Jeremy Corbyn will struggle to hold his line over Europe | Martin Kettle

By changing his tune on the EU, the Labour leader looks devious or, at best, indecisive. And it could stoke up real trouble with the unions

The Labour party is not best understood as an old-fashioned struggle of left and right. It is better to see Labour as a permanently unresolved engagement between competing traditions. The three most important of these traditions are ethical socialism, labourism, and social democracy. The first emphasises the kind of person you wish to be, the second the kind of person you represent, and the third the kind of thing you seek to win support to do.

Most Labour MPs of modern times are a mix of the second and third traditions. But it is no accident, as the more doctrinaire Marxists say, that Jeremy Corbyn’s roots are in the first and second traditions, and not in the third. Social democracy’s priority is to fashion achievable compromises between capitalism and social justice. This places the emphasis on governing. But governing has never been Corbyn’s thing, as this week has shown.

Related: Jeremy Corbyn’s policies may be popular – but they don’t add up to a platform | Peter Hain

It suggests a hitherto extremely well concealed streak of pragmatism in the seemingly ascetic Corbyn

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