Month: January 2016

The Revenge Reshuffle: For Some Critics, Jeremy Corbyn Can Do No Right

Samuel Hooper2 Comments


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There is no honour in the behaviour of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet malcontents

Amid all the noise and self-important whining provoked by Jeremy Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet reshuffle, an important point is being rather overlooked – that as Labour leader, Corbyn is entitled to appoint or dismiss whoever he wants in order to build a cohesive and effective team. And the open defiance and public disagreement which continues to emanate from some restive shadow cabinet members would never have been tolerated under any other leader.

Maya Goodfellow writes in LabourList:

This is not, and was never going to be, a revenge reshuffle. It is not a contradiction of Jeremy Corbyn’s brand of honest, inclusive politics. By replacing shadow defence secretary Maria Eagle with Emily Thornberry, shadow EU Pat McFadden with Pat Glass and sacking Michael Dugher, Labour’s leader is doing his job – a position to which he was elected by 59.5% of the selectorate. On a landslide victory. He is well within his job description to make sure that his shadow cabinet is the most effective it can be. But you wouldn’t know that, listening to some Labour MPs, they’re clinging to the anti-Corbyn bandwagon – and they aren’t doing themselves or their party any favours.

For a small, vocal group of MPs Jeremy Corbyn can do no right. In fact, almost everything he does is wrong. These people are well within their right to point out areas of disagreement and argue their own point of view, but actively briefing against Corbyn, dismissing certain activists and shining a spotlight on discontent – instead of the Tories – is pernicious.

Goodfellow goes on to cite other famous historical reshuffles which – perhaps thanks to a stiffer upper lip and the lack of social media – did not lead to quite such an orgy of public posturing and self-aggrandisement, including those of Harold MacMillan and Margaret Thatcher.

Right now, it’s impossible to see how Labour’s restive moderates think that they are helping matters. They hate Corbyn and believe that he is leading Labour toward a third general election defeat, that much they have made abundantly clear. But do they seriously believe they are helping the situation with their incessant carping and tendency to run to the press with juicy anti-Corbyn quotes every time he does something they don’t like?

At some point, party unity – or at least trying to take seriously their responsibilities as the official opposition – should kick in, and encourage Labour MPs and politicos to stop targeting each other in order to focus on opposing the government. And yet we never seem to reach this promised land.

As Goodfellow observes:

The comments made by some MPs in recent months have been frustrating to witness. Change is difficult; negotiating with people you don’t agree with on certain issues is hard. Even when we try to take the personalities out of it, politics is so very personal.

But the way they’ve been acting is an insult to the overwhelming number of people who voted for Corbyn and a let down for all those people who desperately need a vocal, concise and coherent Labour opposition.

Is the sacking of the shadow culture secretary really something to go running to the press with angry quotes over, or taking to Twitter in high dudgeon about? Were any of Jeremy Corbyn’s unremarkable changes to his team truly so shocking that they merited a live TV resignation on the BBC?

Hardly. But the juvenile behaviour of Labour’s temporarily-out-of-power centrists is very revealing indeed. It speaks to their over-inflated egos and sense of self regard that they feel the need to publicly disassociate themselves from Jeremy Corbyn in the media rather than buckling down and helping him to oppose the government; that they are in many cases more concerned about how Corbyn’s leadership reflects on them and affects their future career prospects rather than how they can best serve the party and the country.

It would take a socialist miracle for Jeremy Corbyn to ever find himself in 10 Downing Street as prime minister, the odds (thankfully) are so small. But how Labour chooses to spend its wilderness years is important because it determines the type of party which will eventually emerge as a vote-winning force. Are they to stay deep within their comfort zone and become an angry party of protest, or will they oppose the government thoroughly by developing a credible alternative blueprint for government?

As Michael White notes in the Guardian, with reference to 1930s Labour leader George Lansbury:

Labour had been reduced to 52 seats in the general election of 1931, but Lansbury’s principled leadership cheered up the party activists and kept the show on the road. He’d never wanted to be leader (at 73 he was even older than Jeremy) and kept offering to resign. After hardheaded unions voted for a more robust stand against Hitler than Christian pacifism, he insisted on going.

