HARD LEFT MAINTAINS ITS IRON GRIP ON LABOUR
EDDIE IZZARD will almost certainly have cause to cry into his pink beret next week. The crossdressing comedian, a serial flop in his ambition to become a Labour politician, is set to be thwarted again.
Party insiders say lipstick-loving Mr Izzard is almost certain to be among the losers when the results of a ballot for seats on his party’s ruling National Executive committee are announced on Monday. The comic was backed by moderate opponents of the party’s hard-Left leader Jeremy Corbyn. But any candidate not endorsed by Momentum, the Corbynite fan club, is said to have little chance of winning any of three committee seats elected by the party’s grassroots membership.
Monday’s results are set to confirm that the grip of the Labour leader’s hard-Left clique on the party is tightening. Jon Lansman, a Momentum founder and former aide to the late socialist guru Tony Benn, is tipped to join the ruling committee. Some MPs fear the latest advance of the Left will lead to a purge of Mr Corbyn’s opponents from key posts.
Gloom reigns in the ranks of Labour moderates. “Corbyn can stay leader as long as he wants to,” one senior insider told me. “Even if he does step down in two or three years, whoever follows him will have to be pretty far to the Left to have any chance of getting the membership’s backing.”
Anti-Corbyn MPs and activists lack any coherent alternative to the Marxist programme being touted by the leader and his ideologically driven shadow chancellor John McDonnell. The one issue that unites moderates at present is their desire to halt a clean break from the EU. Their strategy is increasingly becoming a matter of simply waiting in the hope that Brexit turns into a catastrophe.
It used to be the extreme Left that lived in perpetual expectation of a crisis of capitalism for a chance to say: “We told you so.” Labour’s supposedly centrist Europhiles are now the ones waiting for an economic crisis to turn up.
After another expected thrashing by the Left on Monday, Mr Izzard and his friends will have to start thinking seriously about what they stand for. Pinning their hopes on a Brexit disaster is unlikely to get them anywhere.