It did not take much for me to leave the Labour party, again, when it was taken over by a bunch of hairy-arsed middle – and upper – class toffs who just happened to represent various strands from the ultra left in ultra left wing politics. And with a hardline Stalinist millionaire, Seumas Milne, literally making party policy, seemingly on the hoof, and a party hellbent on the same hard Brexit as Theresa May and Nigel Farage, I concluded it was time to move on, or more accurately, move to nowhere at all. It was a chance meeting with a couple of Momentum comrades which finally made up my mind for me.
My personal experience of Momentum was not a pleasant one. They were relatively young, they certainly lived up to my prejudices by being well educated middle class students and ex students. And they were absolutely certain that they were right about everything, that Jeremy Corbyn was the absolute boy who stood for a “new kind of politics”. As the atmosphere became slightly more heated, I pointed out, helpfully I thought, that there was absolutely nothing new Corbyn’s type of politics and moreover it was a reheated, pound shop version of exactly the simplistic rhetoric pushed forward through the decades by the late, not very great Tony Benn. They reacted as a royalist might if I’d described the Queen as a worthless parasite who has never done a day’s work in her life. They were not amused.
Well, I didn’t try to disabuse them for their misunderstanding of the myth of Corbynism just to amuse them, simply that I was attempting to explain that this temporary phenomenon – and that’s all it is – will not last forever and one relatively near miss the the 2017 general election ballot box was as good as it would get. This was when things got a bit silly.
I was then asked what I was doing in the Labour Party anyway because it was clear I was not a “proper socialist”. In fact, why didn’t I “Fuck off and join the Tories?” My basic explanation that I was a lifelong Labour man who stood for all the things Labour stood for, like equality, fairness, a strong NHS – oh, you know all the stuff – didn’t hold any water. I was a “Blairite neo-liberal”. It is a basic fact of life that you cannot argue with pork and, perhaps mistakenly, I said as much. I had already decided to leave Labour because of Corbyn and the comrades and their hard Brexit leanings (and a million other things) and this did little other than to confirm my belief that this was the right thing to do.
Wind the clock forward to today and I read that Labour has not performed well in the local elections. It has done all right in its strongholds but achieved nothing elsewhere. I think there are a number of reasons for this but a tweet this morning from the broadcaster James O’Brien seems as accurate as anything else I have read”
“I’m no psephologist, but hurling abuse at people unpersuaded of Jeremy Corbyn’s magnificence doesn’t seem to have persuaded many of them to vote Labour.
The vast majority of the electorate is not persuaded by Jeremy Corbyn’s claims – ludicrous claims in my view – to be the next prime minister. Granted that Corbyn’s substantial cult following will not hear a word of criticism of the Absolute Boy, they still represent a tiny percentage of those he needs to put him into Downing Street. The comrades, who as we know always know best, start to sneer, exercising their faux superiority. Corbyn, they tell us, suffered a terrible campaign of abuse by the mainstream media (MSM) which has obviously affected the judgement of mere simpleton voters who, unlike the comrades, fall for every bit of propaganda going. Er, no.
Every Labour leader gets abuse from the right wing media and there are bound to be people who are heavily influenced by what they read, say in the Mail and Sun. But let’s be clear about this: the written press is dying on its arse and the vast majority of people do not buy a newspaper. The likes of Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch can make a difference in a desperately close vote, like Brexit for example, but they will not greatly affect a general election in terms of the overall result. Just look at the 2017 general election where peak Corbyn and dire May convinced the electorate that neither were fit to run the country. The right wing press was just as awful to tony Blair until they realised that most of their readers were going to vote for him.
Yes, Corbyn gets abuse from the MSM but then everyone in the Labour Party who does not doff their collective cap to the Great Leader get plenty themselves. And if you repeatedly tell some people who are Labour but don’t believe in an IRA/Hamas/Hezbollah apologist who allows anti-Semitism to fester under his lacklustre leadership they can fuck off and join the Tories, don’s be surprised when they no longer vote Labour.
Peak Corbyn has passed and it’s all downhill for Labour from now on. For the comrades, it doesn’t matter anyway because all they ever wanted was a “social movement”, essentially a protest party. For those who need a Labour government that actually delivers, well they will have to put up with the Tories ad finitum.
Corbyn is going nowhere, say the comrades. How true that is.
