Chancellor George Osborne was quick to react to Labour’s embarrassing U-turn on the question of the government’s planned fiscal charter, whereby future governments would be compelled to run a budget in normal circumstances. Two weeks ago shadow chancellor John McDonnell was calling for Labour to support it, but this week he has decided that instead they should now oppose it. George Osborne, never slow to grasp a political opportunity joyously exclaimed: “Labour’s economic policy has lurched from chaos to incredibility. Two weeks ago they said they were going to vote for a surplus – now we know they want to keep on borrowing forever. That would be a grave threat to the economic security of working people.” You might not agree with every word of that, but Osborne must be laughing all the way to the next general election.
McDonnell now claims his U-turn is merely a change of tactics. First of all, he wanted Labour to vote for the charter because it was, he said, “a gimmick” and now he wanted to vote against it because it’s wrong. Well, thanks for that, John. Better still, Jeremy Corbyn knew nothing about it. This, I assume, must be the “new politics” Corbyn and his pals have been talking about. A complete break with the past, “straight talking, honest politics”. We now know what a load of old tosh that was.
John Mann MP described McDonnell’s decision as a “huge joke” and, better still, on leaving a meeting of the parliamentary Labour Party, Ben Bradshaw said “it’s a total fucking shambles.” Of course it is. It’s back to the future with Jeremy Corbyn, that future being the 1980s.
It’s not going to work, is it? We have been told by certain Corbyn three-quidders that those of us who are not on the far left should shut up and go away. A new movement is growing across the land that will change this country forever. Too right it will, but the way things are going the new movement will be the Tory Party under George Osborne.
Corbyn himself is booting the awkward stuff into the long grass, under a blizzard of reviews and committee meetings, Miliband style, but sooner or later they will have to be addressed. And even in the long grass, like the renewal of Trident, the great man has already pre-empted any such view by saying he’d never, under any circumstances, press the button. And on Europe, Syria, the economy and on just about everything else, there is a vacuum, a complete absence of a vision or any coherent opposition to the government. As Labour drifts away to the outer reaches of politics, Corbyn talks at rallies to people who already agree with him.
And there is the small matter of the past. The Daily Telegraph, no friend of Labour, recently ran an article by Andrew Gilligan reminding us all, in case we needed reminding, of both Corbyn and McDonnell’s uncomfortably close associations with the IRA when they were at their most murderous. This cannot be explained away quite so easily and McDonnell’s weasel-worded apology for his crass comments regarding the republican terrorists was born more of political expediency than sincerity. After all, he’d had over a decade to apologise and he only thought it worth bothering with when he was appointed as shadow chancellor. I would argue that it’s far too late for a meaningful and sincere apology. We all know that some people apologise in order to try and limit the damage. The damage in this case has been done, literally to death.
The Canada-sized brain of Diane Abbott laughed off the chaos at the heart of Labour that makes others despair. Some people in the party were “only slowly coming to terms with the fact that Jeremy won” (the leadership contest). Believe me, Ms Abbott, we came to terms with the grim reality of the outcome of the Labour leadership election some time ago and now it is beginning to unravel far quicker than many of us suspected it would.
The honeymoon is over now for Corbyn. It’s time to show the leadership qualities he has so far failed to demonstrate during his 33 years in the House of Commons. A lot of people have shown great faith in the old boy. Isn’t it time he showed us what he is really made of? My fear is that he already has.
