Corbyn

 Jeremy Corbyn banned from standing as candidate for Labour party

I thought it might make for a change if, in as far as DGBooks strays into the murky waters of politics, I didn't indulge myself by finding fault with Boris Johnson. Anybody can do that and it's only a wonder that even more don't but, even given his reputation as a 'greased piglet' capable of slipping out of any of the zugzwang situations he habitually got himself into, surely he's finished now. It is to be hoped that Rishi Sunak can run his party as coherently as Keir Starmer is managing Labour and have no more to do with a self-styled troublemaker. If there really is a lecture circuit on which useless articles can go and deliver their same old, tired stand-up routines for big piles of cash then that is the free market economy for you, but mainly for him.  

Politics is an endlessly despairing business in which those taking part can only see things their way. I voted for Labour, as led by Jeremy Corbyn, once. But not the second time. Even someone as disreputable as Dominic Cummings had to concede that a General Election that was only offering a choice between Corbyn and Johnson was a poor version of democracy.

Corbyn now reckons it to be a "shameful attack on party democracy" that the NEC, democratically elected by the party, vote 22-12 against having him as a candidate. That's the bit that Rishi needs to read.

The other bit is how he said the decision to block him showed "contempt" for the voters who had supported the party at the 2017 and 2019 elections. 

That was two elections that Labour were nowhere near winning and so unelectable that they allowed the school buffoon to persuade places like Workington and Bolsover to vote for him. That's how far doctrine can get you. Let's see what happens at the next election when Corbyn isn't the Labour leader and Keir Starmer has to take on much more credible opposition in Rishi. The bookmakers, at least, are of the opinion that Labour are in with a proper chance next time.

 

I know it's not going to happen but I wonder if Starmer and Sunak couldn't work together more easily than either of them can work with the 'Left' and 'Right' of their own parties, the Corbyn supporters and those supported by Jacob Rees-Mogg. While Boris was supported by Jacob, he was really a 'right-winger', he didn't believe in anything really and just made up simplistic vote-catching slogans.

I feel like some old, idealistic Radio 4 listener from the 1970's finding myself wishing we could have a genuinely Socialist Party with Arthur Scargill, the militant trade unions on strike, Eric Heffer forever walking out of conference in protest and Corbyn devoted to demos and opposition, anti NATO, but with no real interest in running the show or even having a position of Europe, and a Right Wing party made up of unreconstructed hanging judges, Little Englanders and Liz Truss ecomomists who can make the financial sector take flight and surrender at a stroke.

Harold Wilson and Ted Heath were relatively sensible and responsible and Jeremy Thorpe a bit more radical than either of them. All we need is for the lines on this alleged spectrum between 'right' and 'left' to be drawn in different plaves, a bit wider apart. A Starmer-Sunak coalition would be no more of a coalition than the Labour and Conservative parties already are, and certainly no less unmanageable.