The Labour Party is beyond help
Just when you thought the Labour Party might be about to have a rethink, it turns on Trevor PhillIps (the one man in Race Relations who has become a national treasure) and suspends him on the basis of “Islamophobia”. This is very bad news for Keir Starmer, because it means that – even if he wins, which looks likely – the most powerful bodies in the Party are still run by fanatics glad to see the back of anyone who’s popular – for example, Kate Hoey.
As I posted in late January, this was always going to be true: whoever wins is going to have to deal with sore losers, because Labour is no longer a Party; rather, it is a remnant of something very decent once upon a time that got captured by guilty public school boys in the 1950s and technocrats in the 1960s, nearly captured by Militant Unionchic in the 1980s, and then finally penetrated (in every sense) by Momentum after the failure of Blairite Metrochic in the Naughties. The Party will become, more and more, a sort of Brexit2 on a smaller scale….but with the same divisive outcome.
All the fascist fringes that made Labour unelectable for eighteen years have been rebranded as ecofreaks, radical feminists, pc harbingers and race whingers. The biggest and most solid voting franchise they have is British Islam, and they will do anything to keep them on board – be it looking away during gang-rapes, seeing 25 year old males as unaccompanied harmless children, or expelling a black man who – like most of us – flatly refuses to believe that some kind of “phobia” about Islam is the real problem here.
Equally, the British Muslim Council wants the closest ties possible to Labour, because Leftist ninnies offer the best chance of giving them the intolerant, irresponsible power they crave.
But what an odd marriage it is. Religious zealot misogynist male supremacists hand in hand with atheistic radical feminist forced egalitarians. Shurely shum mishfit there, Mushstafa? Not so much hypocrisy as hypercrisy. A veritable Nazi-Soviet pact for our times.
I once met Trevor Phillips – many years ago, and only briefly. His calm decency and ultra-keen intelligence really have to be experienced close up, for he is a great man. He told me that the first time he went to the BBC to be interviewed, they thought he was an applicant for a cleaning job vacancy. That is the sort of unconscious and pernicious racism we all have inside us somewhere – black or white.
But it was a long time ago. A long, long time ago – when Britons woke up to the need for a change in attitude, only to discover much later that their natural tolerance had evoked a propensity for taking a mile among some elements of non-Caucasion immigrants. Intermarriage and tough-love community leaders have ensured that, in the end, West Indian Brits have made some progress on a number of social and economic dimensions.
In 2020 however, Decency Britain faces an altogether more serious threat – a style of (largely Tory) national management that wants the Establishment to have more and more money for doing less and less, while brazenly ignoring certain Civil Rights promised to our People sixty or more years ago – ranging from State Pensions that arrive when the recipients are still extant to security of employment tenure at a basic level.
The New Borisonia is getting away with it at the moment, because it is (rightly) attacking thoroughly disliked enemies such as Sir Humphrey and the Barnier Brussels Conglomerate.
But make no mistake: Johnson is a slippery eel and has not lost sight of his vision of a Britain modelled on Singapore, in which cronies get taxi deals based on erroneous information, kids in Richmond get rogered by Tory Councillors, and media monsters tap the nation’s phones.
In that context, the crisis within Labour is a crisis for all of us. By all means relegate collectivism and umpteen other isms to the footnotes of history but be careful what you wish for. We need a new movement of some kind to act as an ideology-free answer to the dangerous lunacies of neocon alliance and neoliberal economics.
The idea that a “reformed” Labour Party could fulfil that role is almost as silly as the idea of a reformed European Union. They are so far away from being “on it” when it comes to the BoJo case, one might as well give the task to an unbalanced dysfunctional teenage girl from Sweden.
Opposers come in all the sizes and all the colours in Cruel Britannia. Every last one of them (with the exception of the Waspi/Backto60 axis) is busy examining molehills under a magnifying glass while asking us to believe that what they’ve found is the Himalayas.
Do I think that mutualist, grassroots movement is going to happen? To be frank, no. In the Kingdom of the Mad, the mildly depressed man might become King. But if enough people are comfortable, the madness is ignored in favour of the telly and Netflix.
I should let Mr Phillips have the last word:
‘…..the phrase “administrative suspension” grabbed my attention. These words signal banishment from a community that I have inhabited for decades: friends, colleagues, even family may be compelled to shun me. Significantly, my indictment concerns matters of faith, doctrine and dissent. It is written, not in the language of a democratic, open political movement but in the cold-eyed, accusatory prose of the zealot.’
The Slog 