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The Daily Toast: Ken Livingstone, Mental Health And The New Politics

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Ken Livingstone.png

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Ken Livingstone’s attack on Kevan Jones’ depression is typical of the hard activist Left. They are happy to use the poor, the sick and other minorities as cynical campaign props, but hate it when they dare to speak for themselves

Today’s Daily Toast goes to James Kirkup for his furious, relentless evisceration of Ken Livingstone in the Telegraph.

Some context: When Red Ken was unexpectedly appointed to co-lead the Labour Party’s upcoming defence policy review (bringing his open minded attitude toward vital questions like Trident renewal), the Labour MP Kevan Jones – who had previously spoken out in a parliamentary debate, attempting to reduce the stigma of mental illness by revealing his own struggles – raised political concerns about whether Livingstone was the right person for the job.

And in response to Kevan Jones airing his political concerns, Livingstone responded with an extraordinarily personal attack:

Mr Livingstone told the Mirror: “I think he might need some psychiatric help. He’s obviously very depressed and disturbed.

“He should pop off and see his GP before he makes these offensive comments.”

So this is the New Politics that we were promised with the Jeremy Corbyn era – more of the same coarse, unbecoming personal insults that we have always had.

It’s no surprise. Because many on the Left see themselves as the only virtuous people in town – the sole custodians of the nation’s morals – they think that somehow it “doesn’t count” when they say rude, aggressive, condescending, racist or sexist things. They believe are allowed to get away with it because they spend their careers policing the debate and controlling the language, casting out anyone else who says or thinks the wrong thing. Just like a corrupt cop might consider themselves above the law, so the egotistical leftist believes that they have carte blanche to cross any of the lines that they draw to constrain the rest of us.

All of which makes Kirkup’s takedown of Livingstone so satisfying – and worthy of the Daily Toast:

I believe in civilised debate and generally try to avoid throwing around personal abuse when writing about politics. But there’s no way of being polite or restrained about this. Ken Livingstone’s words are vile, a poisonous act that would leave him consumed by shame if he had a shred of decency.

Yet he’s standing by those comments. He told the London Evening Standard: “It doesn’t matter what disorders he’s got, he doesn’t have the right to be rude … to be constantly undermining Jeremy Corbyn.”

This is utterly hateful. Mr Livingstone he hasn’t just grotesquely insulted Mr Jones, denigrating his suffering and his bravery, he has sent a brutal message to anyone else who suffers mental illness: stay quiet or you’re fair game.

Even if he wasn’t part of a leadership team that had so piously promised a nicer, kinder politics and to embrace open political debate, Mr Livingstone’s behaviour would be disgusting. The staggering hypocrisy involved just compounds his disgrace.

And if Mr Corbyn does not act quickly and firmly, by dropping Ken Livingstone into the deep dark hole of political obscurity where cockroaches like him belong, he deserves to share every bit of that disgrace.

Ken Livingstone was eventually forced to apologise for his behaviour, but was unable to stay contrite and was soon walking back his apology with justifications and angry asides to journalists.

The Labour Party – and the British Left in general – can’t have it both ways. They can’t spend half the time prancing around pretending to be high-minded emissaries of the New Politics, holding hands and singing Kumbaya, and then spend the other half acting like vicious thugs, smearing people because of their mental health conditions or whipping their activists up into a Tory-hating, phlegm-lobbing rage. It’s time to pick a side.

And yet Ken Livingstone is perfectly entitled to say mean or ignorant things about his fellow MPs in public if he chooses. That much is a fundamental free speech issue, so let’s see no talk about Parliament needing to be a “safe space” where coddled MPs need to be praised and affirmed at all times.

However, the question here is not one of free speech, but one of hypocrisy. Ken Livingstone and much of the virtue-signalling Left love to use the mentally ill, the poor and other groups as cynical campaign props, showering them with ostentatious sympathy in order to make themselves look good and pick up votes. But as soon as one of those same people becomes a threat – whether it’s a former welfare recipient questioning the welfare state or a fellow MP simply raising a political objection – suddenly the tribal thuggishness comes out and the Left’s feigned concern for the disadvantaged is revealed as the sham that it is.

