I’m disappointed by the General Election result, and angry. Mostly angry. Momentum has comprehensively destroyed the chances of the Labour Party of getting into office over the last 3 years. Let’s have a look at why and how…
I’m going to start with posting a rant from Twitter, posted by @RussInCheshire – I’m now following him. Give this a read. He’s saying a lot of stuff I totally agree with. Here it is in full:
People will say “Brexit broke traditional parties”. True. But Leave all voted Tory. Why didn’t Remain all vote Labour? Cos our leader is divisive, inept, shambolic, uninspiring, and too easy to besmirch as an anti-semite, terrorist sympathiser, and Leave voter.
People will say “his Brexit plan made sense”. Maybe. But he had to be dragged to it over the course of 3 years, resisting every step, giving mixed messages and looking woozy and lost; by the time he had a plan, nobody trusted him.
People will say “Tories told thousands of lies”. Yep. If only somebody had seen this happen before and put together a Rapid Response Unit to kill lies in seconds. Oh yeah, Blair did that and won. Corbyn didn’t and lost. Just cos Blair did it, doesn’t make it bad.
People will say “the PLP mutinied against him”. They did. They aren’t idiots. They could see within weeks Corbyn was a disaster, cos they’d met him. 172 wanted him to go. 40 wanted him to stay. Pretty much the ratio of voters who wanted him to stay / go. MPs were right.
People will say “we had to let him try”. We did let him try. For years. He lost the referendum in 2016. He lost the election in 2017. He lost the EU elections in 2019. He’s lost again. The only thing he’s won was “most unpopular Leader of Opposition in history”.
People will say “the soft left didn’t help him”. We did. We proposed him as leader. We elected him leader. We voted for him in elections, even though we knew he was shite. What didn’t help him was the hard left telling us to go and join LibDems every day.
People will say “he was democratically elected”. Yes. But members are fanatical, by definition. They don’t think like average voters. Letting a fan club manage a band is a stupid idea. They’ll book Wembley for 4 nights for Steve Brookstein, cos they don’t realise he’s shit.
And I’m sure people will say rude things to me. They’ll pick apart every word and quibble every sentiment. They’ll demand I “prove it”, or send me links showing how wrong I am.
Sick of that shit. We lost, millions will suffer, and you’re still defending the primary cause. Jeremy Corbyn has been, from the moment he was elected leader, the Tory party’s wet dream. Unless you drink a LOT of Kool Aid, you could predict this fiasco years ago. If he couldn’t see it coming, he’s a moron. If he could, he’s a selfish prick for not quitting.
Time to go now. Hand over to whatever MPs are left after this car-crash, get to your allotment, and let some bloody professionals try to save what they can from the Tory disaster you’ve bequeathed upon an undeserving nation.
A cursory look across socials this morning was instructive. The “Corbynistas” were out in force, blaming the electorate for not voting Labour. They were warned time and time again by the MPs, who are the people in direct contact with the public in their constituencies, and they ignored it. So long as London was happy, so were they. They betrayed the very people whose legacy they’d had themselves entrusted with. Think about it this way: the political party, called the Labour Party was set up just over a century ago by trade unions and co-operative societies to look after the people being trampled on and ignored by the London-centric government and rich establishment as a whole. The vast majority of those were people who just wanted public services that worked and laws to stop them being abused and worked to death.
The more hardcore elements within that movement found out about Karl Marx and his writings and Marxism hitched it’s caravan to the Labour Party. It started as a symbiote, but it has become a parasite. That parasite severely damaged the host in the 1970’s, so badly it lead to Thatcherism.
The host recovered enough to take power back in the late 1990’s. Unfortunately, as a host gets stronger, so does the parasite. Attempts were made to excise the parasite, but just enough survived in the host to keep it viable. When Labour weakened under Gordon Brown (a lot of it because Tony Blair’s “I don’t want to go…” act dragged on far too long, and Gordon Brown just wasn’t the right man for the job), the parasite gained strength. First it managed to get Ed Milliband elected leader. A good man, yes, definitely, but not able to play The Game like Blair and his team could. The parasite then managed to take over. The thing is, the Momentum crew are so self-absorbed and were so intent on an ideological purge that they missed opportunity after opportunity to humiliate the government. The “leader” they installed may have been an excellent agitating backbencher, but as a leader?!
Not.
A.
Fucking.
Clue.
The fanatics, of course, would permit no dissent, even if the ineptitude of the leadership were obvious to “a blind man riding backwards” as my dad is wont to say. When the deputy leader installed by the members who saw through Momentum tried to do something to tackle the anti-semitism that the leader himself refused to even acknowledge, Momentum tried to force him out by staging a coup at the conference. This deputy leader was Tom Watson, the man who had Rupert Murdoch squirming during the phone-hacking inquiry. Looking back on his newsletters, the exasperation is obvious. He obviously knew this meltdown was coming, so decided to leave before it happened.
It’s people like him that Labour needs. Jess Philips is another one. Her fury at what was being done in the name of the Labour Party is obvious. It’s that righteous anger that is needed to root out the parasites before they finish the job and destroy the broach church Labour party created a century ago in the industrial north.