Telling it like it is, man that’s gotta sting!
Time to root out Corbynites once and for all
Philip Collins
The only way to change an institution is to change the management. As long as a toxic leader remains in situ there is no hope that the institution can recover its standing. This was the force behind Sir Keir Starmer’s line, at prime minister’s questions, that the Labour Party is “under new management”. And this is the force behind his decisions to eradicate the [ censored word]emitism that has stained the Labour Party.
Mr Corbyn himself responded with his characteristic lack of grace and style by declaring the decision to be political rather than legal. The left immediately promised hellfire. The fringe websites and alt commentators were aflame with anger and threats of recrimination. In the final moments before the settlement, lawyers for the former high command of the Labour Party tried to stymie the payments and the apology that was then issued on behalf of their successors.
Mr Corbyn still cannot seem to fathom, and being a bear of little brain probably never will fathom, that this is a political fight as well as a legal fight. Even if the decision to settle were purely political, Sir Keir made the right call. The new manager has to do everything he can to make sure he is rid of the last one.
Sir Keir has made an assured start as leader. The position of leader of the opposition is a notoriously tough gig and the impressive figure he cuts has already been reflected in his ratings among the public. He has restored decency and gravity to British politics which went missing when the two principals were Johnson and Corbyn.
For someone who allowed two decades of Labour membership to lapse over the party’s unfitness to govern, as I did, it was quietly moving to hear the shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, deliver his urgent question in the House of Commons on Tuesday about Russian interference in the Brexit referendum. Mr Thomas-Symonds was measured, serious and properly concerned about national security. He was doing the work of an opposition that has a credible pretension to govern.
Labour had lost the sheen of credibility and that is why, despite Sir Keir’s fine start, the Conservatives remain ahead in the opinion polls. The 20-point lead has gone — classic Dom — but Labour has not yet established itself such that it can expect to be in the lead itself. The Corbyn period has tarnished the party and the public understandably wants more reassurance that it has changed than Sir Keir has been able, thus far, to provide. Change has to be dramatised over and over again, given that most people, most of the time, are not watching. This is why decisive responses to incidents like the libel case are so vital. These are the moments when the public looks up and notes that the place is under new management and the fear and loathing that marked the old management have gone.
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There are grave lessons for the party here. The first is not to yield to ideological temptation. To turn a great party into a fanzine for one of its factions is to court oblivion. The response of the Corbyn team to the allegation that Labour was not really serious about investigating [ censored word]emitism was to pour scorn on the journalistic ethics of the BBC. As John Ware put it in a piece in The Jewish Chronicle: “Labour’s defamatory blast triggered a year-long fusillade of falsehoods from a stream of left-wing bloggers, ‘media activists’, Labour’s ‘people powered’ Momentum faction, and alt-left outlets — all of whom share a conviction that the mainstream media is fundamentally dishonest.”
To declare war on all of the mainstream media is a disastrously stupid strategy for any political leader. In due course Sir Keir will be well advised to be much more forensic than this in his choice of media enemies. He will need some — a media bogeyman is always handy in politics — but it most certainly ought not to be the BBC.
The second lesson is personal. The chaos of the Corbyn leadership is what happens if you take the most stupid person in the building and put him in charge. Public life can only bear so much stupidity. Bereft of intellectual weight, with nothing much in his head and painfully conscious of the deficiency, Mr Corbyn’s options were to lean heavily on unctuous self-righteousness or, when that failed, to lash out. Unable to provide good reasons, or any reasons, for his decisions, he simply acted with erratic impunity and got instantly testy if anyone questioned his authority. He was always a rather pathetic figure, if briefly quite a dangerous one. Meanwhile his entourage of sycophants, the Milnes, Murphys and McCluskeys, went out to argue for a man they always regarded as a useful idiot.
If the left decides to start a civil war in the party, so be it. In fact it would be a highly uncivil war as Corrie Drew, a Labour candidate at the 2019 election, showed when she posted a picture of herself, in response to the libel case, offering a single-finger salute to John Ware. Classy, these lefties. This is just the reaction that Labour needs.
There was a lot of talk during Mr Corbyn’s leadership that the Labour Party would have to split. The agony then was on the right of the party, as loyal Labour people wondered whether they would ever get their party back. That sort of talk will return, but this time with the left as the probable instigators. The party does contain two ideological groups who ought not to be glued together — the social democrats and the socialists. A split would be traumatic but, in the end, cathartic.
There may well be a casus belli because the saga of Labour’s [ censored word]emitism is not over yet. The full publication of the report by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, which could arrive next month, is likely to be devastating reading, if the account of the Panorama whistleblowers is anything to go by. If it is, this will be another occasion on which the Labour leader has to be emphatic and decisive and there is an obvious course of action. Get rid of the toxic leader.
The real catharsis, the real way to show the world that Labour has changed, will be to kick Corbyn out. Take away the whip, expel him from the party, point the way out for his nasty band of facilitators.
