In the age of Facebook, a new party of the centre-left can work

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When Tony Blair was taking the UK to war in Iraq, creating chaos abroad and the domestic conditions for the eventual destruction ‎of his New Labour project, Facebook did not exist. Around this time, Blair liked to talk a lot about the extraordinary speed of technological and economic change sweeping across the globe. No-one, including Blair himself, could have imagined that the changes coming down the line would also result in the election as Labour leader of an obscure backbencher called Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left friend of the IRA. The unthinkable happened, and this weekend Corbyn has been re-elected as leader, crushing his opponents. Corbyn secured 313,209 votes (61.8%) and Owen Smith 193,229 (32.8%).

After Iraq, Blair’s New Labour coalition of interests held together one last time in the 2005 UK general election. The Tories were not ready for a return to power and dodged the bullet of being in office during the financial crisis of 2008, an episode which destroyed Labour’s reputation on the economy. A project – New Labour – originally predicated on prudence at home and pragmatism abroad ended up leading to disaster on both fronts, to moderate disillusion, a revival of the far left and the destruction of Labour as we know it.

The reason Facebook is worth ‎mentioning in the context of Labour is that while all this has been happening a technology firm grew from nothing out of the dorm of its founder Mark Zuckerberg into a giant-killing behemoth of the Internet Age. Facebook’s rise took less than a decade and along with smaller outlets such as Twitter, and the surge of mobile, social media has changed communication, giving family and friends new ways to interact and share experiences over long distances. Facebook is also in the process of destroying the news business. The media companies that pinned too much hope on being close to the groovy geeks are discovering they are really as ruthless as hell. Why waste time and money on going to the digital operation of a traditional new giant to reach consumers? Just go straight to Facebook, which mines the data and knows the wants and desires of its users, and give them the money for ads direct.

Those in newspapers who developed their own audiences, of subscribers and members, have a much better chance of survival because of the revenue involved. Others who went “free to air” are waking up to the reality of Facebook (and Google, founded only in the late 1990s) hoovering up even more of the ad money than has been the case in recent years. ‎That means profits squeezed (and worse) and even less money for journalism. In this way, one of the most powerful industries on the planet – the democratically important Western media – has been disrupted and plunged into a crisis which only a few quality outlets will ‎survive and prosper.

When this can happen at such speed, when billions of consumers demonstrate that they are prepared to adopt new brands and change their working, spending and leisure habits, the cry of the defeated Labour moderates that they must stay where they are, because Labour was founded 116 years ago, and the trade unions, and here’s a film of Clement Attlee, all seems pathetic. Understandable, when one acknowledges Labour’s great weakness for sentimentality and self-mythology, but pathetic nonetheless.

The practical reality is as follows. The moderates have lost the Labour party. This is no longer an open question; the deed is done. Corbyn has attracted hundreds of thousands of new members who share his anti-market ideology and screwball sentiments on life in general. They are not going to evaporate. Even when Corbyn is crushed at a general election, there will be constructed a version of events that blames the mainstream media (less powerful than it was in reality) or the moderates, or most likely the voters for being enemies of the people. Their revolutionary Socialist message will not, short of a zombie apocalypse, ever work with the voters of England, who have demonstrated time and again what they do not like. They will not like – do not like – the twit Corbyn whose monstrous ego grows larger by the day.

All that being the case, the moderates can either wait for the Corbynites in the membership to come after them, when they will be deselected by the new activists, or get out in front and lead the establishment of a new party. This will split the opposition and guarantee Tory rule, say fearful moderates. No, it is staying that guarantees destruction and then five years of a John McDonnell or Diane Abbott leadership. There will be nothing left at that point. Labour will have gone the way of MySpace, or Yahoo, to the graveyard of modern life.

With so much concern in the country about there being no serious opposition, there is an opportunity now for the mainstream elements of the centre-left to establish a new force. They can appeal for help to almost 200,000 members who didn’t vote for Corbyn and to wealthy non-Tory donors for help. If enough Labour MPs resign the whip to set themselves up as a party there are ways for them to get the so-called short money that funds the parties at Westminster.

It is true that they lack an obvious leader, but the silence of Dan Jarvis MP, a former soldier, suggests that possibly he is being held in reserve if the moderates do find the courage to strike out soon. If not him, the rapid changes of the last few years suggest that it is quite possible for new faces to emerge quickly, if they grab the public attention by being bold and having something to say. There the campaign of Owen Smith, the defeated challenger to Corbyn in this year’s leadership race, proves the futility of accepting the Corbyn Socialist agenda and thinking that putting on a New Labour suit and tie will make the difference. What is needed is fresh thinking on markets, technology, public services and foreign policy.

There have been some very encouraging initial signs in the last week, with several Labour moderates such as Emma Reynolds making it clear that‎ they are now in favour of ending free movement and open borders, which they clung to during the EU referendum. Since then they have been speaking to the voters, listening a lot and thinking. This is a welcome development.

Why should I care? A moderate Brexiteer on the pro-market centre-right should be delighting in the disaster which has befallen Labour. I cannot share the rejoicing. The Tories without any challenge at all for more than a decade will be terrible. In such perilous circumstances, Labour’s moderates will just have to accept the world has changed and be brave.

Facebook showed that in providing something new that people wanted, or learned to want, it is possible to build an extraordinary business that has 2 billion users a month and a value measured in many tens of billions. Consumers are open to adopting the new if it works and improves their lives.

Labour moderates cannot expect similar numbers to those claimed by Facebook, but they can provide a vehicle for millions of sensible Labour voters and centrist floating voters to get their voices heard. They can use this clout to hold the Conservatives to account and begin to build an alternative potential government that might win in England. Perhaps eventually, in a decade or so, the new party if it is successful might take over what is left of Labour once the far left has wrecked it completely. Until that day, moderate centre-left voters need something serious to vote for, and that is not the Liberal Democrats who were all but wiped out last year. The centre-left need a new party for new times.