With the news that Ian McNichol has resigned as general secretary of the Labour Party, I suggest we can safely say goodbye to the next election. My guess is that election will be some years away and Labour will be a very different beast by then.
McNichol is the last senior ‘moderate’, or mainstream Labour person, at the top of the party. The hard left now controls all the levers of power from the NEC downwards and given Jeremy Corbyn’s huge popularity among the affluent left leaning middle classes means they can do whatever they like from now on.
Expect a purge of non far left MPs before long, as the comrades, led by Momentum, which is owned by the Bennite multimillionaire Jon Lansman, increase their hold on the party. As well as that, expect the policies to lurch still further leftwards. If you think the stuff about nationalising the Royal Mail and the water companies is almost revolutionary, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
We are back in the 1980s, except that it’s actually 2018. Corbyn, in reality a puppet of far more sinister comrades, stands for the failed policies that gave us Margaret Thatcher for 18 years; reheated Bennism, high on slogans and rhetoric, low on detail and costings. And this is actually much worse than the 1980s because the hard left never actually got their hands of the Labour Party machinery back then. They have now.
Whilst Corbyn’s Labour ran May’s woeful Tories close in the 2017 election, I cannot see this happening again. I still maintain that elections are usually won from the centre ground. Last year, there was virtually no centre ground as the Lib Dems disintegrated and, interestingly, no one clearly won.
I am not sure there is an appetite among the electorate for old style, old fashioned hardline socialism as promised by Corbyn and the comrades. There never had been in the past, either, because the truth is hardline socialism has never won an election in this country. Labour tried in in 1983, with a manifesto described by Gerald Kaufman as “the longest suicide note in history” where they promised unilateral disarmament, leaving NATO, leaving the EU and a huge programme of public borrowing. Voters chose Thatcher with cataclysmic results. May is no Thatcher but her successor – she won’t make the next election: no chance – cannot possibly worse than her, unless it’s Jacob Rees-Mogg or Boris Fucking-Johnson.
Corbyn’s politics are steeped in old Labour. He has not had an original idea in his life. His different kind of politics is nothing of the kind.
In my view, we have had peak Corbyn. The current leadership will be in their mid to late sixties come the next election and whilst he will probably maintain his core support, those from the centre ground and from the mainstream left are not likely to stick with Labour. I, for one, will not support Labour as it stands. I am politically homeless and will not support any party run by the likes of Lansman, McDonnell, Corbyn and the rest of them.
