I’ve got to get this off my chest: just how completely fucking shit the phonies and bellends that have made up and represented the Labour Party for my entire life have been and continue to be. Never have I wanted something to succeed so much and watched it fail to so badly, time after time after time.
This weekend we’re again presented with the most chaotic, incompetent and corrupt government of our lifetime, and here we are again with lawsuits being fired by one side of the opposition to the other. The Tories are objectively awful in manifold ways, they’re there for the taking, but squabbles in the labour party have left it worse than ineffective. The problem is that there are two fundamentally different visions of the left, and they can’t live in harmony. They slag each other off all day long, ‘Centrist’, ‘Trot’, ‘Blairite’, ‘Cultist’ – just shut the fuck up, park it, and concentrate on the common enemy, the actual problem here. The Tory party has the ERG maniacs, a majority of MPs who voted remain in 2016 – and has slowly morphed into a Kremlin sponsored BNP, yet has managed to keep a consistent message when it’s been time to go to the polls.
Before you fucking start with the ‘If it’s so fucking terrible why don’t you do something about it?’ bullshit, and ‘I bet you couldn’t do any better, why don’t you a have a go?’ I’ll try to explain the complexity of the problem. There ain’t no fixing what can’t be fixed. This is not simply a Labour problem, this is a problem across the left. The factionalism – you can’t bring different elements of the left to provide a united front, and the purity – you can’t disagree on any single issue without being thrown out.
The Tories and The Right don’t have this problem. This is because their philosophy brings them together in a common hatred of the other, rather than a common goal of an improved world. The world over, The Right has this advantage. If you want to join the tories but you don’t hate one particular group of people then that’s ok as long as you have some scapegoats. You’re ok with gay people but you only hate minorities? That’s fine, be one of us, blame immigrants for everything. You’re ok with immigration but you hate poor people? Yes, join in, let’s somehow blame people on benefits for the banking crisis, just shut up about your more liberal beliefs and you can be in the gang. Let’s all go fox hunting and have a laugh… Oh you care about the animals? That’s ok, meet us in the pub later while we all have a laugh about structural inequality.
The Left doesn’t have such tolerance for differing views. You could have chained yourself to nuclear weapons and done three years digging wells in Africa but if you need the whole pronoun thing explaining then you’re a fucking Nazi and you can’t be back in the gang until you post a clumsy vlog attempting to square the circle of identity politics in a way deemed suitable by the hive mind. The Left requires complete consistency of views across the board, which is of course impossible. I mean you can’t make the case for equal Palestinian and Israeli rights at the same time, so I’ve got an idea, just for now, stop fucking trying. Anyone who does try awkwardly sets off an anti-semitism trap, one that they get caught in for years, while some tory romps home on a manifesto of equal hatred for Arabs, Jews and anyone else who isn’t them.
The current manifestation of infighting can be seen via hundreds of thousands of mostly young Corbyn fans who actively hate Starmer and would rather Boris Fucking Johnson was in power than him. At least Johnson didn’t stab Dear Leader in the back, they cry, as the rest of us on the left just shake our heads and get used to the idea of two more decades of these corrupt lying traitors in charge of this nation, a nation in its twilight. Don’t get me wrong, I think Keir Starmer is a massive twat. Just look at him and his bottle of Peroni and his pathetic tory power stance, the amount of open goals he continues to miss, and yeah the way him and his mates have treated the Corbyn wing with complete disdain – but in a choice between him and Boris Fucking Johnson, surely it’s no contest? Well apparently it is. The Tories are still ahead in all the polling, and they’re now winning with the largest left wing group in the country too, Momentum. It makes me want to smoke crack.
Years ago, back when Momentum were the SWP, my mate Rambo used to run the local branch. They had meetings in the back room of the pub, and Rambo used to organise pretty much everything they did as he was the only capable person in the ranks. One day he got promoted into management by the local council, but unfortunately management wasn’t allowed in the SWP so the rest of the little gang voted him off the committee. That was the end of that chapter of the SWP. No one else could organise a wank in a brothel. This is how mental the left is and has always been.
This is where trying to make a difference gets you. The local Labour party in most wards around here (Merseyside) are the same gang as the pub quiz team and the CAMRA committee. A load of hobbits arguing about who has got the worst gout or who was into Jethro Tull first. You’d need the kind of revamp that the Taliban got. Remember how one minute they all looked like Millie Tant out of Viz? Fatties in stupid big white gowns, doctor martins and NHS specs, and the next they were all wearing black prada jump suits and raybans? Well Labour need the Taliban stylist, or there’s no way anyone with an ounce of charm is getting involved.
Lets face it, it doesn’t matter anymore at this stage. Labour made such a massive bollocks of the Scottish referendum that the only chance they’d have of gaining power in an election would be a guarantee that they’d never win it again… A coalition with the SNP would be like a worker bee shagging the queen and dying. Once Scotland is independent, it’s over forever, so as one inevitability follows another we may as well just accept now that the union is over, Labour can never win power again even if it did get it’s shit together, which it won’t, so let’s move on and plan for that instead of waiting for the 10 years in between.
If the left grew up and accepted that it represented a broad range of views, but concentrated on the ones that will make the most difference in the shortest amount of time, this could all be sorted. Imagine an inclusive manifesto based on a collaborative project of social justice, education for all, help for those who need it, the expansion of the welfare state, transformative green infrastructural projects, redistributing the billions being made through the digital economy, fairly redistributing all the assets of the nation – and not fighting over the extremes, not falling for media campaigns designed to cause internal chaos, then we’d have half a chance at fixing this mess.
Accept this and agree to work together towards the common goal, or fragment further becoming less relevant by the hour. Our current government is vile, the vast majority of Labour supporters want very similar things. Let’s call a ceasefire and try to figure a way out of this terrible mess, together.
John Crump
