Socialism

Purge Tom Watson From The Labour Party, Not The Corbynites

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Tom Watson - Jeremy Corbyn

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If there is to be a Labour Party purge, leave the Corbynites and centrists alone and purge disgusting people like deputy leader Tom Watson

Charles Moore is quite right to identify the real odious usurper within the top echelons of the Labour Party – deputy leader Tom Watson:

The majority opinion is that it is a disgrace that Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the Labour Party. Actually, the real disgrace is that Tom Watson is its deputy leader.

It is a question of character, not of political views. Mr Watson is an inveterate plotter (see, for example, his almost successful political assassination plot against Tony Blair in 2006, to assist Gordon Brown). He is also the purveyor of utterly unsubstantiated malicious rumour.

Moore reviews Watson’s inglorious history:

In 2012, collaborating with the website Exaro, he used parliamentary privilege to allege “clear intelligence” of a “powerful paedophile network” in Parliament and Downing Street. He called on the Metropolitan Police to investigate, and later passed them “information”. This led to a series of operations by the police – Fairbank, Fernbridge, Midland – which looked credulously into allegations, some blatantly crazy, about child abuse, torture and even murder by leading figures in politics and society.

The investigations collapsed this year, but not before they had defamed the late Sir Edward Heath, ruined the last years of Lord Brittan, tormented the wife who then became his widow, and persecuted Field Marshal Lord Bramall (who is still, I am glad to say, robustly with us) and many more.

And then explains why the odious Tom Watson actively hinders the efforts of Labour’s suddenly reviled centrists to dislodge Jeremy Corbyn:

Now Mr Watson alleges that the Labour Party is being infiltrated by Trotskyists. “Some old hands [are] twisting young arms,” he says, making it sound like his favoured subject of child abuse. He may actually be right in this case. But the Corbyn team clearly finds it easy to say Mr Watson is “peddling baseless conspiracy theories”: he has done so before. It is utterly dismaying to see Labour led by the hopeless Mr Corbyn, unless you want a permanent Tory government (which I certainly don’t), but Labour moderates who oppose him do not seem to understand why they cannot gain the moral high ground. A big part of the answer is Mr Watson.

I’m actually with Owen Jones on this one – the idea that Trotskyist entrists are of any significance  in Labour’s influx of new members is ridiculous overstatement. Anyone who has ever been to a party conference or a political demonstration knows just how fringe these wizened far-leftists are, with their cheaply produced pamphlets and anachronistic slogans.

The fact that Tom Watson seeks to portray these people as having outsized influence is quite understandable, given his thuggish imperative to topple his leader and restore the rule of the centrists, but that does not make it true. In fact, it is a great slander on the hundreds of thousands of people who have flocked to the Labour Party, attracted by the fact that Jeremy Corbyn offers something other than the muddled centrism practised by Blair-Brown-Cameron-Miliband.

Tom Watson is exactly the kind of bruising, Chicago-style machine politician that we should be working to purge from our politics, not looking to as our salvation from Corbynism. He is the epitome of New Labour’s headline-led approach to governing – the fact that Watson’s first major act as an MP was to agitate for a ban on Gary Glitter albums shows a slavish desire to win the approval of The Sun and a brutal authoritarian streak which has been revealed numerous times since, not least in his Herculean efforts to take down Tony Blair in 2006, acting as Gordon Brown’s hired gun.

Is Jeremy Corbyn the great white hope of British politics? Of course not – his ideology and policy obsessions come pretty much unreformed from the 1970s, his foreign policy is alarmingly anti-American and he has any number of unpleasant friends and associations, at home and abroad. But at least he offers a gosh darn alternative to the centrist consensus.

Ambitious Conservatives in particular should appreciate that Corbyn’s efforts to shift the left hand border of Britain’s political Overton window makes it equally possible for a future radical Conservative leader (anyone? anyone?) to push the other boundary further to the right.

And for that potential alone, Jeremy Corbyn is worth 650 Tom Watsons.

 

Tom Watson - Labour Party - Deputy leader

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Top Image: ITV

Bottom Image: International Business Times

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What Next For The Labour Party?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLa67mjm7hg

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And when Jeremy Corbyn storms to re-election as Labour leader, what then?

