Stella Creasy is in a position to be a mediator and, through the co-operative movement, bridge the widening gaps between Labour Party factions

Stella Creasy, the Labour Co-operative MP, has put herself at the front of progressive campaigns - from support for local credit unions to campaigns opposing violence against women. Photograph: Stella Creasy at the launch of LAWRS' anti-violence campaign by Macarena Gajardo (Licence) (Cropped)

Jeremy Corbyn's victory heralds as much change for the Labour Party as it does for British politics. His election through a process of mass, popular internal democracy broke a century of control over the party by a largely middle class establishment of economists and lawyers - as former Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell put it (from Bogdanor, 1983):

'We, as middle-class socialists, have got to have a profound humility. Though it's a funny way of putting it, we've got to know that we lead them because they can't do it without us, with our abilities, and yet we must feel humble to working people.'

Yet Corbyn's rise has not healed the deep stratification within the party, but rather exposed the rifts. The fact that the Islington MP should need to build a coalition of groups within his own party (Kuenssberg, 2015), which is riven with rumours of splits (Peston, 2015), may be an indication that it's about time that the Labour Party began to act like the broad coalition that it very clearly is.

One MP, and parliamentary group, that would benefit from a clearer organisation of Labour MPs, more than most, is Stella Creasy and the Co-operative Party.

Corbyn, and the Trade Unionist 'Left', don't have a great deal in common, beyond their common allegiance to Labour's party and movement, with the Brownite 'Moderates' and the Blairite 'Modernisers'. They have shown themselves, however, to be capable of finding common causes and working together.

The Co-operative Party is one group that could hold them together. Long sitting in parliament with candidates put up jointly with Labour, they have supported members that have played roles across the Labour movement. From former ministers like Alun Michael and Ed Balls to shadow cabinet figures like Chris Leslie and Lucy Powell, many leading Labour figures have been elected as Labour Co-op.

If Labour's internal factions would start to organise themselves - rather than splitting off to form new parties or join others - there could be some consolation for deputy leader candidate Stella Creasy. Despite losing to Tom Watson (Mason, 2015), she would be in one of the, potentially, more powerful positions within the party.

Now one of the most visible women in the parliamentary party, Creasy has the makings of a future Labour leader (Blackburn et al, 2015). But first, as a visible figure in the Co-operative Party, she could lead a fully coherent, organised, internal faction - one that would be able to reach out to all sides and bring them together.

Arguably, the Co-operative Party has never been in a stronger position within the Labour Party.

With the new leadership committed to public ownership and the Labour mainstream having just begun to fully embrace neoliberalism, along with its vast reductions in public spending and role of the state, just as it was swept away by the Corbyn-tide, ideas are needed in which each side can see its values.

Co-operation has the capacity to fill that space. The Corbyn faction has expressed openness to the public ownership they have championed coming in the form of worker and customer co-operatives, rather than control by the state (Voinea, 2015) and New Labour at times embraced mutualism during their time in power (Wintour, 2010).

In those discussion, co-operative voices would have a strong role to play and Creasy and the Labour Co-op MPs could help to bridge the factional divide. As for a leading, mediating, figure, Creasy herself has been a vocal champion of feminism and women's rights (Bryant, 2014; Creasy 2012) and championed credit unions in opposition to pay day lenders - both progressive causes around which even the most disparate wings of the party could unite.

The idea of economic co-operation itself might also have an even bigger impact than just holding together the Labour coalition. It could also be one of the pillars upon which an electoral alliance of Left-wing parties could be built. While it is unlikely that the Liberal Democrats could get behind a program that would see Corbyn pushing state socialism, there has long been a liberal commitment to co-operatives. Small crossovers of this kind can be the foundations for much larger agreements.

Labour is in need of a means to hold its broad coalition together. It is also very much in need of visible female leaders (Moore, 2015). Stella Creasy is in a position to play mediator, along with other Labour Co-op MPs. Played right, its is a role that could see her leading a much wider movement in the future.