But his legacy allowed Clem Attlee, the “interim” leader (1935-55) to triple the party’s MPs to 154 at the 1935 election. It survived to win the next election – the war delayed it until 1945 – decisively and do great things.

Like Lansbury, Corbyn’s principles and essential decency are obvious for all to see. He’s trying to make the best of a bad job when his party has just suffered a defeat arguably “worse for the Labour party than 1931”, chiefly because of the loss of Scotland to the SNP and at a time when many Labour supporters are, as in 1931, under the economic cosh.

It doesn’t sound like a recipe for success, does it? No, and I don’t think it’s meant to be.

Think of Jeremy Corbyn as the night watchman rather than the team captain, adjusting your expectations and success metrics accordingly, and moderate Labour’s hysterical overreaction to the “revenge reshuffle” begins to seem even more shrill and misplaced.

Jeremy Corbyn’s critics are measuring his performance and appeal with the wrong yardstick, in the belief that the 2020 general election is still winnable if only they can tame or replace their unexpected leader. Viewed this way, Labour centrists would do much better to quit the unconvincing “not in my name!” routine, get behind their leader when they can and maintain a signified silence when they can’t. And this should remain their strategy so long as they have a snowball’s chance in hell of retaking the leadership from Corbyn.

Labour MPs and shadow cabinet members currently revelling in the anarchy of being able to brief against their party leader to a salivating press corps with near total impunity should ask themselves what will undermining Corbyn from within actually accomplish when he won the leadership election by a landslide and retains significant support among the party base?

Seriously, what is their best case scenario?  All of this teenage sulking succeeds in destabilising Jeremy Corbyn and forcing a new leadership election, and then what? Labour’s army of activists forgive the parliamentary party for toppling their hero and willingly vote for Liz Kendall the second time around? The British public forget that Labour embraced Corbynmania in 2015 when they come to vote in 2020?

No. These temper tantrums against Corbyn from the centre-left serve one purpose, and one purpose alone. They act as a pressure release valve for the frustrations – and a balm to the bruised egos – of a group of forgettable, utterly unexceptional centrist politicians who so comprehensively failed to inspire excitement with their visions and policies that their mediocrity allowed Corbyn to win in the first place.

But these preening anti-Corbynites – who feign to be so much wiser and more pragmatic than we partisan hotheads on either side of the aisle – should consider the precedent for open dissent and disloyalty which they are now setting, as it will be very difficult to roll it back and expect the level of deference and respect accorded to say, Ed Miliband, when Jeremy Corbyn eventually leaves the stage and a new leader seeks to assert their authority. In fact, good luck to any party leader who has to endure the sheer volume of friendly fire taken every day by Corbyn.

Allister Heath, with uncharacteristic presumption about (and condescension toward) the working class, their likes and dislikes, writes in The Telegraph:

There is no going back from any of this. For the hard-left Labour activists who brought Corbyn to power, this is a belated Christmas present: their man is delivering on their terrifying agenda, and in turn they are helping to recruit a steady flow of new, radical and often London-based members. They want to turn Labour into a cross between a latter-day version of the Greater London Council, circa 1981, when Red Ken was in charge, and the current Green Party.

But for the rest of Labour, including most MPs, it’s a disaster. The traditional, patriotic working class, still a large chunk of the electorate, has even less time for the antics of the Stop the War Coalition and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament than other voters. They may be nervous about foreign adventures, but they loathe terrorists, love the Armed Forces and care deeply about national security. Labour needs both the “progressive” and the “working-class” elements of its coalition to come together if it is to win elections, but the careful balance found by Tony Blair is being deliberately jettisoned by the Corbynites.

Heath continues, in praise of those Labour MPs who either flounced out of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet or were sacked in the reshuffle:

The truth is that it is no longer possible for any sensible Labour politician to serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet while retaining their self-respect. In time, Jonathan Reynolds, Stephen Doughty and Kevan Jones, the three shadow ministers who quit, will be seen as heroes: they put their principles first. They were braver that many members of the shadow cabinet.

[..] There are others in the same boat. Regardless of how they caveat their position, they are endorsing a leadership which has nothing but contempt for the values and aspirations of Middle England, and which believes in appeasing the extremists who seek to harm us. It is decision time for members of the shadow cabinet: they must quit, or be held responsible for the catastrophe about to engulf the Labour Party.

