On Labour Party Chickens & Their Coups
In the 1980s quiz show Bullseye, contestants played darts in an attempt to win the star prize — a speed boat. It’s now comedic folklore that a speedboat wasn’t much use to working class contestants from Wolverhampton.
Owning a speedboat on a working class estate is probably as much use as control of the Labour Party will be to Jeremy Corbyn if he wins a second leadership election. In the event of a Corbyn victory, he’d be titular head of a parliamentary party which holds him in the kind of esteem enjoyed by a mosquito on a Brazilian maternity ward.
Despite numerous wins in by-elections and high-profile mayoralty contests, Corbyn has recently been tarred unelectable by Labour’s crack squad of election stars Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown and most vocally, Neil Kinnock. When deemed unelectable by these three, it’s probably time to start measuring new curtains for the bedroom at 10 Downing Street.
Opponents inside the party claim Jeremy only has the support of the ‘three quidders’ — those who donated £3 to join the Labour Party last year during the leadership contest. Imagine, a Labour Party in which the low paid, but passionate can join en masse and help decide the direction of the party supposedly created for their benefit, the wealthiest members holding no more sway than the worst off.
Corbyn needs to wise-up sharpish.
If he isn’t willing to don his best sailing gear and head to sea on Oleg Deripaska’s super yacht, Mandelson style, the party is well and truly done for. Times like these call for imaginative fundraising ideas outside of member and union contributions. Corbyn was recently mocked for signing apples he’d grown on his own allotment to raise funds — a move as touchingly lame as a grandfather offering his eighteen-year-old grandson £20 worth of WHSmith vouchers to spend on ‘whatever he wants’.
If only there was something the leadership could offer potential big donors. Perhaps life peerages in return for cash ‘loans’? It raised just shy of £14m up until 2006. How’d ya like them apples, Jezza?
Aware of his popularity with the party’s membership, detractors repeat their faux praise of Corbyn as a ‘decent and principled’ man, who just doesn’t have the leadership skills nor political nous required to lead the party. One such detractor is Angela Eagle, who today announced her intention to stand against the Corbyn in a leadership contest.
Whilst Corbyn and the usual parliamentary odd squad were showing leadership in the fight against welfare cuts, raising tuition fees and the invasion of Iraq, Eagle was voting in favour of all three. Although perhaps we should give Angela the benefit of the doubt — maybe it was her twin sister Maria Eagle posing as Angela as she walked through the lobby to vote a second time as a prank on her sister. Either way, Angela has promised to ‘heal’ the party. If her healing of the party is as effective and thoughtful as her stance on Iraq was, expect bitter sectarianism and civil war to break out across the party.
Eagle also has a keen eye for economics. When Liberal Democrats tabled a parliamentary motion in 2008 suggesting the country faced an ‘extreme bubble in the housing market’ and ‘major recession’, Eagle’s Oracle of Delphi like response was to state that; ‘Fortunately for all of us…that colourful and lurid fiction has no real bearing on the macro-economic reality.” Such statements make it difficult to claim the Tories’ 2010 and 2015 election campaigns unfairly portrayed Labour as arrogant and utterly complacent on the state of the economy in the lead up to the 2008 financial crash.
Eagle claims she is best placed to ‘reach out’ beyond an overly self-involved party to the wider electorate. It’s a big claim from someone who has spent the weeks following the EU referendum plotting within her own party and whose own Wallasey constituency branch last week issued a statement of support for Corbyn’s leadership.
Apart from Eagle, the party’s new voice of moral rectitude and deft leadership, it’s slim pickins’ when it comes to Corbyn’s potential successors. It’s still unclear whether Owen Smith, a man with the charm and charisma of an overly invested manager of a suburban Costa Coffee chain will roll up his sleeves and throw his hat into the ring. Not that he’d ever throw a hat — it would be a risk to health and safety. Of course, as someone who worked as a producer for Radio 4 for ten years, before becoming a special adviser to the Secretary of State for Wales in 2002, Smith is surely best placed to reach out beyond the metropolitan, liberal elite which Corbyn relies upon. The same can be said for Eagle considering her humble background studying PPE at Oxford, before putting in a shift at the bastion of workers’ rights, the Confederation of British Industry and getting ‘real world’ experience as elected secretary for the Constituency Labour Party in Peckham. In the contemporary Labour Party, it doesn’t get much more relatable to the electorate than that.
What of ‘king slayer’ Tom Watson? At first I laughed at claims from Corbyn’s inner circle that they didn’t want their man left in a private meeting with Watson because ‘he’s 70' and they have a ‘duty of care’ for the old dear in face of possible bullying. Then I watched Watson rubbing his hands whilst sat behind Corbyn at PMQs and began imagining the former as the icy cold manager of a failing care home — overseeing a regime of petty violence inflicted on residents, but stepping in whenever it went too far lest relatives notice bruises on their loved ones’ arm. Watson’s calm and measured tone would allay the fears of rarely visiting relatives whenever they noticed the look of terror in their senile loved ones’ eyes in response to physical contact.
Until the weekend Watson had been in talks with the unions and party leadership to try and broker a deal about how the party can overcome its present travails. Anyone who claims Watson was simply stalling until the release of Lord Chilcot’s inquiry into the Iraq War is as cynical as a Labour MP ‘regretfully’ resigning on principle exactly one hour after and one hour before their Shadow Cabinet colleagues in an attempt to drag out maximum media coverage. The fact Watson withdrew from talks quicker than a teenage boy dating the daughter of an Irish Catholic priest following the release of the Chilcot Inquiry is completely coincidental. As coincidental as Watson’s parliamentary record of consistently voting against an inquiry into the Iraq War, a war he himself voted in favour of.
The role of Peter Mandelson and assorted Blairite oddballs is unclear. Paul Mason refers to the soft-left of the Labour Party as visionless ’tethered goats’ ultimately doing the dirty work of the Right of the party which has wanted Corbyn gone from day one. This uncharitable view is unfair. They do have a vision; never-ending Middle East military campaigns, neoliberal welfare ‘reform’, tuition fees, light-touch regulation of the banking sector — all a world away from the vision and policies of Blair and his supporters in the PLP.
As recent history shows, the centre-Left of the Labour Party know how to back a winner; Kinnock, Brown, Miliband. The chutzpah these men and their allies display in their attacks on Corbyn’s electability and relatability to the general public is another example of the tragi-comic nature of the modern Labour Party. Anyone who believes Labour voters who have jumped ship to UKIP will be enticed back by more of the same political-economic poison which has been killing off their communities over the past three decades is possibly quite delusional. Such self-delusion and cognitive dissonance not witnessed since Tony Blair’s response to the Chilcot Inquiry all of five days ago.
Time is up for Corbyn and the last-gasp of life his leadership breathed into the rapidly decomposing corpse of the Labour Party. As many of his supporters feared, Corbyn’s victory was a dead cat bounce for a party in hock to powerful, moneyed interests. It was indeed naïve of us to believe that those who have built careers serving the interests of the powerful would allow such a trifling thing as party democracy stand in the way of their life’s’ work.