Ben Kelly despairs:

To see just how low the Labour Party has sunk don’t look at Jeremy Corbyn, look at the usurper the rebels have chosen; Owen Smith. Is that really the best they have to offer? He is a total non-entity with no personal charm whatsoever. His combination of smarm and Corbyn-lite policy ideas are sure to repel the electorate and offer no hope for redemption for his wretched party. His ambition vastly outsizes his talent and the fact his pitch has been an attempt to attract Corbyn supporters exposes him as not just weak, but utterly pointless.

If Owen Smith miraculously manages to win the leadership race is he really going to bring salvation for the Blairites? He asserts that he is the only person who can unite the Labour Party but it is clear that he hasn’t the courage or the political intelligence to confront the Corbynite activist base, nor has he got the full blooded support of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

The harsh truth is that those figures in the Labour Party who really want to be leader have opportunistically ducked out of this race because they don’t want to enter a leadership race they will probably lose. They are too cowardly to take on the Momentum crowd and want to bid for the leadership when they can cruise into the position in some fantasy future when the Corbnyites realise the error of their ways.

Before Corybn Labour were already losing voters and it was mainly due to welfarism and immigration. Owen Smith is in no better position to win back the voters that have abandoned his party because of these issues than Corbyn. To that you can also add his Europhilia and his commitment to push for a second referendum in a blatant attempt to prevent Brexit. Ideologically his is little more attractive to the electorate and personally? This creep isn’t going to be embraced by the British people anytime soon.

The spending commitments in his cringeworthy, amateur hour, 20 policy pledges is quite enough to repel the wider electorate. The 28% that Corbyn’s hapless Labour Party is polling at the moment is clearly an over estimation, and the idea that Owen Smith is the man to reverse this dire situation is laughable.

The fact that even the man trying to oust Corybn thinks Britain wants socialism of any kind, even after Milibandism was comprehensively rejected in 2015, is a clear indication that Labour is in very serious trouble. It will either split or leap head first into electoral oblivion from which it will likely never recover.

Pete North is similarly unenthused:

https://twitter.com/PeteNorth303/status/761532183458803716

Well, at least Corbyn is powering a thriving socialist folk song revival.

This blog’s assessment, however, remains unchanged:

If Jeremy Corbyn remains as leader and takes Labour to an historic defeat in the 2020 general election, the party will be out of power for nine more years at most. But if the centrists, acting in a fit of pique at finding themselves out of favour and influence for once, decide to split the party then it will be ruined and broken forever. The time horizon in the minds of the centrist rebels conveniently gels with the likely length of their own political careers. When centrist Labour MPs earnestly declare that the future of the Labour Party is at stake, what they really mean is that their own parliamentary careers are at stake. The Labour Party has survived bad leaders before. What it cannot survive is the treachery and self-serving behaviour of the majority of its own parliamentary caucus.

If Labour’s centrists are serious about regaining control of their party and influence within in, there is only one course of action. And it involves sitting down, shutting up and letting Corbyn drive Labour off a cliff at the 2020 general election. Anything less than their full-throated support (or at least their tacit acceptance of his rule) will see bitter Corbynites attempt to pin the blame for their defeat on lack of enthusiasm (or indeed sabotage) within the parliamentary party. If Corbyn is to be deposed and Corbynism rejected once and for all, he and McDonnell must be given a clear shot at the general election and allowed to fail on their own.

“But people can’t take nine more years of Tory rule”, sanctimonious centre-leftists wail, indulging in their favourite pastime of painting themselves as the sole Defenders of the Poor. This would be a marginally more convincing if there was actually a radical, Thatcherite conservative government in office rather than the Cameron/May Tories who preach statist, paternalistic big government solutions to every problem – effectively Tony Blair’s missing fourth term.

It would be more convincing if there was more than a cigarette paper’s difference between centrist Labour and the leftist Toryism practised by a party which has more to say about “social justice” than liberty and freedom. But since there is so little difference, it doesn’t really matter whether Labour are in power or not – so they may as well take this decade to get their house in order and decide exactly what kind of party they want to be.

