“Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake”, says Barry Gardiner when asked what the hell Labour is doing about the mess the government is in regarding leaving the EU. Your first question might be this: who the hell is Barry Gardiner when he’s at home? I’ll tell you. He is the Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the EU. I’ll bet you’re none the wiser. He’s yet another non-entity on Jeremy Corbyn’s wretched opposition front bench.
Set to one side the issue of Brexit, critical though it is, but what we have here is the most cynical Labour opposition we have seen, perhaps ever. We can, remoaner or Brexshitter, all agree that Theresa May has been particularly clueless in her dealings with the EU but Labour adopts a different strategy altogether: it says as little as possible. And why? Because their only aim is to win power. Yes, you might say that this is precisely what Labour should be doing. I won’t agree.
Labour should be offering an alternative to the Tories. They should not, as Gardiner suggests, simply sit back and watch Brexit destroy thousands, perhaps millions, of jobs; the jobs of people who they would surely want to vote Labour. As strategies go, it’s as bad as it gets.
I for one will not vote for any Labour Party that is not committed to, at the very least, remaining in the single market, the customs union and continuing with free movement. If they were to say, we are aiming for an off the peg Norway deal, I could live with it, even though it’s very much second best to actually staying in the EU. Corbyn and the comrades simply play games, cynical political games born of a lifetime of smoke-filled rooms. This is anything but a new kind of politics.
It is no wonder people are so disillusioned by politics and politicians. May and Corbyn are the worst leaders of the main parties of my lifetime and probably well before my lifetime. Hopeless inadequates, out of their depth, leading the country off a cliff.
Someone should resign, perhaps all of them.
