Labour Party

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 Toast: Bring On Corbyn’s Reshuffle And Purge Of The Cowards

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Jeremy Corbyn Shadow Cabinet 2

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Jeremy Corbyn’s restive but cowardly shadow cabinet members have refused to put up or shut up with their concerns about his leadership. Therefore, he should fire them. Now.

Rumour has it that Jeremy Corbyn had finally had enough of spineless Labour shadow cabinet members who choose to serve under him by day but run to the newspapers with sensationalist quotes attacking him by night.

The Telegraph reports:

Jeremy Corbyn will spend the Christmas break planning a reshuffle to oust his most prominent shadow cabinet critics that is due to be announced within weeks of the New Year, The Telegraph understands.

The Labour leader and his aides will spend the next fortnight working out how to replace leading internal critics with allies in major a departure from his initial conciliatory top team.

Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, and Maria Eagle, the shadow defence secretary, are high on the target list after their public opposition to Mr Corbyn over Syrian air strikes.

Good. A reshuffle is long overdue.

Let us not forget that it is the restive Labour centrists currently murmuring and plotting within Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet who are responsible for his rise – and the rise of the hard left in general – in the first place.

Hopelessly pathetic Labour leadership candidates like Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper inspired such little inspiration among the party grassroots with their centrist non-vision that Corbyn, an unreconstructed socialist, won the leadership contest by a landslide.

And for the past five years of Conservative coalition rule, the Labour centrists – working under Ed Miliband – engaged in a hysterical, sanctimoniously moralising form of opposition which tolerated the most ridiculous anti-Tory hyperbole in the pursuit of power. This approach – incorporating such tactics as ranting about the supposed “human rights” abuses of the Evil Tories – gave a green light to the crazies and far-left types who have now taken control. The centrists tried to ride the far-left tiger, but were eaten by it.

And yet these losers – these Labour centrists who could barely motivate their own families to vote for them – have the temerity to mutter their discontent to the national newspapers, even while serving in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet and being loyal to his face.

These are some of the anti-Corbyn quotations briefed to just one sympathetic journalist, Dan Hodges, by those dull, craven shadow cabinet featherweights who sanctimoniously claim to have the best interests of the Labour Party at heart:

Labour’s internal phoney war is about to be brought to an end by a real war. The mood among shadow ministers has changed. “We haven’t got any choice,” one said to me yesterday. “We have to take him on now.”

This is the dilemma facing Labour MPs after ‘Suicide Saturday’. The size of Jeremy Corbyn’s victory makes it impossible to mount an immediate challenge. But his reaction at the moment of his victory reinforced the impression he cannot be left to lead his party for an extended period. “We can’t wait five years”, one shadow minister said. “Two years at the maximum”.

It’s clear that as the first rays of the Corbyn dawn spread across the landscape, the disparate anti-Corbyn forces have yet to draw up a unified plan of action. “The first thing I’m going to do is shore up my constituency” said one shadow cabinet member. “I’m not taking any chances. If his people [Corbyn’s] come for me I’m going to be ready.”

“What’s the one thing all of Corbyn’s recent appointments have in common?” a shadow cabinet member asked me yesterday. “It’s this. They all hate the Labour Party. They think Labour gets in the way and prevents the voters embracing true revolutionary socialism.”

One shadow cabinet minister has warned of a potential wave of “punishment beatings” being meted out to those MPs who do not show their new leader and his supporters the appropriate degree of respect.

If even one of these quotes had been made by a restive shadow cabinet member about Ed Miliband, such brazen disrespect for the office of Leader would have been front page news, and news channels would have led with stories about an imminent resignation from the Labour front bench.

But under Corbyn’s leadership, the normal rules of behaviour have been suspended – Corbyn’s shadow cabinet feel free to brief against him every day without doing the decent thing and resigning, and the spectacle has become so unremarkable that each instance serves only to add colour to other news stories, rather than making headlines on their own.

