A Labour party that espouses “Corbynism without Corbyn” risks disappearing from the political map, a Labour MP has warned. In a new pamphlet with the Fabian Society, Wes Streeting, an MP on the right of the party who has been a persistent critic of Jeremy Corbyn, urges the party to leave the current leader’s legacy behind to give it a chance of regaining mainstream public support. In a plea to change course, Streeting warns that the party’s existence will again be threatened should it continue with some of Corbyn’s key political tenets such as his approach to foreign policy, nationalisation and uncosted spending commitments outside a time of crisis. “There is no future for the Labour party in Corbynism without Corbyn,” Streeting writes. “The next leader of the Labour party needs to hit a big reset button and to do so loudly enough that the voters notice. That doesn’t mean that we need to jettison every policy, embrace the damaging economics of austerity or seek solace in past victories. “But it does mean building transformational economic policy that people can believe in, a worldview that provides security and opportunity in turbulent times and a political culture that is open, welcoming and inclusive.” In “Let Us Face the Future Again”, Streeting calls on Labour to concentrate on economic inequality, our ageing society, technological revolution, the climate emergency and shifting global power.
“There is no future for the Labour party if the debate about our future becomes locked in an ideological battle between two competing visions of the past instead of building a new politics that can unite the country around a vision for the future,” he writes. The intervention will anger the party’s left, which is facing a major challenge to its domination of the party’s leadership, which it secured with the arrival of Corbyn in 2015 and his overwhelming re-election in 2016 after an attempt to oust him. It is also a message to the next leader – likely to be Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary. Streeting criticises what he calls “Corbynomics”, attacking the suggestion that only the top 5% of earners would need to pay more tax under Labour’s plans and its “inclusive ownership fund” – which he describes as “a massive tax grab and attempt to nationalise a significant chunk of British business”. He writes: “Unless we face the future with answers to the real and dangerous challenges facing our country and our world we risk becoming a cautionary tale to future generations about how it was that a once-major political party managed to… stall progress, empower our opponents and disappear quietly into a vacuum of our own making.”