ALEX Salmond has urged Jeremy Corbyn to stop being “nice” to his rebels as the Labour leader was yesterday said to be preparing to purge his shadow cabinet of members who defied him on Syria last week.
The former First Minister said he faced two years of conflict when he first became SNP leader in 1990 until he learned to stand up to his internal party opponents – and said Corbyn should learn from that experience.
Corbyn watched 66 of his MPs vote with the Conservative Government to bomb Syria after he allowed them a free vote to oppose his own anti-war message.
“When I became SNP leader at a very tender age in 1990 I got a landslide majority,” Salmond said. “I was a young leader and I thought my job was to be nice to the people who opposed me and attacked me.
“What I found was there was about two years of internal warfare because people hadn’t been reconciled to my leadership.
“Then I realised that the job of a leader was to lead.”
He added: “It’s not just because people want things their own way, it’s because unless you are prepared to do that, you cannot be a leader.
“In my estimation, Jeremy Corbyn’s mistake this week was not imposing the whip on the war vote and not inviting those who disagreed with him to resign from the shadow cabinet, as he could have done, and represented a party as a coherent political party.
“I think he would benefit from doing that, and I think he still would benefit in starting to lead in that sense.”
Shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn, who gave the final speech for Labour, arguing in favour of strikes on Daesh targets in Syria, was among the Labour MPs who voted with the Tories.
Chief whip Rosie Winterton, who abstained, and shadow defence secretary Maria Eagle, shadow culture secretary Michael Dugher and shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Vernon Coaker, who all supported air strikes, are allegedly among the figures who may be vulnerable if Corbyn moves against the dissenters.
Salmond went on to take the SNP from a fringe party to the dominant force in Scottish politics, with a largely unwavering support of his elected members which was rarely tested in public.
While he may have faced dissent at the start of his leadership, in recent times the lack of public disagreements among SNP parliamentarians under his leadership and his successor Nicola Sturgeon’s has often been noted.
The only significant disagreement to have surfaced in the last few years has been over the party’s decision, supported by the leadership at its October 2012 conference, for an independent Scotland to remain in Nato. Three leading SNP MSPs – Jean Urquhart, John Finnie and John Wilson – quit the party in protest and now sit as independents.
In a separate development yesterday the shadow chancellor John McDonnell acknowledged Corbyn’s election as Labour leader had been a “massive cultural shock” to many MPs, but insisted “there is no going back” on the course he had set.
Despite being forced to grant a free vote on Syria in the face of a threatened shadow cabinet revolt, he still saw the majority of his top team and the majority of Labour MPs vote with him in opposing military action.
He was then further bolstered by a Labour victory in the Oldham West and Royton by-election, which saw the party see off the challenge of Ukip with an increased share of the vote.
“Now Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has been strengthened,” said McDonnell, writing in The Observer . “The message is clear: unite around the principles of the new politics and we can be the most powerful force for progressive political change in generations.”
McDonnell made clear Corbyn remained determined to re-make the party in his own left-wing image and that of the grass roots activists who propelled him to the leadership.
“The new leader was also elected with an overwhelming mandate on a political programme that seeks to take the party in a direction that reflects the current views of party members,” he wrote. “This platform explicitly seeks to transform the party from the traditional centralised party into something more akin to a mass social movement, responding to the rising demand for greater activist engagement.”
He added: “People realise that if Labour is to fulfill its founding goal of transforming our economic and political system into a more equal, free and truly democratic society, which provides security and life-changing opportunities to the British people, then there is no going back.”
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