Dan Hodges got it 100% right when he said that it is Labour’s spineless MPs – not Jeremy Corbyn – who are now most to blame for destroying the party:

Mass shadow cabinet resignations. A dramatic stalking-horse challenge. Poor-health. An act of God. The bulk of the PLP yearns for anything that will bring an end to their Corbyn nightmare. Anything, that is, that does not require an act of courage or defiance from themselves.

And these people actually aspire to govern us. They have the nerve to represent themselves as our future leaders. Ask us to place in their trembling, fumbling hands decisions of life and death, health and happiness, war and peace.

They will not get their wish. There is no 100,000 strong army of “moderates” riding to their rescue. Good. Labour’s spineless parliamentarians no longer deserve salvation.

The current situation is quite simply untenable. The Labour centrists lost the general election, the Labour leadership election and the argument. They lost. They utterly failed to present a compelling political vision of their own, and so they were turfed out in favour of the Corbynites, who do actually stand for something (however unappealing that vision may be).

Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet are duty bound to serve the man who won their party’s leadership election. That’s how it works. If they have irreconcilable differences with Corbyn on fundamental matters of policy or leadership style, they should air their dissent from the backbenches after having resigned on principle, and not continue to moan and whimper while clinging on to their thoroughly unremarkable front bench careers.

So I say bring on the Corbyn cabinet reshuffle. Those who brief anonymously to the newspapers but lack the courage to air their grievances directly do not deserve their positions of seniority.

May many cowardly heads roll this Christmas.

Jeremy Corbyn Shadow Cabinet 3

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The Daily Smackdown: Toby Young’s Misguided Invitation To Dan Hodges

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Dan Hodges - Labour Party - Defect to Conservative Party

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Not so fast, Toby Young. Dan Hodges is an honourable man, but he has no place in the party of Margaret Thatcher

It wasn’t the first time and it probably will not be the last, so understandably you may have paid little attention when Dan Hodges quit the Labour Party this week in disgust at the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and the behaviour of his supporters.

Hodges departed again this week, firing this parting shot:

I’m done. Yesterday I cancelled my direct debit to the Labour Party. “Why don’t you just sod off and join the Tories”, Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters regularly ask anyone who dares to challenge their rancid world view.

I won’t be joining the Tories. But I am sodding off.

Fair enough. Dan Hodges has legitimate, irreconcilable differences with Jeremy Corbyn – both his policies and the way in which he runs the party (though Hodges’ sudden sensitivity to supposed bullying from the Corbynites seems a little odd coming from someone who was only too happy to get scrappy in his past life as a political campaign manager).

But clearly Dan Hodges and Jeremy Corbyn have very different visions of what the Labour Party should be, and nobody should fault Hodges’ decision to quit. I made the conscious choice not to re-join the Conservative Party when I returned to Britain in 2011, out of disgust with the centrist course plotted by David Cameron and an unwillingness to associate myself with the record of the coalition government, and so I’m certainly not preaching any kind of “stand by your man” dogma.

And now, inevitably, the offers to Dan Hodges to come join the Conservative Party are coming rolling in. At first, these were mostly coming from mocking Corbynistas on social media, rejoicing that a turncoat “Red Tory” like Hodges had finally gone (again). But then the mocking from the far left was replaced by more earnest offers from the supposed political Right.

Foremost of these offers came from Toby Young, Hodges’ colleague at the Telegraph, who wrote an open letter attempting to woo the ex-Labour columnist into the Tory fold. This letter is well-meant, but utterly misguided and counterproductive, as we shall see.

Toby Young begins:

On all the biggest political issues facing our country – what to do about the Islamic State, tackling the deficit, the renewal of our independent nuclear deterrent, education reform – you and the other Labour moderates are far closer to the leadership of my party than to Labour’s. I think that’s even true of the NHS, given that the health budget has increased in real terms year-on-year since David Cameron became Prime Minister. The commitment to increase spending on the NHS even further in the Autumn Statement surpasses anything promised by your party. And, as I’m sure you know, the minimum wage is set to rise faster under this government than it would have done under Ed Miliband, assuming he’d stuck to Labour’s manifesto.

