History is repeating itself in the Labour civil war – but it's too early for a split

Jeremy Corbyn can expect a victory in the Labour leadership battle in September, but the electoral system explains why Owen Smith is running on his own left-wing ticket

Owen Smith launched his '20 left-wing polices' in Rotherham this week (Charlotte Graham)

We have a female Conservative prime minister; a Labour civil war as the soft left, led by a man from South Wales, takes on the hard left; party members are at odds with many Labour MPs, who are threatened with deselection. There are divisions over EU membership and unilateral nuclear disarmament. Some of those fighting the hard left talk about forming a breakaway party.

Yes, all that is happening today – it also happened in the early 1980s. The soft left leader and former unilateralist then was Neil Kinnock. Today it is Owen Smith, who is standing against Jeremy Corbyn in the party’s leadership election. Lord Kinnock received plenty of abuse, and even threats of violence, after he broke with the hard left in 1981, by refusing to support Tony Benn’s bid for Labour’s deputy leadership. Today the intimidation is even worse, thanks to social media. Women MPs feel particularly exposed, as Labour supplants the Tories as the nasty party.

Some characters in this repeat drama are the same. Corbyn was at Benn’s side, a bushy-bearded pin-up at a turbulent Labour conference in 1981. (Attending my first Labour gathering, I followed Benn and Corbyn around fringe meetings, where the excitement and adulation was the same as at Corbyn’s rallies today).

Kinnock is still on the scene and made a powerful plea at a recent meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party for Corbyn to stand down. He argued that losing the support of 80 per cent of his MPs made his position untenable in a party that had chosen the parliamentary rather than revolutionary route to socialism.

Frank Field, under attack by the Militant Tendency in the 1980s, was deselected but reprieved by Kinnock’s intervention after threatening to trigger by-election in his Birkenhead constituency. Today left-wingers plan to deselect Field and his Wirral neighbour Angela Eagle, who opposed Corbyn before standing aside for Smith. The Benn family is still in the script. The sacking of Hilary Benn, whose late father remains Corbyn’s guiding star, for alleged plotting led to mass resignations by his frontbench colleagues. Some Labour MPs think that Benn Junior would have been a much more experienced and formidable challenger to Corbyn. But he is self-effacing and perhaps his family history was too much for him.

Not everything is the same. An important difference is that in the 1980s, the trade unions broadly supported Kinnock as he fought to bring Labour back from the brink. Today’s shrunken, mainly public sector unions mostly back Corbyn – although they came close to supporting a formula under which he would have stood down before the 2020 general election in recent talks with Tom Watson, Labour’s deputy leader. The negotiations collapsed.

Crucially, the system for electing Labour leaders is different. In the 1980s, Labour MPs, the unions and members each had a third of the vote. Under Ed Miliband's changes, an MP’s vote is worth the same as a party member. So the estimated 550,000 members (up from 422,000 last year) will call the shots, which will help Corbyn.

Some left-wing members expelled under Kinnock or who later resigned under Tony Blair are back, enthused by Corbyn. MPs tell me that these retreads are still loyal to Corbyn, as are the newbies who joined last year. But many of the stalwarts who have remained members since the 1980s and backed Corbyn last year, now judge him not up to the job and will vote for Smith this year.

This still points to a Corbyn victory in September but the electoral system explains why Smith is running on a left-wing ticket. His 20-point plan includes a wealth tax on the top 1 per cent of earners – part of what he calls “a cold-eyed and practical revolution” rather than Corbyn’s “misty-eyed romanticism”.

Some Corbyn critics worry that Smith will not win by echoing the man he opposes, and is shifting the party’s centre of gravity even further to the left. But Smith probably has little alternative. He would be different to Corbyn; under him, Labour would have a much stronger team as the refuseniks would return to the frontbench; he acknowledges the need to address public concern about immigration; is pro-EU and supports the nuclear deterrent (which, like Kinnock, he opposed in his younger days). As in Kinnock’s time as leader, the only way Labour’s right-wing can defeat the hard left is to endorse a soft left candidate who can wean party members off full-blooded socialism. Nixon goes to China again.

But Smith faces an unenviable task. Many Labour members, out of step with the voters the party needs to win to regain power, prefer the ideological purity offered by Corbyn to the better electoral prospects under Smith. It echoes the 1983 general election, when Tony Benn hailed the triumph of eight million people voting for a socialist manifesto. A pity that Margaret Thatcher won a majority of 144.

Where does the story end this time? History could easily repeat itself, with Labour out of power for 18 years. It could be even longer because this crisis is deeper; Labour has no divine right to survive. It is hard to see how the gulf between the MPs and party members can be bridged.

Will Labour split? Not yet. Even if Corbyn is re-elected, his critics will try to oust him again next year and hope that enough members will eventually turn against him. The SDP's 1981 breakaway forced Labour to change, but those who walked out did not reap the benefit. That deters some of today’s Labour figures from handing over the party they love to the Corbynistas, so they will stay and fight. But as 2020 looms, they may make a different judgement. “Sometimes, politics creates its own dynamic,” said one former Shadow Cabinet member.