Set aside Allister Heath’s wildly misplaced hero-worship of utterly unremarkable politicians such as Jonathan Reynolds, Stephen Doughty and Kevan Jones. Many of Heath’s criticisms of Corbyn’s policies are correct, but he makes the classic mistake of assuming that the Labour Party should hold the same policies as the Conservative Party on a broad range of topics.

The drawback to having a broad, stultifying political consensus on everything from nuclear deterrence to the NHS is that when there is nothing left to debate, people lose interest in politics and stop taking part. Our current centrist malaise and the rise in voter apathy are not unrelated phenomena – when our political debate is reduced to arguing over who will better manage our public services, people understandably switch off. Jeremy Corbyn still offers the last, best opportunity to break this consensus and widen the Overton window in British politics, raising the possibility of a small state, free market revival – if we have the stomach to fight for it.

Heath of all people should appreciate this. Many of the small-government, conservative policies that he would no doubt like to see implemented are doomed never to see the light of day because of the political consensus typified by Blair, Brown, Miliband and Cameron. And there will never be space for more radical right wing ideas and policies so long as we become outraged when Jeremy Corbyn and his followers express their own, stridently left-wing ideas.

Thus even staunch conservatives have reason to support Jeremy Corbyn, and deplore those centrist malcontents within Labour who seek to topple him. Supporting Corbyn as a conservative does not mean endorsing his socialist policies – it means having the magnanimity and confidence in our own ideas to allow other, different arguments to be heard.

Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership election by a landslide. That says an awful lot about the candidates who ran against him, the wing of the party from which they hailed, and our beleaguered, centrist politics in general.

But it is time for malcontents in the shadow cabinet and the media to get over it and learn to live in this new reality with a modicum of dignity.

Jeremy Corbyn - Cabinet reshuffle

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You Wouldn’t Buy A Song Praising HMRC, So Stop Worshipping The NHS

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

NHS Choir - Harriet Nerva

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Buying and praising the NHS Choir’s Christmas single is not “harmless fun”. In fact, anyone who truly believes in improving healthcare should see through this complacent, self-congratulatory piece of propaganda

It’s amazing how easy it is to be published in the Guardian, just so long as you hold the “correct” right-on, trendily left wing views, and have distinguished yourself with some suitably ostentatious act of public virtue-signalling.

Enter Harriet Nerva, junior doctor and newly ordained High Priestess of the NHS. Nerva is one of the principal architects of that sappy piece of virtue-signalling NHS propaganda inflicted on the (sadly often-willing) British populace this winter – the “Bridge Over You” single which predictably made it to Christmas No. 1 in the charts.

I explained at the time why singing hymns to a powerful government monopoly was neither a morally virtuous nor a productive thing to do, and was met with a predictable chorus of criticism and accusations of being a Christmas Grinch. But the argument against this latest piece of NHS-worship needs to be restated and expanded, particularly in light of the failure of other commentators to utter a critical word, and also because of the nauseating victory lap currently being taken by the #NHS4XmasNo1 campaign chiefs.

In her self-aggrandising victory speech, published in the Guardian, Nerva begins by declaring:

As a junior doctor, I started a campaign that united the public, staff and patients in its demand for a free and properly funded healthcare service for all.

Already it starts to become clear that this is all about the Harriet Nerva Show first and foremost, long before any other consideration. The article continues:

Since becoming a junior doctor 18 months ago, I have felt immensely proud to work for the NHS. In particular, I’ve been humbled by how well we cared for one patient in their dying days, and felt privileged to have forged a relationship with this person in the last few weeks of their life.

Again, this is boastful and irrelevant. Nerva isn’t “humbled” by anything, she is proud of her accomplishment – and that’s fine, but not when it is wrapped in the pretence of promoting the NHS, or when the fact that she gave good care to a dying patient is misused as an argument for persevering with one very specific model of healthcare delivery.

