ESTABLISHMENT LABOUR? DISMAL FAILURE
There have been a thousand pieces written (at least) across the media since the defeat of the Ed Miller Band in May 2015. The predictable outcome (a draw or worse) let in the most unpleasantly right-wing government for nearly a century.
A new page at The Slog, ‘Why Labour lost’ – the link for which is below – offers up nine pieces written during the three years before the 2015 Election. Completely unaltered since their original appearance, they accurately depict a Labour Establishment negligently blind to the obvious fact that two Eds were worse than none.
It’s nice to be right, but depressing when one doesn’t want to be. The only real importance such a thin anthology has is that of spelling out a lesson, and the lesson is this: it would take an econo-fiscal catastrophe to get Jeremy Corbyn elected Prime Minister in 2020, but that’s no longer the point. What Labour has to do now is not take on the usual entirely political role…it must fulfil two Constitutionally vital roles above that:
- Reach out to others and provide an efficient, coordinated and almost surgically cutting Opposition to the erosion of our liberties, and the establishment of a corporate State
- Demonstrate without exception that it stands for ethics, democracy and The People…not for slimey advantage and opportunistic short-term gain forgotten by the voters within days.
Jeremy Corbyn is a scrupuluously inclusive constituency MP, he is not Michael Foot, he is not mad, he is not an extremist, and he is not Tony Blair; rather, he is a bloke dealing with a nation riddled with inflexible tribalism, he is effective, he tells the unvarnished truth about motives, he opposes globalism tooth and nail, and he isn’t a sociopathic collaborationist. I differ with him on almost every issue facing us, but the best we can hope for in the immediate future is for someone honourable to give Cameron and his cronies a bloody nose. This is above ‘political opposition’: it is a fight for the survival of multivariate politics and its ownership by the Citizen Electors.
Of course the Tories try to demonise him. I too think his Middle East stance is naive on the subject of Arab culture. But this is what they tried to do to Blair in 1997:
How utterly puerile and laughably inaccurate that looks now. But what the Conservatives saw in Blair was an operator – just like them: a man after money and power – just like them.
The Camerlot government wants more than anything for the Labour Establishment to triumph again. Andy Burnham, house flipper and cynical Union apparatchik. Yvette Cooper, pretty face and married to the detestably intolerant Ed Balls. And on and on and on.
But my own hunch is that a man from David Cameron’s background and personal make-up will not know which way to hold Corbyn up. Where Ed Miliband failed at PMQs and Balls failed at every budget debate, Corbyn and his ilk will tear into these liars and catch them out. Jeremy has, after all, nothing to lose: he’s expected by the vast majority to be a dangerous disaster. For him, the only way is up.
It’s also my (still minority) view that come 2020 we will be in a very different world indeed. Europe will be tearing itself apart, higher interest rates will be hammering ‘the Anglo-sphere’, the risibly unbalanced and flakey nature of Britain’s silly financial services confection-economy will be obvious to far more people, and the emerging world Brics will be in a far stronger position. Mr Corbyn will be, in that context, the most acceptable British leader a Bric leader could wish for.
The biggest hurdle of all for the UK’s Decency Spectrum is an element that no longer a represents a possible option among others: it is a must-have. The rise and rise of UKip and the SNP has devastated the Labour vote, while natural Labour allies the Liberal Democrats are in a wilderness of their own making. A Corbyn Labour Party must come out of the stockade and start – openly not cynically – finding common ground and establishing constituency cooperation with the Greens, LibDems and SNP. It must show that Metro is out and Common Man is back, in order to regain those Labour traditionalists who wasted their votes on UKip last time around.
Failure to do this is no longer a debating point: it is a near mathematical certainty (especially if Scotland secedes) that it would result in a dreary dehumanisation of the British People via corporatism. Or as we used to call it before the idiot Peter Hain devalued the term, fascism.
Our country’s governmental, political, social and cultural mores are rotten to the core. Genuine Britons in favour of personal independence and freedom should support the one man ready to dismantle it: Jeremy Corbyn.
Dedicated page at The Slog: How Labour used up all nine lives
The Slog 