That’s the real story here. Yes, Ken Livingstone’s behaviour was boorish and inexcusable, but he’s a left wing bruiser and unlikely to change his ways any time soon. But this incident was just the most high profile recent example of behaviour that is not uncommon on the Left: behind the friendly faces, the talk of inclusivity and a new, kinder politics, too often there lurks a hardened, egotistical ideologue who always responds to criticism by lashing out.

So by all means let’s haul Red Ken over the coals – certainly Corbyn should publicly condemn Livingstone if the Labour Party’s newfound passion for mental health is to be taken seriously – but let’s not pretend that this incident is anything other than standard behaviour from a certain segment of the activist Left.

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The Daily Smackdown: Jeremy Corbyn’s Non-Clarification On ‘Shoot To Kill’

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Jeremy Corbyn - Paris Attacks - Terrorism - Appeasement

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Why is it so hard for Jeremy Corbyn to say that the police should kill terrorists in the process of committing a massacre?

Sensing the storm that was about to break over the Labour Party following his catastrophically weak  response to a simple question on the merits of shooting terrorists in the act of attacking innocent civilians, Jeremy Corbyn reluctantly scrambled to contain the damage.

Yesterday, on Corbyn’s Facebook page, the Labour leader took the opportunity to scold everyone for supposedly misinterpreting his remarks:

I am therefore disappointed that comments I made yesterday in regard to a “shoot to kill” policy have been taken out of context [..]

Nonetheless, I would like to clarify my position. As we have seen in the recent past, there are clear dangers to us all in any kind of shoot to kill policy. And we must ensure that terrorist attacks are not used to undermine the very freedoms and legal protections we are determined to defend.

But of course I support the use of whatever proportionate and strictly necessary force is required to save life in response to attacks of the kind we saw in Paris.

Here, Corbyn is trying to pull off a classic bait-and-switch. Yes, of course we must ensure that terrorist attacks are not exploited as an excuse to clamp down further on already-threatened civil liberties – this blog has consistently said the same thing, and did so again following the Paris attacks.

But that’s a side issue. People were not angry with Corbyn because he was taking a plucky stance in defence of civil liberties, they were simply incredulous that the Leader of the Opposition – when presented with a golden plated opportunity to come out on the side of human decency and rebut some of the criticism that he is soft on terror – point blank refused to countenance the shooting of armed terrorist gunmen actively engaged in committing a massacre.

Even in his so-called clarification, Jeremy Corbyn remains unable to force the words “kill” and “terrorist” from his lips in the same sentence, giving only the bland statement that he supports “proportionate and strictly necessary force”. This might be sufficient coming from another politician, but the trouble is that in Corbyn’s case, the public strongly suspects that his idea of a “proportionate and necessary” response to a terrorist massacre might mean sitting down with a cup of tea and talking about our feelings rather than eliminating a clear and present threat to the British public.

Look: nobody expects Jeremy Corbyn to be the man in the SWAT flak jacket kicking down doors, throwing flash-bang grenades and pulling the trigger in these situations. If Corbyn wants to follow his absolutist pacifism in his own private life, that’s fine. But it is not okay for the Leader of the Opposition, the holder of an important official constitutional position in our national life, to take such a fundamentalist stance when the security of our country and our citizens is at stake.

When the man seeking to become Britain’s next prime minister can’t even bring himself to utter the words “kill” and “terrorist” in the same sentence, it naturally raises questions as to what possible group of people – which vitally important constituent base – he is desperate to avoid offending by giving a more full-throated response. And as this blog noted yesterday, sadly there is only one plausible answer: the people Corbyn is unwilling to offend, is even willing to take a political hit in order to avoid offending, are those people who think that maybe Paris and the West had it coming on Friday the thirteenth.

But even putting this distasteful fact aside, Corbyn needs to learn that not every crisis or event needs to be a teaching moment for the British people in the ways of pacifism and non-violence. When Laura Kuenssberg asked Jeremy Corbyn yesterday if he would be happy for the police to take down an active terrorist, the answer should have been a simple “yes, of course”. Case closed.

