Mick Hartley

Good stuff from Philip Collins in the Times (£) – The silence of Labour moderates is shameful:

The defining moment of the 2017 Labour Party conference was not the evangelical church that Jeremy Corbyn addressed on Wednesday. It was the speech on Tuesday of Mr Corbyn’s captive prisoner, deputy leader Tom Watson. For two years Mr Watson has been promising the cognoscenti that his political prowess would ward off the Corbyn takeover. Some incomprehensible committee-fixing solution was always being pledged. As he, sadly and forlornly, sang “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” on the conference floor in Brighton, Mr Watson must have known that the game was up and the party was over….

When Mr Corbyn won the Labour leadership in 2015, and in the summer of 2016, when they resigned en masse and forced a further contest, most Labour MPs regarded their leader as a hopeless case. Their argument against him was framed in terms of competence and unpopularity. Mr Corbyn’s uniquely shambolic version of dreary left-wing nostrums, they said, was leading the Labour Party towards the cliff edge. All that was left was to take a great leap forward. Objections to Mr Corbyn were never elevated to the level of principle. It seemed sufficient to say he was rubbish without adding the extra indignity that he was wrong.

Mr Corbyn defied that account and the argument collapsed. Deprived of their objection to their leader, Labour MPs have hunkered down in phoney unity. Europe, which tears the Tories apart, holds Labour together. As long as the party has its self-righteous fury about the mess of Brexit, it can avoid its own unbridgeable chasm. With Labour ahead in the polls most of the party has simply ceased being honest in public. Do they really think that nationalising the water supply should be an early call on public funds? Of course they don’t. Have they decided that rent controls are the best way of fixing the housing market? They have not. Do they really think a series of flaccid aspirations for nice things amounts to a government-in-waiting? Emphatically not, in private. And yet what are they all saying, in public? They are standing on the stage to acclaim the prospect of Diane Abbott as home secretary and to sing “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” as if lobotomised into compliance.