Nerva concludes by inadvertently calling the song what it really is – a religious hymn:

This campaign has made it clear that the public, staff and patients are singing from the same hymn sheet. We are united in the belief that we should have a free and properly funded healthcare service available to all in our society, one that values and respects its staff and users. The choir have sung, the public have spoken, and now it’s time to listen.

Meanwhile, the Mirror reports approvingly:

Harriet told Mirror Online: “I didn’t have any links with the choir but what they have produced is a fantastic celebration of the NHS”.

“Seeing the video moved me to tears. The context of it is very powerful. I qualified 15 months ago and I love the NHS, I’m very proud of it. And I feel getting it to Number One would bring to the public’s eye the fantastic service it provides in very challenging times”.

But this reasoning is nonsense. Everyone in Britain already knows about the excellent and important work done by doctors and nurses, and the vast majority support the NHS. It’s hardly as though there is some massive popular revolt against our system of nationalised healthcare.

Most people seem content with our current system when they bother to think about it at all, and (left-wing scaremongering aside) no major politician from any party has serious plans to dismantle what currently exists, let alone end the principle of healthcare free at the point of use.

So, since there is no imminent threat to the NHS (it survived eighteen years of Tory government before 1997, and will do so again), what is this really all about? What really motivated a junior doctor to make us endure this turgid hymn to the NHS?

NHS Choir - Christmas Single - 3

By prancing around with her Twitter hashtags and handwritten signs, Harriet Nerva isn’t just saying that she shares our presumed love for the NHS or has a strong devotion to providing healthcare. What she is really saying is that she is a better person than you, because she A) works for the NHS, and B) organised a huge act of public NHS-worship.

“Think you’re a good person just because you like the NHS?”, Nerva is saying. “Well I’m ten times better than you, because I got the British people to collectively sing a hymn to the NHS on Christmas Day. I love the NHS so much that I made this extraordinarily extravagant public gesture. What did you do?”

And of course short of sacrificing ourselves on a huge pyre as a burnt offering to the NHS, there is nothing that we can do to better her accomplishment. Harriet Nerva wins.

But this is noisy, shallow virtue-signalling, and nothing more. I’m sorry if it sounds harsh or seems unpleasant to rain all over what first looks like a harmless act of charity, but the NHS Choir’s Christmas single is so much more than that. And so much worse. It is yet another part of the vast tapestry of reflexive NHS worship which smothers Britain, and prevents us from looking critically and dispassionately at one of the most important issues in our society.

And we need to wake up, stop patting ourselves on the back for the accomplishments of previous generations, and recognise that singing hymns to an outdated healthcare delivery model from the 1940s is going to do nothing – nada, zilch – to ensure that Britons enjoy the best healthcare in the world in this century.

NHS Worship - London Olympic Games 1

It is therefore heartening to see a few other brave souls also now daring to stick their heads above the parapet and call the NHS Christmas single what it is – emotionally manipulative propaganda.

My Conservatives for Liberty colleague and Creative Director, Paul Nizinskyj, also picks up on the pseudo-religious undertones beneath this latest act of NHS-worship:

This was encouraged by a message on the music video, which urged people to “Show how much you #LoveYourNHS” by buying the single. Well, this is a concept I struggle with, because I have no love for a catastrophically flawed system of healthcare which seriously fails its patients, despite the best efforts of its frontline staff.

But that distinction – between the structure of the NHS and the people who work for it – is one we seem to struggle with in this country. So, instead of a conversation about why the NHS continues to fail the people who pay for it, we again exalted it as an infallible deity, this time in a kind of Christmas Day papal coronation.

One of the Left’s greatest successes has been to conflate “Our NHS” with “healthcare” in the minds of the British people, so that the two concepts effectively merge to become one and the same. This was a war of words, and the Left won a total victory – now, even those people who are naturally sceptical of government monopolies often speak of the two terms interchangeably, and carve out an illogical exception for the NHS when they extol the virtues of competition and privatisation.

But as Nizinskyj points out:

I’m certain dedicated health professionals would be dedicated and professional under whichever system of healthcare they were working, but the results of that hard work often depend on whether the system is working with them or against them. And, when it comes to the NHS, I’m afraid it’s working against them.