But instead, the Labour leader – and the army of online Corbyn fanboys and fangirls blindly backing him up – decided instead to quibble sanctimoniously about whether “happy” was the right choice of word, bring up misleading comparisons like the mistaken shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes when no terrorist attack was underway, and generally refute the premise of the question.

That’s the kind of behaviour that would just about be tolerable from a smarmy sixth-former. It’s the kind of behaviour that has become eye-rollingly predictable from a far-left backbencher. But it is most definitely not the kind of behaviour acceptable from somebody who plans to stand before the British people and ask them to make him prime minister.

Jeremy Corbyn - Paris Attacks - Terrorism - BBC Interview

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The Daily Toast: Don’t Exploit The Paris Attacks To Increase Surveillance

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Surveillance State - Britain - UK - Paris Attacks

Demands for more government surveillance in response to the Paris terror attacks are crass, opportunistic and pointless

It’s very rare for this blog to agree with a Guardian editorial, but the newspaper’s stance on the proper response to the latest terrorist atrocity in Paris contains a lot of sense*.

For a start, there is none of the Western self-flagellation that grips too much of the Corbynite Left, and the absence of this equivocation is refreshing in itself (but then ever since their decision to back Yvette Cooper over Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership election, the Guardian’s left wing idealism has seemed more affected than deeply held).

And on the need to avoid using the Paris attacks as permission to ratchet up the surveillance state, the Guardian is absolutely correct:

In Britain, there will be some who see Theresa May’s new investigatory powers bill in a more urgent light after Paris. But unless and until the evidence shows that bulk surveillance would have made a difference in that dreadful scenario, the argument remains where it was. And our starting point is still that mass surveillance of all of us is neither necessary nor effective.

When the intelligence agencies are looking for a needle in a haystack, they shouldn’t be adding more hay. When they need to spy on an individual or group, they should seek – and they will usually get – the legal warrant to do so. And, in case it needs repeating, European societies do not defend their values when they turn on their Muslim fellow citizens – on the contrary, they violate those values.

This is exactly right, and a welcome counternote to the blind panic currently spilling from the keyboards of other commentators such as Dan Hodges. While one can understand individuals – particularly those actually caught up in the attacks – being led by emotion and willingly sacrificing everything for the false promise of greater security, those people who make public policy or influence public opinion should be more careful with their thoughts and words.

As the Guardian rightly points out, it is for the intelligence services (and their willing cheerleaders in the media) to conclusively prove that harvesting more bulk data would have prevented the Paris attacks from happening. If they really want to shift the status quo and treat every citizen as guilty until proving innocent by keeping a record of their communications, they must prove that the lack of this data is what allowed the eight attackers to slip through the net. And they can prove no such thing, because even if some of their communications were swept up in bulk collection along with everyone else’s, they cannot prove – or even plausibly claim – that they would have known to look for that data in the giant haystack of data.

The problem with our current national security state is not that it lacks sufficient powers over us, but that we lack sufficient power over it. Citing “national security concerns” now seems to be enough to win the argument for more surveillance on its own, and the intelligence services have grown both lazy and entitled, expecting governments to grant their every request even when they fail to construct a convincing case for them. Just as President Eisenhower presciently warned of the military-industrial complex, so we must be wary of the national security state – which has now become so big that it has taken on a life of its own, with priorities and ambitions that go beyond their original, limited remit.

This would be bad enough if it worked, but the awkward truth is that we will never achieve the perfectly secure state. Realising this, we must understand that responding to every new barbaric terrorist attack by ratcheting up the same surveillance state which failed to prevent it represents a colossal failure of imagination on our part. Glenn Greenwald likes to make the comparison with road safety – we do not insist on draconian new road safety legislation such as a 20mph speed limit every time we see a road fatality, because we accept that a degree of risk comes with the freedom to drive.

As this blog commented after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, warning of the dangers of government overreaction:

The harms that would be inflicted in order to achieve absolute safety are the very same harms that David Cameron intends to inflict upon Britain in his panicked, servile submission to the demands of the national security and intelligence chiefs. The only way to achieve absolute safety is through absolute surveillance – and zero privacy. Stepping out onto a London street totally certain in the knowledge that you will come to no harm would require us to become North Korea.

