Stand down, Margaret

There’s an excellent tweet this morning from the veteran Labour MP Margaret Hodge. It goes:

Corbyn logic: Upset the Leader and you get the sack. Jew-hater, bully or Hard Left troll and you just get a slap on the wrist.

She’s right, of course. Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour is a cesspit of Jew hatred, of bullying and trolling from his fans and outriders. I fully understand this. What I don’t, for the life of me, understand is why good people like Ms Hodge stay in the Labour Party. It’s not as though it’s about to change, is it?

The main thing people in the Labour Party have to address is quite simple. In the future, and I suggest it will be in the very near future, there will be a general election. Labour members, including its MPs, will be campaigning not just on a manifesto that will certainly be the hardest left manifesto in Labour history, they will be campaigning to make Corbyn prime minister. One follows the other.

This is why I cannot belong to, support or vote for Labour. Its leader is hopelessly out of his depth, a career backbencher of little intellect nor talent and a man who has never had an original thought in his life. Add to that, his dubious past supporting terrorists and always opposing the west and you have not just a man unsuited to any form of high office, you have one who is seriously unpleasant.

Labour is in the hands of Len McCluskey and his trade union barons and fixers and Corbyn’s chief allies are actual Stalinists, many of whom have a long history of attacking Israel. The National Executive Committee is almost totally controlled by the hard left and the comrades are in the business of filling full time jobs with their place men and women. Corbyn has a wealth of talent on the back benches in the House of Commons but prefers those who share his 1980s worldview, such as Diane Abbott, Rebecca Long Bailey, Richard Burgon, Barry Gardiner and Dawn Butler. And throughout Corbyn’s Labour, family and friends of the top comrades, including of Corbyn himself, are handed plum well-paid jobs at the head of the party. The Freemasons have nothing on this version of Labour.

To summarise Labour’s current situation, if you campaign, support and vote for Labour, you are voting for all of the above with added anti-Semitism. If you knock on someone’s door and put forward Labour’s good policies – and there are some, beyond the usual empty rhetoric and sloganeering you always get with the comrades – you also have to tell the potential voter what voting for Labour means in practice. Vote Labour, get racism, and that’s just for starters.

I do not understand how decent, mainstream left moderates can campaign for Labour in its current state and urge others to vote for things they themselves strongly oppose. A Jew can surely not urge people to vote for anti-Semitism, can s/he?

To rearrange the old saying, if you can’t beat ’em, leave ’em. I have left Labour, probably never to return. I am still in the political wilderness, waiting for a better offer, probably from the Liberal Democrats who I feel still need to complete the detoxification of the coalition years.

Today’s Labour is ‘led’ by someone even his closest colleagues know isn’t up to the job and he has surrounded himself by some seriously unpleasant people. Margaret Hodge knows this better than anyone and soon both she and her colleagues will need to be clear about where they stand. Inside Labour or out?