Should the Labour Party only represent Labour Members ?

[Goldstone1976]

The electorate desperately needs the Labour Party to split as part of a wider political realignment, with the right of the party forming a new centrist coalition with the Lib Dems and disaffected 'One Nation' Tories.

I think the formation of a new party along precisely the lines you outline would be attractive to a decent chunk of the electorate and it's even quite likely that the right of the Labour party would want it to happen, particularly if Corbyn remains leader. It's a big ask to then expect that the LDs and disaffected "One Nation" Tories would join them. It would be a seismic shift in UK politics - a single party in the (perpetually shifting) "centre ground", with Labour and the Tories sitting on the Left and Right respectively. Seismic shifts are pretty rare in parliamentary democracies - but the conditions currently are just about perfect for such a shift to happen. An interesting idea.

 

[beorhthelm]

But the problem is that the members are a very select subgroup of the people that voted for the party at the last GE (or an even more select subgroup of the people that are represented by a Labour MP). With membership levels generally on a downward trend, this is only going to get worse.
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...which suggests that the membership is more right wing that the MPs and much more so than the voters that elected them.

its inevitable, to be a paid member and activist you have to hold some strong view and engage in them fairly passionatly. so the membership will tend towards the harder line of the party.

 

[KingKev]

Ask yourself one question. In referenda people don't vote on a broad range, they vote on one specific issue. If JC is so in touch with the core labour vote, why didn't he make massive efforts to get them to align their vote to his party view?

There are many answers, many of which are likely to be that labour doesn't represent the view of their core constituency - unions are becoming more of a side show and the swp or momentum are no closer to the minds of the working class left than tony Blair was. In fact they may be further away

Agree with the referenda point.
Our first past the post system means that England in particular can only support 2 main parties in the long term. That means they individually have to try and cover too much of the political spectrum and end up being coalitions that grudgingly compromise on the manifesto platforms that they will campaign on in order to obtain power. That means that as soon as you get into a specific issue the deeply held beliefs of individuals are almost impossible to predict from their party allegiance (other than UKIP on Brexit I assume - even members / supporters of SNP voted in decent numbers to remain in UK!).
So what we have, thanks to first past the post, is a party infrastructure that normally avoids weak, multi-party coalitions in government but leads to constant tensions and power struggles within parties to control the agenda and manifesto, and that themselves are really coalitions pretending to be something else.
Brexit leave vote is effectively a result of first past the post and the inability of a two party system to support a calm and reasoned debate on the issues with EU membership over four decades. The result was entirely due to protest votes from people who thought they had not been heard on the subject rather than a dearly held common belief that Brexit is a good idea.
It's a crazy world that calls it democracy when UKIP can get nearly 3 times as many votes as SNP but end up with 55 (98%) fewer seats. That was the point where the out vote was sealed. 13% of the people that bothered to vote were completely disenfranchised and were looking at a parliament where, formally, they only had 1 MP out of 600-odd to state their case. Yes the government promised a vote, but leadership of all the main parliamentary parties campaigned for 'in'.
Hey ho...