Labour’s problems go way beyond Jeremy Corbyn
Published on IWA's comment site on 21 July 2016 So, the Labour Party is in crisis - plots, rebellions, protests: the whole nine yards. As a recovering political journalist I feel pretty jaded about the whole thing. Fundamentally, the Labour Party is pretty solid and has been through all this before - several times. But. And there is a big But. Maybe this time it’s different. I’m not overly bothered by the division between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith - it is the meat and drink of politics, but what does greatly trouble me is the growing divergence between those inside the party and the people we were founded to represent. Successful political parties reflect the communities they are drawn from. That became very clear to me when I first joined the Labour Party in the mid-90s. In parts of the constituency where the local branch was a good cross-section of the local community we did well; in parts where it wasn’t, we did not. I’ve spent much of the last 12 mon...