, has to start taking the prospect of electoral alliances seriously. Even a convenient Blairite rebrand isn't likely to break through the Southern attachment to conservatism without losing ground of its own elsewhere.

There are, however, more than 30 seats - largely in the South - where the Liberal Democrats remain the main opposition to the Conservatives. And the Green Party took 4 second places and around 20 third places in 2015. And in these and many other places, the parties will have tripped each other up to the benefit of the Conservatives.

Where Labour has less chance of winning, they should be actively interested in ensuring that the Conservatives have a difficult time of it too. This means accepting that Green environmentalism and Lib Dem civil liberties pitches will cut deeper amongst some current Conservative voters than what Labour might pitch - all the while building the possibility of forming a working, progressive government later.

Despite the barrage of negative press, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour has shown it can win and has secured control of executive positions that will legitimise it as a party of government. But when 2020 rolls around, for reasons far beyond Corbyn's fault or control, that may not be enough. If an alliance with the SNP remains taboo in England, a progressive majority might still be possible without them. But it will probably require progressives of different stripes working together to get there.

Can Guy Verhofstadt's four steps to reforming the state help bring together progressives of all stripes?

In July, Guy Verhofstadt outlined to Alexis Tsipras the steps he believed where necessary to reform the state. Photograph: Press Conference from ALDE Communication (License) (Cropped)

Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the Liberal caucus in the European Parliament, was amongst those to congratulate Justin Trudeau on his party's victory in the Canadian general election. The former Prime Minister of Belgium praised the inspiring example set by the Liberal Party of Canada's positive campaign (Verhofstadt, 2015).

Trudeau's team sought to rise above their opponents' negative campaigning and pledged investment in much needed infrastructure - with the promised benefit of stimulating the economy - and to pursue progressive policies like a positive climate change policy, taking the pro-choice side of the abortion debate, and seeking to heal the wounds from internal conflict over indigenous rights (Hays, 2015; Phipps, 2015).

It is unsurprising that Europe's liberals would be looking for the lessons they can learn from the success of their counterparts in North America. In the European Union, liberals govern in only 7 countries, their European Parliament group holds only 9% of seats, and in countries like Germany and the UK the long established liberal parties have faced electoral wipeouts over the last five years.

Yet the elections in Canada - as well as elections in Argentina, Poland and elsewhere over the past week - confirm one thing very clearly. Overcoming the Conservative establishment and fending off the efforts of Right-wing populists to assume control, isn't something that one progressive faction alone can accomplish.

Relying on the distorting effect of electoral systems that force voters into unrepresentative concentrations, or hitching the party wagon to a popular carthorse, cannot be considered lasting strategies. In what is clearly a pluralistic and divided political arena, the alternative has to be the building of alliances - and that means finding common cause between liberals and democrats, socialists and radicals, that can hash out what it means to be progressive in opposition to conservatism.

Back in July, Guy Verhofstadt used a visit by Prime Minister of Greece Alexis Tsipras to the European Parliament to challenge the Syriza leader on the need for political reform in Greece (ALDE Group, 2015) - a confrontation that was at least softened with support for finding a solution to the government of Greece's need for serious debt relief.

In his speech, Verhofstadt laid out a series of reforms Tsipras would be required to take if Greece was going to get the support it needs. Condensed into four steps, they were:

• Bring an end to clientelism & establishment privileges,
• Downsize the public sector,
• Privatise public banks, and
• Open up employment to give young people access.

If these four steps can be taken to represent a condensed version of the reforming aims of modern liberalism, how do they match up with the aims of other progressives?

In Greece, Tsipras and the Radical Left Syriza party have been struggling under stringent fiscal and economic conditions to press on with reforms (Hope, 2015). Tsipras choice to accept Eurozone terms for a further 'memorandum' bailout, to get access to the funds to continue reforms, even caused a split in his party that saw first Yanis Varoufakis and then later the Left faction of his party leave (Farrer, Rankin & Traynor, 2015; Henley & Traynor, 2015).

In his efforts to find a solution to the recurring crises, Alexis Tsipras' pragmatic radicalism has seen the Prime Minister of Greece drifting into the same political territory as that occupied by Prime Minister of Italy, and Partito Democratico leader, Matteo Renzi.

