Why liberal Conservatives should welcome a strong Labour party

It has been an unprecedented few weeks and less than three weeks in, the medical, economic and social repercussions of the Coronavirus crisis have barely begun.

An unexpected light in the darkness was the Labour front bench response, led by the Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth. Ashworth’s statement was a model of statesmanship:

“I hope that Members across the House understand that when we ask the Secretary of State probing questions, we do so constructively — not to undermine him or to create some false dividing line for the sake of political point scoring. This is a frightening time for our constituents and we all have an interest in ensuring that the Government get this right.”

Compare and contrast Jeremy Corbyn who, in the last few days of his leadership, ended as he began. He wrote a letter aiming for a five-point plan that was neither five points nor a plan — he as antagonistic, numerically illiterate and unconnected to reality.

There are two sides of the Labour Party: those who wish to govern, and those who are happy for their party to exist in Opposition. Corbyn was the latter, much happier rallying his own crowd than he ever was at PMQs or when it came to engaging with the detail. But, as Corbyn returned to his allotment, his party stood in the Chamber for the Coronavirus Bill and showed that it had become, again, a party that wanted to govern. This Labour party wants to engage with the mechanics of legislation. It has an interest in outcome as well as in rhetoric. It has an interest in being the party of Government.

Jonathan Ashworth was previously best-known for a leaked tape in which he called Labour’s election profile “dire” and said that the Party had erred in not getting rid of Corbyn earlier. While some brave MPs — Luciana Berger, Jamie Reed, Ian Austin — walked out of the party prior to the election, many others stayed put and stayed quiet.

It’s easy to forget that some of those who have been extremely vocal in opposition to Corbyn since losing their seats, among them Caroline Flint and Anna Turley, stayed in the party in 2019 and were content to stand on Labour’s manifesto. Presumably they thought privately before the election what they said publicly after it. It’s for them to answer why they stayed in.

But, if it was to ride the Momentum wave and take their party back once the Corbyn experiment failed, the opportunity is there for Labour’s remaining MPs. Because for all the Momentum takeover of the grassroots and however radical the 2019 Labour intake, the mass deselections never came.

Why is this relevant now?

At a practical level, the opposition functions by criticising the work of the government in order to persuade the electorate that they are better suited to govern. Corbyn only ever really engaged with the first part and his backbenchers played ball or shut up. This criticism of the government does not have to be ideological right-left because most voters don’t care about ideology: the pendulums of both the Conservative and Labour parties have swung radically to the right and left across the last few years, yet the successive governments elected have been relatively centrist. Voters like competence above ideals: as has often been repeated, voters liked the Labour Party ideas in 2019, they just didn’t seriously believe the Labour Party was capable of implementing them.

The coronavirus pandemic has led to the use of emergency powers by government and those powers have to be scrutinised. “This must never become a nation where people risk arrest for walking their dogs, visiting beauty spots or making impulse buys.” Sensible words. That they appeared in the Daily Mail this week is perhaps not surprising. What’s more surprising is that they were written by the hardly–libertarian David Blunkett.

It is almost impossible to believe that somewhere, in an alternative universe, we are in the last few weeks of the 2015 David Cameron administration. Since then we’ve had Brexit, two elections, three Prime Ministers and the bumbling Corbyn, whose Labour party argued furiously with itself as the country careered from one earth-shattering event to the next. This was a disaster for the Labour Party but it was a disaster for the Conservatives too, to the point of near catastrophe when complacency led them into the campaign in 2017. The Conservatives’ 2019 campaign, by contrast, had a vitality. Organisation. This time round, the government tried to earn people’s votes, because they knew there was a real danger that they might vote for the other side. The spirit of competition is as healthy to government and politics as it is to the market.

If criticism is irrational it will be dismissed or laughed at, as Robert Peston showed earlier this month. That is why well-informed shadow ministers are vital. As the government takes unprecedented powers to implement its much-needed emergency strategy, we need a calm, constructive figure on both sides on the dispatch box. To quote Jonathan Ashworth again, everybody has an interest in ensuring the government gets this right.

The Labour Party need to rebuild public trust and prove they have what it takes to engage sensibly. Labour has got an opportunity — let’s hope they take it.