Tag Archives: Jeremy Corbyn

And the sign at the side of the road pointed to Mars

Posted on December 3, 2015 by Tim Hall

I have taken what should hopefully be a brief absence from Twitter. The alternative would have been to unfollow or mute significant numbers of genuine friends, and I’m not willing to do that. It’s alll got very ugly since Parliament voted on airstrikes against ISIS in Syria. The mood reminds me of the days immediately after the death of Princess Diana, and not in a good way. Twitter is not the place for nuance.

Labour MP Jess Phillips sums up how I feel quite accurately.

My husband was once asked which super power he would have if he could pick. He gave the utterly unbombastic answer “the power of hindsight”. While I’m spying on you with the invisibility power that I picked, he will be resting on the laurels of never making a mistake. Mine is more fun in the short term but his eliminates a life of pain and hand-wringing. What a clever man he is.

Without this power I remain uncertain. What I am certain of is that those who are so certain that they are right are certainly not as clever or good as they think they are.

Indeed. As was said on Twitter a while back about a completely unrelated issue, if you really don’t know all the answers, it’s better to be zero than a minus one.

In this time of great uncertainty, we need some proper grown-ups in charge, and the people we do have don’t measure up. David Cameron comes over as little more than an opportunistic spiv with no underlying principles, who wants to go to war in an exercise of nationalist willy-waving. Even if he’s right, he’s probably right for the wrong reasons, and it’s hard to blame anyone for not buying what he’s selling.

But Corbyn is no better, an inflexible ideologue who, even if he’s a decent person at heart, is too weak a leader to be able to control the more thuggish elements amongst his own supporters. The personal abuse I’ve seen on Twitter towards those who supported the Government, especially women, has been quite appalling. And these people claim to be on the side of “peace”.

In terms of weighing up whether action or inaction is the lesser of two evils, among party leaders Tim Farron comes over as the only adult in the room. Even he may be wrong, but I’m more inclined to trust his judgement than that of Cameron or Corbyn.

It’s not as if a tiny number of planes is going to make a great deal of difference anyway. To defeat ISIS, something that does need to be done whatever the “peace” movement might say, will require putting together some sort of anti-ISIS alliance on the ground. That will need a lot of diplomacy and may well require treading on the toes of some of our supposed allies. And even that would be a fruitless game of whack-a-mole unless we also discredit their ideology, something that may take a generation to accomplish.

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Will Oldham be Labour’s Eastleigh?

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Tim Hall

The Oldham by-election is going to be interesting. I’m not going to try and predict the result; maybe Labour will hold on with a much-reduced majority, or maybe Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour will get a very bloody nose at the hands of UKIP. Labour activists are speaking of his unpopularity on the doorsteps, and some Corbyn loyalists are shooting the messenger. Labour Twitter is ugly at the moment.

But even if Labour hold on, it will still be their Eastleigh.

Eastleigh, if you remember, was the by-election following Chris Huhne’s resignation, narrowly retained by the Liberal Democrats with the help of the opposing vote being split. But it was a pyrrhic victory, which allowed the party to remain in denial about the electoral consequences of coalition with the Tories and sleepwalk into electoral disaster this May.

A defeat at the hands of UKIP might actually be better for Labour, and for Britain.

Even though the Liberal Democrats have no chance of winning, they’re still taking this by-election seriously. This is a constituency where they came second in 2010, only to fall to fourth in 2015. If they manage to increase the share of the vote it will be a sign of the party’s slow recovery. It’s not inconceivable that they might even push the Tories into fourth place, especially if UKIP manages to squeeze the Tory vote.

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Seamas Milne and the hard-left bubble

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Tim Hall

Seamas MilneI’m no Labour supporter but I was willing to give Jeremy Corbyn a chance to revitalise the British left and shake up the establishment consensus. I’d hoped he’s galvanise a broad-based movement rather than retreat into sectarian zealotry. Unfortunately his appointment of Seamas Milne to the powerful post of communications director does not bode well.

Milne gives every impression he’s an unreconstructed and unrepentant Stalinist who sometimes seemed as though he was only employed as a columnist for The Guardian to make some of their other leftist writers look like voices of reason by comparison. He’s close to a caricature of the worst kind of public-school leftist, the product of an expensive private school and Oxbridge education that’s filled his head with Marxist theory, undiluted with much contact with ordinary working people.

It’s as if David Cameron had appointed the notorious Daily Telegraph columnist James Delingpole to the equivalent post for the Conservatives. Except worse; Delingpole is a noxious button-pushing rightwing troll, while Milne is a staring-eyed True Believer. Milne’s acolytes are meeping about “smears”, except that most of those so-called smears are links to his Guardian op-eds, which let people read, in context, what he said about everything from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the murder of Lee Rigby. And none of it is pretty.

Searching for “Seamas Milne” on Twitter and the overwhelming message is dismay from across the centre-left. This hard-hitting piece from Labour PPC Kate Godrey sums up that dismay rather well. As for Milne’s cheerleaders, a blog called The Canary thinks Jeremy Corbyn’s choice of Comms Chief should delight his supporters and terrify his enemies which actually speaks volumes about the delusional bubble inhabited by much of the hard left. It’s difficult to imagine that bubble surviving contact with electoral reality on the doorsteps next May.

Liberal Democrat blogger Stephen Tall nails it rather well.

Of more interest to the Labour party is whether he will be any good at the job. Key question: will he be able to see issues clear-sightedly from his opponents’ point of view? “Never neglect to think like a Tory,” advises John McTernan, Tony Blair’s former Director of Political Operations – a job title which guarantees his words will be dismissed by Corbynistas, whose only true experience of fighting and winning elections is against their own side.

The truth they’re unable to accept is that a hard-left Labour Party has little chance of being elected unless Britain suffers a Greece-style economic meltdown. And if you’re really hoping for a Greek-style meltdown so you can benefit from it politically, then you’ve not the sort of person anyone should trust with political power.

And this is before we start on how the whole controversy is distracting attention away from the really nasty stuff the Tories are doing.

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Jeremy Corbyn

Posted on August 22, 2015 by Tim Hall

As a Liberal Democrat it’s tempting to grab a big bowl of popcorn over the Labour Party’s meltdown on the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn winning the leadership ballot. The latest episode is the rejection of many new members who “don’t uphold the values of the party”. While some of those are people who publicly supported other parties in the General Election, and we don’t really know the scale, in the event of a close result it’s going to undermine the legitimacy of whoever wins.

Although conventional wisdom is that a Corbyn-led Labour Party will be unelectable, we have no idea what likely to happen if he wins. The truth is that Labour is a hollowed-out shell of a party which no longer knows what it actually supposed to stand for, merely satisfied to triangulate in pursuit of power and let the Tories set the political agenda. That’s why they lost the election.

My guess is that a critical mass of Labour members have concluded that none of the other three candidates look remotely like election winners either, so they’ve put their faith in someone who, even if they can’t win, will at least widen the Overton Window in favour of things that won’t emerge from Tory-leaning think-tanks. A serious challenge to the austerity narrative would be a good start.

We can’t assume that Jeremy Corbyn intends to lead the party into the next general election. He does have far too much negative baggage, especially his links with anti-Semitic Islamists and his support for the IRA rather than the constitutional nationalists during the Northern Ireland troubles, and this will count against his party in the ballot box. But perhaps the plan is to spend two or three years revitalising the grassroots and changing the national conversation before stepping down in favour of someone else?

Liberal Democrat blogger Jonathan Calder is predicting a Corbyn victory will be bad for the Liberal Democrats. But I’m not so sure. The truth is we really don’t know what will happen. And if there’s another economic crash, all bets are off.

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