Labour’s Big 5….Serious Jeremy, Smiley Owen, Horrified Owen, Corbyny Owen, Loveable Jeremy
The News
An SBS was noted in yesterday’s Torygraph. Does anyone know what one of these is?
Anyone seen this headline yet?
You won’t have done, because it never appeared. But in truth, both interpretations are equally valid.
However, this process of persistent Blamestorming Brexit propaganda is going to give the Labour Party an increasingly embarassing problem: if they keep on agreeing with their favourite papers like the Daily Telegraph and The Sun about this all being Brexit’s fault, it means that Theresa May and all her ship’s company aboard the Mayflower can keep on saying, “So you see, there was no problem with Tory economic strategy….all the problems were caused by Brexit”.
Given that the PM and the Chancellor are both Remaindeers, this is highly likely. They don’t want any blame attaching to them, but they do want to stay in the European Union.
Now, a LABoraTORY consensus on how wonderful the EU is will kick away the third leg in Labour’s 2020 election campaign. For if the ‘coming recession’ is all Brexit’s fault, then the Tories must’ve been right all along….so let’s stick with Plan A (says Hammond).
So we’ll just have to, er, meekly agree with a Government we hate in order to support the Unbrexit rearguard (says Smith).
After all, it can’t be the fault of the Tories and Brexit, because Tory MPs voted overwhelmingly against Brexit. And we can’t say it wasn’t Brexit wot dun it
This is what professional politicians call painting yourself into a corner and then digging a very deep hole. It’s what we analysts called Manual Labour.
What the News really means.
Unless it keeps Corbyn – and the lad himself comes out of the closet to condemn Europe as a neoliberal workers’ deathtrap in the making – Labour can offer no real opposition to the Mayflower’s crew. The more she works to undermine the Referendum, the more Labour will have to keep quiet about it. And the more the Conservatives blame Brexit for our ills, the more Labour will have to look the other way.
Only Corbyn stands a chance of getting back those heartland Labour voters who put their crosses solidly in the Leave box. Owen Smith, you see, is another of those losers who wants to rerun the Referendum until the electorate gets Brexit fatigue, and votes to Stay. Then Owen can do what all failed UK pols do…..go to Brussels armed with the biggest gravy-boat he can find.
Already, this has plunged Who-he Smith into very deep, scalding hot water in the Labour Establishment’s marathon bid to ignore the will of Labour members and voters. For one of Labour’s biggest business backers, multimillionaire John Mills ( a huge donor to the Labour Leave campaign during the referendum) has called Smith’s Best of Three scam “an especially unhelpful idea” that would “help UKip seize large traditionally Labour-supporting parts of the country at the next general election”.
Mathematically now, with a Remaindeer leader in charge after September, Labour will be slaughtered….and UKip (albeit busily engaged in a toe-shooting contest too) will very probably take some seats off the Party: it could even, in truth, do to Labour in the North West and West of England/Wales what the SNP did to Labour in 2015.
Safely reelected Leader, Jeremy Corbyn will feel (one suspects) more relaxed about taking a eurosceptic line. This will spike UKip’s guns, and thus reassure some worried Tory backbenchers; but it will also leave the Mayflower isolated from the feelings of both the electorate and its own grassroots. That Theresa Maniac fears the Tory rank and file was made obvious by the way she deftly side-stepped their civil rights during the Leadership contest.
So for Labour supporters and genuinely democratic British constitutionalists, Corbyn remains the obvious choice.
Labour’s track record suggests it will do everything in its power not to make it. And if Corbyn wins, the rabidly élitist nature of British Left thinking will ensure that the backbiting continues. This will allow Captain Maniac to bait Labour from the Despatch box, while the neoliberal press continues to depict Corbyn as the throwback he may well be.
In short, the Labour Party’s chances in 2020 – as things stand – range from tiny to sub-atomic.
The only hope is to get behind Corbyn, hope he can reassure a broader spectrum of voters, and pray very hard indeed for the Eunatics to keep setting fire to the Reichstag.
The Slog 