Labour should unite, and direct all its firepower on May’s government

The country stands on the brink. Both the EU and Brexit secretary Dominic Raab send out warnings to prepare for a volcanic no-deal, tantamount to preparing for war. The unthinkable is being prepared for. The Tories are falling apart, incapable of governing, and a constitutional crisis looms if parliament can never agree any deal. A general election might well be the only resolution: there never was a riper time for a strong opposition to seize the day.

And yet for once Theresa May landed a blow on Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs: “While I was negotiating our future security relationship with Europe, he was renegotiating the definition of antisemitism.” She was right: Labour’s NEC wasted three long hours failing morally and politically by refusing to endorse the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Definition of antisemitism.

Along with all the usual antisemitic abuse, Margaret Hodge has been inundated with messages of support from Labour party members since she challenged Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite and a racist. They are shocked by the idea that she should be disbarred – she who fought off the BNP in Barking, and as head of the public accounts committee, skewered government failings time and again.

Tom Watson, in that disastrous NEC session, reportedly thumped the table and asked: “Are we serious about winning an election?” That’s the political question many Labour party members are asking. How could four Labour MPs, plus leftist Kelvin Hopkins, save Theresa May from a defeat that would, her whips say, have led to an immediate confidence vote? The Hoey, Field, Stringer, Mann and Hopkins group will bear heavy responsibility for every future act of this brutally austere government.

While the country is in the gravest danger of a kamikaze Brexit, Labour is not only mortally offending Jews but obsessing over its own rulebook for electing the leader, council leaders and MPs.

That risks being the hot story at Labour’s September conference, blanking out all that matters most from Brexit to benefits, housing to health. What a time for leftist MP Chris Williamson to conduct a roadshow on internal democracy round the seats of Labour MPs he disagrees with, in favour of de-selections. Many will remember how Corbyn was allowed to rebel against New Labour over 400 times unmolested. True, Wednesday’s crucial Commons vote has raised the bitterest questions about how much rebellion should be tolerated in Labour MPs. But this is no time for the party to turn inwards, for some around Corbyn to spend more energy on securing total party domination than on winning what may be an imminent election.

Labour is lucky that strife in the ruling party draws most of attention. But they know they should be streaking ahead on the polls. Too often weakness on Brexit has left them as bit-part players in the national psychodrama: the self-indulgence of their own internal wranglings suggests Watson is right to question their serious will to win.

Any outsider can see that both Labour and Tory parties should split. Brexit creates new battle lines within both parties, ungluing awkward cohabitations – the old Tory wet/dry divide that held together through Thatcherism and beyond, the Bennites, social democrats and trade unionists who did split Labour once. Only our monstrous first-past-the-post voting system forces these miserable bedfellows to stay together. As we SDP veterans know well, fantasy talk of new parties dies with one glance at the electoral arithmetic of seats and votes. Besides, who in any Labour faction would sit down in Anna Soubry’s imaginary “national unity government”, joining with those who screw down the poorest while cutting tax for the well-off? Impossible.

What’s not impossible is that Labour could soon be in power. Brexit chaos may bring a shock election – so Corbyn and his team shouldn’t waste any energy on internal strife but direct all their firepower instead on May’s disaster of a government. Labour has the popular policies, and by every law of political gravity, should stomp home to a mighty victory, banishing for decades the Tories who brought us Brexit. Do all sides of Labour want it enough to put aside their factionalism?