In Italy, Renzi has faced many of the same problems as Tsipras: unemployment, particularly amongst young people; clientelism and corruption; and a public and private sector heavily intertwined (Kramer, 2015). His approach has been to try to work within neoliberal models and play by its rules - a big centrist democrat legacy of Tony Blair (Day, 2014). That has required the pursuit of "competitiveness", including making labour more "flexible" - meaning making the cost of business cheaper, by making the cost and permanency of labour cheaper and weaker (EurActiv, 2014).

In the run-up to the UK general election in May, BBC Economics Editor Robert Peston described Ed Miliband as in the mould of Margaret Thatcher in his attempt to react to the times, and the debts held by the state, to tried to find solutions that did not involve the state being in control or ownership (Peston, 2015). In seeking decentralised solutions, Miliband was crossing into traditional liberal territory, but he struggled to sell them or inspire support with them

With Jeremy Corbyn taking over the helm of the Labour Party there have been fears of a sharp shift towards state ownership. Yet the ideas of the his economic advisory council are fundamentally mainstream and his 'renationalisation' plans have been more about co-operative public ownership than state control (Cortes, 2015).

In Greece, Italy and the UK, economic conditions are forcing parties of the Left to look for solutions that would certainly fall within two of Verhofstadt's recommendations: to downsize the public sector and privatise public banks. The question then becomes whether progressive parties can find an economic approach broadly acceptable to all sides.

As for political reforms, the situation looks trickier. In the UK, support for electoral reform towards something more proportional and bringing an end to an unelected Lords is growing, but is far from certain. In Italy, proposed political and constitutional reforms remain controversial in their attempts to strengthen the executive over the legislative (Politi, 2015), while Italy, and Greece, remain in an ongoing struggle to tackle corruption.

With regards to youth unemployment, in both Italy and Greece, tackling that specific problem seems a long way away as both countries grapple with the broader crisis (Totaro & Vasarri, 2015; Howden & Baboulias, 2015). In the UK, the Conservative government is pursuing apprenticeships as its go to measure, a pledge matched by the Labour Party during the election campaign (Wintour, 2015).

The need to find broad agreement across the Centre and Left is hastened by the dangerous rise of populism in the hands of deeply sectarian factions and moved along by popular nationalism and popular traditionalism (Roubini, 2015). Critics of conservative populism call for a Keynesian response that boosts aggregate demand with job creation and economic growth, that reduces income inequality and increases opportunities for the young.

To achieve these goals, a way has to be found to overcome the problem of social democratic/liberal positions having become toxic and to embrace the fact that people want something more. There is a general progressive hope, expressed through protests and activism, for a grander vision that focusses less on ambition and wealth, and more on cooperation and on what kind of life, and what kind of opportunities, there can be.

Elements of Guy Verhofstadt's proposed reforms being found in the work of other government's of the Left across Europe, even under huge fiscal burdens, certainly shows that some sort of bridge can be built between the positions of moderate and radical progressives, whether democrats or liberals, to offer a positive progressive alternative to conservatism, nationalism and populism.

But these are only the broad strokes and far more progressive things can be achieved. The next step has to be to embrace movements like Yanis Varoufakis' "very simple, but radical, idea" to build a cross-party EU democracy movement (Varoufakis & Sakalis, 2015). In such movements there is a chance to find common ground in pursuit of reform for the common good.

If Labour is going to compete with the SNP in Scotland, it needs to address its own complicated and confusing politics

Labour have a lot of work to do in Scotland if they are to recover from the landslide defeat that cost Jim Murphy his job. Photograph: Jim Murphy and Eddie Izzard meeting retailers in East Renfrewshire by Scottish Labour (License) (Cropped)

In his speech to the Scottish Labour Party conference, Jeremy Corbyn made clear his intention of facing the SNP head on in Scottish Parliamentary Elections in May (BBC, 2015). Corbyn pulled no punches in the speech, which contained barely veiled criticism of SNP. He referred to Labour as the true democratic socialist party, in both "words and in deeds".

Along with new Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale, the Labour leadership face an undoubtedly uphill task. Even accounting for the 'Corbyn Effect' and 'Corbynmania', the general election in May was only the culmination of years of alienation - during which time the popularity of the SNP soared.

