The final kiss of death for Jeremy Corbyn’s ill-fated leadership, such as it is, of the Labour Party. Sadly for him, UNITE leader Len McCluskey has given him his full support. It’s the political equivalent of the football club chairman giving a vote of confidence to his manager. You know the game’s nearly up.
Mind you, Len’s criticism that preceded his declaration of full support to the Glorious Leader was not exactly devastating because all he said was that Corbyn’s “shoot to kill” remarks were “inappropriate”. Inappropriate is hardly the word I would have chosen and if UNITE’s supremo was to ask his members, who donated £100,000 of subscriptions towards Corbyn’s election campaign, I wonder if they might just have a slightly different take on the matter. I am not the only person who thinks that Corbyn’s pathetic, ill-considered remarks have changed everything and he will never recover from it, certainly not in the eyes of ordinary voters.
I am not surprised to find my views about Corbyn are a minority in the Labour Party. 66% of Labour members think Corbyn is doing a good job whilst no less than 88% of his supporters think the same. At the same time, Labour’s poll figures are going through the floor as the electorate looks away in horror at the unfolding car crash and David Cameron’s Tory Party moves into a double digit lead. And this at the time when the Tories are in the middle of making the “difficult decisions”, that is nasty and unpleasant stuff to you and I and it will be catastrophic to those who depend on Labour being a serious political party.
Of course, if you are on the centre left of Labour, as I am, by conviction and not pragmatism (although the latter matters if you want to win elections), you are told to shut up, stop shouting from the sidelines, to eff off and join the Tories (because that’s where right wing, Tory-lite non-believers should be, even if they absolutely loathe everything the Tories stand for), accept Corbyn’s mandate from the members and so forget the mandate that Labour MPs got from some 10 million voters just a few months ago. Much as democracy can be annoying to those of us who still sometimes wonder if they will wake up and find Corbyn’s election to the leadership was a summer long nightmare, it’s a nuisance to his supporters, so they’ll turn away and pretend May’s election never happened.
It is already true that Labour is beginning to haemorrhage members who are not of the hard left. And who could blame them? It is not just Corbyn’s politics that are turning people away, but his basic incompetence and unfitness for the role of Leader of the Opposition. I agree with much of what he stands for but he is as mealy-mouthed and noncommittal on some issues as some Lib Dems. He is a mass of contradictions and qualifications. The Tories are about to inflict upon us a level of spending cuts that would have made Margaret Thatcher blanch, but Corbyn has nothing coherent to say.
Tomorrow is going to be a critical day for the country. George Osborne will begin the next stage of unravelling the very principles of having a public sector, imposing austerity as we have never seen before. The master tactician Chancer of the Exchequer will be up against Corbyn’s right hand man, John McDonnell who will have one chance to set out a vision for the future that does not include a decade more of austerity. He will be expected to demolish Osborne’s arguments one by one and convince the country that Labour is serious and has a genuine alternative. He had better take it, not just for Labour’s sake, but for the country.
McCluskey adds: “Jeremy has my full support as he develops his alternative programme to that of this disastrous government.” Develops it? What the hell has he been doing all these years on the back benches, apart from voting against his own party? He can’t stand up from the front bench and say, “We oppose this draconian policy of austerity and now we are having a good think about it. So there.”
And what of Len McCluskey, the man who chooses the Labour leader from his plush UNITE offices, the man who gave us Ed Miliband and now Jeremy Corbyn? Not an edifying record is it but I fully expect McCluskey will soon have a successor in mind once Corbyn has gone, probably with George Galloway or Ken Livingstone in the box seat.
