Things could have been very different for Jeremy Corbyn

YOUR correspondent wants answers as a Labour member to “why Jeremy Corbyn should strongly contest his suspension?”.

May I, as a member of the Labour Movement these past 60 years or so, attempt to provide them.

Your correspondent begins his letter with reference to the pandemic. It is unprecedented and throws everyone and everything into confusion.

The one point that does come out of it, however is that there is “The Money Tree” that could have funded Corbyn’s radical manifesto.

Not just one tree, with millions of pounds a month being spent on furlough, more like an acreage of forest. But, no point in speculating, Corbyn did not get in.

And it is no use Mr AsquithCowan bugling the party’s historical function, fighting for the rights of the working class, taking on the capitalist establishment as it struggles with a defensive trade union movement, etc.

Labour did not get a majority in Parliament; that is, it did not get power to fight for such rights where it counts, Westminster.

The question to ask is why didn’t it?

The Conservative Government has now an unassailable majority based on traditional Labour voters in such strongholds as Grimsby North, Scunthorpe, Worksop, Blyth and so on.

It breached “The Red Wall”.

That wall did not collapse because the cry “up the workers” was heard in Conservative Party central office, or that Kier Hardy was discovered to be a closet Tory, it was because Boris Johnson and Dominc Cummings shouted the loudest with “Let’s get Brexit done” and a majority of working class Labour voters, misguided or not, who wanted the same, heard them.

Jeremy Corbyn could have shouted just as vociferously. He never has, since 1972, wanted the European Union and always wanted to leave.

Had he not misread the mood of the electorate and instead built on his spectacular success in the election of 2017 and come out as a “Leaver”, a “Brexiteer”, we would have been looking at a Labour Party majority Government that could have negotiated a deal with Europe that might have satisfied “Leave” and “Remain”,and so been democratic, dealt with alleged antisemitic criticism, so no suspension, avoided sectional party strife and media character assassination.

But he didn’t, he would not commit himself and the Labour Party has paid the price: political failure.

There is not now a possibility of a “civil war” in the Parliamentary Party, there aren’t enough troops.

The ones that are left are distracted by “identity” politics rather than class, ensuring that there is unlikely to be a Labour government in what is left of my lifetime.

Ronald Fairfax.