If Corbyn wants to outright defeat the SNP, he has to get to grips with Labour's long term Problems. At the last election, Labour lost support in every direction: they lost their base on the Left and amongst the working class by making those supporters feel abandoned; and they lost amongst their targets on the Right because the Tories convinced voters that their abandonment of the Left was not genuine.

Their unclear, inconsistent, positions - that sought to string the Left along without having to pursue Left policies - only led to alienation.

Ahead of Corbyn and Dugdale is the task of making Labour credible again. But rather than how this is usually interpreted - vis a vis embracing mainstream neoliberalism - the renewed credibility requires consistency: clear beliefs, backed by clear motivations, that support clearly communicated stances and policies.

That means Labour has to be very careful of U-turns and wavering - the choice to delay tax credits cuts rather than to kill them outright (BBC, 2015{2}), or Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell's shifting position on George Osborne's fiscal responsibility charter (Perraudin & Wintour, 2015), both being prime examples.

Along with establishing their own position, they also seem determined - if the thinly veiled criticisms from Corbyn's speech tells us anything - to shake the impression people have of the SNP as a true party of the Left.

There certainly are, undoubtedly, some legitimate criticisms to be made with regards to SNP governance (Macwhirter, 2015). And it isn't a departure from reality to suggest that the SNP could be more comfortably described as a broad tent party of the Centre. But the SNP under Nicola Sturgeon is no flash in the pan protest vote, to be undone by the simple bursting of a bubble.

The SNP used disaffection on the Left with Blair and Brown's long rule of Labour to first establish themselves, through Alex Salmond's Scottish minority administration, as a credible party of government. As Labour's credibility sank, the SNP converted that position into a majority in Scotland in 2011 and then a virtual sweep of Scottish seats at Westminster in 2015 under Nicola Sturgeon.

The position of the SNP has been at least a decade in the making. It is a well organised, with visible support that wields distinctive branding and a clear sense of themselves as the opponents of conservatives. Theirs is a formidable position.

If they're to compete, Labour need consistency, clarity and clear communication. Without addressing the complicated and confusing politics with which they alienated supporters as New Labour, they stand little chance of being seen as a credible alternative to the SNP.

Clemenceau showed that you can achieve radical change in politics away from the establishment's institutional power

Portrait of Georges Clemenceau by Édouard Manet. Photograph: By Renaud Camus (license) (cropped)

The UK Labour Party's old guard establishment of former leaders and ministers has shown a crushing fear of the task of opposing the Tories when out office - out in the civic space where debate, protest and journalism set the political agenda. Yet history shows that it not only can be done, but that it is necessary to making radical change possible.

Clemenceau and the Dreyfus Affair

Georges Clemenceau, a leading figure amongst the French Radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, consistently found himself caught between more extreme forces. The man who would go on to be 'The Tiger' of France as Prime Minister during the Great War, was caught between a reactionary government and the revolutionary commune in 1871 and then later made a scapegoat, in 1893, for the Panama corruption scandal.

Ousted at the elections that followed the scandal and frozen out, Clemenceau poured his energies into journalism. After a time championing the radical causes close to his heart, he became wrapped up in a slow burning campaign, one that took several years to catch light, in support of Albert Dreyfus' innocence.

The Dreyfus Affair, involved the scandalous selling of military secrets being pinned on Dreyfus, a Jewish captain, at a time of rising anti-Semitism. Several years after a miscarriage of justice saw Dreyfus imprisoned, Clemenceau was presented with evidence by Arthur Ranc, a Dreyfusard journalist, which was seconded by the Senator Auguste Scheurer-Kestner.

Clemenceau used his position as editor of L'Aurore to demand a retrial. When that trial too proved a farce, he was approached by the famous author Emile Zola. Clemenceau published an incendiary letter by Zola - headed as 'J'accuse...!' by Clemenceau himself - as the front page of L'Aurore. It named names and called out corruption amongst the political class in a letter addressed directly to the President.

In one dramatic stroke - which saw the newspaper's readership increase from 30,000 to 300,000 - the outcast Radical had thrown himself in amongst, not only, the supporters of Dreyfus, but also amongst the opponents of anti-Semitic nationalism.

