What a useless shower the Labour party is right now. What a snivelling dance of fools. And I don’t just mean the new lot, under Jeremy Corbyn, although his ongoing decision to surround himself with a team of people who seem to have each been tasked, individually, with emphasising a different bad thing about him does take some beating. I mean the whole train set, radicals and moderates alike. This is a party, right now, reaping what it has sown, which is piety, tribalism and a sort of over-weening preachiness. And now, to mix my metaphors, it is getting bitten by all of them.
Last week, Labour suspended a man called Andrew Fisher, who was, and remains, Jeremy Corbyn’s head of policy. It might sound odd, that ‘and remains’ bit, but don’t blame me. Fisher, inasmuch as I can make out, is mainly tasked with reminding people that although the new leader looks like a genial Captain Birdseye, he actually hails from a section of the party that hates almost everybody else, even more than the rest of it hates almost everybody else, which is saying something.
Fisher’s more recent crime, though, was party disloyalty, via tweets. In part, this involved calling the Miliband shadow cabinet ‘the most abject collection of complete shite’, although having met people who were actually in the Miliband shadow cabinet who would have merrily called it much the same, I’d say this seems wholly forgivable.
More dangerous was his endorsement of the Class War candidate in Croydon South. Fisher now claims this was a joke, and may even be telling the truth, because only Oxbridge trustafarians from west London support Class War these days. No matter. Article something of Labour’s terribly important something or other declares that anybody Labour who joins or supports somebody who isn’t Labour can’t be Labour any more.
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