Labour parties battle it out

Though he retired from front-line politics a while ago former First Minister Rhodri Morgan is still capable of some pithy analysis of current events. Last week, for instance, commenting on Labour’s divisions over the bombing of Syria he pronounced that we were seeing the emergence of two parties rather than one. The catalyst had been the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader and his estrangement from many Labour MPs at Westminster, and not least many in his Shadow Cabinet.

 

Rohodri Morgan - Labour is now two parties, or is it three?

All this was creating a very different kind of party. As Rhodri told BBC Wales last week: “We have got a new kind of Labour Party now. The majority of the membership in the country, almost doubled, are very loyal to Corbyn and very few of them in favour of going to war in Syria. But you’ve got sincerely held beliefs among those 66 MPs who voted on the government side that they’re doing the right thing. Generally the 232 Labour MPs are not really Corbynistas except for a small number, maybe 20 or 30.”

Rhodri Morgan went on to consider a suggestion that had been made by Birkenhead Labour MP Frank Field that there should be two Labour leaders, one of them leader of the party as a membership body, and the other leader of the party in the House of Commons. “Now it’s not very workable that, but you can see what he means because in effect we do have two Labour Parties,’ Rhodri said.

A problem in working all this out is that it is even more complicated than Rhodri Morgan suggests. To see that you only have to ask which of the two Labour parties he describes he would support. The answer is neither.  He does not support Jeremy Corbyn but neither does he support the bombing of Syria.

To understand Rhodri’s position it’s necessary to go back to the Labour leadership campaign during the summer. In early August Jeremy Corbyn visited Wales and was quizzed at some length on Welsh Labour’s approach to policy which he said he supported a good deal. He referred to the notion of ‘clear red water’, which is short hand for the way Rhodri Morgan had distinguished himself from Tony Blair’s more right wing policies. Corbyn said, ‘“I know Rhodri very well and I’ve enjoyed reading the book on Clear Red Water ... Maybe we can narrow the red water and we can walk across it.’

This drew the following response from Rhodri Morgan: “There’s a massive gap between between what you can call Corbynism and Blairism. I attempted to fill that gap with what I called Classic Labour. He’s not Classic Labour, he’s old hard left Labour. So its got nothing to do with clear red water at all. When I heard it I thought it was a bit of a cheek to be honest because I think Yvette Cooper represents that space between Corbynism and Blairism which is where I think Labour ought to be.” One conclusion we can draw from this is that Rhodri Morgan is wrong in suggesting that two Labour Parties are emerging. There are at least three.