And if, at the end of that process of sober reflection, the decision remains that the party would be better off splitting into a hard left contingent and a centrist contingent for the professional political class then so be it. But this is a grave and permanent decision indeed, of sufficient magnitude that it ought to be determined by something more than the frustrated career aspirations of a few restless centrist Labour backbenchers.

Advice that will doubtless be ignored as this failed generation of exceptionally unexceptional Labour centrist MPs howl, rage and bring the Labour Party crashing down upon their heads, beside themselves with self-entitled rage at being out of power and influence for even a few short years.

 

Owen Smith - Labour Party Leadership Coup

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h/t Christopher Snowdon – Thank you for the music

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The British Left Tries And Fails To Solve Its Immigration Dilemma

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

TUC - Managing Migration Better for Britain - Immigration - Labour Party

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Labour’s metro-left ruling elites want unlimited immigration to continue unchecked forever. Labour’s working class voter base want – at the very least – an element of genuine control. And there is simply no papering over this widening chasm

The biggest political issue facing the Left right now, besides the slow-motion clown car crash that is the self-immolation of the Labour Party, is immigration – specifically, the yawning gulf between the liberal metro-left who love unlimited immigration and the working class voters who stupidly, stubbornly refuse to accept what a wonderful thing it is, simply because someone else gets all of the benefits while they pick up all of the social and opportunity costs.

The latest plucky hero to try to bridge this unbridgeable divide is the Trades Union Congress, who have cooked up a fancy new report – Managing Migration Better for Britain – in an attempt to get those ignorant, racist working class plebs to go back to the Light Side.

The report is a load of codswallop, primarily because it has nothing to do with “managing migration” at all. What we have instead is a tacit (but unwritten) acceptance that unlimited immigration should continue as before, balanced with the promise that lots of failed left-wing policies from the 1970s (think collective bargaining, incomes policy and the Winter of Discontent 365 days a year) will somehow make everyone happy.

Here’s Owen Tudor, the TUC’s Head of European Union and International Relations, trying to polish that dinosaur dropping into something shiny and attractive in Left Foot Forward (his emphasis in bold, not mine):

The idea of restoring the Migration Impact Fund is now widely shared. But our concern is that the fund should be considerably larger than it was under Gordon Brown, and should give local people a say over the funding of local services, like schools, hospitals and GP surgeries. It should also pay for the extra housing needs of a growing population.

We want to make sure that the economic benefits of migration that politicians and economists talk about actually filter through to the people who need better services and more homes.

We also want to press the case for an economy that prevents both exploitation of migrants and undercutting of the existing workforce.

Bad bosses will use any opportunity to divide working people if they can make a fast buck out of it. That’s what’s behind the lower rate for young people of the so-called National Living Wage, and it’s what they tried when women entered the labour force in greater numbers.

The appropriate response is to ensure equal pay for people doing the same job in the same place, closing the loopholes that allow exploitation and undercutting, and toughening up the enforcement of such rules.

Restoring collective bargaining where unions can recruit, and introducing modern wages councils where that doesn’t happen also have a part to play.

The TUC is also advocating a bigger Border Force, with a remit to prevent trafficking and exploitation, to take the strain of enforcing migration laws off employers, landlords, education and health professionals.

As the Byron Burgers experience shows, turning private people into part of the Border Force leads to all sorts of abuses, as well as giving people roles they are uncomfortable with and unprepared for.

Pish.

The very first section in the report is entitled “Take action against undercutting and exploitation”, showing exactly where the TUC’s sympathies really lie – with immigrants working low paid jobs that British people are reluctant to do for the wages on offer. Now, preventing exploitation is an entirely worthy aim, just as it was when Ed Miliband led with that ambition leading into his enormously successful 2015 general election campaign… But it has nothing to do with managing migration and everything to do with looking after people who have already migrated.

Back in the real world, though, getting all misty-eyed over the rights of immigrant workers is not the most pressing concern for most of Labour’s lost working class voters. And this is where the much-vaunted Migration Impact Fund comes in. This is to be expanded and turned into a massive slush fund where the monetary “benefits of migration to the economy” are wrested from the hands of their legal owners and dumped in the hands of local councils to be frittered away on gender-affirming street lighting, safe spaces for school exam trauma survivors and, inevitably, Our Blessed NHS (genuflect).