And it’s true – Dan Hodges does hold refreshingly realistic perspectives on tackling ISIS in Syria, the deficit and Trident. When it comes to fundamental issues of national security, as all of these are, people from the Left and Right are often united.

More worryingly though, when it comes to trampling civil liberties in pursuit of an unattainable degree of security, both he and Theresa May are on the same page. And if Dan Hodges actually believes that throwing more money at a fundamentally broken and outdated NHS model is a good thing, then there is great crossover potential there, too. I’m just not sure that this is a good thing, as Toby Young seems to believe.

Young continues:

Indeed, on all the most important aspects of Osborne’s economic policy, the Labour moderates are much more closely aligned with us than you are with John McDonnell, not least because it’s virtually indistinguishable from the policy set out by Alastair Darling. In this respect, as in so many others, the Prime Minister and his Chancellor are the heirs to Blair.

Toby Young clearly meant this to be a bright and positive pitch to Dan Hodges to jump ship. But by hammering home the similarities between George Osborne and Alastair Darling and their remarkably similar (in practice if not in rhetoric) approaches to deficit reduction, all he manages to do is reveal just what a weak and ineffectual supposedly conservative government we currently have – Blairites with a patrician Tory façade.

Young concludes:

If your only hope of improving the lot of the least well-off is to persuade the Conservative Party to be more compassionate, then shouldn’t you do exactly what you’ve been urging the leadership of your own party to do? Say to hell with ideological purity and strike a bargain?

[..] I also think that, in time, many people on my side will come to see the value of a Blairite faction within the Conservative Party. Some of us are already worried about the corrosive effect that a lack of serious opposition will have on the government and would welcome a proper challenge. If that’s not going to be provided by Labour, then it must come from within our own ranks. Those of us who style ourselves “modernisers” will regard you as natural allies. In my mind’s eye, I can already see Lord Finkelstein standing at the other end of the welcome matt, bottle of champagne in hand.

So come on over, Dan. You already have many friends in the Tory party,including the Prime Minister, and I’m sure you’d quickly make many more. I think we’d be lucky to have you.

Unfortunately, in his rash invitation to Dan Hodges, Toby Young is falling into the same trap as David Cameron’s woolly “One Nation” model. Sure, it may be possible for the Tories to eke out a couple more narrow election victories by becoming so blandly inoffensive and unrecognisable that a sufficient number of the most bovine voters grunt their approval. But these narrow victories, like David Cameron’s “miracle majority” of twelve, provide a mandate only for the dull, technocratic management of Britain’s public services. Essentially they elect a Comptroller of Public Services – someone to kick when the trains don’t run on time or NHS waiting times get too long – not a world leader.

Convincing majorities – margins of the sort that allow radical changes to the country like realigning foreign policy, rolling back the remaining vestiges of the post-war settlement and delivering a smaller, more effective state – don’t come from pretending to be sufficiently like the Labour Party that it tricks a few wavering voters into switching sides. They come from articulating a vision so clear, so exciting and so blazingly inspirational that people vote as enthusiastic citizens inspired by the message, not self-interested consumers voting based on fear or greed.

A Conservative Party that is tame and toothless enough to accommodate someone like Dan Hodges would by definition be of the former type, not the latter. The mere fact that Toby Young is able to make his offer with a straight face proves that there is not currently a cigarette paper’s worth of difference between Blairite Labour-in-exile and the Cameron Conservatives, a party which enthused the electorate with their vision so much that they are perpetually just six defections away from defeat in the House of Commons.

In 1968, over a decade before she became prime minister, Margaret Thatcher warned in a speech:

There are dangers in consensus; it could be an attempt to satisfy people holding no particular views about anything. It seems more important to have a philosophy and policy which because they are good appeal to sufficient people to secure a majority.

[..]

No great party can survive except on the basis of firm beliefs about what it wants to do. It is not enough to have reluctant support. We want people’s enthusiasm as well.