This is the point which continually eludes the NHS priests and their congregation of grateful but uncritical Britons. Yes, of course the doctors and nurses who saved your life / delivered your baby / cared for your dying relative did an amazing job. But that is a reflection on them, not on the system in which they operate.

Lives are saved, babies are delivered and dying relatives cared for in healthcare systems all over the world. Many of these other healthcare systems do the job very well, if not better, than the NHS. Many of these other healthcare systems are also free at the point of use. Very few of them are like the American system, which is always cynically held up as a bogeyman to scare British voters and shut down debate. And yet mysteriously, none of these other healthcare systems copy the NHS model.

Think about that for a moment. Every day, people are treated with love and dedication in hospitals and healthcare systems around the world, and in many cases receive comparable or better care without being stuck with a bill that they can’t afford. Yes, poor people actually receive medical care in other countries, not just Britain. And yet we are not able to even look at these other systems or ask ourselves the question whether the decision we made as a country in 1948 is still the best choice in 2016.

Why are we not able to do this? Why can we not look at best practice from around the world and strive to emulate and build on these ideas so that we have the very best healthcare in the world, rather than being satisfied with an ebbing and subsiding parity? Because of people like Harriet Nerva, and the closed-minded viewpoint of legions of others like her.

NHS Choir - Harriet Nerva - 2

There are two forces are at work here. First, there is the British public’s irrational, unshakeable devotion to “Our NHS”, about which a bad word can never be spoken. Sure, you can criticise waiting lists, falling standards or the inevitable winter crises, but politicians question the wisdom of sticking with the NHS model itself at great peril – and so none do.

And secondly, there is the growing phenomenon of online virtue-signalling, fuelled by social media, in which your political stances are worn and discarded like this year’s latest fashion, and where your stance on key social issues is taken to determine whether you are a “good” or “bad” person. Thus thousands of Twitter bios proudly proclaim that the account owner is a “lefty” or that “I voted for Corbyn”, while people looking for love (or something else) on dating sites like Tinder will often have “don’t bother if you are a Tory”, or other dismissive words to that effect, emblazoned on their profiles.

Take the British public’s “pre-existing condition” of an uncritically sentimental attachment to the NHS and add the social cachet and sense of identity which now comes from blaring one’s political views online and wearing political stances like a fashion statement, and this is what you get: people taking selfies of themselves holding up devotional banners praising the NHS, and even more people singing hymns in honour of Saint Aneurin Bevan’s sacramental gift to our nation.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to get swept up in the NHS love-fest. You are guaranteed to get smiles from strangers and likes on social media with every unthinking post and re-tweet of a “Love Your NHS” meme. You will suffer no negative consequences at all for declaring your blind loyalty to this one particular branch of government, and in fact will be praised for doing so. Just by clicking a few buttons and sharing a couple of posts on social media, 90% of the population will think you are magnificent.

But it is not magnificent. It’s self-aggrandising, counterproductive and wrong. It actively detracts from efforts to improve healthcare for Britons, and it stifles and prejudices a much needed public debate before it can even take place.

I’m sorry to be Scrooge this winter, but there’s no other way of saying this: if you bought the NHS Christmas single, you are part of the problem, not the solution.

Christmas number 1 race

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The Daily Smackdown: Sore Loser John McTernan Doesn’t Understand Bullying

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

John McTernan - Labour Party - Jeremy Corbyn - Bullying

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Everyone in the Parliamentary Labour Party is a grown adult. Accusations of “bullying” by Jeremy Corbyn are nothing short of pathetic

John McTernan dials up the centrist Labour victim complex yet further, with a whiny piece in the Telegraph moaning about the supposed “bullying” of Labour MPs by Jeremy Corbyn:

It has long been a watchword of the labour movement that “an injury to one is an injury to all”. The PLP have to put that into action – starting with the Shadow Cabinet. If any frontbencher is moved, let alone sacked, because of how they voted over air strikes on Isil then the entire Shadow Cabinet should resign in solidarity. Immediately. Without hesitation. And the rest of the PLP should refuse to fill the vacancies. Well, at least the nine out of ten who didn’t vote for Corbyn.

[..] To work this action has to be like a successful strike – well-organised, widely supported and ruthlessly executed.

