The civil war in Labour has become a High Conflict. How do we get out of it?
It will be news to exactly no-one that there is a conflict within the Labour Party. However, I believe it would be better described as a High Conflict. What does that mean, I hear you ask? Well dear reader, a High Conflict is where the conflict itself is the reason why two groups are fighting. Sound familiar?
Conflict is when you fight to achieve something. Better rights for women or ethnic minorities, a shorter working week, the return of looted artwork, or an end to the use of fossil fuels. High Conflict is conflict for the sake of conflict. It’s not when you’re fighting to achieve something, it’s when you’re fighting to stop the other side winning. This is what the Labour Party has become. It’s like a dysfunctional marriage, where the couple is only together because they can’t afford to move out (that’s the electoral system in this tortured analogy).
The book
High Conflict is the subject of Amanda Ripley’s book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Her book focuses on America, but it perfectly sums up the sorry state of the Labour Party.
Ripley describes many different High Conflicts: in non-partisan local politics, between liberals and conservatives, in marriages, families, companies, religious communities and even between gangs. High Conflict can trap anyone or any group. It’s destructive, achieves little and is difficult to escape.
From reading Ripley’s book, I saw that the factions within Labour exhibit many of the signs of High Conflict. Ripley uses the metaphor of a tarpit to show how difficult it is to escape High Conflict and how fighting just makes it worse. Labour is stuck in a tarpit right now and it won’t stand a chance of getting into government unless it can find a way out.
Fire starters
There are several fire starters for High Conflict that Ripley identifies in her book, three of which are present in the Labour Party. They are group identities, humiliation and conflict entrepreneurs.
Group identities are the easiest to spot. The ongoing civil war doesn’t neatly break into two camps, but there are plenty of polarising divisions around which group identities are built, such as pro-Corbyn vs Corbyn-skeptic, socialist vs social democrat, centrist vs left or Momentum vs Progress. The presence of group identities gives people a flag to rally around for the High Conflict and prevents individuals from empathising with their opponents.
Humiliation is also easy to spot. Almost everyone in Labour believes that their faction is being ignored or shut out. Some feel humiliated because Jeremy Corbyn was chucked out, or because Peter Mandelson was brought in, or because Angela Rayner was demoted, or because Jess Phillips isn’t in the cabinet, or because the leadership isn’t sufficiently pro-EU, or because the leadership isn’t talking enough about “traditional Labour voters” or … you get the idea. I could keep writing this list until the next election.
Conflict entrepreneurs
Another important fact that Ripley identifies in starting and prolonging High Conflict are conflict entrepreneurs. Conflict entrepreneurs are people who create High Conflict because it benefits themselves. See the film Marriage Story for examples of how the American divorce-industrial complex is filled with conflict entrepreneurs who turn simple resolvable conflicts into High Conflicts at great financial gain to themselves.
The conflict entrepreneurs in Labour are the people who get attention, social media followers, blog views and, ultimately, power and money from intensifying the High Conflict in Labour. Politics is a field that’s rife with conflict entrepreneurs; that politician you hate who you’re thinking of right now is probably one. Conflict entrepreneurs don’t campaign to win anything, they just stir up conflict so that people pay attention to them (and in the attention economy, attention is money and power).
I’m not going to use this space to accuse anyone from profiting from the High Conflict that has engulfed Labour. Conflict entrepreneurs may not even know they are conflict entrepreneurs, and their followers certainly don’t believe they are; unless they find all this internecine fighting entertaining, like the world’s most bureaucratic soap opera. What I am asking you to do is to think about a politician or journalist’s motivation. Ask yourself: would this person’s livelihood be destroyed if they got what they claim they want?
American hyper-partisan conflict entrepreneurs
For a concrete example of a conflict entrepreneur, we will travel across the pond to America where the political High Conflict is worse than here and there’s big money to be made from being a conflict entrepreneur. Ben Shapiro - a man whose purpose in life is to whip up conservative hatred for liberals and is beloved by the people who confuse the ability to be rude to college students as being a good orator - is an obvious example of an American hyper-partisan conflict entrepreneur.
Shapiro is a frequent face on many conservative media outlets and makes money writing books with titles such as (deep breath for these) Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans and How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument. The worst thing that could happen to Shapiro is for him to get what he wants: the destruction of liberalism and the total domination of conservatives. This is a clear sign of a conflict entrepreneur.
The disaster of getting what you want
If everyone in the USA became a conservative, Shapiro would have nothing to rail against and have no means of getting attention or selling books and tickets to his campus speaking tours, where the terminally self-satisfied can watch a professional pundit and trained media personality be publicly rude to teenaged college students and then tell themselves that this makes conservatives right and liberals dumb.
All Shapiro does is make Americans hate each other more and further their High Conflict, whilst getting fame, money and the respect of angry people who like to take selfies in their car wearing trucker hats. When looking at Labour figures, and this is especially important for Labour figures you agree with, ask yourself: what would happen if they won? Would the end of Labour’s forever war mean they had no platform anymore? Are they fighting for a principal or just stirring up conflict to get attention?
The route out of High Conflict
Okay, so Labour is stuck in High Conflict. How do we get out of it? To escape from High Conflict, Ripley says, a route out is essential. So, if Labour wants to escape the tarpit of High Conflict then the various factions will need to start engaging with each other instead of fighting each other.
Ripley’s book offers many examples of how people have exited High Conflict, from violent gang feuds to America’s unending culture war. Most of them involve having some perspective on a High Conflict, taking a step back, engaging with the other side and asking difficult questions of yourself. Not easy when you’re in the middle of a conflict, but it's essential to stop the endless cycles of High Conflict.
The end of the Labour forever war
If Labour cannot end the High Conflict that has engulfed the party, then it won’t be able to win an election again. High Conflict ensures that Labour is only talking to Labour, and this puts voters off. Labour needs to engage with the electorate - what do they want? what does Labour want to offer them? - but Labour can only do that when it’s not endlessly talking to itself about itself.
Recognising that Labour has become engulfed in High Conflict is the first step to escaping from High Conflict. The route out of the tarpit is long, difficult and probably painful, but what is the alternative? Does anyone really think they can win the Labour civil war? Surely, it’s better to see it as what it is, a forever war that cannot be won and will ultimately destroy the party.
However, there is an added complication to all this. Ripley says in her book that conflict, as opposed to High Conflict, is good and healthy. It’s how we resolve problems and make progress. The divisions in the Labour Party are not all High Conflict, there is conflict mixed up with the High Conflict. There’s lot of problems Labour is facing, and both the conflict and High Conflict is over the solution to these issues. The conflict over what the Labour Party should be or do, is one I will explore in the next blog post.
