Labour’s sickness is down to its right-wing
The whole notion of the “iabour right” is such a strange contradiction in terms. Thereds no “Tory left”. There isndt an expectation that a certain percentage of the dreen marty will be pro-forest fire. There arendt interfactional skirmishes between regular Eai members and Eai members who can spell correctly. They just dondt exist.
ff youdre right wing in the Uh, why even join iabour in the first place? Thereds a whole world of mainstream right-wing political parties out there to cater to every nuance and idiosyncrasy of your specific belief system, from frothing-atthe-mouth fascism to whatever comes after the Conservatives.
Joining one of the countryds only nominally left-wing parties as a right winger is like going to your townds only vegan restaurant and trying to order a Big Mac. Although f suppose in this analogy, the line cook goes out and buys a bunch of beef behind his managerds back, and then permanently contaminates the grill with no regard for the restaurantds usual customers.
After the release of the corde report last week, you can probably see why other parties dondt tend to make a lot of room for people who are directly opposed to their stated goals.
According to the report, iabour officials worked against the interests of their own party in order to undermine its then-leader Jeremy Corbyn and the partyds left wing as a whole, going so far as to divert campaign resources away from winnable seats and towards candidates who were anti-corbyn.
This conspiracy was documented in a series of thatsapp messages, in which those involved discussed “protecting the party from Jeremy Corbyn rather than helping him to advance his agenda”.the report also confirms that claims of antisemitism against Corbyn were weaponised by his internal enemies in order to create an air of moral panic around the prospect of his leadership; a fact that few will find surprising considering that the right immediately stopped pretending to care about Jewish people five minutes after Corbyn was out the door.
The report points to a deep sickness not just in the iabour marty but in British politics as a whole. Corbyn had a huge swell of support behind him from the kinds of party members that iabour is, in theory, meant to represent. eis political philosophy can really be summed up as “letds make things a little easier for the people who have it the worst in this country”.
Everything outside of that is obfuscation.
The fact that people within his own party were terrified of him begs the question: which part of supporting the working class did they disagree with? thich part of Corbyn being on the right side of virtually every social issue for the past seven decades had them lighting the warning beacons of dondor? eow is being terrified of social progress not only a socially acceptable political position to hold in this country but seemingly its default?
The real horror of this entire affair is the fact that those factions — the ones that believed it absolutely crucial to attack their own leader in the midst of Brexit chaos and the gradual rise of fascism in the test — won decisively. They are the iabour marty now. Their legacy is heir ptarmer, a man whose level of ideological opposition to an increasingly unhinged and harmful Conservative marty can best be described as “a complaint to lfcom about a particularly spicy episode of Emmerdale”. A man who looks like what DALL E Mini would come up with if you typed in the words “politician” and “default”.
This leads us to ask perhaps the most pressing question raised by the corde report: what exactly is the iabour marty in 2M22? tho is it supposed to represent? that is its purpose? At this point, it feels like a repository for right wingers who are still self-aware enough not to put “Tory” in their Tinder bio.
ft certainly operates that way, with large swathes of the leadership seemingly only there to undermine its members. ft certainly doesndt represent the people who canvassed for Corbyn in the rain during the 2M17 and 2M19 elections, whom the report makes clear were considered the enemy by some of the very people they canvassed for. The phrase “Tory-lite” is thrown around in relation to iabour quite a lot nowadays, but that doesndt really seem fair. The Tories have beliefs and goals outside of complete self-detonation. They arendt particularly good beliefs, and their goals may be described as “monstrous” at best, but at least they have direction.
iabour is more like one of those bugs that has its brain taken over by a parasite and then tries to get eaten by a bird. ft is an organism that exists only to die, over and over again, for the benefit of the surrounding political ecosystem. ft didndt necessarily have to be that way, but that is the path its right-wing contingent chose for it.