I have just been watching The Daily Politics and found a really interesting discussion on there (I imagine it's on iplayer)
Andrew Neil(AN) It is clear Labour have problems with Corbyn in Copeland because of the nuclear issue but actually what the people of Copeland think is broadly what the British people think. They're in favour of Trident and in favour of some kind of nuclear power provided it's not too expensive. So it's not just a Copeland issue but it's not just a Corbyn issue either. I would suggest Social Democratic parties across Europe and, indeed, including the Democrats in the United States, most of them are in trouble.
Rafael Behr(RB) It think that's absolutely right and I think John Woodcock's interview there was very interesting because it illustrated to me a couple of things. First, that people in the Parliamentary Party have learnt the lesson from last year when they went after Jeremy Corbyn, they attacked him after the European referendum because they were so frustrated and thought the leadership was dire. They essentially had one bullet in the chamber and they fired it off into the air and Jeremy Corbyn was still leader and what's more they antagonised a lot of the members who supported Jeremy and thought he was absolutely brilliant and he was their choice of leader and they wanted to keep him. What I thought John Woodcock demonstrated that is they have sort of understood that there are still members of the labour party who really want the Jeremy Corbyn project to work but also he understands that there is not much point in just removing Jeremy Corbyn if you don't address this broader of what does a party of the centre left do in the 21st Century, when all the industrial structures that have always supported the Labour Party for generations and labour movements across Europe and the nature of the economy, the nature of those structures have just changed so much. It is not obvious what a core social democratic constituency looks like any more. There is a sophisticated understanding of the problem now in the Parliamentary Labour Party, what there isn't is anyone who is really articulating what any answer is but they know that the answer isn't the on-going leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
AN But they are not alone in that. The Greek socialist party has been pretty much wiped out; the Italian democrat socialist party, Mr Renzi's party is ripping itself apart at the moment; the French socialists are about to be wiped out in the presidential elections; the German socialist democrats may be given a new lease of life by the new candidate and Mrs Merkel is on the back foot but that seems more a change of personnel than a change of any kind of policy so British Labour is not alone in trying to work out what to stand for.
RB No, and although these are quite different jurisdictions there are quite common problems and one of them seems to be a big gap between what became the sort of - I hate this term – the sort of metropolitan liberal intellectual steering committee of the left and the sort of storm trouper basis, industrial working-class base that always drove the Labour movement forward through trade unions. Now you need that coalition of two different sort of constituencies to form power but culturally those two constituencies have drifted ever, ever further apart and from Ed Milliband's leadership into Jeremy Corbyn's leadership you sense that those two entities – the ties have frayed completely.
