Blairites can’t call themselves the moderates
The former Labour PM thinks top-down ‘change’ is good but democratic verdicts are bad ‘populism’
There are few more pitiful sights than the far-left scuttling to keep the sacred flame of the Corbynista cult burning, in the debris of their historic defeat. Except, perhaps, the mutant rebirth of Remainers as “the moderates”, rising like a molting, two-headed phoenix from the ashes.
The attempt by Britain’s retrograde political forces to reinvent themselves as forward-looking is quite something to behold. Teflon Tony has become Bold 2in1 Blair – whitewashing the Remainer rout by warning Labour not to “whitewash” the election result. This is, of course, centrist politician code for the urgent need to stage a cover-up. Namely ensuring that there is no robust scrutiny of the Left’s disastrous move to back a second referendum, so that, instead, Jeremy Corbyn is scapegoated.
Diagnosing the fall of the Red Wall from his pulpit in central London yesterday, Mr Blair accused his party of being “marooned on fantasy island” and warned that it “faces being replaced” unless it ditches its proto-marxist orthodoxies. Naturally, liberal journalists were salivating so profusely in the audience that their write-ups slicked effortlessly over the anti-brexit elephant in the room. One almost feels sorry for the Corbynistas, as the London narrative – under the oleaginous hypnotism of Mr Blair – not so much shifts as slithers from Labour’s Brexit betrayal towards more comfortable BBC champagne socialist territory, namely, the far-left’s lack of economic credibility and the unique unpopularity of Steptoe.
Labour Remainiacs who lost their seats are all too happy to help along this bogus theory. Take former Wakefield MP Mary Creagh. After waging a three-year guerrilla war against democracy – refusing to vote for Article 50 and then campaigning for it to be revoked – she has boasted about giving Jeremy Corbyn “the hairdryer treatment” as if she is a star football manager let down by a player. Such are the delusions of grandeur of the Brexit debacle’s political Z-listers.
What the centrists lack in humility, they fail to make up for in intellectual agility. Stuck on “retropolitan” loop, the technocrats are proving just as incapable of creative thought as the Trotskyites. Labour’s civil war is like watching a Discman trying to bash a Walkman to death, the Nineties in battle with the Eighties. The Left is doomed to live in the past, whoever triumphs.
You can hear it in the strangled attempt by “moderate” leadership hopefuls to set out a vision. Not least that clearing of the throat in human form, the pompous and anxious Sir Keir Starmer. The poor man has no words for what Labour should do next. Instead he mumbles tie-constricted progressivism. “There’s no victory without values” apparently; and it is “important not to oversteer” but instead be “bold and radical”.
Even hot favourite Lisa Nandy
– the centrist’s centrist, affiliated with neither the Blairites nor the Corbynites – offers little beyond runny-nosed Fabianism. In her opening leadership gambit, the daughter of Marxist intellectual Dipak Nandy whined that Parliament “reeks of privilege”. Her Blue(-blooded) Labour instincts were on proud display in a recent Guardian column – in which she wrote off Brexit as the articulation of “anxiety and insecurity” and traced the “wake-up call” about the rise of the “far Right” in Brexitland back to the Ukip resurgence.
That centre-left politicians are just as blinkered as the Corbyn mob in their own way is only part of the problem. The Blairites are equally beholden to a backwards and eccentric support base. The latter is emotionally encapsulated by the likes of journalist Yasmin Alibhai-brown who has admitted the election shock caused her to “suddenly start crying in a shop”, and Hugh Grant who claims that Leavers have “destroyed a country”. The unhinged hyperbole of the Remainer grassroots is matched only by its clinical hypocrisy. In particular, those who usually love to virtue-signal about minority rights are in disgusted denial about the fact that their views are no longer mainstream. Hence the feverish exchange of bizarre stats by Lefties on social media: while viral graphs suggest the PM’S Brexit landslide somehow proves a majority support for Remain, other infographics demonstrate a Left-wing coalition would have won if Britain had the good sense to use the same voting system as the European Union.
Understanding this visceral antidemocratic impulse is key to grasping the great paradox that will define the next chapter of British politics – the slightly baffling revulsion of centrist Blairites towards this centrist One Nation Tory government. The point is that, for all his proselytising when in office that the public should embrace that metaphysical force “change”, Mr Blair and his acolytes only favour top-down change; if it comes up from the bottom, they lambast it as “populism”. It is this witless tendency to control-freakery which makes the view that the “moderates” are the answer so absurd. It may be their last meal, but the Corbynistas will eat them for breakfast.