Supping with the Devil: Labour’s right want to choose power without morality
The question of electability arose again last night on the BBC’s once essential viewing Question Time. Blair’s number one ally Alastair Campbell dragged out the usual scare stories about the left while declaring that all he wanted was a Labour government back in power.
It comes down to a choice between the immediately practical and the moral. Labour supporters and those within the PLP who deem electability more important than policies — and they do, despite dressing it up as being about Corbyn’s policies being unpopular with the electorate — are supping with the Devil.
Chris Hedges — in his wonderful book, Death Of The Liberal Class — describing similar pacts undertaken by so-called liberals in the States, where they seek “personal and financial advancement as well as continued entrée into the inner circles of power” and are “not concerned with the moral but the practical.”
In other words, the choice is to conspire with the policies and aims of the elite rather than to challenge them. Dress them up as having more heart ad compassion behind them but basically leave things in place to maintain the power of the elite. Serve the corporate state rather than seek to find a way to subvert it and restore democracy.
The talk of entryism and the hatred of the left for the Labour Party is a strange claim when we have Blair admitting he wouldn’t want to win on the platform proposed by Jeremy Corbyn. A platform, remember, that appears to be broadly accepted by the majority of the electorate, were they ever to be allowed to hear its message without mainstream media distortion.
It is those on the right of Labour, therefore, who seem to be willing to damage the electoral chances of the party. Owen Smith is now calling for the banning of Momentum. Quite what a ban would mean is unclear but there is no equivalent talk of banning Progress, for instance. Momentum has a small membership — a fraction of the new total of members in the Labour Party itself — and is hardly the vanguard of the proletariat that scaremongering would suggest.
The choice is binary, really. A choice between continuing to follow the dictates of a neoliberal economic policy that benefits the few or to return to policies of fairness and economic justice that considers every citizen worthy of a place within society. We have become a nation that seeks comfort over thinking, of selfish needs over compassion, of ecological damage over the long-term health of the planet and the future of our children.
Returning control of the Labour Party who believe that power on the terms of the elite is worth more than creating a movement to make seismic change is the way of hopelessness. It is the way of despair.
