On the 4th of April, Sir Keir Stammer had become the Labour leader with 56% of the vote. Divided Left also managed to lose the Deputy role to Angela “Have you heard my story?” Rayner and the NEC election. Left’s candidate Rebecca Long Bailey – who did OK in my opinion – came a distant second and Richard Burgon – a torchbearer for socialism to many – a distant third, having finished behind Rayner and vacuous Ms Khan in the Deputy Leader elections despite having the best campaign out of all candidates. About 25%-30% voted for RLB/Burgon and that’s the real state of play.
As far as the fiascoes go, it is a pretty epic one. Not winning the GE was one thing, not to use the party machinery to ensure a smooth transition of power is another. Criminal negligence. It must also be said that the leadership election result was an emphatic condemnation of John McDonald (still my hero but truth must be told) and those who kissed Corbyn on the cheek only to stab him in the back at the same time. Becky was the wrong choice, John, and so was getting behind Stammer and his election winning Brexit strategy. A supremely talented politician unable to see a bigger picture but I digress. Labour Leaks document going around laid bare how the party’s own bureaucracy tried to undermine Corbyn during GE 2017. They wanted Labour to crash and burn with the sole aim of excising socialism once and for all. With comrades like these who need enemies? These people could barely disguise their hatred and bile in public so can you imagine what was happening behind the scenes? Well, now we can. I just wonder what the OG Keir would have made of it.
The party is rotten through and through. A weird combination of the Gordian knot and the Augean stables. This makes the way forward surprisingly clear. The time has come for a Political Reformation. Just like the Catholic Church/Habsburgs had no choice but to accede to other ways of worship – albeit after a bloody and disastrous Thirty Years War – so the future democratic socialists must accept that the Labour party is not the medium to achieve our desired utopia. One does not need the Catholic Church to worship God and in the same vein one doesn’t need this grotesque Labour party to achieve socialism. Time for a new movement and party. Free of illegal wars and decades-long infighting baggage, free of recent austerity shade and the media-friendly neoliberal fifth column. Many downbeat and downcast Corbynites may say: there is only so much of my life I’m willing and able to devote to failed socialist projects or in what way is the ground more fertile for a new socialist party than it was for Respect, TUSC etc? But I say to this: how did Syriza, Five Star, Podemos, En Marche do it? Different times, different circumstances, different people involved. And of course it would take time, radical agenda, charismatic leadership and balls but if the vision is great enough then people of all persuasions would follow. The future is no longer about left and right. It is about right and wrong. We must get our world – yes the whole thing – as close to the Kingdom of Heaven as possible. For a little taste of things to come: we now have a Shadow Cabinet with Lisa Nandy as our Foreign Secretary, with many distinguished Corbyn bashers, who cost Labour the election in 2017, in prominent positions. Even that orangutan Jess Phillips made the cut but not the dashing and supremely competent triumvirate of Gardiner/Lavery/Trickett. Unity indeed.
The fate of many declining socialist European parties awaits. Next election would be to a large extent about Brexit again and its delivery unless Covid-19 takes over in earnest. Sir Stammer’s idiotic, catastrophic, defeatist Brexit policy will long live in the memory of voters and in the annals of history. I can see Tory attack lines in 2024 already. Another easy victory. No wonder The Spectator, Sky News, Osborne et al are ecstatic. Socialist threat had been torpedoed but then what is the point of the Labour party if not delivering workable socialism? It’ over. Basta. Fininto. Kaput. Time for a Political Reformation. Time for something new. Time to think big. Time for Carpe Diem. I left and cut up my membership card as soon as the penny dropped on the 4th of April. The day the Labour party died.