Corbyn must go!

The last two years have seen the Tories, riven by in-fighting – rip themselves apart while the internecine civil war over Europe intensifies.  They have shown themselves to be self-serving, self-interested and unfit for office. Undoubtedly the worst administration in a century, trapped in a moribund Groundhog Day of incompetence and division.

In any other circumstances this would have been an open goal for an opposition party. But despite the opportunities, daily presenting – Jeremy Corbyn has failed to take the fight to the enemy, twiddling his thumbs while the Tories set about the wholesale defenestration of the country.

The root of that is obvious. Corbyn hates the EU and wants Brexit as much as any Rees-Mogg or David Davis. His record speaks for itself. He has been deeply and implacably opposed to the European Union ever since he first sat in parliament. He voted to leave the EEC in 1975, he voted against the Maastricht treaty, the Lisbon treaty and he voted in favour of the EU referendum. His lacklustre, sluggish approach to campaigning in 2016 was a complete betrayal of the tens of thousands of Labour Remain activists who worked hard to avert the disaster.  At the height of the EU campaign he even went on holiday.

Come in Jeremy – your time is up

Since then he has done nothing to steer the course set out by the very hardest of the ERG wreckers. He put a commitment to Brexit in the Labour manifesto of 2017. He has prevaricated and vacillated – but he has not led.

Corbyn’s dithering and inability to knock points off Theresa May’s lead has been matched only by his wholesale inability to stamp out racism in his party. For months he refused to adopt in full the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism causing Deputy Leader Tom Watson to warn that the party risked disappearing into a ‘vortex of eternal shame.’

At the same time he has rendered millions politically homeless. In doing so, he has set the progressive cause back a decade, while letting down the working people of Britain – whose lives his party was created to serve.

Meanwhile his increasingly bilious die-hard fans – blinded by a dangerous and at times fanatical sense of loyalty seem incapable of accepting what is patently obvious to everyone else.

Jeremy Corbyn, for all his idealism and core old school Labour values – is never going to be elected Prime Minister – and the longer he stays – the more damage will be done to the party, the movement and the country at large. At our most desperate hour of need – there is no opposition – and worse the Labour party looks set to fall apart.

With seven MPs quitting Labour is now facing a threat to its very survival. With rumours circulating that more MPs might follow – the hapless Theresa May must be doing one of her famous dances of joy and thanking her lucky stars.

It’s not too late to stem the leak before it turns into a flood. Corbyn has an opportunity to stop the destruction of Labour, the fragmentation of his great party and the devastation of Brexit.

Corbyn needs to do a disappearing act – before the party does it for him.

Advertisement

VOTE REMAIN – why I won’t be voting Labour today

I grew up in a political family. My parents were Tory activists. My mother had worked for a Conservative MP and my Dad was a Conservative councillor, but I learned a lot from them politically, because they were not ‘drones’ or Heathites or Thatcherites or any sort of ‘ite’ at all. They didn’t blindly toe a party line and were not afraid to say so. It was extremely admirable in retrospect. My Mum had grown up in a pit village in Staffordshire and was enraged with her government over the treatment of the miners in the 1980s – and despite campaigning for the party in 1983 she hinted to me later that she had voted Liberal instead. She once wrote an angry letter to The Telegraph about expenses and discovered that a memo had promptly been sent to her constituency office asking if she was a local communist. A letter was sent back informing that she was in fact the branch Chair.

In her later life she worked with refugees and having heard their stories and known them as human beings she was equally passionate about their circumstances and their fate and angry again with the way the immigration and asylum debate was going. Consequently she spent most of the nineties falling out with fellow members and Shire Tory friends over their unhinged xenophobic opinions. She wasn’t right about everything – far from it – but she was very right indeed about putting principle before party.

Vote Remain

For my own part, I began as a teenage Tory, became a Liberal, flirted with the hard left, came to my senses and since my early twenties have (mostly) voted Labour.

As a Labour member I went through the trauma of witnessing Kinnock’s defeat in 1992, the loss of John Smith and the rise of Tony Blair. Like many I was rather sceptical of Teflon Tony but warmed to him in his first term only to come crashing back to Planet Reality after the invasion of Iraq. I departed after that and voted Green in 2005 in protest, but I returned to Labour in 2010, 2015 and for Corbyn last year in the 2017 election as well as locally and in all of the EU elections in between. Yes – it said in the manifesto that they would implement Brexit – but I hoped that Labour might come to its senses and anyway it’s ‘my’ party – so I voted for Jezza.

Never again.

And stop electing them too

Since Corbyn came to power the party has increasingly turned its back on people like me. I view myself as a progressive and a centrist and the Labour party doesn’t do those things at front bench level any more. Corbyn may have his acolytes and Momentum but in order to win elections in the UK you have to appeal to those beyond your immediate constituency and if he has lost me and thousands like me, then he will never become PM and there will not be a Labour government and we are stuck with the Tories and their disastrous out of control administration.

That Labour (incredibly) continues to trail behind the unbelievably useless and unlikable Theresa May and her barmy Brexit army in the polls says it all. The main reason for that is blindingly obvious and it has nothing to do with the MSM or ‘Centrist Dadaists’ or whoever they are blaming now. The truth is this: Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is blindly following the agenda of the most ghastly Tory government in history in pursuing the most suicidally stupid and unnecessary political endeavour since – well since ever. By enabling Brexit the Labour party hierachy is ignoring the will of most of its members and supporters and doing the 48% of largely progressive and outward looking Britons, who voted Remain, a massive disservice. Yes there is a slight nuance of approach – but then Pepsi is essentially Coca Cola isn’t it – they both taste much the same – while fucking with your teeth.

There are those who claim that Jeremy Corbyn is actually a Remainer and that he is simply going along with the democratic choice of 52% of the people of the UK; but then there are also people who believe that the Earth is flat.

Brexit – the stupidest thing since – well ever

So tomorrow I shall be voting on the issue of Brexit – and as such I shall not be voting Labour.

“But wait! Hold on!” I hear you cry “Brexit isn’t a local issue!” And that, my imaginary reader who disagrees with me, is sadly where you are mistaken. Brexit is a local issue precisely because Brexit affects everything. Brexit is like taxation or those Kardashian people – you might not want to hear about it or have any interest in them – but it is an unavoidable, big fat arse casting a shadow across the land and unlikely to go anywhere any time soon.

Now given that you have read this far I am guessing that you are a Remoaner. I have talked here about the Labour party but precisely the same logic (and some) applies to you if you are a Conservative Remainer. If you want to stop Brexit you need to give the leadership of the two main parties a mighty wake-up call and you can do that tomorrow by not voting for them while making sure you vote. The one place you can hit the government and the Brexit friendly Labour leadership is in the ballot box. You will never win the Lotto but you do have that power.

Brexit has shaken up the old convictions and the old certainties and sometimes you have to stand firm in belief over tribal loyalty – just as my parents did. I will be deserting Labour with a heavy heart tomorrow – but doing so in the hope of brighter days ahead.

VOTE REMAIN