Luke Akehurst: Do we choose survival or a descent into sectarian in-fighting?

This is a very strange leadership election.

It isn’t really a choice about politics, but more one about the culture and ethos and image of the Labour Party.

Last year there was a very clear and wide range of policy and political alternatives. Liz Kendall representing a return to Blairism, Yvette Cooper representing the right wing of the Brownite social democratic tradition, Andy Burnham the leftwing variant of it and perhaps by default the Soft Left, and Jeremy Corbyn representing the Bennite Hard Left.

This year the gap between the two candidates on policy is a lot less stark. Both Corbyn and Owen Smith are advocating a radical anti-austerity platform several notches to the left of Ed Miliband’s manifesto in 2015. For instance, Smith’s early commitments include rail renationalisation, £200 billion of infrastructure investment, the return of wage councils, rewriting Clause IV of the party constitution to include a commitment to tackle inequality, and transformation of the tax system. Only on Trident is there clear water between them.

If Corbyn had not been allowed on the ballot, Owen Smith would probably have been the most left wing of a range of candidates who would have run.

If Corbyn wasn’t the incumbent, Smith would represent an undreamt of movement to the left for people from that wing of the party, and would terrify the Blair and Brown era old guard.

But we are now in a bizarre situation where everyone to Smith’s right is happy to fall in behind him as immeasurably preferable to Corbyn, and many Corbyn supporters are attacking Smith as a “Blairite” or “Red Tory”.

That’s because a lot more is at stake than the meagre headline policy differences suggest.

Crudely put we have two leadership candidates both offering similar domestic and economic policies which are slightly to the left of Ed Miliband’s offer.

But one of those candidates – Corbyn – is running as an anti-politician who doubles down on Ed’s gauche and counter-cultural public persona, and adds to it rhetoric that is a lot more leftwing. Plus a vote for Corbyn is a vote to smash Labour’s internal power structures, factionalise every level of party activity, and sweep away – through deselection and internal election – everyone from MPs down to branch membership secretaries from before 2015 who doesn’t buy into the new regime.

Oh, and some foreign policy stuff that is anathema to 75 per cent of the public and makes it impossible for them to even consider voting Labour however much they like the anti-austerity policies – nuclear disarmament, an apparent greater warmth towards Russia than the USA, an apparent greater warmth towards Hamas and Hezbollah than Israel, and a passionate support for the Latin American left including in its despotic variants in Cuba and Venezuela.

Oh, and according to the testimony of large numbers of senior colleagues who tried to work with him since September he is impossible to work with, lacks leadership skills and can’t function as part of a team.

Oh, and he doesn’t have the confidence of over 80 per cent of Labour MPs and isn’t able to put together a functioning front bench team to do the basic job of opposing the Government in the Commons because of this. And the toxic culture that comes with his far left support base has brought blatant antisemitic discourse into the heart of the Labour Party, rekindled the phenomenon of entryist infiltration by Trotskyists parties, and led to the suspension of every CLP meeting because of incidents of disruption and intimidation.

Owen Smith on the other hand, takes broadly the same set of domestic and economic policies and presents them in a way that is more mainstream, punchy and smoothly presented than either Ed or Jeremy could manage. He looks like you could imagine him being Prime Minister. He is a pluralist who seems capable of working with everyone from Livingstone and Corbyn’s policy supremo Neale Coleman to veterans of the Blair era. He doesn’t come with foreign policy baggage that terrifies the public, or followers who are hell bent on factionalising the party. He isn’t planning to deselect any MP whether they agree with him or not. He has the confidence of the vast majority of MPs as shown by the nomination process. Everyone is prepared to work with him so he could assemble a front bench that would genuinely be the best talent Labour had to offer from across the spectrum. His policy stance ought to mean he can bring unity to a traumatised party.

This is not a difficult choice for rational Labour members and supporters to make.

We do not live in times where people are making rational political choices though, so I am under no illusions that Corbyn isn’t the frontrunner.

Nor is this really the choice that we need to be making to win a General Election against a formidable “reassurance” Prime Minister like Theresa May who is doing what Tory leaders like MacMillan did in the past and occupying the centre ground we have vacated, and offering a calm and competent persona at a time of national crisis.

This contest isn’t even beginning to answer the questions Labour needs to answer to win back power:

How do we reconcile our opposition to austerity with public acceptance of and in many cases support for government belt-tightening?

How do we reconcile our support for the EU with public, particularly working class, enthusiasm for Brexit and a clear democratic mandate for it?

How do we reconcile our liberalism with public, particularly working class, opposition to immigration?

How do we win back Labour’s lost voters in Scotland from the SNP?

But we can save those questions for another time.

The question now is do we want to chose unity and survival of the party, or a deepening crisis and chaos, a descent into an orgy of sectarian infighting.

Do we want to at least try to present the case for a Labour Government, or accept that 16 per cent Tory opinion poll leads and the potential loss of another 50 seats are a price worth paying for ideological purity?

I love the Labour Party so I know which choice I will be making.