Many supposed conservatives and Tory party members seem to have forgotten that lesson – the essential truth which delivered three terms of a Thatcher premiership, saving this country from seemingly inevitable decline and irrelevancy. David Cameron and George Osborne, both old enough to reap the fruits of Thatcherism without having really understood why it was so necessary, seem never to have absorbed this lesson in the first place.

Announcing the defection of Dan Hodges to the Conservative Party – having David Cameron welcome him at the door of Number 10 Downing Street with a big bottle of champagne and a basket of pears – would be the ultimate triumph of One Nationism. It would complete the transformation of the Conservative Party, underway since Thatcher left office, from a party of some ideological coherence to a well-oiled and finely calibrated PR machine, excelling in being all things to all people. An intelligent but soulless hive mind of people who quite fancy being in power, and who are content to say anything or compromise on any conviction in order to keep it. Thus, David Cameron will go down in history as the twenty-first century version of Ted Heath.

I don’t think that this is good enough. A Conservative Party sufficiently bland and uncontroversial that it might appeal to Dan Hodges, even on his most jaded day, is not one which I could bring myself to vote for at the ballot box. It’s not good enough for me. But way more important than that, it’s not good enough for Britain. This country is crying out for real leadership, a renewed sense of national purpose, and the re-imagining of the state and its role in our lives. Monolithic institutions like the broken welfare state and “our NHS” (genuflect) – fraying anachronisms from the post-war consensus – need to be redesigned from the ground up, with their blind apologists and vested interests dragged kicking and screaming into the new century.

But if Dan Hodges is walking around with a Conservative Party membership card in his wallet by the time 2020 rolls around, it’s all over. None of this essential conservative reform will happen. Not because Hodges is in any way a bad person, but because he is Labour to his core – and a Conservative Party which provides a political home for him is quite simply no longer a conservative party at all. They will defeat Labour and win a third term, sure. But their voter coalition will be so broad and so lacking in common aspiration that they will be even more rudderless and scattershot in government than they are today.

I’m almost certain that I know who Toby Young would pick if he was forced to choose, but I’m going to make the ultimatum anyway, because I care deeply about the Conservative Party too, and I am deadly serious about this.

Toby Young: It’s Dan Hodges or me.

Toby Young - Dan Hodges - Defect to Conservative Party

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Jeremy Corbyn, Owen Jones And The Thin-Skinned Labour Commentariat

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Dan Hodges - Owen Jones - Labour Party

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A campaigning journalist or opinion writer must write according to their conscience, without a second thought for whether it helps or hurts their own party in the short term

Owen Jones is angry that his attempts to make sympathetic, reasoned critiques of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party are attracting the same levels of vitriol and hatred that those of us on the Right experience every day.

In his Guardian column yesterday, Jones complains:

I have several criticisms of the Labour leadership, held in good faith and constructive in approach. Because I want the left to succeed – otherwise, what’s the point? The need to build coalitions of middle- and low-income people; to reach out beyond the converted; to have a credible, coherent economic alternative; to rebut smears of being hostile to the country; and so on.

But when voiced, the right will use these as evidence that “even the left is losing faith”. Some on the left will see such suggestions and criticisms as playing into the hands of an aggressive media campaign regarding anything but blind loyalty as treachery. The isolated sympathetic commentators end up almost duty-bound to stay in line.

Such is the unrelenting nature of the media attack, any balanced discussion of the Corbyn leadership risks being shut down. That the media can be so dominated by one opinion – and so aggressive about it – is a damning indictment of the so-called free press. I’m an opinion writer: my opinions appear in the opinion section. But the media is swollen with opinion writers, and in too many cases their work ends up in the news section. A constructive critique of the Labour leadership is still needed for its own sake if nothing else. It is, however, an almost impossible task.

Meanwhile, Dan Hodges – a commentator with absolutely no concern about the potential impact of his words on the short term prospects of the Labour Party – has cancelled his direct debit and cut up his membership card (again) in no small part because of the vicious response to his opinions from the Corbynite Left.

