As Storm Doris blows away the bunting from Copeland and Stoke, Doris Miliband blows into town for what, nobody knows, nor cares.
What Labour supporters of Labour like me want to do is oppose the Tories in government because of what Tories do in government and we see little opposition from those Labour MPs who are forever on the TV and radio and in the press attacking Labour’s leadership. If a Labour MP is noted for their attacks on the Labour leadership then they are not representing the issues I care about, not because I am one of their mythical ‘Corbynistas’ but because I oppose the Tories and I think that that is what they should be doing too.
Doris Miliband blows into town, the washed-up ex Labour MP who quit his seat when he was defeated by his brother to lead the party in some past century. There are two key things about Miliband’s rising as a commentator on Labour in the wake of the Copeland result, firstly, there are no MPs who currently oppose the current Labour leadership who have the support or recognition of the party, membership, or the general public who can stand against the current leadership. John McTernan admitted as much last year when there was brief talk of Tony Blair returning to politics and Doris chirruping up now is proof of that.
Secondly, Doris’s chirruping isn’t off the cuff and coincidental, his name has been bandied about before as Labour’s white knight and been roundly dismissed by the party’s membership. Labour were set-up to lose in Stoke and Copeland, after waters had been muddied over Labour’s position triggering Article 50. Miliband was the knight on a charger ready, stage left, to swoop in amid the headlines of Corbyn’s ‘humiliating’ ‘crushing’ defeats. Because Nuttall, liar and disgrace, loused up the Tory/UKIP pact in Stoke, the ‘wreckers’ weren’t confident of losing either seat and had already started talking the results down. Losing just Copeland has not been the plan but it was better than nothing, so they’ve gone at it anyway. It’s weak and transparent and, as much they might drag it out, it’s a waste of their time. They need to turn the membership and the victory by the membership in Stoke means we’re going nowhere.
Corbyn is the leader Labour needs right now because he stands between Labour and the return of people like Mandelson and Blair. Labour have removed some of the claws of such people from the party, why would we hand it back to them? Labour supporters like me are insulted when we are reduced to the media’s and ‘wreckers’ raving mob of Hard Left fanatics, blindly following our messiah. We’re not. We oppose the Tories because of the immorality that they bring to government. We oppose the Tories because of their attacks on society’s most vulnerable. We oppose the Tories because of their economic incompetence and, probable, criminality. We oppose the Tories and we are surprised that our too comfortable and self-satisfied politico-media circus don’t oppose them too (and that includes ex MPs like Jamie Reed, who stood in Parliament and applauded Theresa May for taking on Corbyn over the nuclear industry, before he quit his seat in Copeland to take a high paying job in the nuclear industry).
Most of the media don’t actually care if Corbyn is leader of Labour but they have set themselves to unseat him and it annoys them that he has resisted them and it annoys them that 100,000s of people have ignored them too. Labour have it’s ‘New Labour’ remnants and they want to unseat Corbyn because he sits between them and taking control of Labour and an imagined return to power in government. They don’t care if Corbyn could or could not lead Labour to government, they don’t want him to because they are currently isolated from the control of Labour and would be even more isolated from power if Labour were in government with Corbyn as leader.
The general public don’t know and don’t care what has been going on with Labour’s internal party politics but they should. Those within Labour jockeying to oust Corbyn have repeatedly shown their inadequacies, their lack of political and strategical imaginations. They managed to win the battles of gerrymandering the voting for the last leadership election but lost the war of the actual vote. They win the battle for smearing the leadership and the party in the media but they are losing the war by diminishing the general public’s perception of the Labour party as offering a viable opposition to the Tories. They are hapless, witless and woeful and their persistence does nothing but damage the party. They rejoice at every negative headline about Labour but are picking at the very seams of the party with each one. They are idiots. I worry whether Labour’s PLP is fit to see them off the field but maybe that’s not the next play.
Corbyn’s election record has been pretty good, considering the state that has been made of the party by Labour’s ‘wreckers’, so they contrived to hand Corbyn two defeats in Copeland and Stoke and they were undone by the Tories feeling they had to make deals with UKIP and UKIP being lead by Paul Nuttall. I can’t see many other Labour MPs being prepared to give up their seats to try again but they might resign the whip and go independant or cross to the LibDems. It is clear Sainsbury’s money has had an influence on the narrative coming out of the LibDems, with ‘press’ releases on twitter that read like something from Progress.
But that wouldn’t actually place any pressure on Crobyn, in fact it would have the opposite effect, relieving him of some of the most ‘troublesome’ people. There is always another possible direction errant ‘dissatisfied’ MPs could take, there’s also the possibility that we could see a splinter Labour Co-Op Party emerge, possibly lead by someone like Lucy Powell. They might need something more than the weak excuse of the Copeland loss to trigger it but I bet there are feelers out in Labour to see how MPs are feeling about the current onslaught in the press. They turned 172 MPs last June, are they having the same luck now or has the facade surrounding the ‘wreckers’ been suitably exposed? It would be a disastrous step for the leadership of the Co-op Party to allow to happen and, ultimately, the few MPs behind Labour’s actual problems are unlikely to jump without a sizable proportion of the PLP and, equally, they will not want to leave behind the Labour Party brand. We’ll see. There are 100,000s of Labour members, will a dozen or so Right leaning entryists be able to wrest control of the party from us?
