The shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, said today at a small rally in Broxtowe for Jeremy Corbyn’s cult following that she would rather die than join a party other than Labour. I can guess why she said that. Firstly, to impress the easily impressed Corbynistas who now run the Labour Party and to have a dig at the MPs who left the party last week. Of course, Thornberry will never be presented with such a choice. “What’s it to be, Em? Labour or death?” For Luciana Berger, who was driven out of Labour by fanatical anti-Semites, six of whom have been prosecuted for their actions and many more await prosecution, it was a very different story.
Thornberry also employed the language of the Daily Mail, referring to the ‘betrayal’ by those MPs. I am just surprised that she did not refer to Ms Berger and her colleagues as ‘enemies of the people’. In Corbyn’s ‘kinder, gentler’ Labour Party, anything goes. No effort to understand why this schism has occurred in politics, only a desire to punish those who, so rarely in modern politics, gave up their cushy little jobs for life on the backbenches , to actually do something on a matter of principle.
I’d say the formation of the Independent Group in the House of Commons should make everyone happy. For millions, being stuck with a binary choice between Corbyn’s hard left Labour and a Tory Party being taken over by the fanatics of the ERG was no kind of choice at all. I am not sure whether the Independent Group will last a week, never mind the rest of the parliamentary term. I don’t know – and I suspect neither do they – if they will morph into a proper political party. At least I have some hope for the future beyond no hope at all.
Those who worship at the altar of the false idol that is Corbyn must be very happy. Labour is being expunged of alternative points of view and settling for the type of socialism they have always dreamed of. You know, the socialism pursued by Derek Hatton, George Galloway, Ken Livingstone and every other supporter of one of the 57 varieties of hardline socialism. Indeed, they are probably already dreaming of turning the UK into a European version of Venezuela because that went so well, didn’t it? The point is this: the hard left now has the Labour it wants. Why whinge when those with other points of view acknowledge they do not support this version of Labour and, in any event, are not welcome in it?
That Corbyn’s Labour is destined surely never to win a general election should not trouble his fan club, either. After all, the leaders, his ‘top team’ (stop sniggering at the back) have always dreamed of not so much a government to change the country but a social movement. I would suggest the Corbyn experiment is closer to a bowel movement.
It will not be those who leave a party they no longer recognise, with a leadership and policies they simply cannot support. Selling those leaders and policies is a matter for those who now control and own Labour. We know why Luciana Berger has left a Labour Party which, even by the admission of Corbyn’s lieutenants, has a major issue with anti-Semitism. It is for those, like Corbyn outrider Chris Williamson, to explain to the electorate that it’s fine for them to support a party that has people who hate and abuse Jews or at the very least tolerate those who do.
Yesterday, Corbyn does what he always does: he spoke at a rally where everyone agreed with every word he said. He attacked the media, in the same way that Donald Trump and Stephen Laxley Lennon attack the media, he attacked the brave MPs who had escaped the sewer of a Labour Party he has enabled, he made his usual terrible speech. And in so doing, he made clear his own priority: himself.
No matter that the country is about to go off a cliff with Theresa May’s insane hard Brexit. Corbyn preferred his own echo chamber, the adulation and the selfies by the deluded who somehow see his reheated Bennism from the 1980s as something new. What nonsense.
Thornberry’s comments were as crass as they were pathetic. Her world, that of a wealthy ex barrister married to a wealthy barrister, whose children were sent to an elite selective school some 14 miles from where she lives, just like Corbyn’s son went to a private school, just like Diane Abbott’s son went to a private school, just like most of Corbyn’s top team and outriders are, as they might say of others, from the ruling class. They are as much a part of the establishment as the Tory cabinet.
The comrades have the Labour Party. It’s gone forever. They should not be bitter that their perceived opponents are either leaving or being hounded out. It’s what they’ve always wanted. For those of us who feared years, perhaps decades, of political homelessness, there is a small chance of a brighter day away from the broken political system that has outlived, if not its usefulness, it’s relevance.