In announcing his decision to quit Labour again, Hodges writes:

I’m done. Yesterday I cancelled my direct debit to the Labour Party. “Why don’t you just sod off and join the Tories”, Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters regularly ask anyone who dares to challenge their rancid world view.

I won’t be joining the Tories. But I am sodding off.

What’s a left wing polemicist to do if they find themselves disagreeing with the direction of the Labour Party in the Age of Corbyn?

It’s funny. Many of us on the right are well used to being called Evil Tories or labelled as heartless, uncaring monsters utterly lacking in all compassion – not because we don’t want to help the poor and disadvantaged, but simply because we don’t believe that endless, uncapped government spending is the best solution.

We are used to mainstream media outlets – heck, even the current Chancellor of the Exchequer himself – unquestioningly accepting and repeating the notion that conservatism is only about helping the wealthy, rather than the many. And when we are not being actively spat on or jostled in the street because of our political opinions, we are still used to being reviled, and our ideas not given a fair shake. And as a result, we have developed superior reasoning abilities, reserves of fortitude and patience, and very thick skins.

The left-wing commentariat utterly lack these qualities. For years they have marinated in the sanctimonious belief that their side has a monopoly on truth, compassion and decency. And since Labour lost power in 2010, it has been the easiest job in the world for them to sit on the sidelines throwing stones at the Conservative government.

(I’ll make an exception here for Dan Hodges, who correctly called Ed Miliband’s vacillating uselessness from the very beginning, and correctly predicted that he would lead the party to electoral ruin. And for his Cassandra-like efforts, he is now a pariah figure in the party he loves, with the small consolation of being David Cameron’s favourite columnist).

But to say that the left wing commentariat have had trouble adapting to the new reality under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn is a huge understatement. Because now, more than ever, the Labour Party has devolved into warring factions and bitter rivalries. And all of them – MPs, writers and activists alike – are now treating each other with the same contempt and raw hatred that they previously reserved for “Tory Scum” like me.

And it turns out that the Left can dish it out, but can’t take it.

Owen Jones in particular seems to be struggling with the fact that writing critically about tactical errors by the Corbyn leadership is not generating a warmer and more receptive response:

I have several criticisms of the Labour leadership, held in good faith and constructive in approach. Because I want the left to succeed – otherwise, what’s the point? The need to build coalitions of middle- and low-income people; to reach out beyond the converted; to have a credible, coherent economic alternative; to rebut smears of being hostile to the country; and so on.

But when voiced, the right will use these as evidence that “even the left is losing faith”. Some on the left will see such suggestions and criticisms as playing into the hands of an aggressive media campaign regarding anything but blind loyalty as treachery. The isolated sympathetic commentators end up almost duty-bound to stay in line.

And when Dan Hodges found himself implacably opposed to the current direction of his party – with his anti-Corbyn positions being received even more coolly than his tirades against Ed Miliband – he simply upped and left.

One might suggest that Owen Jones & company could learn a thing or two from this site. I’m a natural conservative supporter, though I reluctantly voted UKIP in 2015 out of frustration with the pro-EU consensus, in solidarity with good people like Douglas Carswell who went out on a limb in pursuance of their ideals, and because my local constituency fielded a dithering left-wing Wet Tory candidate. And I made clear that the Conservative Party did not deserve my vote because in every important area – national sovereignty, rolling back the state, fiscal policy, civil liberties and more – they were quite simply not behaving like a conservative party.

This blog is the exact right-wing mirror image of left-wing commentators like Dan Hodges: a natural supporter of my party, but with complete contempt for the current leadership (Cameron and Osborne) and a strong desire to see the Tories move in a more conservatarian direction. Dan Hodges can’t bring himself to remain within the Labour Party while its leadership refuses to countenance military action against the middle age barbarians of ISIS. I can’t bring myself to give money to the Tories so long as their leadership remains slavishly pro-EU and believes that the British people can be distracted from the gradual loss of their sovereignty and democracy by manufactured “table-thumping rows” and a sham renegotiation with Brussels. Or when they field a Conservative In Name Only parliamentary candidate who rails against the “bedroom tax” and thinks that we should do away with our independent nuclear deterrent.