From 1897 to 1899, Clemenceau campaigned alongside others, including Bernard Lazare who had been working to prove Dreyfus innocent since the matter began in 1894, in what has been described as "one of the greatest achievements of French journalism" (Daniel Halevy, in Hampden Jackson, 1946):

"...a close-knit discussion carried on over two years, sustained each morning by an article sparkling with wit, vigour and rationality..."

That journalist-led civic discussion eventually achieved a Presidential pardon for Dreyfus (although Clemenceau thought that still to be an injustice); a sea change in parliament with government and ministers toppling and the Radicals becoming the biggest party, bringing substantial reforms like the separation of church and state, the secularisation of education and the abolition of censorship; and the return of Clemenceau himself to parliament as a Senator.

Labour's fear of impotence

In the present, Labour has been warning loudly of the danger of the impotence from which the party will suffer without the institutional mechanisms of the establishment at their beck and call. From Tony Blair to Gordon Brown (Blair, 2015; Mason & Halliday, 2015), the party members have been urged not to vote the Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn, according to some of the party's own MPs, is a purveyor of "crazy left-wing policies" who will leave the party out on the British political fringe and will face internal rebellions from the moment he is elected (Wilkinson, 2015). Yet that attitude from the Labour Parliamentary Party can hardly be considered a safer course. It mimics the very same, deeply unpopular, attitude towards its own membership, as the Eurozone held towards Greece. Embracing the status quo as a party of establishment bureaucracy also did little for PASOK, the main social democrat party in Greece, which collapsed at the election in January (Chakrabortty, 2015).

It also ignores Labour's essential problem - it has never changed 'the political fundamentals in its favour' (Kirby, 2015). Labour has always preferred, instead, to use them in its own service. In doing so, the Labour has forgotten about social power in order to play the best they can according to the rules of the political game (Tietze, 2015) - and so cling to an institutional power that comes with serious restraints, from various sources of pressure, and offers ever diminishing returns.

"Although the history of the Left has produced an extraordinary theoretical legacy, which continues to be the nucleus of almost all radical thinking, it has nonetheless left a trail of extraordinary failures in practice.

I understand the dialectical relation between theory and practice, of course, but we have to admit that in real historical terms this dialectic is terribly uneven, to the degree in fact that it may render questionable a great many of these theoretical achievements, which, if we are going to be rigorously leftist about it, cannot really stand entirely on their own." (Gourgouris, 2015)

When pressed, Labour's establishment figures may point to the danger of leaving the Tories with majority power. Yet their power has depended upon an effective control of the civic debate, framing and directing the discussion in a civic space that Labour has seemingly abandoned (d'Ancona, 2015).

Recovering radicalism

This boils down to an essential point: the importance of the social debate makes the direct pursuit of institutional power almost an irrelevance (Gourgouris, 2013).

In order to govern radically, a group first has to engage the public in the civic space, where is fostered the power to govern and change society regardless of hierarchies and institutions (Gourgouris, 2013). Clemenceau and the Dreyfusards were an early modern example of the power there is in the civic space. For radicals, this means encouraging localised self-organisation, opening up a space for teaching and learning, and fighting against alienation.

Labour has already made one big step in that direction when it chose to, effectively, crowdsource a leadership candidate (Perkins, 2015). But this example of radical democracy in action is only a beginning. In order to be a vital part of the Left, Labour has to accept that it is only a part.

Radicalism requires space for protest and critical dissent, for differences of opinion, for discussion, debate and disagreement (Gourgouris, 2015). The radical Left needs the internal antagonism of multi-party politics, not the domination of a singular power. It needs to be an activist outside of parliament and a disruptive troublemaker within it - not unlike the belligerent Clemenceau a century ago.

It looks unlikely that Labour will be able to muster enough enthusiasm amongst progressives to get over the majority electoral line while it continues to preach the values of the establishment. However, if any of the leadership candidates, of which Corbyn looks most likely, can embrace this kind of radical shift in the party - away from centralism, statism and party leader domination - there is hope of a new, more pluralistic, Left mounting a serious challenge in 2020.