Unfortunately, this can basically be summed up as “raising taxes”. That is the only way that you can possibly take an economic benefit from one economic agent and redistribute it into the lap of another. The TUC can wail all they want about reinstating the 50p rate of income tax or only taxing the rich, but it will inevitably be the middle classes who end up paying into this Migration Impact Fund, through direct, indirect and stealth taxes. It always is.

Then it all starts to get very 1970s indeed. The TUC literally wants to re-establish wage councils (putting the word “modern” in front of the toxic term doesn’t make it any better) with wide-sweeping powers to encourage and enforce collective bargaining agreements on a regional and sectoral basis. And as well as advocating an immediate return to the inflationary policies of the 1970s, the report goes on to recommend the wholesale de-liberalisation of the labour market, effectively killing off the temporary workers industry and making self-employment onerously, punishingly unrewarding, stripping people of their right to flexible work and employment on their own terms.

Then the TUC turn their attentions to “shared values and a shared language”. This is where you might think they would be on stronger ground, and that perhaps we are about to hear a stirring call toward patriotism and the need for immigrants to quickly assimilate into the culture of their adopted home.

But no. Apparently the real problem is that the British are not welcoming enough, that we do not already bend and twist and cast aside our own values and traditions to make those with other values feel more at home. Hence the TUC sees a massive role for nasty, politically biased organisations like Hope Not Hate in policing the indigenous population in case of anti-immigrant thoughtcrime, with a few words about learning English thrown in as a half-hearted gesture.

Worse, the report goes on to suggest that the key to placating unease about the extent of recent immigration is to hold more “inclusive events at moments of national unity such as royal occasions, Remembrance and sporting events”. Those moments aren’t already great as they are and have been for generations, you see. They must be carefully deconstructed and reassembled by bien-pensant leftists to include more nods to other cultures.

And the last part of the TUC’s report is entitled “Protect the rights of EU citizens in Britain and tackling racism and xenophobia”, which can basically be interpreted as instructing the police to spend even more time on social media tracking down people who say off-colour things on social media and dragging them through the criminal justice system to make an “example” out of them. Again, fantastic outreach to the disaffected working class left-wing vote, just brilliant.

One can feel some sympathy with the TUC. As an organisation, their leadership is filled to the brim with exactly the kind of sneering metro-lefties that have infected the Labour Party. They all want more low-skilled immigration, either in order to signal their own virtue as Wonderful Tolerant People or as a demographic wheeze to create more future Labour voters. But they also want working class Britons to vote for them, and they know that a supremely relaxed stance on unlimited immigration is an obstacle to this goal.

But it is a goal they are not willing to give up. They will not even meet their disaffected working class voters at a genuine half way point and talk, just talk, about reducing net numbers, the one thing which many people have clearly said that they want. The most they will do is airly say “oh, let’s just raise taxes and fling the extra cash at places with higher immigration” (i.e. back to London) as though bribing people with their own tax pounds was ever a genuine, long-lasting political solution.

Getting a contemporary Labour politician to accept that a working class voter’s complaint about the level of net migration is actually about the level of net migration (and not about housing policy or workers’ rights or anything else) is about as hard as it is for an Islamist gunman to convince the political and media establishment that the terrorist atrocity he has just committed was performed in the name of Islam and is not an inchoate cry about welfare spending or social inclusion. They just don’t want to hear it. They have certain fixed narratives in their minds – unlimited immigration is always good and must be defended at all costs, Islam is purely a religion of peace and is never in any way connected with acts of violence carried out in its name – and they will squander every last drop of dignity and public credibility before letting go of those mantras.

And so, determined to maintain net immigration at current figures of c. 300,000 people a year, the Left is reduced to tricks, sleights of hand and outright lies, like this “report”, which feigns to take working class concerns about unlimited immigration seriously, yet somehow manages to propose a permanent extension of the status quo with the added bonus of resurrecting the days of industrial strife and national decline.