Yes. John McTernan, in his latest foot-stomping tantrum, is seriously invoking the language of industrial action and trade unionism to argue for the continued privilege of Labour’s centrist political-bots to set the tone and direction of the Labour Party, even though their faction overwhelmingly lost the recent leadership election.

Don’t be deceived by McTernan’s claim that this is all about the Syria vote. If a reshuffle does indeed occur – and it should – it will be just as much a response to the two-facedness of those shadow cabinet members who willingly chose to serve under Corbyn and profess loyalty to his face, while briefing against him anonymously to the media.

And take a moment to appreciate the absurdity of Labour’s centrists – generally those people furthest removed from the party’s roots in the trade union movement, fully paid-up members of the political class – now invoking the language of collective struggle in an attempt to preserve their loosening grip on power and influence within the party.

Having forged careers based on centrist triangulation and studiously ignoring the trades union or anyone with old-fashioned socialist views, these pampered princelings now have the nerve to elicit sympathy by painting themselves as victimised underdogs, humble workers being oppressed by the tyrannical Corbynite managerial class.

This is yet further proof that centrist Labour is still nowhere close to understanding the reasons for their defeat and rejection by the wider leftist movement.

The John McTernans of this world would still seek to make a virtue out of the fact that they stand for nothing save the acquisition of power, and that to them, even the most fundamental political or ideological belief is ultimately negotiable in the quest for votes. And they are terrified that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party will usher in a new era, whereby politicians are actually expected to believe in something and seek to persuade and convince the electorate, rather than slavishly flattering voters and tilting with every passing opinion poll.

That’s why we are now seeing this hysteria about supposed “bullying” by Jeremy Corbyn. Never mind that it is the ranks of unhinged activists online who are doing the “bullying”, and not the mild-mannered Corbyn. It serves the interests of John McTernan & co. to conflate the two – to make Jeremy Corbyn personally responsible for the behaviour of every single online troll, and claim that the unpleasant abuse on social media is somehow being coordinated from the Leader’s office.

This blog disagrees with nearly everything that Jeremy Corbyn stand for. But the only thing worse than Corbyn’s socialist policies is the attitude of the self-entitled Labour centrists, who – despite comprehensively failing to articulate a political vision of their own – still arrogantly expect to get their own way.

Only the warped and self-important mind of John McTernan could cast Labour’s centrists-in-exile as the plucky underdogs, and Corbyn’s small band of loyalists as the cruel capitalist oppressors. The rest of us will see this hyperbolic nonsense for what it is.

Jeremy Corbyn bullying

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Bring On Jeremy Corbyn’s Cabinet Reshuffle, And Save Us From These Whining Babies

Samuel Hooper7 Comments


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Spineless nonentities in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet seek to undermine the Labour leader at every turn, yet demand respect and job security for themselves

Never mind all those people who spent Christmas on the streets, in hospital or caught in the grinding deprivation which still grips too many of our fellow citizens. They can all go to hell. Instead, you should spare a thought for those poor Labour shadow cabinet members who spent the past three months agitating against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, and who have suddenly woken up to the realisation that publicly trashing your boss in the national media is a poor guarantor of job security.

Just when you think that the preening sanctimony and self-regard of the Labour Party and its parliamentary caucus cannot possibly get any worse, they somehow manage to find a new low. And this time they have excelled themselves, with coddled and self-entitled Labour shadow cabinet members weeping to journalists that rumours of a coming Corbyn reshuffle “ruined” their Christmas and New Year break.

The Telegraph reports:

Jeremy Corbyn “ruined Christmas” for moderate members of his front-bench with his plans for a a “revenge reshuffle”, a shadow cabinet minister has said.

[..] The Labour leader is expected to sack Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, along with Maria Eagle, the shadow defence secretary, and her sister Angela Eagle, the shadow business secretary. Rosie Winterton, the chief whip, is also said to be on the brink of being demoted.

The shadow minister said: “Our Christmas was ruined, there’s a level of fear within the party that’s worse than anything I’ve seen since the 1980s. It’s insidious.

“We [moderate members of the shadow cabinet] feel as if we have targets on our backs. This is supposed to be a new politics – instead we’re left wondering if we’ll have a job when we get back after the New Year. I chose to serve as a front-bencher because I am loyal to Labour, I just thought he would respect that”.

