If I had my way, I’d end the Labour leadership election right here, right now, as Norman Cook might say. It would put plenty of people, like me, out of their misery. It is blindingly obvious that Jeremy Corbyn is going to be returned as Labour leader by an even bigger landslide than he achieved last year. Owen Smith might as well withdraw immediately.
And how could Corbyn fail? In the last week alone, he has received the endorsement of rape apologist George Galloway and Militant tendency, known these days as the Socialist Party, who were expelled from Labour for being a shower of…oh, I mean a party within a party. Add to the mix, the man who wrecked the biggest civil service union, Mark Serwotka, and every other hard left nut job in the land and Corbyn is nearly there. These are dark days.
Of course, not all of Corbyn’s supporters are Trotskyite fanatics, nor are they all members of a cult. But a good few are. Corbyn now commands the support of the vast majority of Labour members (and supporters) who joined after Ed Miliband’s barmy move to allow anyone who fancied picking a new leader to do so. Interestingly, the people who were members before 2015 support Smith. How can this be?
My guess is that the old members see Smith as the best, or least worst (my view), candidate to allow Labour to be at least competitive in British politics and they know Corbyn has shown beyond reasonable doubt that he isn’t. The new members, well that’s a bit more complicated. We know that there is considerable disillusion and anger with politicians, some fair and some not. Driven by parts of the media, the perception that politicians are thieves and crooks and out of touch with ordinary people is widespread, understandable and not without some truth. Along comes this elderly bearded man, a career politician who has never known a life outside the council chamber and the House of Commons, who accidentally gets elected to lead the Labour Party and an extraordinary myth develops that he stands for something new, something fresh and something better than what was there before. Younger, generally affluent and well-educuated people have heard something they like the sound of. They turn up at public meetings where the same elderly bearded man hands out a chunk of rhetoric here, a slice of sloganising there, and all of a sudden we have a movement of half a million people who somehow believe that they are a journey to government. With them come the ageing hard left renegades from the 1970s and 1980s, who abandoned Labour as soon as it became fit for government in the 1990s and concentrated on building the revolution elsewhere. In little over a year, the renegades have control of the Labour Party machinery and the votes to keep them there for the foreseeable future.
If you had asked me two years ago whether an IRA-supporting backbencher, who made money from Iranian state TV at the same time as the state executed people for major crimes like being gay and referred to islamist terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends” would become Labour leader, I’d have laughed in your face. There’s nothing to laugh about now.
I am baffled that so many of his own supporters cannot see, or do not want to see, the sheer incompetence and ineptitude of the man. He has proved incapable of leading the opposition in the House of Commons, allowing the Tories to get away with political murder on a daily basis, incapable of running a functional opposition and putting together a credible shadow cabinet. Instead, he roams the country, making terrible speeches – he is an awful public speaker – to people who already agree with him. And this is the man who will be, according to my Labour Party literature, Britain’s next prime minister. Is that for real? I don’t think so.
I quite like Owen Smith who seems to resemble a proper human being and has at least half an idea of how to lead a political party and how to oppose the Tories, but quite liking him is not the same as giving his my full unqualified and unequivocal support. Here I’ll come across all Corbyn by blaming the right wing media who are so keen to see Corbyn re-elected, they’ve barely mentioned Smith at all. I am quite sure that the reason for the silence of the likes of the Sun and the Mail is for that reason. The important thing to bear in mind about Smith is that he will be obliterated in this election and as a direct consequence Labour will be obliterated at the next general election.
Corbyn’s henchman John McDonnell announced today that Labour’s membership would “hit a million” when Corbyn wins the election to which I can only respond with a solid, so what? Scores of thousands turned out to hear Tony Benn and Michael Foot back in the 1980s and that didn’t end well. Corbyn is not fit to lace the boots of Benn or Foot and the public, outside the public rallies, know this well. The Tories never hold political rallies and they don’t often lose either.
Labour does need a stronger candidate for next year’s leadership election. Maybe it will be Gloria di Piero, Yvette Cooper, Dan Jarvis or someone we don’t yet know about. As things stand, Corbyn and his friends in the hard left hold the keys to power in the Labour Party, power that means absolutely zilch if it cannot secure power through the ballot box.
Every vote for Corbyn is a vote for Theresa May and her new hardline Tory government. Every vote will not be able to prevent the destruction of the NHS, the widespread return of selective education, the scrapping of the human rights act and a future outside of the EU which will have savage consequences for working people everywhere.
Labour was formed in order to provide parliamentary representation for working people. Corbyn’s vision, such as it is, is of a protest and social movement and a pressure group. That would be a complete sell out of everything Labour stands for.
The worst thing about all this is that Corbyn has already won this election by a landslide and it’s painful to see it all drag on.