This is why the Labour Party is ultimately doomed, regardless of who prevails in the Jeremy Corbyn / Owen Smith showdown. This is why every Labour MP representing a Northern constituency will be deservedly plagued with sleepless nights from now until May 2020 when the electorate render their judgement. There is simply no credibility any more. Having already been shown up as grasping and self-serving in their attitude to Brexit, immigration and everything else, they have decided to simply double down on the same patronising strategy while hoping in vain for a different outcome.

Let Jeremy Corbyn (or Owen Smith) pick up this report, and try to run with it. Let’s see just how far it gets them on the stump in Stoke-on-Trent, or Sunderland.

There are two honourable courses of action open to the TUC, the Labour Party and the Left in general. They can flat-out tell their working class voters that they are wrong to be worried about immigration, that their concerns are grasping, xenophobic and not worth addressing, and then try to “educate” them in the enlightened ways of metro-leftism. That is one honourable path – politics as a means of persuasion, even against the odds.

The other honourable course of action would be for the metro-leftists to have one brief moment of introspection for once in their lives, think again about whether pursuing policies which screw their core vote is a morally acceptable choice to make in the pursuit of blind multiculturalism, and maybe start acting as the voice for the working class again rather than a very deceitful interpreter.

There is no honour, though, in the third way desperately trodden by Ed Miliband and now picked up by the TUC and Jeremy Corbyn, which is to cry “I hear you!” in response to working class sentiment about permanently high, unlimited immigration while deliberately refusing to do a damn thing about it.

This is the path which Labour has chosen, and if it leads those pandering moral cowards off a cliff and towards electoral Armageddon then nobody should shed a tear.

 

Labour 2015 General Election Mug Control Immigration - Immigration Policy

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Top Image: Independent

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Jeremy Corbyn, His Place Confirmed On The Leadership Ballot Paper, Declares War On The Centrists

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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Jeremy Corbyn taunts centrist Labour MPs with a subtle repudiation of Neil Kinnock’s 1985 party conference speech denouncing Militant Tendency

After avoiding a party stitch-up to prevent him from automatically going forward into the Labour leadership ballot, Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters have been taking something of a victory lap.

The Labour NEC’s decision prompted the valedictory video shown above, hosted on the official Jeremy Corbyn YouTube channel and promoted on the Labour leader’s social media accounts.

In the video, Corbyn concludes his remarks:

Our party is determined that the next government will meet the needs of all of the people of this country. That will invest in health, in housing, in education, in jobs, in infrastructure.

The next government will be a Labour government – a Labour government– committed to ending the injustice and inequality that exists in Britain today.

My emphasis in bold.

I highlight this phrase because I do not believe it was accidental. In fact, I believe it was a direct and very deliberate reference to former party leader Neil Kinnock’s 1985 speech to the Labour Party conference, in which Kinnock (in a bid to make his party more electable) denounced the far-left Liverpool city council and the Militant tendency wing of the party.

Here’s what Kinnock said in 1985:

I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises.  You start with far-fetched resolutions.  They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end up in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

Jeremy Corbyn’s choice of repetition (“a Labour government – a Labour government”) in his address today is, I am certain, not coincidental. On the contrary, it is a direct reference to Neil Kinnock’s speech and a repudiation of Neil Kinnock’s work in the 1980s to drag the Labour Party closer to the political centre (Corbyn himself was part of an effort to depose Neil Kinnock from the leadership in 1988).

By flagrantly co-opting Kinnock’s turn of phrase, Corbyn is defiantly stamping his own authority on the Labour Party. Corbyn is making clear that he is the Labour Party now, for all intents and purposes, and that the party of Kinnock, Smith, Blair, Brown and Miliband has passed away.

Anybody entertaining any lingering wistful belief that Jeremy Corbyn will “do the right thing” and slink away “for the good of the party”, letting the centrists resume their rule without a fight, should now abandon all hope.

This is Jeremy Corbyn’s party now. And he is here to stay.