Jeremy Corbyn wins the Labour leadership election in a revolution of party members overthrowing the party establishment

Jeremy Corbyn MP speaks at anti-drones rally in 2013. Photograph: By stopwar.org.uk (license)(cropped)

Jeremy Corbyn has been elected leader of the Labour Party with 59.5% of the vote in the first round of voting. In a contest where over four hundred thousand people voted, no other candidate achieved over 20% of the vote and Corbyn won in every party category, including 49% of established party members and 57% of trade union members.

In the build-up, Tom Watson was also announced as the winner of the deputy leadership contest. The MP, who led the campaign to hold the media to account after accusations arose of  illegalities, promised in his acceptance speech to back the new leader and help them to unite the party.

Whether or not the new leadership can unite the party is the big question that will come out of this contest. The remarkable rise of Jeremy Corbyn exposed a rift between the Labour Parliamentary Party and the party's wider membership and supporters.

The contest had been initially dominated by the more right-leaning Blairites and and centrist Brownites, in the form of younger generation candidates like Chuka Umunna, Tristram Hunt and Liz Kendall and older generation members like Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper.

Yet there was a sense that the party's Left needed to be represented in order to have a substantial debate. That was only accomplished with the assistance of MPs 'lending' Corbyn their nominations. And yet those 'lent' nominations opened a floodgate. The popular appeal of Corbyn seemingly gave the Labour Left the confidence to come out in numbers and chance a return to the mainstream.

The future of the Labour Party from here may well have a lot to do with how it organises going forward.

In the run up to today's announcement, with the defeat of the followers of Brown and Blair seemingly imminent, there began to be suggestions that the two groups should unite themselves into a strong 'moderate' faction. United and organised, they would represent a formidable pressure group, pushing Corbyn to adopt pragmatic policies - and there are already signs of ranks closing with members of the shadow cabinet resigning.

The Left-wing faction, over which Jeremy Corbyn has effectively become leader in the last few months, has shown that it is strong in the party, but it remains firmly a parliamentary outsider. Its numbers are spread out across the country, in trade unions and constituency parties.

Against the strength of the self-appointed 'moderates', who will still have great strength in parliamentary numbers, the Left will need new methods to support its approach. Following its supporters, that will likely mean shifting the power of policy-making away from MPs and out to activists in the community.

One very notable and troubling issue is the absence of a successful female nominee for either leadership position, with Yvette Cooper coming third in the leadership contest and Stella Creasy coming second in the deputy leadership race. That will need to be addressed. One option would be to appoint a female chancellor. But that will be something to delve into deeper as Corbyn announces his shadow cabinet in the coming days.

Today though, the story is that the mainstream pragmatists have lost control of the party to Corbyn and his more idealistic, popular, Left-wing supporters amongst the party membership. In his acceptance speech as the new Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn spoke of wanting to build a better society. For all progressives, it can only be positive and exciting to hear a leader, elected on a huge mandate, championing a challenge to inequality and poverty.

George Osborne's appeal for progressives to back his 'reforms' cover an attempt to dismantle compassionate social security

An old branch of the Job Centre in London. Photograph: DSC_0107.JPG via photopin (license) (cropped)

In The Guardian on Sunday, George Osborne made an appeal to progressives and Labour Party MPs to get behind his welfare 'reforms' (Osborne, 2015).

"We are saying to working people: our new national living wage will ensure you get a decent day’s pay, but there are going to be fewer taxpayer-funded benefits.... I believe this settlement represents the new centre of British politics, and appeal to progressive MPs on all sides to support us."

Yet even as Osborne attempted this appeal to 'moderates' with his new 'Centre', Conservative ministers were floating policy ideas that made it clear the party is not content to settle for just the latest round of austerity cutbacks.

While it has become abundantly clear that austerity is the long term economic plan that the Conservative leadership has taken pains to remind us of, ad nauseum, the ambitious extent to which that plan would be extended was not.