Ultimately, the only way to make us safer is to reduce the number of people living among us or dwelling overseas who wish to rain death and destruction upon us. That does not – repeat, does not – mean appeasing them, admitting that they have a point, or accepting the legitimacy of their sick and evil ideology. But it does mean accepting some fundamental truths that we prefer to overlook in our righteous fury, as I pointed out after Charlie Hebdo.

Those who think that the way to prevent the next attack is by granting government yet more power to spy on our actions and regulate what we say would apparently be content to live in a society where a small, nihilistic minority hate us and wish us harm, but whose attempts to kill us are always thwarted by an omnipotent security and intelligence apparatus. I do not wish to live in such a state, and nor do I think that such a scenario should be our highest aspiration. We can do better than that.

In the shocked aftermath of these reprehensible terrorist attacks in Paris, some would have the authorities start to construct their very own North Korea right here in England’s green and pleasant land. They are motivated by an understandable fear, but our country will not be best served by acting on their gut instinct. Even when the advocates of the surveillance state mean well, we must oppose them.

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* That’s not to say that the Guardian gets everything right. Determined to push their pro-EU agenda at all times, the article keeps banging on about “European values” as though our common revulsion at the killing and maiming of innocent people in Paris somehow means that the national cultures of Britain, France, Portugal, Greece and Poland are more or less identical, and ripe for further political integration. This much is nonsense, but does not detract from the overall thrust of the piece.

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Paris Terror Attacks: More Government Surveillance Is Not The Answer

Samuel Hooper6 Comments

The surveillance state did not prevent Madrid, the 7/7 London bombings, Ottawa, Charlie Hebdo or the 13 November Paris attacks. Ramping it up yet further will not guarantee our safety either – but giving the intelligence services and their media apologists everything that they want will undoubtedly erode our freedom and change our way of life for the worse

In the early hours of 14 November, in the immediate aftermath of the appalling  and barbaric terrorist attacks in Paris, this blog wearily pointed out the well-worn sequence of events which would inevitably follow:

Day 0: Expressions of shock, sorrow, anger and solidarity

Day +1: Insistence that now is a time for mourning, not asking difficult questions about how or why the atrocities were committed

Day +1, later: The first difficult questions are asked, particularly of the government and security services

Day +2: The intelligence services dust off their wishlist of draconian new powers, and strongly hint that if only they already had these powers, the attack could have been avoided

Day +3: The official narrative is established – “we will defeat this terror by giving our intelligence services the tools they need, and making radical or hateful speech illegal”

So far, things are running like clockwork. We are certainly very good at the sorrow and solidarity phase of our response. Facebook timelines have been a sea of people updating their profile pictures to display the French tricolour (and, to a lesser extent, the inevitable virtue-signalling pedants inexplicably criticising them for doing so). Day +1 followed the normal pattern.

Day +2 is when we usually hear the first whispers of criticism about the intelligence services, when the identities of some of the attackers are revealed and it turns out that in many cases, they were operating under our noses undetected for some time. This is just starting to happen now – though it is being drowned out somewhat by criticism of Europe’s muddled borders and asylum policy, as it was reported that one of the attackers had a Syrian passport and entered Europe in Greece as a refugee.

And while it is slightly too early for the intelligence services themselves to come out and start agitating for new powers, this has not stopped some of their media cheerleaders from getting the ball rolling. We are officially still in that interregnum period after an attack when it is considered unseemly or inappropriate to have a real discussion about why the attacks happened, but there is an exception to this rule when it comes to demanding more surveillance powers for the state.

And climbing through this loophole today is Dan Hodges, writing before he thinks and letting his fear cloud any judgement or sense of proportion:

If we are serious in our expression of sympathy and solidarity, if we are serious about confronting those men who lined up the disabled patrons of the Bataclan and then gunned them down, then we must act. We must expand the same collective energy we utilise proclaiming “Je suis Paris” demanding concrete action. Or at least, not demanding inaction.

In the coming weeks the government’s surveillance bill will be passing through the Commons. If we truly believe in standing in solidarity with Paris, we must let it pass. We must demand it passes.

