Following the General Election, the stock of Labour leader Corbyn has risen. Many of Corbyn’s Parliamentary colleagues, who know the true nature of the beast, had expected him to fall flat on his face and expose his loony left principles.
That he got through the election and, for the most part, got away with it, was nothing short of miraculous. Hence the recent regard, built on the slender foundation that their leader did not make a complete ass of himself, shown by some of his party. Some of those who previously saw Corbyn as a dangerous ideologue, have packed up their scruples, at least for now, and with flagrant self interest and for self protection have given him their support.
A casualty of this Corbyn “success” was West Bromwich East MP, Tom Watson, who lost his post as Chairman of the Labour party to trade unionist and Corbyn loyalist, Ian Lavery.
Lavery has already warned Labour moderates that the party is “too broad a church” meaning they are on the way out and that no-one has a “divine right” to be an MP, a not so coded message; “toe the left line or be deselected by your local Trots.” Suggesting that the ousted Watson was right to warn previously of “Trotsky entryists”
At last Friday’s A.G.M. of the West Bromwich West Constituency Labour party, was there evidence of possible entryism in the Wednesbury North Ward branch?
Already, the ward’s Labour councillors Costigan and Peter Hughes had opposed the re-selection of veteran Labour M.P. Adrian Bailey as Labour’s candidate for the West Bromwich West seat at the General Election. It is unlikely that either of them was acting on their own initiative. Though only a fantasist would suggest their colleague Tony Meehan, had any part in a plot. Any plot there was, Meehan could be relied on to lose.
Disappointed in their campaign to oust Bailey as a candidate, the Wednesbury North cabal turned up at the CLP meeting determined to introduce a paper critical of the newly elected Bailey.
The chief complaint was that Bailey had, surprise surprise, made negative comments about the great Corbyn. Had he not made any such criticism, he would have been unique among Sandwell’s Labour M.P.’s, most West Midlands Labour M.P.s and the bulk of the Parliamentary Labour party.
These are the people who know Corbyn through and through, not the easily impressed, possibly stoned, middle class teenagers at Glastonbury who allegedly found him a bit of a whizz.
A second complaint was that Bailey was one of the 49 Labour M.P.s who had defied Corbyn and voted to stay in the single market after Brexit. On this Bailey was subsequently wholly unapologetic saying “Getting the best possible access to the single market is vital to the UK and most importantly…it is vital for manufacturing in the West Midlands”.
Defending jobs against dogma seems the hallmark of a practical realist. Something Corbyn has never been accused of being.
Yet such is Corbyn’s enhanced post election position, that he was able to sack 3 shadow ministers who had voted alongside Bailey. A few months ago, Corbyn was having difficulty in finding M.P’s to fill positions in his shadow cabinet. Still it is good, for other parties, to see that he still has to rely upon the risible Diane Abbott, who seems to have experienced an almost miraculous return to health, to be back as shadow Home Secretary.
However, the West Bromwich West CLP meeting was having no truck with any Wednesbury fellow travelling trots. Their document was not entertained. So the comrades linked arms and marched out and, like all revolutionaries throughout the ages,………. went to the pub where Costigan regaled all and sundry of their principled and courageous stand against the forces of reaction in the Labour party.
Voters, not only in Wednesbury North, but throughout Sandwell, have to ask, if thinking of voting Labour, precisely what they are voting for and whether that party any longer stands for the interests of ordinary hard-working people.