As far back as 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron was telling guests at the Lord Mayor's dinner that austerity measures would, in the end, produce a 'leaner' state permanently (Watt, 2013). The first Conservative budget, divorced from the Liberal Democrat obstructions, then arrived with a prelude from Cameron, announcing his wish for a 'higher wage, lower welfare, lower tax' society (BBC, 2015).

But even the budget, with its cuts to welfare - which have been variously criticised as driving divisions between the old and the young (McVeigh & Helm, 2015), between men and women (Watt & Perraudin, 2015), and between the rich and poor (May, 2015) - only mask a more fundamental change being pursued.

There is a project under way to comprehensively deconstruct the welfare state and the principles upon which it was founded. From the NHS (Campbell, 2015), to welfare (Mason, 2015), to even the post office (Macalister, 2015) and public broadcasting (Perraudin, 2015), the public sector is faced with being stripped back and undone - with tax funding for services being replaced with fees charged to the 'consuming' individuals.

The big question is why? Looking beyond the temptation to suggest a colourful variety of reasons involving detached selfishness and collusion with vested interests, what ideological and theoretical motivations are there to dismantle the systems of social security?

The word that comes up, again and again, is dependency.

From around the 1970s, modern conservatism began to form itself around the long abandoned ideas of classical liberalism, absorbing its priorities of laissez-faire, that is non-intervention, and meritocracy. Those principles are used as the theoretical underpinning of a low tax, low regulation and low equality modern conservative economic system, that acts as the social framework for advancing certain deeply ideological values.

The stated aim is to encourage self-interest, or greed as Boris Johnson championed it (Watt, 2013{2}), while discouraging dependence. It is in particular dependence which these modern conservatives see as the danger inherent to systems of welfare and social security.

The practical application means divorcing the state, acting on behalf of society and particularly of its richest members, from the responsibility of securing the wellbeing of the individual members of society - passing that duty off onto the individuals themselves. Through this means, neoliberal conservatives aim to drive individuals to self-interested action, where their productive work directly links to their social security and makes them wholly dependent upon themselves.

What they do not seem to grasp is that the idea of paid work, in the form of productive labour - with success and wealth marked as the result individual character, and failure and poverty as likewise the result of a personal fecklessness - is a deeply moralistic and ideological viewpoint of how society should function.

The facts do not bear out these moral and ideological beliefs. If you are born poor, the statistics say you will likely remain poor (Harrison, 2013). Whatever merit based rewards that the market might offer are suppressed or distorted by very real social conditions. Liberties and rights become privileges far out of reach for most individuals, who are reduced to factors of production competing with each other for survival.

So busy are neoliberal modern conservatives in trying to avoid dependency (George & Wilding, 1994) - and an escalating collectivism that they fear it would lead to - they ignore, are blind to, or outright disavow, the necessity of facilitating opportunity, for competition to actually be fair and so produce meaningful outcomes, or facilitating justice, where members of community are fairly supported and rewarded for the competitive exploitation of what ultimately belongs to the community.

Neoliberalism also undermines two important factors in any progressive state: social cohesion and the principle of universality. Through progressive tax contributions that pay for general use public services, society is bound in a common obligation (Peston, 2015). A portion of what is made by the individual through the exploitation of other individuals and of community resources, is used to fund care and support for the whole community.

The public sector, from healthcare to education, represents the individual members of society pooling their funds to provide a universal service. Everyone, who can, pays in and everyone benefits, regardless of their bank account, from freely accessible services. Communities, and society at large, are brought together on the basis of compassion, acknowledging the inherent value of one member of a society to another - with each member benefiting from the education of another and from their wellbeing, healthy and free from poverty.

Neoliberalism is neither post-ideological nor centrist. It carries very definite social aims that are focussed squarely upon the destruction of this consensus. In its place is put a highly moralised version of earning a living, where working for pay - however degrading and insufficient - is no longer a necessary sufferance, which radical reforming governments attempt to alleviate, but the focal point of an individual's life and a  marker of their worth (O'Hagan, 2012).