I’m surprised – I didn’t think we would see these calls for more unchecked government surveillance until the start of the new week. But hats off to Dan Hodges – by publicly freaking out in his newspaper column and calling for the Investigatory Powers Bill to be passed, he has opened the door for Theresa May, David Cameron and a parade of GCHQ ex-chiefs to hit the TV studios and make the same demands.

Of course, what Dan fails to do is explain how new government surveillance powers a) would have prevented the Paris attacks of 13 November, or b) might realistically prevent any such attack in future. And if you pushed him, I doubt that he could explain the scope of current surveillance laws in any detail, or describe the ways that the British security services currently do or do not make use of those powers.

Dan is (understandably) frightened following the Paris attacks. And when people are scared it is natural to demand more security, to insist that the authorities wrap us all in cotton wool, kill the Bad People, do anything to alleviate the gut-wrenching fear that next time it might be the concert hall that we attend, or our local neighbourhood restaurant in the line of fire. And that’s quite understandable from the perspective of a private individual, only concerned for their own immediate safety.

But coming from one of the most prominent, respected political commentators in the country, it is downright irresponsible. Everyone is entitled to have their own private freakout behind closed doors when civilisation is shaken – as Paris was – by Islamist barbarism. But what is unacceptable is taking to your keyboard whilst you are in that fearful state, and using your national profile to give the government carte blanche to do whatever it likes in the name of national security.

Paris Attacks - Military

Clamouring for the government to pass the snooper’s charter (the Investigatory Powers Bill) is not a wise and considered response to the Paris attacks, and neither is it a moral one – particularly when you cannot point to a single measure in the bill which would have prevented the horrific carnage we witnessed on Friday.

Spiked magazine sums up the illiberal measures contained in the bill:

The draft of the bill, published last Wednesday, sets out new and draconian powers allowing the security services to monitor, access and store our online communications data: IT and comms companies would be required to store information on the websites we visit for up to 12 months, and release them to the state when required; intelligence agencies would be given legal authority to hack into communications and bulk-harvest metadata; and the ability of companies like Apple and Google to encrypt individuals’ messages – putting their content beyond the reach of themselves and the spooks – will be severely curtailed.

Home secretary Theresa May has been quick to talk down the measures. She insists that the data retrieved from your web history is no more than a ‘shopping list’ of the sites you visit, rather than individual pages – a fine and utterly meaningless distinction. And while there has been much talk of the ‘safeguards’ guaranteed by the IPB, with judicial commissioners required to approve requests for interception warrants and wire taps, these are little more than formalities. Judges will only be able to reject Home Office requests on the principles of judicial review; as backbench Tory MP David Davis pointed out, ‘This is not the judge checking the evidence, it is the judge checking that the correct procedure has been followed’.

If Dan Hodges had ‘smoking gun’ evidence that the eight Paris attackers and their network of accomplices made extensive use of unbreakable encryption to plan their crime, or that the intelligence services always suspected the attackers but were constrained by law from keeping them under closer surveillance, then he would have the beginnings of an argument.

But Hodges has no such evidence. Instead, he wants to use the deaths of scores of innocent people to empower the government to keep us all under surveillance, all the time. He makes no proposal as to how the security services might pick out the terrorist needles in this new haystack of intelligence were they to gain access to it, and no idea of the trade-offs between combing through the communications of the entire citizenry rather than focusing on known threats.

Worse still, he is so unconcerned with the potential consequences for privacy and freedom that he doesn’t even bother to address them in his article. And still Dan Hodges feels qualified to tell civil liberties defenders that they are wrong, and to clamour for more government intrusion in our lives.

Clamouring for Parliament to pass the snooper’s charter two days after a horrific terrorist attack in Paris isn’t brave or level-headed – it is a response borne of fear. When we are afraid, our time horizon shrinks to zero and we are concerned only with avoiding immediate danger. If we believe we are in imminent danger of being shot or blown up, we would likely hand over a great deal of our future freedom to avoid that fate. But this instinct – which may be essential for an animal in the wild – is entirely inappropriate for citizens living in a modern democracy.

France - Mass Surveillance - Protest

When making laws and empowering the machinery of state, we need to consider not just the threats of today and the people who will wield those powers today, but also what threats may exist tomorrow and who will wield those powers when David Cameron, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn are no more than names in a history book. We have a duty to our children and descendants to think about the type of country and world we want them to inhabit when we shape the laws of today.

