We are one month in to Jeremy Corbyn’s time as leader of the Labour Party, and one wonders already whether the currently tense relations between the PLP and the leadership can be sustained for the next few months, let alone until next May. The prospect of this carrying on until 2020 seems even less likely.
Two weeks ago at Labour conference, John McDonnell told Evan Davis that the party would sign up to George Osborne’s fiscal charter. He said: ‘ We will vote for it on the basis that we want to assure people that we will tackle the deficit, we will balance the budget, we will live within our means.’ Early on Monday afternoon, he sent an e-mail to his fellow Labour MPs to advise that he was considering the party’s position on the issue, and that he would consult with the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Shadow Cabinet.
But before Labour MPs even had chance to discuss it at yesterday evening’s meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, McDonnell announced that the party would vote against the fiscal charter. At the meeting, he attempted to explain himself, but sparks flew. George Eaton of the New Statesman wrote that the centrist MP and former Culuture Secretary Ben Bradshaw left at the end of the meeting saying that it had been ‘a f***ing shambles,’ that John Mann had called the decision to backtrack on it ‘a huge joke’, while another unnamed Shadow Minister had said of the meeting that they had never seen anything like it.
This afternoon, there were more developments. On today’s edition of the BBC’s World at One, the Corbynite MP and the Shadow Minister for Energy, Clive Lewis, suggested that McDonnell changed his mind on voting for the charter because he hadn’t realised until now that doing so would not give Labour the scope to borrow to invest. And then, from Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, who tweeted that Corbyn had not known that McDonnell was going to be announcing the change in policy:
All sorts of reasons why McDonnell U turn on budget surplus not a laughing matter, including that Corbyn himself had no idea it was coming
— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) October 13, 2015
McDonnell, for his part, says that it is not an alteration of policy but of tactics, and has put his change of heart down to the situation in Redcar, and to happenings in the global economy over the past few weeks, though it is thought that many Labour MPs think this explanation to be specious at best. While it is perhaps for the best that Labour has arrived at the stance it probably should have taken in the first place (from the point of view of being in line with McDonnell’s outlook, rather than whether it’s the right thing to do electorally) it has been a muddled, unedifying spectacle to behold. If what Clive Lewis says is true, it is also a little worrying that a prospective Chancellor changed his mind on whether he was in favour of the fiscal charter because he hadn’t, until very recently, understood it properly.
the wilderness years 