Labour has turned into angry party

HARRY BELL

Given the dollops of demented reverence that the geriatric NHS is afforded, it looks as if we’ll all be voting Labour on June 8.

We definitely will in Canterbury and Whitstable, where even affluent streets with large houses like St Augustine’s Road are full of Labour posters.

And we can be more certain of candidate Rosie Duffield’s election to Parliament and Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to Prime Minister if we look at the Canterbury Residents Group Facebook page in the build-up to polling day.

There you can find a welter of intelligent and insightful analysis which cuts right to the heart of the matter: “Tories evil, Labour good.” A young Canterbury Corbynite put it starkly on Twitter: “Socialism v barbarism.”

Obviously only the truly selfish, wicked and ignorant would vote for barbarism wouldn’t they?

Well, no. It’s time to get the credits rolling on this episode of Let’s Pretend.

For a peek into the real world, the bookies are offering odds of 1/100 on a victory for the Conservative candidate Sir Julian Brazier. That’s right – bet £100 to win just a quid.

So if the future of the health service and of the Kent and Canterbury Hospital is at stake why aren’t people going to elect Labour?

After all, Labour propaganda would have you believe that only it can “rescue” the NHS from horrible Conservatives who want babies to die, as one candidate in the north put it. This argument is, of course, as facile as it is idiotic.

The answer as to why Labour won’t win in Canterbury and Whitstable has, I suggest, very little to do with policy.

It has even less to do with Jeremy Corbyn. The leader is a symptom of Labour’s malaise rather than its cause.

It is more to do with the face of the movement itself, the messages it gives off out about itself and the kind of people it attracts.

Under Ed Miliband the image of the party was sculpted by priggish wet farts who went about saying that they just want to “help people”.

This phrase is, however, a camouflage for what it really means – telling people how to live their lives and instructing them on what kind of people they should be.

As I argued back in February, too many leftists are guilty of towering moral and intellectual vanity, which persuades them to think that they know what’s best for everyone else.

Corbyn’s Labour still retains this characteristic. Otherwise how can one explain its proposal to ban adverts for junk food and sweets from TV shows broadcast before 9pm?

The condescending paternalism of the “we know what’s best for you” brigade is nauseating, but it is nothing compared to the adolescent shouty brand of leftism with

‘Tony Blair was able to win elections because under him Labour looked suave, business-like, intelligent’

which the Labour Party under Corbyn is increasingly associated.

Political scientist Daniel Allington argues that this is a product of the kinds of people who have swelled the party membership in the two years since the Labour leadership election began in earnest in the summer of 2015.

Writing in the New Statesman last month, Allington said: “They are people who joined the party not because they agreed with its goals and wanted to help it achieve them, but because they identified with the culture of leftism and sought an active form of cultural participation — much as theatre buffs might join an amateur dramatics club, or history enthusiasts might join a medieval re-enactment society.”

That purposeless demonstration through the streets of Canterbury in February was a perfect manifestation of this – and such activities have absolutely no chance of playing to middle England.

My friend Tony Mooney, who lives on Canterbury’s London Road Estate, has been a lifelong Labour Party member and prayed that Owen Smith would unseat Corbyn during last year’s leadership crisis.

He tells me despairingly: “About 75% of the population see themselves as slightly right-wing, in the centre or slightly left-wing. Labour wins when it appeals to the centre. You only have to look at Sadiq Khan’s success in the London mayoral election.”

Labour now simply looks like a protest movement for the perpetually aggrieved.

Add to that the fact that one of its most prominent figures, the Shadow Chancellor John Mcdonnell, is happy to attend a May Day rally in Trafalgar Square where people displayed flags bearing the hammer and sickle – a symbol as repellent as the swastika.

Furious young radicals are just as much at home in such a movement as the dandruffed revolutionaries from the 1960s and 1970s who somehow never managed to grow up.

Theirs is the politics of rage and envy.

They want to destroy those they hate – the rich, the privileged, people who went to public school, banks, big business, energy firms, bosses, Conservatives, indeed anyone they have decided is simply an enemy to be vanquished.

These assaults are writ large in the Labour Party manifesto and in Corbynite rhetoric.

But the problem for Labour is that people aren’t as angry as the party supposes. Moreover, a great many ordinary Brits are revolted by shouty aggressive politics and have no wish to declare war on others or take people down.

Tony Blair was able to win elections because under him Labour looked suave, businesslike, intelligent. Now that the permanently enraged and adolescent class warriors have seized control of the party it has no chance of winning.

This will be a tragedy for someone like Rosie Duffield, who I’ve no doubt would make a good MP, and other decent Labour candidates across the UK. The reality is that they will be denied the opportunity to enter Parliament because in its present incarnation Labour is incapable of sounding relevant to middle England.