Unfortunately, ramping up the surveillance state at the expense of the right to privacy and civil liberties fails both tests – it does not provide a convincing response to the threats of tomorrow, and it takes no account of who might try to wield those powers for their own ends in the future.

Terrorists are smart – when attacking the secure West, rarely do they try the same strategy twice. Thus, since 11 September 2001 we have gone from airplane hijackers armed with not much more than boxcutters to shoe bombs, liquid bombs and surface-to-air missiles. Our own intelligence services, to whom Dan Hodges wants to grant sweeping new powers, are usually one step behind. Thus, although the guardians of our safety were never smart enough to think of these risks before they were tried by terrorists, we are still constrained in the liquids we can take on airplanes, and have our shoes checked for explosives before we fly. In fact, modern airport security theatre as a whole reads like a “lessons learned” list of all the cock-ups and clangers of forty years of intelligence failures, with almost no discernible foresight or forward thinking.

So it will be with any new surveillance measures. Technology changes so rapidly that any law passed today will almost certainly be obsolete in a decade, while terrorists will immediately adapt and stop using monitored channels. Human ingenuity will always defeat the clunking fist of government, because it always does. So granting the government the power to monitor who we talk to, go through our emails and hack our smartphones will only infringe on the freedoms of the law-abiding; the terrorists will simply find new technologies or revert to tried-and-tested analogue techniques.

As for the leaders of tomorrow, the thought of a future Prime Minister Theresa May is frightening enough. But what is to say that in a couple of decades, if we do not properly grapple with the scourge of terrorism or in the wake of a future economic crisis, a far more extreme politician may come to power? And if they do, how glad they will be that our present government – cheered on by people like Dan Hodges – passed laws like the Investigatory Powers Bill, granting the state the tools and the legal cover to do as they please.

Again: having these fears and wanting government to provide safety is a perfectly understandable instinctive reaction to terrorist horror, coming from a private citizen. But government will happily assume new powers forever if they are freely offered up by the people, and so newspaper columnists should know better than to provide intellectual and emotional cover in the wake of an atrocity.

I admire Dan Hodges enormously as a writer and commentator on left-wing politics, but these latest irresponsible comments – invoking the image of massacred disabled concertgoers at a Paris theatre to cheerlead for the expansion of the surveillance state – cannot go unchallenged.

Jean Jullien - Peace for Paris - Paris Attacks

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Bottom Image: Peace for Paris, by Jean Jullien

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The Daily Toast: Hugo Rifkind On The Dilemma Of Labour Party Centrists

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Labour Centrists

Why don’t those members and activists who hate the new direction of the Labour Party simply leave?

It’s hard to bring yourself to leave an organisation when you have convinced yourself that everyone outside of it is hateful, immoral and evil. That’s the point Hugo Rifkind makes in his latest piece for the Spectator, a reflection on why there has been no hint of a centrist exodus from the Labour Party in the Age of Corbyn, despite much grumbling and plotting.

Rifkind wonders out loud:

What is wrong with these people? It’s like they’re children. Part of the madness comes, I suppose, from social media, whereby every utterance is ‘campaigning’, even if you’re just doing it in the office, on the loo. The bulk of it, though, is the idea that Labour people have to be Labour forever, even if they completely disagree with Labour, or else they’re not Labour. It’s weird and it’s needy and it’s anti–intellectual, and it makes no sense at all. They went big on this during the leadership election, when a host of people with politics virtually indistinguishable from Jeremy Corbyn’s were kicked out on the basis of prior support for the Greens or the Scots Nats. Because, of course, if they were true Labour they’d support Labour even while disagreeing with Labour, because that’s what Labour does.

Why does it? Nobody else behaves like this. Nobody else turns party into a tribe, not just putting loyalty over policy, but feigning a virtue with it, too. In any other party, anyone who disagreed with the party line as often as Corbyn has might have been expected to resign at least once, if only out of embarrassed deference to the voters who had blithely ticked the ‘Labour’ box. Perhaps due to its history, though, Labour is not merely a jumble of policies in the manner of other parties. Labour is a ‘movement’ and if you aren’t with it, you’re against it. No matter which direction it currently happens to be moving in.