I get a lot of stick for my views. I’m universally hated by the Left (and recently discovered a Tumblr page full of foul-mouthed invective about yours truly), and can hardly get deeply involved in Conservative politics when I disagree so fundamentally and vehemently with the centrist wet rag of a leader who just delivered a resounding general election victory only in the total absence of a viable Labour prime minister in waiting.

But that’s my lot in life, and I accept it. I’ve been called every name under the sun on Facebook and Twitter, earned the opprobrium of friends and acquaintances, and written lots of mean things about my own party, taking them to task for their failure to advance conservative policies while in power. But the one thing I have never done is pull a punch or moderate a sincerely held opinion because of the friends I might lose or the immediate electoral damage I might do to the political party I used to call home.

Love him or hate him, Jeremy Corbyn remained a Labour Party member through all of the long wilderness years of Blairism, years which must have seemed to Corbyn like an unbearable compromise with flawed Tory-lite policies. Ridicule and obscurity were his crosses to bear, and he bore them patiently until quite unexpectedly his fortunes changed.

For many of the left-wing commentariat, however, just a few short months out of power and favour within the Labour movement is apparently already taking a psychological toll on people more used to calling the Tories “evil” and sitting back to soak up the lazy applause than being tarred with the same brush and called Red Tories themselves.

I have no sympathy for any of them. Jeremy Corbyn sits atop the Labour Party because of the wretched job that the centrists and their establishment buddies did in making a convincing public case for moderate Labour. And on the flip side, I accept my share of blame for the Conservative Party’s current directionless, centrist malaise – I should have done more and worked harder in my own small way to keep the party true to Thatcher’s legacy, and fought harder against the Cameron project. Sadly I only began writing in 2012, when it was far too late anyway.

But if nothing else, perhaps now that major and influential left-wing commentators like Owen Jones have been on the receiving end of the same kind of foaming-at-the-mouth left wing demagoguery that libertarians and conservatives receive every day, they will refrain from indulging in it themselves.

Of course, that would require that they stop feeling sorry for themselves long enough to recognise the pattern staring them in the face.

Jeremy Corbyn - Paris Attacks - Terrorism - Appeasement

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The Daily Smackdown: Labour’s Pitch For Power Is A Child’s Temper Tantrum

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Labour - Save Our NHS

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Thus far, Jeremy Corbyn’s elevator pitch for power would be more at home in the school playground than the adult political debate

When your core political argument and pitch to the electorate can be easily summed up in crayon by a seven year old girl, it’s time to develop a more robust vision for government.

A first good step for Labour to take would be to stop fomenting or tacitly condoning behaviours like these, from activists and supposed supporters:

Shouting “Tory Scum” at opponents

Vandalising war memorials

Shrieking about nonexistent human rights abuses

Physically threatening MPs

Being insufferable online

Pretending that there will be no offsetting behavioural consequences to dramatic tax hikes

Stubbornly believing in the magic money tree

I’ve written before about how, in their incoherent rage at the supposed transgressions of the Evil Tories, the Left are in great danger of becoming the British left wing equivalent of the American Tea Party – morally certain, impervious to facts, intolerant of the slightest internal dissent and quick to anger when contradicted by outsiders.

Where the Tea Party blindly venerate the US constitution (though they read it selectively, and from a highly originalist perspective) and would see the federal government shrunk back to its nineteenth century bare bones, the Corbynite Left venerate “our NHS” (genuflect) and the other monolithic edifices of the welfare state stemming from the socialist post-war consensus.

Neither seem very comfortable living in the present. And the worst excesses of both would be more at home stapled to the wall of a primary school classroom than reported and printed as serious ideas in the pages of a national newspaper.

Tory Protests

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