With Labour tanking in the polls and failing to provide any meaningful opposition to the government’s shocking failures over flood defences, as well presiding over virtually unreported NHS crisis where junior doctors are poised to go on strike, Jeremy Corbyn has done exactly what you would expect him to do: he has ploughed all his energy into Labour Party internal machinations. If anyone seriously believed the Corbyn era would usher in a “new politics”, they must have been seriously disabused of it by now.
Michael Dugher, the excellent shadow culture secretary, has been sacked for speaking out against the friends of Corbyn who have been briefing the media for weeks about the forthcoming reshuffle. Dugher, that rare beast, a working class politician, is not the only Labour MP who has been trashed by the shadowy figures on the far left, but he’s the first one to pay the price of the new politics. He is hardly to the right of politics seeing that he ran Andy Burnham’s leadership campaign so we can now see that anyone, apart from the hard left friends of Corbyn, is going to be bombed out in the new politics.
Maria Eagle has been told she will be moved from defence because she supports Labour Party policy on the question of the nuclear deterrent. This will enable Corbyn to install his unelected friend Ken Livingstone to oversee Labour’s change to unilateral nuclear disarmament and, better still in the Corbyn era, have one less woman in a position of influence. New politics, no women seems to be the new politics battle cry. Eagle took George Osborne to pieces in the House of Commons a week or so ago, landing more blows on the chancellor than Corbyn has laid in Cameron in three months, but she has to go. Labour’s internal politics comes first these days. Diane Abbott as shadow foreign secretary, anyone?
And Hilary Benn is likely to keep his job as shadow foreign secretary, despite having obeyed Corbyn by voting with his conscience on the question of bombing ISIS targets in Syria. Eh? Why were there questions about this in the first place? When is a free vote not a free vote? Worse than that, the friends of Corbyn had spent the previous weekend suggesting Benn would be sacked. So far we have had two days go by when…er…nothing has happened.
The best quote came from Livingstone who attributed Benn’s cabinet survival as being because he “stopped being quite so critical and dissident”. Coming from such an important member of Corbyn’s inner cabal, the man who will soon be implanting a new policy of unilateral disarmament, you have to believe this is the word from the top. Corbyn, the serial rebel who has voted more often against the Labour Party than David Cameron, decides Benn can stay because he has now toed the line. Breathtaking chutzpah from the architect of so called “new politics”.
It is not just the political manoeuvrings from the Corbynistas, it is the sheer incompetence of the Corbynistas and it is the twisted priorities of the Corbynistas. Instead of launching effective campaigns against this useless and dangerous government, Corbyn and his friends look inwards, prioritising their own positions in the Labour Party. They made an almighty mess over Osborne’s U turn over tax credits and even to date have not noticed that the reinstated tax credits will be taken away through reductions to the Universal Credit. Corbyn and McDonnell should stop patting themselves on the back and pay some attention to detail and the things that really matter to ordinary people.
Corbyn’s elevation to party leadership was not supposed to happen. He was the token left fall guy who would argue the traditional hard left causes and fall quickly by the wayside. Corbyn knows that better than anyone and no one was more surprised to win than he was. Perhaps he is still learning, which makes you wonder what the hell he has been doing in the Commons for the last 33 years, but more likely he was never cut out for leadership in the first place and he is proving that on the job.
The mess over the reshuffle, which goes on and on and on, angers everyone; his friends in the dark recesses of the far left and the more mainstream MPs who are left in a different kind of darkness. If there is some kind of plan in action here, it is a very odd one and a very bad one.
Every day I hope that Corbyn will do better, that he will himself embrace Labour’s broad church his mentor Tony Benn always spoke about and unite the party around a manifesto that will engage and enthuse the electorate in a credible, modern, realistic and progressive way. But he has not started well, actually rather the reverse.
This shambles of a shadow cabinet reshuffle and the priorities of the Corbyn-led Labour Party are taking the party further away from power by the day. The worst thing is, they don’t seem to care. That is one of the main reasons MPs are so angry and, frankly, so am I.
*CORRECTION: It was Angela Eagle who twatted Osborne at PMQs. Apologies to all concerned!
