At last Labour is turning against its disgraceful leader
EXACTLY a year ago this week Theresa May called her ill-fated general election. Her expected triumph turned into a flop as her campaign faltered badly and her majority disappeared. In contrast Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn defied all predictions of humiliation by presiding over the biggest surge in votes for his party since 1945.
After this surprising result there was excitable talk that he could soon be prime minister, given the likely collapse of the apparently fragile Tory Government. How distant that prospect looks today.
In recent months it is May who has gained in stature while Corbyn has faded. Yesterday she comprehensively demolished him at Prime Minister’s Questions by pointing out that the last Labour government bears much of the responsibility for the Windrush immigration fiasco.
But the real hammer blows to Corbyn’s leadership came during extraordinary proceedings in Parliament when members of his own party lined up to denounce him in venomous terms. As a mood of anger swept through the opposition benches Labour MPs defied him twice, first over his protest against the Government’s air strikes on Syria and, second, over his failure to combat worsening anti-Semitism.
THE Commons chamber has rarely seen anything like it. This was nothing short of an explosive political mutiny by mainstream Labour MPs against Corbyn, who has allowed racial bigotry and antiWestern dogma to spread through his party. In repeated displays of insurgent solidarity they gave standing ovations to Corbyn’s fiercest critics.
The Labour leader, a diehard rebel all his life, is now the victim of his own rebellion. It is hard to see how he can recover. His credibility has been shredded, his authority shattered.
When a party leader is the subject of such an explicit challenge in the Commons it is usually the sign of a terminal crisis. In May 1940 Neville Chamberlain’s premiership was brought to a dramatic end by the Norway Debate, during which Tory MPs from his own side repeatedly attacked his management of the war against Nazi Germany. “In the name of God, go,” cried Leo Amery, quoting Oliver Cromwell electrifying effect.
Similarly Harold Macmillan’s demise as Conservative prime minister in 1963 after the Profumo scandal was presaged by a famous attack on him by the former Tory minister Nigel Birch, who used the words of Robert Browning: “Never glad confident morning again.”
Margaret Thatcher’s downfall in November 1990 was triggered by a savage verbal assault from her former deputy prime minister Geoffrey Howe. In a telling gesture on Tuesday Corbyn’s own deputy leader Tom Watson ostentatiously left his place on the front bench to sit among the dissidents.
What made Tuesday’s to antiSemitism debate so damaging to Corbyn was the harrowing personal testimony of Labour MPs who have been the target of abuse under his leadership.
He stood exposed as an epic hypocrite, a man who talks about his anti-racist credentials but then colludes with rampant hatred. Luciana Berger was reduced to tears as she told the House how antiSemitism had become “more conspicuous and more corrosive” within the party.
The Jewish Stoke North MP Ruth Smeeth bravely highlighted some of the messages she’d received. “Hang yourself, you vile treacherous Zionist Tory filth,” was one from a Corbyn activist. Perhaps the most
BUT that poison has been dragged from the fringe to the heart of politics by Corbyn and his supporters, for whom hardline dogma trumps humanity.
In Tuesday’s debate veteran MP Dame Margaret Hodge said that “anti-Semitism is making me an outsider in my Labour Party”. Coming from the daughter of Jewish refugees who fled the Holocaust her words are a brutal indictment of Corbyn’s spell in charge.
The Labour leader has compounded his disgraceful record on anti-Semitism with his gross mishandling of his party’s parliamentary response to the Syrian crisis.
With his usual lack of judgment he thought that he could unite Labour in opposition to the Allied air strikes but the opposite happened. His call on Tuesday for a symbolic protest vote succeeded only in inspiring a huge Labour revolt, as 52 of his MPs refused to follow his line. As a consequence disillusion and fury has deepened. One Labour rebel argued that Corbyn was wrong “to play games” with an issue as serious as Syria.
Yet he is always indulging in such puerile antics. He is the eternal, immature hard-Left activist, continually backing the latest fashionable radical cause as long as it is anti-British and anti-Western. He talks of “a kinder, gentler politics” but his 35 years in Parliament reveal a sinister figure who is drawn to violent extremism, from Irish Republicanism at home to Hezbollah abroad.
The events of this week have reinforced his unfitness for high office. By challenging him the Labour moderates have at last shown courage. The nightmare of his leadership could finally be coming to an end.
‘His credibility has been shredded’