I’ve never seen anything like the last three weeks. Never in my life. A prime minister, who led his party to a general election win last year, toppled by the public’s vote to leave the EU, the shysters and charlatans who led the campaign to take us out of Europe have all crawled back into their holes, a new prime minister appointed today who supported the campaign to take us out of the EU and Jeremy Corbyn still Labour leader. Not one of these people speaks for me and I am beginning to wonder who, in a position of power, really does.
No Tory will ever speak for me. I could never, under any circumstances, vote for the party of Thatcher, Gove, Johnson, Duncan Smith, Cameron and now May. Cameron, the great Tory moderniser, never spoke for me or to me. He slashed the numbers of frontline public sector workers at the same time as he attacked their wages, conditions and their pensions. His government brought in the Bedroom Tax, cut benefits to the sick and disabled and indeed vilified the sick and disabled by branding them scroungers and skivers. With the exception of equal marriage, I can think of no single positive legacy that he has left behind. Worse, he will be forever and deservedly remembered as the man who wrecked the country by taking us out of the EU. Words alone are not enough to express my anger and contempt for the last Tory government.
And Jeremy Corbyn’s version of Labour? That certainly doesn’t speak for me. He doesn’t speak to all that many other ordinary working class people either. From his privileged Islington enclave, surrounded by trendy middle class sycophantic groupies, speaking only to people who agree with his every word, he is as out of touch as the Tories. You can tell a man from his friends and I don’t just mean Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA, although they’ll do for a start. Foul-mouthed John McDonnell, a prize candidate for the nastiest man in politics, and the Toytown revolutionary himself Mark Serwotka, the man who turned the PCS from a serious trade union into a nearly bankrupt laughing stock, joins Corbyn to lead the workers. Lions led by donkeys, more like. Millions of people in our country need, if not a Labour government (although I’d argue that we’d all be better off with a good one), then a credible opposition. But we don’t have a credible opposition. We have Corbyn, McDonnell and Diane Abbott building for the futility and hopelessness of opposition, a social movement, a protest march; talking to themselves, loving the adulation and meanwhile a million people use food banks.
If anyone on the left dares question the leader, they are right wing, they are Blairites, they are Tory-lite. They are abused at public meetings, trolled on-line by the comrades, they have bricks thrown through windows, they face death threats. But even if I was on the right of the Labour Party – and I’m not – here’s the rub: Labour would need people like me to vote for it to win a general election. It would need people further to the right than me, it would need those with no set views at all. The Corbynistas plainly don’t care about this because they are puritans. There can be no compromise, there can be no deviation from purity. They do not want Labour unity. They want only their positions – Corbyn and co have positions, not policies – to carry the sway. They do not give a damn about ordinary working people. They can leave them to the Tories. Socialism, Corbyn style.
There are people in Labour who do speak to me. Dan Jarvis, Keir Starmer, Ben Bradshaw, Yvette Cooper, Chuka Umunna and Thangam Debbonaire to name but a few, but they are nowhere near power. They are as disenfranchised as I feel. And there’s nowhere else to look.
The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, which is a front for the Socialist Party (Militant)? No chance. The Liberal Democrats, the parasites who got in bed with the Tories in 2010, and gave us a far right government which was everything as bad as Thatcher’s? I’d no more vote for them than I would have supported the traitors of the SDP, who turned out to be genuinely right wing, back in the 1980s when they split the Labour Party. And then what? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
It’s Labour or nothing for me and if it’s the Labour of Corbyn, McDonnell, Abbott, Lansman and Serwotka, it could be nothing. They’re not reaching out to me – they’re threatening and abusing people like me – so they’re certainly not trying to bring back to the party those millions who have walked away.
No wonder people are disillusioned with politics and politicians. Hardly any of them seem to be there to represent the great unwashed, as they regard us. And that’s every bit as true on the far left as it is on the right.