Labour's woes continue as the party splits over welfare cuts - where is their unifying idea?

The Labour Party is in the midst of an identity crisis. Two election defeats seem to have completely sapped the party of self-belief and bold ideas and now the party is divided over the merits of the Tory Chancellor's cuts (Perraudin, 2015).

Labour are struggling to come up with a convincing alternative narrative to the one George Osborne is using to bulldoze his way through the public sector. That struggle is pulling the party apart into distinct factions.

Yet a big internal squabble might actually be, in the end, rejuvenating.

The factions in that fight a pretty familiar. There is the New Labour mainstream - a majority of which seem to be more Brownite than Blairite, following the school of Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband. These are the moderates and modernisers, represented by Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper in the leadership race.

To the Right of the mainstream modernisers there is a faction that has gone under several names, Blue Labour and One Nation Labour in particular. This is the wing of the party, represented by Liz Kendall in the leadership race, that wants Labour to embrace working class conservatism, along with the Far-Right themes of anti-immigration and clampdowns on welfare.

It is also clear that there is a small but significant number of Labour MPs, at the moment with Jeremy Corbyn as their ringleader, who are significantly to the Left of the Labour mainstream. They have stood here against welfare cuts here and Corbyn's leadership campaign has firmly embraced the broader anti-austerity movement.

How this division is healed will depend upon a lot of factors, internal and external to the party. But it is a state of affairs that must ultimately be settled. Labour's determination to be a big tent has largely suppressed or alienated voters on the Left, driving many of them away - particularly in Scotland.

If the moderate or Right-wing faction wins out, how much longer will its Left-wing remain bottled? If the Left-wing wins out, will the mainstream fall in line?

In the face of these issues, there are predictions that Labour faces an extended stay in the wilderness (Moss, 2015). One of the few ways back would encompass a major change of direction: embracing the proposed progressive pact in England and embracing electoral reform that can ensure representative government, showing that Labour is finally working to work co-operatively with others on the Left.

Yet for many progressives, who would have been taking hope from Caroline Lucas' progressive alliance proposal (Lucas, 2015), there will have been an ironically collective sigh of despair when Labour's tendency to give in to populism struck again - this time in the form of Harriet Harman (Wintour, 2015):

"We cannot simply say to the public: you were wrong..."

Why not? What exactly is the point of an opposition party, many on the Left will be asking, is if it isn't going to oppose?

If the party are just going to argue for the same policies as the Tories, differing only on who is better equipped to administer them, then are Labour and the Conservatives anything more than two squabbling factions of essentially the same party?

And if the party is just going to be a reflection of popular opinion, then does it even stand for anything? Where is the belief, the ideology, the theory?

That only produces an image of a Labour Party more interested in power than standing for something. It wants to build trust through sycophancy, not through ideas, theory, facts and reason.

While in the US, Bernie Sanders is proposing a push of support for trade unions, worker-owned co-operatives and the living wage (O'Hara, 2015), Labour are getting themselves in a political twist over whether or not to support Conservative cuts to welfare set to have a disastrous effect on the poorest (White, 2015).

Labour's next leader has to find a way to navigate these splits, these contradictions and the party's overall idealistic emptiness (Hawkins, 2015). There are internal rifts to heal and the Centre-Left of the political spectrum filled with alternatives to navigate. The leadership race itself, with its warts and all exposure of the party's factions is a helpful start in the process of reconciliation.

For the external matters, co-operation is surely Labour and the Left's best hope of opposing the Conservatives on big progressive issues like human rights and electoral reform. For the party's internal struggle, the answer can only be found by digging deep. By looking for the roots of what unites Labour supporters of all stripes and all those allied to the socialist and democratic movement.

To, humbly, get the ball rolling, here one word that offers a place to start: Justice.

Liberals have liberty. Greens have sustainability. With these words, and the ideas they represent, they can construct coherent tests for any policy. Labour seem to lost their connection to a simple and fundamental idea that would underwrite social democratic and democratic socialist analysis, and so their ability to construct a meaningful and consistent narrative.

The new leader of the Labour Party, to be announced in September, has to reclaim a unifying idea - like Justice - if they are to lead the party back out of the fractious wilderness.