 

Neil Kinnock’s 1985 party conference speech – highlight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWLN7rIby9s

 

Jeremy Corbyn - Labour Leadership Election - Victory Nears

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In Defence Of Jeremy Corbyn

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

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The Labour Party is Jeremy Corbyn’s party now. If rebellious centrist MPs don’t like it, it is for them to leave and find (or found) a new party, and new voters to support them

This blog has little time for the left-wing politics of Jeremy Corbyn, but has consistently supported his leadership of the Labour Party – not out of some mischievous desire to make Labour unelectable, but because centrism is a disease which has sucked the meaning and consequence from British politics, allowing indistinguishable governing elites from all parties to consistently act in their own interests rather than the national interest (see: European Union). And in our current centrist malaise, this blog has common cause with anyone who promises to give the British people a genuine ideological choice.

The naivety and numerous missteps in Corbyn’s first year in charge of Labour have been frustrating to watch, as they have only given further ammunition to those bitter centrist forces who never accepted the validity of his leadership in the first place, and who have been working tirelessly (and in many cases openly) to undermine their leader since the day he was elected. And this blog has had occasion to take Corbyn to task several times for his controversial stances, particularly in the realm of national security and foreign policy.

But Corbyn now finds his leadership under sustained and determined attack by a Parliamentary Labour Party determined to be rid of him in order to resume their previous, uninspiringly bland centrist course. Though this rebellion was precipitated by the shock Brexit victory in the EU referendum (with many sullen Labour MPs blaming their leader for failing to uncritically sing the EU’s praises loudly enough during the campaign), the Labour coup has in fact been building for months. Even I, at the outermost margins of the London political scene, am aware of the late night plotting which has been taking place in homes and pubs with a view to deposing Jeremy Corbyn – in some cases before he had even been formally elected as leader.

And now, ten months later, things are finally coming to a head.

The Parliamentary Labour Party’s stalking horse in this campaign is Angela Eagle. Yes, that complete and utter nonentity Angela Eagle, the former shadow Business Secretary with the voice and mannerisms of a Dalek.

LabourList reports:

Angela Eagle today kicked off her challenge to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, saying that her priority is to “heal” the Labour Party.

The former Shadow Business Secretary, who resigned from the frontbench last month, accused Corbyn of “hiding” from his critics. She said that Labour needed to be “strong and united” to deal with the fallout from the Leave vote in the EU referendum, and that Corbyn is now unable to deliver that.

Setting out her pitch to be Labour leader on ITV’s Peston show, Eagle said: “I think we need someone who can heal the party.

“I think we need to have somebody that can lead the Labour Party forwards and unfortunately Jeremy has lost the confidence of the vast majority of his parliamentary party.

“We need a strong and united Labour Party that can put a very compelling case to the British people to deal with the challenges that Brexit will give.”

And the rebels intend to create this “strong and united” party by fixing the rules to prevent Jeremy Corbyn from automatically appearing on the ballot in the first place.

The Telegraph reports:

The two rivals made televised pitches to supporters this morning in broadcast interviews after a dramatic series of developments ended the stand-off over the embattled leader’s position.

Ms Eagle suggested Mr Corbyn should not automatically be on the ballot. “He will have to find the nominations”, she said.

“I’m a gay woman with strong, Northern, working class roots. I think I’m the right person for this job at this time”.

So this would-be Labour leader is already resorting to crass and superficial identity politics to get on the ballot, presenting her socioeconomic background and sexuality as traits which would somehow make her a better leader.

What fatuous nonsense. What the Labour Party really needs is not some wheedling, self-entitled centrist who thinks that being a gay woman gives her additional plus points, but an authentic leader who can actually connect with Labour’s disillusioned base by actually reflecting some of their fears, priorities and aspirations.

And it gets worse:

Former shadow business secretary Ms Eagle said Mr Corbyn had “failed to fulfil his first and foremost duty, that is to lead an organised and effective Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) that can both hold the Government to account and demonstrate we are ready to form a government in the event of a general election”.

Speaking earlier this morning Angela Eagle did not set out any policy areas where she differed from Mr Corbyn but said he was not able to win a general election.

Angela Eagle’s leadership bid is particularly risible because given a prime spot on the Sunday shows to set out her own alternative policy stall, she failed to name a single substantive difference between herself and Jeremy Corbyn. One would think that rattling off a few clear dividing lines would be easy, given how terribly left-wing Corbyn supposedly is, but apparently we are supposed to be sufficiently entranced by Eagle’s winning personality that we don’t need to see an alternative policy platform.

