Friday 30 October 2020

Interlude: How To Destroy Good People

So Jeremy Corbyn got suspended from the party. The spectacle of his demise is reminscent of the medieval barbarism from the likes of Game of Thrones. Bloody vengeance as spectacle. A soap opera of personal destruction. The excoriation of a fundamentally decent mild mannered guy. Someone who helps his community. It's an ungainly sickening spectacle. It happened under Her Majesty's Opposition to the silent pixelated cheers of the assembled right wing media no doubt.

I haven't the energy to get into the specifics of why. Apparently it's because his comments in response to the EHRC report were deemed to reduce or trivialise the problem of antisemitism. I don't really think that's proven. Maybe he should have kept his trap shut, probably would have achieved little more than a stay of execution. We know that the biggest factor throughout all of this is the desire to get rid of him. No one did anything about the few, unacceptable, cases of antisemitism (always unacceptable) in the party before his leadership and the problem won't disappear afterwards. This is because these views have a political dimension that isn't being addressed. It certainly won't be under Starmer.

Ultimately he's not long for this world, politically speaking. Corbyn, that is. They want shot of him. No questions. What that means is a further rightward shift in the British body politic. While many radicals will shed no tears of the death of the Labour party, this is really nothing to cheer on. I want this sytem and the rotten parties within, all of it, gone. This whole machine serves only Moloch, it certainly doesn't serve the working class. But if Labour lurches to the right, as seems to be the current trajectory, all that does is embolden the right, including the media, whose headlines this morning are predictably horrendous.

This situation doesn't benefit the working class. It just weakens the left. That may not mean much given how weak the Labour party is, but anything that reduces the strength of the left in the current climate, under a crazy yet ascendant Tory government (I dread to think what the poll results are today). That just means there's no opposition. Unfortunately, that is the course Starmer has chosen to chart. 

I'm not saying people should remain in the party. Labour is a dead duck, had been for years. This is just one more, if oversized, nail in the coffin. It's a scalp taken by Starmer for his capitalist masters. That is all the Labour party is now, a husk willing to appease the likes of Murdoch and the British capitalist class - who themselves don't want Brexit. That is one of Labour's most egregious mistakes: refusing to understand or accept why people voted Brexit. Even though us leaving under the Tories, which is what the vote really meant, it is arrogant and dismissive to just call people who believed the lies they were fed by a wealthy elite, and who wanted, justifiably, to stick it to the ruling class. The problem is that Labour failed to channel that anger, in fact it had fed it during it's time in office under Blair. 

It could have been different, but the vote last December was, in hindsight, inevitable. Unfortunately Corbyn allowed that to happen. He wasn't, ironically, ruthless enough. He should have removed the Blairites; the troublemakers and the 'front' stabbers, to paraphrase Jess Phillips. Can you imagine the response if he'd said, in respect of, for example, Lucianna Berger, he'd stab her in the front (in the context of betrayal, to be clear)? My god!

But that's the reality. All of this existential crisis was aired in the bloodsports arena of a hostile media, surrounded by bad faith actors who wanted him gone. Many of whom included his own party members!

Yesterday was inevitable, but it won't be the end. There will likely be more scalps, but can you imagine what message it will send to the BAME community if they suspend or even expel Diane Abbot? How many others will follow? Inevitably Labour is intent on becoming a spiritless husk; a drab appeasing entity only fit to serve the interests of the ruling class. I fully support leaving, but there must be an alternative, not a vacuum that will be filled, with equal inevitability, by the far right. The working class must now organise as never before, it's eyes have been increasingly opened during this period. Many must surely now see the truth of capitalism and its crisis prone nature and how its adherents care naughty for them. Labour aren't going to change, reform is undesirable and impossible, 

Fight now. Starmer is no friend of ours. He just appears competent in the face of such a chaotic dishevelled array of Tory corruption and blunder. But that's a smokescreen; a mirage obscuring the truth. He is a weak insipid leader with no vision and certainly no thirst for change and socialism. 

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