Mick Hartley

Corbynism: "banal in content, conspiracist in essence, utopian in aspiration and vicious in practice". Nick Cohen – This could be the end of the Labour party:

You can look at how globalisation, the crash, the fall in real wages, mass immigration and the Iraq war have created a paranoid consciousness across the West. But to understand wilful and self-serving stupidity is not to pardon it. Nor is it to underestimate how hard wilful stupidity is to penetrate. Once hooked, the faithful can find reasons to dismiss any fact that contradicts their ecstatic certainties, and in Trump’s America as much as in Corbyn’s Labour party, there seems no way to get through to them.

Corbyn’s banality, which has driven serious leftists away, is not the unmitigated political disaster it seems either. As with so many who call themselves socialists, it has let him embrace Islamist movements, which are fascist in their political outlook, and Russia’s conservative and kleptomaniac autocracy. This has been my left-wing generation’s greatest betrayal, and its hypocrisy and cynicism is exacting a heavy political price. Yet the banality that allows disgraceful alliances also ensures that the far left does not have to commit to a specific domestic programme.

Utopias are always banal. Corbyn’s Utopia allows his supporters to wallow in the warmth of self-righteousness. They want to end austerity. Stop greed. Bring peace. How they do it is not their concern. Practicalities are dangerous. They take you away from utopia and back into the messy, Blairite realm of compromises and second-bests.

Anyone who knows history knows that utopianism can justify viciousness. By his supporters’ reasoning, leftists who are against Corbyn must be in favour of poverty, greed and war. All tactics are justified in the struggle against such monsters….

Corbyn will go along with any regime or movement, however right-wing, as long as it is anti-western. But the sleaziness of his behaviour has allowed his opponents to avoid a question that the rise of the SNP should have made unavoidable: can they create a progressive English patriotism?

As the 2015 election and the EU referendum showed, Labour has to find a way of bridging the divide between its liberal middle-class and socially conservative working-class supporters on immigration and multiculturalism. Corbyn’s presence ensured it has not begun to look for a path, let alone find one.

I do not want to believe that the English liberal-left will sit back and allow the Conservatives to rule from 2010 until 2025, or beyond. But under Corbyn, I cannot see how the Labour party goes forward as a credible opposition, let alone a credible government. Perhaps Labour’s day is done, and it is time for something new. Whatever it is, it can hardly be worse.