In fact, the article goes on to mention that Eagle’s greatest selling point is apparently her “electability” and ability to connect with the British people – a skill which she has thus far failed to demonstrate during her own utterly unremarkable political career.

But it’s okay – the Guardian (always the voice of the power-hungry metro Left rather than the true socialists or the working classes, and who supported Yvette Cooper of all people for the leadership) tells us that Angela Eagle is “tough”:

Many believe the former shadow business secretary and chess champion is up to the challenge. “She’s tough – in the best possible sense of the word,” a former colleague, who rates her chances highly, observed.

[..] The leadership contest really began for her on 27 June, when she became the 15th member of Jeremy Corbyn’s frontbench to leave, tweeting that she had done it “with deep regret, and after nine months of trying to make it work”.

Let’s be honest. None of the former shadow cabinet ministers who resigned in an attempt to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and force his resignation tried to “make it work”. They were simply biding their time, waiting for the opportune moment to strike against him. And following defeat for the Remain side in the EU referendum and with the fear of an impending snap general election, the timetable was accelerated.

When Angela Eagle and others speak of “healing” the Labour Party, what they mean is dragging it back to the old settlement where the left-wingers knew their place, shut up and didn’t cause any trouble. The plotters have no interest in reaching a consensus or balance of views across the party – they just want to return to the centrist days where Labour competes for power by trying to look as similar to the Tories as possible while yammering on about compassion a bit more. That’s what the rebels are familiar with, and that is what they think offers them the greatest chance of returning to power. Their minds cannot conceive of another path to victory, one based on principle and persuasion rather than compromise and trickery.

What is most offensive about the behaviour of the Parliamentary Labour Party is the arrogance of Labour MPs who think that the fact that they sit in parliament gives their voices greater weight and importance than the overwhelming majority of Labour members and supporters who overwhelmingly supported Corbyn in the leadership election. For a party which supposedly exists to lift up the oppressed and give the ordinary working people a voice, the Labour rebels show a remarkable disdain for their own internal party democracy. And now, bizarrely, they seek to blatantly subvert the wishes of their own party members while still demanding the loyalty (and campaign support) of the very activists whom they are in the process of betraying. This is the arrogance of the permanent political class.

And just contrast this low political skulduggery with what Jeremy Corbyn has been doing.

This weekend, Jeremy Corbyn spoke at the annual Durham Miners’ Gala, an important fixture in the socialist calendar. In an unprecedented move, many serving Labour MPs from the Northeast were disinvited from attending the reception by Gala organisers because of their war of attrition against their own party leader.

The Guardian reports:

The Durham Miners’ Gala attracts at least 100,000 people annually, but this time many Labour MPs from the north-east had tickets to the official reception rescinded by the leader of the Durham Miners’ Association, Dave Hopper. He accused those who had backed the parliamentary vote of no confidence in Corbyn as traitors and “New Labour remnants” who “cannot stand any form of democracy and appear to be interested only in themselves”.

This is the toxic state of relations between the party’s working class base and its elite, out of touch parliamentary caucus. An event like the Durham Miners’ Gala should be de rigeur for any self-respecting Labour MP, and for these MPs to be banned from attending shows the scorn, contempt and even hatred in which they are now held by people who should be their supporters.

All of the warning signs are there: The huge gains for UKIP at Labour’s expense in the 2015 general election. The spurning of centrist Labour’s slavishly pro-Brussels stance in the EU referendum. The banning of centrist MPs from the Durham Gala. And still the Parliamentary Labour Party is treating the party membership and their own working class base with complete and utter open contempt. Still they are sending the message that working class people are only welcome when they shut up, vote Labour and don’t try to influence policy in a more authentically left-wing direction.

And yet against this backdrop, Jeremy Corbyn addressed the Durham Miners’ Gala. This is what he had to say:

There’s a lot of debate about what’s happening in the Labour party at the present time. And I am inundated with questions, questions, questions all the time. And I have patience that is infinite to answer questions, questions and questions.

