Please come and commiserate with me, or better still, help me think of something we can do. Jeremy Corbyn and his faction are an abject failure as a progressive opposition. With the party hijacked by his devotees, it’s unlikely he will be replaced as leader regardless of how many elections he loses (for my explanation of the word hijacked see * below to save me posting further). The Greens (still too small) and the LibDems (too much baggage) are in no position to fill the vacuum. The SNP are the SNP.
Is there anything progressive voters can do? It feels wrong to ditch the Labour party after all the history and all the sacrifice people like my parents made for it, but is this the time to start a new party? For me, our politics have reached such a stalemate that we need parties who expect to be in coalition, know how to stay on good enough terms to do deals with opponents and to make compromises. I also feel that first past the post is way past its sell-by-date – Theresa May seems oblivious to the fact that she’s in minority government.
The Conservative party are in in meltdown. We have a national crisis. Despite this gift, Corbyn and co being ridiculous. I’m not looking for much, right now I just want a sensible outcome to the Brexit mess. To hear a Labour MP today pointing out that the leader of the Labour party was prepared to meet Hamas, Hezbollah, the Assad Regime and Iran without preconditions, but not the British prime minister underlined just how preposterous Corbyn and his puppetmasters are.
The Corbynites, their shameful anti-semitism (not my friends, but a member of my family and you can’t choose them), their discredited-forty-years-ago economics, their class-war prejudice just cannot draw broad support. Not to mention the equivocation about the EU.
So Mumsnet, if you’ve made it with me this far, what is to be done? And if you have no idea either, please feel free to use this thread to vent.
- Hijacked: This just isn’t the Labour Party. I was brought up by Labour activists (I feel so sorry for my mum, after all her hard work). This is just not the Labour Party of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, or 00s, the Labour party of Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson, Neil Kinnock, John Smith. I understand how people feel about Blair (I demonstrated against the invasion of Iraq in 2003) and Brown, but at least they were IN government and they did pursue progressive policies. They won three elections. The Labour party had never won two consecutive elections before.
The Corbyn lot used to be just a tiny faction, blamed for scuppering elections for the rest of the party time and again. God knows how Neil Kinnock must feel after battling Militant in the 80s (‘there can’t be a party within a party’). Momentum are an extremist movement which spotted an opportunity, stole a march on the mainstream Labour party and used C21st methods to stage a takeover. They just don’t represent the majority of Labour voters (or Labour MPs). My evidence for this is that Labour are neck and neck with the Tories in the polls, but Theresa May’s abysmal approval ratings are way above Jeremy Corbyn’s.
My second piece of evidence is from the 2017 general election. The reality is that Corbyn lost the last election, but it was hailed by his supporters as if it was a victory. Labour should have won this, but three weeks from the election date they were polling just 26/7%. Corby-supporting friends on Facebook were dismayed, they couldn’t understand it. The Labour vote only picked up when other progressive voters realised that a) at least Corbyn had pledged to get rid of tuition fees and b) they couldn’t face a TM coronation and hard Brexit. It wasn’t some moment of conversion to hard left politics.