The Blair Mutiny

Not content with having ‘modernised’ Labour by infiltrating the word ‘New’ in front of ‘Labour’, The Blairites are now insisting that new members joining adhere to their ‘values’ (see @mrmarksteel on Twitter). How very Stalinist of them.

Now they are saying that even if the Labour Party, the party with the largest membership in the UK and thus potentially the most democratic in the UK with it’s OMOV (one member one vote), the Blairites will refuse to serve under Jeremy Corbyn. And that’s even if he wins a highly impressive 60% of the vote of the party. So, what the Blairites are saying is that even if the Party votes overwhelmingly for Corbyn, it’s the 60%+ who should leave Labour, not the minority who are likely to lose. How very feudal of them. Doubtless they will leave and form a new SDP and accuse the left of "splitting the party" when it is them who would have...err...split the party, thus proving it's not the mythically "rebellious left" that Labour should fear but actually the proven rebellious right.

Of course, the current campaign by Blairites states that Corbyn is a "divisive" candidate while they...err...divide the party. How very Kafkaesque of them.

Tony Blair has even stated that he’d never want power were it won by standing on a “left wing” platform. That’d be an admirable principle were he a member of the Tories or even of what is left of the Lib Dems rather than a nominal member of The People’s Party.

The thrust of the Blairite argument is that Labour cannot win if it alienates the middle class “centre ground”. Curiously, Mr Corbyn appears to have managed it for decades. This so-called centre ground is very much to the right of the centre ground many of us remember pre-Blair. And the Blairites never seemed to care about alienating the working class, upon whose backs many of them climbed into safe Labour seats. (What really could a friend of George Bush have in common with the hard working people of Sedgefield for instance?) Blair famously once said that Labour could afford to move to this new “centre ground” without losing its core working class support because, as he put it, “they have nowhere else to go”. That was either a disingenuous comment or a Fundily Mundily misjudgement.

Of course they had somewhere to go. They could go home. Or more accurately, stay home. And they did. They chose to stay home not only on polling day but also throughout whole campaigns. It was as if activists decided that they didn’t want to get pissed on by the British weather while electioneering and get pissed on by their own party ‘elite’ at the same time. And of course, in Scotland, ‘New Labour’ was actually annihilated when voters and activists found somewhere to go – to a relatively tame and only vaguely social democratic SNP. But then again, even the old ‘Tory Wets’ would have been left of New Labour.

So, OMOV which ironically the Blairtes introduced in the first place as a device to neuter the Trade Union “Barons” will be the death of them. Because now the people the Blairites left behind do indeed have somewhere to go – back to centre stage in the Labour Party. Or, to put it more accurately - to come back in from the cold of the Blairite winter, all fired up by hope, and ready to chase away the Blairite infiltrators forcing them to take their Henry Jackson Society and Progress Group values with them.

And if they don’t like it? Well, they can leave the country along with all the over-paid greedy bankers and tax dodgers who are threatening to leave should Corbyn win. Put all the ugly mutineers together in the same boat. Strange Boat-fellows indeed.