But one I got today really did puzzle me. They said are you coping with the pressure that’s on you? I simply said this: there is no pressure on me. None whatsoever. Real pressure, real pressure, real pressure – is when you don’t have enough money to feed your kids, when you don’t have a roof over your head, when you are wondering if you are going to be cared for, when you’re wondering how you are going to survive, when you’re wondering how you’re going to cope with the debts you’ve incurred, you’re wondering if your lovely employer is going to give you a call to give you a couple of hours of work, or not bother, or change their mind when you’re on the bus on the way to do that job.

That is the real pressure in our society.

For those people struggling on low pay, struggling on zero hours contracts, not knowing what’s coming from one week to the other, not knowing if they’ll be able to pay the rent, not knowing if they are going to be homeless, not knowing if their children will end up in care, that’s the kind of brutal pressure that’s put on people every day of the week in this country.

Watch the video at the top of this article. Hats off to Corbyn’s speechwriter for a powerful and actually well-written peroration, and to Corbyn himself for an authentically passionate delivery. Whatever else you might say about Corbyn, he shows more eloquence and passion in two minutes here than Ed Miliband managed to muster in five years of cerebral, ineffective opposition.

Here is an embattled leader, stabbed in the back by nearly his entire shadow cabinet (including a number of complete nonentities who would never have had shadow ministerial careers at all were it not for Corbyn), who even now is making speeches highlighting the struggles of the poor, the sick and the marginalised rather than his own plight. I’m sorry, but that’s a class act – and one which only serves to show the petty sniping and plotting of his rebellious colleagues in an even more damning light.

There is no way that this ends well for the Labour Party – and the fault lies entirely with the centrists. Even if they succeed in keeping Jeremy Corbyn off the ballot paper and unjustly ending his leadership, their petulant, childish and subversive actions have created a new normal for dissent within the party.

If Ed Miliband had suffered just one of the many acts of defiance and insubordination from his shadow cabinet that Jeremy Corbyn endures on a near daily basis, the offending MPs would have been banished to the cold extremities of Westminster political life before you could blink (much as nobody really remembers who Adam Afriyie is following his impertinent challenge to David Cameron’s leadership back in 2013).

But how things have changed. Now, it is apparently perfectly acceptable for Labour MPs to openly speculate about their leader’s skills and abilities on the Sunday shows, or for shadow cabinet ministers to vent their frustrations to sympathetic newspaper columnists. Now, even the most junior shadow minister is free to air their grievances in public, party and message discipline be damned. In fact, the level of childish playground politics we are now witnessing makes the unedifying tussle between the Blairites and Brownites look like the model of courteous debate.

The Labour rebels are deluding themselves if they think that this rotten and cowardly behaviour will go back in the box once Corbyn is deposed. It won’t. Such behaviour has now been legitimised by senior Labour figures, including Angela Eagle herself. And these same tactics will be used mercilessly against any compromise, unity or centrist candidate who manages to steal the crown from Jeremy Corbyn – by angry leftists and other centrists who simply want to steal power for their own faction.

This is what Labour’s petulant, rebellious centrists have wrought. A leader undermined by the seething resentments and petty career aspirations of his ideologically rootless, C-list challengers, and a party rendered utterly ungovernable thanks to a complete breakdown in discipline.

But one thing remains clear: after being elected leader outright on the first ballot with nearly 60% of the vote, Jeremy Corbyn remains the one with a mandate. And a quick scan of the swelling membership roles underlines the fact that this is Jeremy Corbyn’s party now. It no longer belongs to the centrists.

This blog has no time or sympathy for the Labour centrists, but one can appreciate their dilemma, serving in a party under a leader they cannot (or will not) support. But it is for them to leave the party. Jeremy Corbyn, love him or loathe him, has earned the right to lead his party. He won a huge mandate from the party membership less than a year ago, and retains widespread popularity.

And if Angela Eagle and her fellow plotters don’t like it, it is for them to leave the Labour Party and go in search of a new party and new supporters.

The door is open, and they most assuredly will not be missed.

 

Jeremy Corbyn - Labour Leadership Election - Victory Nears

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