An interesting argument, but it’s hardly as if the other main political parties are chock full of people who resign in fits of pique and then come crawling meekly back in rhythm with party policy. The only really noteworthy defections of the past few years are those of Mark Reckless and Douglas Carswell – both from the Tories to UKIP.

So while the gulf between the Corbyn left and the Blairite centre of the Labour Party may be particularly large, right-wing Tory MPs such as John Redwood and Bill Cash – with no frontbench career aspirations of their own to worry about – are just as unlikely to leave the Conservative party in disgust at David Cameron as Chuka Umunna or Andy Burnham are about to forsake Labour out of despair with Corbyn.

Rifkind closes by admonishing the centrists:

This is what happens when you brainwash yourself into believing that your lot are the only good guys; when you forget that it’s not the club that matters, but what the club does. This is what happens when you grow so used to feeling superior to everybody outside Labour that you can no longer properly believe such people are proper, moral humans at all. It’s not a church. It’s not a sin to go somewhere else for a bit if you need to. Not when the nuts do it, and not when you do either. Pull yourselves together. People are laughing.

This part is very true, and speaks to a sickness at the heart of the Labour Party – and the British Left in general – which this blog was one of the first to report on, and the most consistent in highlighting.

There are many reasons why Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party is not yet provoking an exodus. First, there is the hope that Corbynism may yet prove to be a passing phase, and that a couple of years of underperformance or a 2020 general election defeat will shock the Left back to its senses. Second, there is the self-protective instinct most Labour MPs have over their political careers – breaking away to start a new political party rarely leads to career advancement and power. But thirdly, there is what Hugo Rifkind calls the “tribal” instinct – that same stubborn unwillingness to leave which kept Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party for all his long wilderness years, and which now keeps the centrists grimly hanging on.

Would it be so hard for the centrists to step away from the Labour Party had they not grown up telling themselves that the Evil Tories represent everything bad about Britain, that Britain’s greatness can be summed up by the output of our public services alone, and that Labour have a monopoly on both wisdom and compassion? Probably not. But they did, and they still do.

Back when the Labour leadership contest was still raging, this blog argued:

If Jeremy Corbyn is not the answer to Labour’s irrelevance, whoever ends up taking the party forward will need to explicitly make peace with capitalism, and undo the bad blood created by Gordon Brown’s brooding statism and the hand-wringing “predators vs producers” equivocation of Ed Miliband. And this will require explicitly praising the virtues of capitalism, and potentially letting the Jeremy Corbyn-led wing of the party split off and float away back to the 1970s.

This does not mean that the remaining rump of the Labour Party should then cast itself as just another centrist alternative to the Tories – British politics desperately needs real ideological variety and choice. But the future ideological lines will be drawn over how to make capitalism work for all the people, with laissez-faire small government types on one side, and bigger government interventionists on the other.

[..] Sniping at capitalism while conspicuously enjoying the fruits of all that it provides has proven to be a deeply unconvincing platform. And it won’t become any more convincing, or win Labour any new voters, by the time of the next election.

So can a Labour Party at peace with the free market still stand for anything, and be a party of clear principle and ideological coherence? Absolutely. But it won’t happen by chance, it will require careful and determined consideration.

But Jeremy Corbyn did win the contest, and it is clear that the Labour Party will not “make peace” with capitalism so long as he remains leader. And in some ways that’s fine – I supported Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy precisely because I wanted to end the stale centrist consensus which currently grips British politics.

However, it does leave those centrists in a bind: disagreeing with nearly everything their leader says, used to attacking capitalism themselves in their lazy campaign rhetoric, but increasingly coming to appreciate capitalism the more they look at Corbyn’s alternative.

If Corbyn looks as though he will stay in power up to the 2020 general election, at some point the centrists will have to jump. And when they do, they will be ruthlessly attacked and vilified by precisely those voices who currently believe that virtue and salvation can only be found within the Labour Party.

But if the centrists wish to stay in politics and be taken seriously, what other choice will they have?

Jeremy Corbyn - Labour Leadership Election - Victory Nears

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