At a time when people are talking seriously of abolishing poverty (Ban Ki-moon, 2015), are rolling out trials of the basic income (Perry, 2015) and discussing the possibilities of a post-capitalist society based on abundance (Mason, 2015), George Osborne is trying to implement a system designed to entrench the old world - and he wants the help of progressives in rewriting that script.

But whatever iniquities the welfare state may have, including its cost, what is there to consider progressive about coercing people into paid employment, however degrading, with the threat of impoverishment? The classical liberals of old were left behind by the modern liberals (1928), who moved on to say:

"We believe with a passionate faith that the end of all political and economic action is not the perfecting or the perpetuation of this or that piece of mechanism or organisation, but that individual men and women may have life, and that they might have it more abundantly."

Dignity and self-esteem come from autonomy - which is a far throw from a life lived supported by the ever insecure low pay scraped together from working in poor conditions for exploitative employers. The austerity agenda will not achieve them for any but the very few.

Tory government back down on Foxhunting exposes the lie of the stable majority

For now at least, the Foxhunting ban remains. Photograph: Fox Grooming via photopin (license) (cropped)

In response to the SNP making clear that it would opposed a relaxing of the laws on foxhunting, the Conservative government has withdrawn the vote it set on the issue (Mason, 2015). A vote had originally been scheduled for Wednesday (BBC, 2015), with the government accused of attempting to bring back foxhunting by the back door (Mason & Brooks, 2015).

The Conservative response in the media will likely be to cry foul on the SNP involving themselves in 'English affairs' (Mason & Brooks, 2015{2}; Jenkins, 2015). But the reality is that internal division is what has stopped this vote from going ahead - divisions that expose the lie of the stable majority.

With a majority in the Commons, the Conservatives should have been able to pass their 'relaxation' of the law. However they faced opposition from both backbenchers, and even ministers, within their own ranks (Helm, 2015).

Foxhunting is just the latest issue to expose the lie of majority rule, with a fragile Conservative government facing constant risks of internal rebellion. What is particularly notable, is that it is the more moderate Conservatives who are causing them so much trouble.

Under the Coalition, many of the more extreme Tory policies never even saw the light of day. The issues on which moderates are rebelling - including a threatened withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights Convention (Watt, 2015) and misrepresenting Britain's relationship with Europe (May, 2015) - were all options opposed and suppressed by the Liberal Democrats.

In fact, most of the struggles Cameron's Ministry have faced over their first two months in office have, seemingly against expectation (Cowley, 2015), come opposition from their moderate wing. The moderates seem to be working overtime to make up for the absence of a liberal influence in restraining the reactionary Far-Right.

Is it possible that they now feel that they took the Liberal Democrats for granted? Are they maybe beginning to regret the electoral strategy of directly assaulting their former coalition partners?

The compromises of the Coalition served the Conservatives well in allowing them to portray themselves as reasonable and responsible. Foxhunting is one of the issues that could undo all of that very quickly and return the toxicity to the Conservative 'brand' (Platt, 2015; Gosden et al, 2015).

Between the toxic nature of extremism and the internal factional divisions, here, exposed, are the flaws of majority government. Handed a virtual five year dictatorship - as long as they can keep their numbers together - there is nothing but self-restraint to prevent parties veering into their own extreme corners, and alienating the usually large proportion of the population who did not vote them into to power.

That power is on display in the matter of foxhunting, which the Tories apparently plan on returning to again in the autumn, once they have introduced their plans for Evel - English votes for English laws (Mason, 2015). The majority party hasn't gotten its way, so it is changing the rules.

Even if you accept the inequality of majority rule on the basis of 36% of the vote - and less than 25% of all eligible voters - internal divisions afflicting the Conservatives show that the system reflects no unanimity..

With electoral reform there might at least be a more honest exploration of beliefs through smaller parties, than found in squabbling big tents. There would also be hope for governments that would be based on a compromise that is representative of the views of broad parts of society - not simply imposing the will of a loud minority on everyone else.