It is truly heartbreaking to hear of the emotional torment suffered by those Labour shadow cabinet members who think that Jeremy Corbyn is a disaster, but lack the cojones to publicly say so and win enough popular support of their own to mount a plausible leadership challenge.

Let us all observe a moment of silence for the “ruined” Christmases of the restive Labour centrists. Maybe some bright spark can pull together a legal argument that Corbyn violated their “human rights” with his rumoured reshuffle. After all, no one is better at cooking up fabricated human rights abuses than the Labour Party.

Hilariously, many of the same Labour MPs and shadow cabinet members who spent the past five years bashing the Evil Tories while prancing around as virtuous Defenders of the Poor are now finding themselves on the receiving end of hysterical criticism from the far left for their lack of ideological purity. And they don’t like it one bit.

The Telegraph reports in another article:

A plot to takeover the Labour party by ousting moderate MPs and seizing control of policy making has emerged in a document being circulated by Jeremy Corbyn’s key aides.

The ‘Taking Control of the Party’ blueprint, which has been seen by the Daily Mail, is understood to have been penned by veteran Left-winger Jon Lansman, now a director of the Corbyn-supporters organisation Momentum.

[..] A former Labour shadow minister told the Telegraph: “What we are finding is there’s a Stalinism that’s beginning to appear and a moral superiority which we are finding very irritating.

“It really is very animal farm and deeply unpleasant. What we are getting instead of an attempt to build bridges and compromise, is Stalinism.

“He doesn’t accept that a leader of a mainstream British political party has to adopt certain attitudes and behaviours. Its so childish.”

Moral superiority, from the party of unearned moral superiority? Surely not.

And what arrogant remoteness from the people is revealed by the pompous statement from a Labour shadow cabinet member that things must always be done a certain way – the insistence upon “certain attitudes and behaviours” – and that any attempt to conduct politics differently, to favour the people over the political class, is “so childish”?

No. What’s “so childish” is the born-to-rule mentality of centrists from all parties – but particularly the current Labour Party – who seek to make a virtue out of the fact that they believe in nothing and stand for nothing, save the aquisition and keeping of power.

What’s “so childish” is the tantrum-like meltdown occurring within mainstream Labour; the incredulous refusal to accept that their utter vacuity, when it came to policy making or offering an alternative vision for Britain, is the reason why they have been swept from their lofty perches and displaced by the Corbynites who (love them or hate them) actually do stand for something.

If Blairite and Brownite centre-leftism is so star-spangled awesome, why was it so comprehensively routed at the ballot box in May? And if telegenic soundbite-bots like Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper truly have what it takes to be a viable world leader in waiting, why were they unable to convince any more than a handful of supporters to vote for their respective candidacies?

There is almost nobody currently sitting in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet who could plausibly be described as exceptional, let alone as a future prime minister. Many of them would never have gotten close to front bench politics were it not for the fact that Corbyn was desperate for warm bodies when trying to assemble his team, and had to accept mediocrity in order to make up the numbers.

And yet these spineless nonentities – these utterly unremarkable politics-bots, many of whom would be toiling away in dusty select committees or vying for the title of Best Constituency MP had they not been plucked from obscurity by Jeremy Corbyn – dare to complain that their leader does not shower them with effusive praise when they brief against him anonymously to the daily papers, or publicly distance themselves from him on television.

What ungrateful, forgettable, pathetic weaklings.

Dan Hodges is absolutely right when he makes the point:

There is also something faintly pathetic about the cries of anguish emanating from around the shadow cabinet table. Those who have taken the fight to their leader were right to do so. But they can hardly complain when he fights back. It’s a bit like watching a pub tough screaming “not in the face” after suddenly finding his aggression reciprocated.

Bring on the reshuffle. And may Jeremy Corbyn’s purge of snivelling moderates, those who criticise anonymously while failing to hold or articulate beliefs of their own, make the Game of Thrones “Red Wedding” episode look like a spring picnic.

