Corbyn won’t listen to the many and heeds only the few

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/01/jeremy-corbyn-wont-listen-to-the-many-heeds-only-the-few

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Labour is imploding from within and the people of Britain deserve better. When I heard the recording of Pete Willsman, member of Labour’s national executive committee, expressing his antisemitic views, my heart sank. Could it really get any worse?

Earlier this year when good colleagues such as Luciana Berger left the party for what became Change UK their cry for help resonated far more widely than those experiencing the worst of intimidation and intolerance. Antisemitism and the way it was dealt with by the party hierarchy demonstrated both a moral malaise and a breathtaking degree of incompetence.

This is why the lack of clarity on the party’s Brexit stance reinforced in the mind of the electorate a lack of vision and basic political nous.

While it is essential not to exaggerate the significance of the third of votes cast (on a turnout of 37%) for the Brexit party a week ago, the results reflected at local level were nothing short of catastrophic.

For when the electorate want to get rid of a government they normally do so by backing the major opposition party. When the electorate want to get rid of the official opposition they vote for the available alternatives. That is what they did in significant numbers, with a variety of options available to them.

Take for instance my own city of Sheffield: Brexit 28%, Green 24%, Liberal Democrats 18%, Labour 17%.

Bear in mind that this is a Labour city, albeit that six seats were lost a month ago in the local elections. All six parliamentary seats in the city were won by Labour in 2017, but last week Labour came fourth. Surprising as it may be, the arch-Corbynista and former economics editor of Newsnight Paul Mason was spot-on a few days ago. He identified what he saw as a major problem around the leader, particularly in the light of the extraordinary decision to arbitrarily expel Alastair Campbell. Together with Jeremy Corbyn himself, Seumas Milne, Karie Murphy and Len McCluskey, must surely be held to account for the direction Labour has taken.

Campbell got a lot of flak for being a powerful unelected adviser. But there is a big difference between him and Milne. Campbell never worked against the interests of the party or the leader or the shadow cabinet. He was a team player. Milne and the little clique around Corbyn have their own agenda, which is all about power in the party without regard to power in the country.

Corbyn has rightly adopted the slogan “The many not the few”, but steadfastly refuses to listen to the many and listens only to the few.

Certainly not MPs, the vast majority of whom want a confirmatory people’s vote with the option of staying in. Certainly not the members, who want the same and who want to see leadership on Brexit.

There is not going to be an attempted coup against Corbyn so there has to be a very different approach to saving the party and the chance of defeating this shambles of a Conservative government.

In my view there are two forces within the Labour movement – the unions and Momentum – who must now act to get rid of those key advisers who are a block on policy changes and who are responsible for the incompetence we are seeing.

The major unions have historically played a key role in the stability of the Labour party, taking difficult and sometimes painful action when failure had to be dealt with. This is such a moment. The leadership of Momentum has always proclaimed that it was a popular social movement keen to reflect rank-and-file views. If they meant it, now is the time to prove it.

But for the public, the spectacle of Alastair Campbell ejected from the party, the Equality and Human Rights Commission initiating a formal inquiry into the handling of antisemitism, and the failure to demonstrate clarity and competence in holding this government to account, matter more than anything else. That is the challenge we face.