A quick post about why I rejoined the Labour party
Provided this as a quote to someone writing an online article about people joining Labour post-Brexit, but thought I’d share it more widely. You may also want to read this for context about how much this leadership challenge is being coordinated to cause maximum damage.
I was quite content with voting for Corbyn as a supporter and letting Labour get on with being a half-decent opposition that actually articulated an anti-austerity position that didn’t pander to anti-immigration sentiment or scapegoat welfare recipients. But it’s really clear that the PLP just aren’t willing to allow that to happen – he’s had to deal with constant sniping and whining by people whose only solution to Labour’s problems are triangulation and image manipulation. They don’t understand the social and economic changes that are driving the economically insecure section of their traditional electoral base towards UKIP or non-voting, and even if they did, they are ideologically opposed to any of the policies which might tackle those problems.
This isn’t a surprise, but the destructive and cack-handed way they’ve gone about things has made me utterly livid. If they had any sense, they’d have taken a good hard look at themselves and their policies and tried to work out why they were so comprehensively defeated last year. If Corbyn is as dreadful as they claim, his obvious failings would have become apparent, he would have lost support in the party and they could have put up an alternative candidate with a hope of wining. Instead we’ve just had endless bitching to the press and now this obviously choreographed string of resignations. I don’t think Corbyn is perfect, and I think he will eventually need to be replaced by a younger candidate who isn’t so easily pigeon-holed by the press as a socialist relic & terrorist sympathiser, but until the party gets reformed so that MP’s don’t have a chokehold on who can stand for the leadership, he needs to stay in place.
I quit Labour in 2003 because it obviously was not capable of restraining Tony Blar’s warmongering, but right now it’s closer to being democratic and left-wing than it has in my adult lifetime. No way am I going to sit back and let a bunch of jumped up shits like that undercooked testicle Wes Streeting ruin it because they want a ministerial career and their understanding of politics only goes as deep as personalities and the news cycle. They keep talking about how they want a functioning opposition, but what they mean by that is they want an opposition that tries to ingratiate itself with the tabloids and offers up a more diluted version of neoliberalism augmented with gentler scapegoating of immigrants and welfare recipients to tempt Labour-Tory swing voters. Fuck that and fuck them. They picked this fight and they are going to fucking well rue the day. Their politics died on its arse in 2008 and the fallout brought us to straight to the vicious xenophobic clusterfuck that is Brexit. I’ve got much better things to do with my time than Labour party infighting, but it’s obvious we’re not going to get anywhere without deselecting MPs who would rather fight the left than organise together with us, so that’s what we’re going to have to do.