Labour leapt into Brexit's fires - and now the party is burning

[Ken Burch]

2. The anti-Corbyn types probably could have persuaded Corbyn to go...

if only they had made THESE guarantees in exchange for his leaving:

1) That there WOULD be a Left candidate on the subsequent leadership ballot.


2) That all the suspensions and expulsions imposed on Labour supporters and members by the party's extreme right-wing Iain MacNicol, would be reversed and all those barred from voting in the leadership contest in 2016 would be allowed to vote in the subsequent leadership contest.

Instead, they offered him nothing at all besides a meaningless and intentionally humiliating new job as "party president"-a position in which he would have no say in policy, would be able to do nothing to defend his supporters from attack and probable expulsion, and would be expected to offer unquestioning public support to whatever the next leader did, no matter how offensive and right-wing that leader's actions are certain to be.


Without those guarantees, we all know that the PLP wouldn't allow anyone to the left of Yvette Cooper on the leadership ballot-in fact, that the anti-Corbynites might not allow anyone but a single right-wing candidate-and then act as though they had the right to EXPECT everyone to unite behind whoever THAT leader was in exactly the way they all refused to ever give Jeremy a chance.


Can you at least agree with me that it was never reasonable for the PLP to expect Jeremy Corbyn to agree to anything remotely like that?

Remember, the PLP are the folks whose response to the 2015 defeat, a defeat in which the the poor were blameless, was to push for the party to stop fighting benefit cuts-it hadn't even fought MOST of the cuts under Ed-and to start voting for more and more cuts AND for the cruel and completely unjustified benefits sanctions policies Cameron and Osborne had imposed. The PLP STILL doesn't understand that it was their insistence on doing that, on reducing Labour to being nothing but the party of slightly smaller cuts, that caused the Corbyn phenomenon to happen. And they STILL don't understand that, if they drag Labour back to that set of ideas, the party will no longer have any reason to exist.

A Labour Party permanently committed to austerity, military intervention in the Arab/Muslim world, and the preservation of Thatcher's union laws couldn't be different than the Tories on any major issues at all. It couldn't ever do anything compassionate or solidaristic or humane. No one anywhere in the UK would ever vote for such a party. What would be the point?

Why would anyone ever vote for a party like that?

I understand that you are a Remain supporter...if I lived in the UK, I'd have voted Remain. But it's time to stop acting as if Corbyn could single-handedly have won a Remain victory. He made many speeches for the Remain cause. But there was never the possibility that the actions of one man could have overcome the horrible campaign the Remain side conducted.