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The Daily Smackdown: Darcus Howe’s Authoritarian Attack on Oliver Letwin

Samuel HooperLeave a comment


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Nobody can call themselves a civil liberties campaigner while suggesting that unpleasant speech should be criminalised

It was only a matter of time before the frenzied condemnation, Tory-bashing and virtue-signalling which met the publication of a controversial Thatcher-era memo from Oliver Letwin and Hartley Booth turned into suggestions that law enforcement should get involved.

Step forward “civil liberties” campaigner Darcus Howe, who – seemingly forgetting what civil liberties are – decided to weigh in against Letwin.

The Guardian reports:

Civil liberties campaigner Darcus Howe has condemned remarks about black communities made in the 1980s by the prime minister’s policy chief after the Tottenham and Handsworth riots, describing the comments as “bordering on criminality”.

Oliver Letwin was forced to issue a statement apologising for any offence caused when a confidential memo from 1985 was released by the National Archives in which he blamed unrest on “bad moral attitudes”.

In a confidential joint paper, Letwin, who is now MP for West Dorset, and inner cities adviser (and later a Conservative MP) Hartley Booth, tell the then-prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, that “lower-class unemployed white people had lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale”.

The men warn Thatcher that setting up a £10m communities programme to tackle inner-city problems would do little more than “subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops” and that any help would only end up in the “disco and drug trade”.

“If a black man had said something quite like that he’d have been called into Scotland Yard and and he might be charged with incitement to riot. It is bordering on criminality,” said Howe, who was a prominent figure in black rights campaigns in the period the document was written.

Let’s be clear: Oliver Letwin’s words, and the sentiment behind them, were reprehensible. And yes, they were far from an isolated case, just as elements within the Metropolitan Police were once institutionally, unabashedly racist.

For all the necessary good that the Conservative government did to turn Britain around in the 1980s, we should not deny that some decidedly unsavoury elements – as typified by the arrogant, cloistered high Toryism displayed by the youthful Letwin – also rose to power on Margaret thatcher’s coattails. And yes, this included some high-handedly ignorant and unreconstructed ideas about race, as the Oliver Letwin memo reveals. On that much, there should be no argument.

But to draw such fresh outrage from a decades-old incident as some are now doing – or to make impetuous calls for Letwin to resign or even face criminal charges, as Darcus Howe is openly hinting – would achieve nothing, and change nothing about the past.

Oliver Letwin may be guilty of having held some unpleasant and ignorant views on race back in the 1980s, but there is no suggestion that he has at any time practiced discrimination on the basis of race, committed acts of violence or even said anything which might be considered a “hate crime”, even by Britain’s low standards of evidential proof.

Besides which, what is the statute of limitations on having once expressed some nasty – but at the time commonly held – political or social ideas when serving in public office? Are people to be permanently disbarred from public life for ever having said or thought the “wrong” thing? And are we so pathetically naive that we expect those politicians who pass our stringent tests to be anything other than those who are smart enough not to get caught, or to commit their deepest and darkest thoughts to paper in the first place?

The Left have a dangerous tendency to weaponise race and social issues, focusing so much on dealing out instant political death to anyone who treads on one of their verbal land mines that they fail to actually deliver the “social justice” they so ostentatiously seek.

And the hysteria surrounding Oliver Letwin’s 30 year old memo is just another example of seizing any opportunity to bash the “Tory scum” (how much more lenient would people be had, say, John McDonnell uttered a similar sentiment back in the early 1980s?) while failing to do any serious policy making of their own. After all, how much easier is it to cry “racism!” than it is to stand before the electorate with your own newly minted policies designed to deliver true equality of opportunity for all Britons?

But worst of all is the predictable irony of a so-called civil liberties campaigner making dark threats about criminalising speech. Any civil liberties campaigner worth their salt knows that the battle for free speech is won or lost at the margins – that the battle will be fought not over pleasant small talk about the weather, but over rude or intemperate speech which may be very offensive to some very vocal people.

Oliver Letwin expressed some truly unpleasant thoughts in his recently unearthed memo, and Darcus Howe is free to criticise him for it as much as he pleases. But if Darcus Howe or anyone else want to include threatening musings about “criminality” or being hauled in by Scotland Yard in their howls of outrage, they should take off the white hat of virtue first – and stop pretending to care about civil liberties.

 

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