In the cacophony of the House of Commons it was once said that a wise old sage of an MP was counselling a young upstart who, disgruntled at the green benches opposite, was railing at what he called ‘the enemy’. No, the elder statesman said, they are the opposition: ‘the real enemy is behind you’. In a week in which the Labour party has teetered on the brink, how apt that tale seems. For Labour is belatedly warming up for one of those vicious civil wars for which it is so famed, the kind of ones that kept the party out of power for a generation and so sullied it in the eyes of the electorate. This, at a time when the party is enjoying the largest lead in the opinion polls for over a decade, is absurd. Romanticised rhetoric will label this latest broadside as a battle for ‘Labour’s soul’. The electorate will look on with resigned indifference, and the Tories will rub their hands with glee. Ultimately, the spat is about control. And, as the parliamentary fable rightly predicts, the people wielding the knife are more than often than not going to be the supposed comrades at your back.

The original source of the GMB motion is from a man who is so committed to the Labour party that he once left it and stood for Socialist Unity in the 2005 general election. Brushing that aside, he has returned to the fold to purge the last remaining Blairites. It is one of the great myths of modern British politics that in the 1990s a sinister cabal of ‘Blairites’ invaded an otherwise healthy political entity, stuffed full of the working class, and turned it in to moribund shell, bereft of heart, soul and – most importantly – leftwing supporters. It seems obvious to mention that Labour’s support among the manual working classes had already fallen exponentially, closely mirroring Britain’s industrial decline. That vast swaths of the working classes in the 1980s left for the SDP and Tories also seems to pass the hardened few by.

Elements of the left are so consumed by the pursuit of ideological purity that they despise the very notion of compromise. The only people talking the language of division and conflict are, thus far, the unions. For our heroic left, divergence is not to be tolerated. You are either on message, marching relentlessly towards socialist victory or you are a Blairite clone, with a Coutts chequebook and a penchant for dodgy wars. However, we dissenters are not hell-bent on internal warfare; moreover, if there is ever a time for frank, open debate, it is now. Having achieved just 29 per cent of the vote, a result that would make the late Michael Foot blush, the Labour party surely has much to discuss.

There is no more dangerous a notion from those pursuing this vendetta that there are strands of political discourse that deserve to be shut down just because they happen to disagree with them. Au contraire; disagreement should be welcomed, the debate fierce and the rivalry comradely. All will make for a better Labour party in the battlefield come the next general election. Blairite, Brownite, Old, New, Red, Purple – it matters not. We are the Labour party.

This episode, despite reaffirming Labour’s long-held ability to self implode, has played to a deeper sense that we on the left dare not read, write, nor promote what many Labour members, and members of the public, are thinking and saying. Labour thinktanks are not the enemy; the Conservatives are and always will be. If the era of New Labour has taught us anything at all, it is that we are best when we are united. We’ll know we have got over our historic preference for self flagellation when we can look across the pews and confidently state: they are the real enemies.

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David Talbot is a political consultant, tweets @_davetalbot and writes the weekly The Week Ahead column on Progress

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Photo: Conservative Party