Don’t waste tears as Labour zealots destroy the party
THE descent of Labour into extremism and selfindulgence is now complete. After Jeremy Corbyn’s re-election with an even bigger mandate from the membership, the party can no longer be seen as an alternative government. Instead it is exposed as a vicious, sectarian personality cult, united by its delusional worship of its bearded Messiah and his hard-Left ideology.
Corbyn’s Labour, packed with sloganising students, privileged poseurs and bourgeois bullies, is utterly divorced from mainstream Britain. Fewer than one in six of his supporters is even working-class, the social group that the party was founded to represent. In all their puerile self-righteousness, the Corbynistas show no understanding of the decent patriotism and instinctive moderation that infuses most of the British public. Their policies, such as unilateral disarmament, uncontrolled immigration and wholesale renationalisation, are anathema to most voters.
Just as alienating is their brutal intolerance towards anyone who disagrees with them. When Corbyn was first elected leader last year, he spoke of introducing a “kinder, gentler politics”. He has achieved the very opposite. His regime is a paranoid, authoritarian one backed by an army of fanatics who act like religious zealots rooting out heresy.
IN A party that trumpets its supposed commitment to fighting discrimination, misogyny and anti-Semitism are rife. The culture of intimidation is embodied in the sinister form of Corbyn’s chief ally, his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, whose political correctness is often laced with violent words. It is no coincidence that Corbyn and McDonnell have been supporters of murderous Irish republicanism.
Labour is now in a death spiral. The crisis is far worse than in the 1980s when the hardliners of Militant and the loony Left were rampaging against the party establishment. Now the lunatics are the Labour establishment.
The Corbynista pressure group Momentum, the modern equivalent of the now defunct Militant Tendency, is in charge, exerting ever-tighter control over the party. This process of radicalisation means that Corbyn’s Labour should be denied any responsible role in our civic life. The party is unfit for opposition, never mind office.
Over the past year it has become fashionable to express regret at Labour’s collapse, as if the meltdown were bad for our democracy. But this is mere sentimentality. It is absurd to weep over a party that has long been disconnected from the electorate and whose anachronistic creed of socialism is wholly wrong for our times.
Yes, our system of governance requires an opposition but it does not follow that such a task must be handed to a broken, discredited organisation. During recent decades Labour has been a poisonous influence on politics, bringing union discontent, mass immigration, wars abroad, public sector waste, divisive multiculturalism, submission to the EU and financial catastrophe. With that record it belongs permanently in the wilderness. If Corbyn keeps Labour there, his stranglehold on internal power will be good news for Britain.
Isolated and marginalised, the so-called Labour moderates continually bewail their fate. Yet through their cocktail of cowardice, incompetence and partisanship they helped to fuel the Corbyn surge.
They now moan about abuse, yet they fomented a toxic atmosphere in politics with their lurid attacks on the Toryled Government, where liberals such as David Cameron and George Osborne were portrayed as axe-wielding reactionaries. They also opened the door to the mass entry of Leftwing hardliners by changing the rules so that anyone paying just £3 could become a registered Labour supporter.
Above all they failed to show any ruthlessness in their attempt to unseat Corbyn. Their plotting was hesitant, their planning inept. Owen Smith, the losing leadership candidate, at least had the guts to challenge Corbyn openly but few others showed his determination.
There is no longer even a flicker of resistance. At Labour’s conference in Liverpool, enfeebled Labour MPs blather about the need for unity which is really code for surrender. The Labour grandee Peter Mandelson shrieks that “the Labour family must stay together” but in reality it is a wholly dysfunctional family where the infants have taken control.
BUT the pretence that moderates can now serve happily under Corbyn is an insult to our intelligence, since only a few weeks ago 172 members of the parliamentary party passed a vote of no confidence in him. How on earth can they now campaign for him to be prime minister or accept orders from his Marxist and Trotskyite henchmen?
The moderates are like a defeated force now agreeing to any terms of occupation. Their humiliation will only deepen as the Corbynistas assert their dominance, replacing uncooperative officials with their own pliant apparatchiks. They will also embark on a programme of deselection of Labour MPs unfriendly to the Corbyn Project, eagerly exploiting the opportunities afforded by the official scheme for changes to constituency boundaries.
Collusion with the MarxistTrotskyite axis is a dead end. It would destroy the last vestiges of the moderates’ credibility and integrity. The only hope for anti-Corbyn MPs lies in a split from Labour to set up a new centre-Left party more in tune with the electorate and freed from dogmatic oppression.
In 1962 the great patriotic Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell vowed to “fight, fight and fight again” to save the party he loved when the nuclear disarmers threatened a takeover.
There is no point in fighting now. With Corbyn’s comprehensive victory, Labour is beyond redemption or recovery.
‘Its creed of socialism is wrong for our times’