LABOUR IS A CULT UNDER CORBYN
ONCE it was called the ‘Corbyn bounce’, that surge in support for the Labour Party at last year’s general election that was put down to the leader’s charisma. One year on it should be renamed the ‘Corbyn cap’.
Faced with the weakest Conservative Prime Minister of our age, a divided Government that lurches from crisis to resignation to crisis – sometimes in a single afternoon – and is widely credited with botching up the Brexit negotiations, Labour should be enjoying doubledigit leads in the polls right now.
Instead, the party is frequently behind Theresa May’s Tories and when it does lead it is only barely, by one or two scraped points.
Even Neil Kinnock had leads of more than 20 points over Margaret Thatcher but still ended up losing both general elections he led Labour into.
Not that Mr Corbyn doesn’t attract supporters from unusual places – both former BNP leader Nick Griffin and ex-Ku Klux Klan head David Duke have made supportive comments.
Apparently, according to Mr Corbyn, Zionists don’t understand ‘English irony’.
What is beyond irony is that a man so opposed to Labour traditions should lead the party.
On the crucial question of the day, Brexit, he cannot answer simple questions. When asked six times last week whether leaving the European Union would be good for Britain, he could not – or would not – answer. That is not leadership.
Instead, on his four-day tour of Scotland, he answered a question no one had asked.
The way to improve broadcasting is apparently to demand that the BBC publishes details of all its employees’ ‘social class’.
How you determine that is very difficult, almost ethereal.
‘Social class’ is as much a state of mind as a measure of income or background.
Presumably, this public school boy and university drop-out wants a public register of those employees who were privately educated and went to Oxbridge. Perhaps he believes that people from such backgrounds don’t believe in equality and aren’t sympathetic to the Labour cause.
He might have a point if you choose to ignore Clement Attlee, the privately educated Oxford graduate who led the most radical Labour government in history – one which founded the NHS.
Or privately educated and Oxford educated Tony Blair, the most successful Labour leader in history whose government delivered a radical redistribution of wealth.
While Mr Corbyn seems to find it near-impossible to expel antiSemites from his party, he is determined to smoke out the BBC’s middle classes. Neither will do him any good in the polls but, again, this is a man for whom electoral success comes a distant second to ideological purity.
It is reasonable to believe that he would have preferred Tony Blair to lose three general elections.
His systematic re-organisation of the Labour Party, which I would call the destruction of it, comes ahead of appealing to the public.
You can say all you like that more than 80 per cent of the public voted in last year’s election for parties advocating leaving the single market and customs union, but when both the biggest parties offer the same policy in an attempt to get back Leave voters in key seats, there aren’t many places for Remain voters to go.
It also does not acknowledge that public opinion appears to be changing. Polls frequently now show that a majority of voters, having watched the farce of our Brexit negotiations, are inclined to stay in the EU. Certainly, many want a second vote.
This should be an open goal for the Labour Party, but for Mr Corbyn dogma comes before public opinion and always has. He offers a majority of the public no option but to back hapless Mrs May.
When they are asked who would make the best Prime Minister, voters back her. Mr Corbyn even loses out to ‘don’t know’. Neil Kinnock’s Labour frequently led the Tories in polls but he couldn’t beat John Major as the voters’ preferred prime minister and that was crucial in the 1992 election.
Mr Corbyn has spent his entire parliamentary career in opposition to the Labour leader of the day.
Now he is the leader, the instinct to remain in permanent opposition seems as strong as ever.
He is turning Labour into a cult rather than a party and while supporters chant ‘Oooh… Jeremy Corbyn’, the voting public seem more inclined to say, ‘Oh no, Jeremy Corbyn’.
Without an effective opposition, in the face of a stuttering government, our politics is left congealed.
This is not like the 1980s when the Labour Party lurched to the Left.
The then leader Michael Foot was nowhere near as extreme as the Corbynites and indeed fought against their like. THEN, the trade unions were a moderating force who wanted Labour to win. Now, the likes of Unite’s Len McCluskey want the party to move ever farther to the Left, whatever the electoral consequences.
Then, the likes of Denis Healey refused to join the breakaway SDP because he was convinced Labour’s traditional coalition of Left and Right could be retained.
Now, moderate Labour MPs face deselection as the alien forces of Momentum try to take them out.
Our democracy only works when the opposition is a credible alternative to the government. Labour moderates know that can only happen if there is an alternative to Mr Corbyn. They should act now, even if that means finding an alternative political party to deliver it.
Thanks to Mr Corbyn, the Labour Party they joined, the party of Hardie, Attlee, Wilson, Blair and Brown, no longer exists.
It needs to be reinvented by people for whom the public come first, regardless of their social class.