Still a fan of Jeremy Corbyn? Labour’s accidental leader, that decent man whose friends include the IRA, Hamas and Hezbollah, the man with a mandate? It looks like quite a lot of his friends aren’t very nice people.
There is a new twitter account called ‘Gentler Politics’. You will remember the term “gentler politics” because it’s what Corbyn is all about, you see. He wants people to respect each other, to avoid abuse. It’s a “new kind of politics”. Except that it isn’t a new kind of politics at all. It’s the new age internet world of intimidation and abuse, practiced but the friends of Corbyn in the 1980s before the internet existed. It’s the same old same old.
Corbyn’s new friends don’t go round blowing people up, like his old ones do. Theirs is about internet trolling and abuse and it’s about intimidating people on line and at meetings. It’s widespread, it’s poisonous and of course it’s never Corbyn’s fault.
Angela Eagle has been the victim of astonishing levels of abuse from the comrades today. Well, she is a woman, I suppose, so that makes her fair game. We can’t have their sort in positions of power. Have a look at this example: “Sick of seeing that chewed up wine gum looking cunt, Angela eagle all over the news. Turn it in you ugly bitch.” And this: “Angela Eagle fucking blairite bitch.” And so it goes. The friends of Jeremy Corbyn, doing his really dirty work for him.
Don’t give me all that stuff about how Corbyn disowns this abuse. He always says that. He doesn’t condone such behaviour, it’s not my fault, guv. Sorry, but it is his fault. He’s the all-powerful leader of the Labour Party. Except that he can’t be all powerful if his disciples don’t listen to a word he says?
Can you imagine, comrades, how this might just play with the electorate at large? Do you think this vicious campaign of abuse will bring to Corbyn those centre ground voters Labour needs to gain power? Of course you know it won’t play well, but you don’t care.
The hard left’s fixer, that old Bennite Jon Lansman has admitted that winning doesn’t matter to the comrades, as if somehow it’s a bad thing that Labour was able to create the NHS, the minimum wage. Sure Start – oh you know the rest. The hard left give it all the bullshit about extending democracy but those of us who were around in the 1970s and 1980s, in the Labour Party and the trade union movement, know how this extending democracy worked, by concentrating democracy amongst themselves. Bennite Labour, with their friends in Militant, worked to keep the best talent from getting on, unless they accepted every word of what they had to say. Take the Tardis with me back to Bristol East and try to win an election if you weren’t a friend of Benn or a friend of Militant. I was there.
The abuse Bristol West MP Thangam Debbonaire received last week was more of the same from the friends of Corbyn. Women were the target of much of the abuse and some felt so intimidated they were reduced to silence, which is exactly what the comrades wanted.
It’s time for the abuse to stop and the first thing that has to happen is to elect a new Labour leader who isn’t Jeremy Corbyn. And the next thing will be to proscribe Lansman’s Momentum from the Labour Party. They are a party within a party, they are one of the major reasons for the chaos in Labour and they too have to go. As a friend pointed out, they already have a name – Momentum – so why not build the kind of party they all want and give us back our Labour? They can even work hand in hand with the Militant-front organisation TUSC who have an unrivalled record of electoral failure in the country.
The thugs and bullies of the hard left have to be faced down and they cannot be allowed to win. It is to Labour’s huge discredit that the party has got itself in the mess, thanks to Ed Miliband’s three quidders and the idiotic MPs who got Corbyn onto the ballot paper when they wanted a debate. Well, they’ve got one all right, a vicious and unpleasant debate with the crackpots of the hard left. And if it means the three-quidders leave Labour, I’ll hold the door open for them, however many hundred thousand people that may be. Go and set up your own party and leave ours alone.
The friends of Corbyn do not believe in gentler politics. We’re back in the 1980s where it all got very nasty. They didn’t win last time and they won’t win this time and when it’s all over Labour must make sure it never again gets hijacked by the friends of Corbyn or indeed the man himself, a man who proves his sheer decency by putting his own interests above those of the country and the party.
