Kick 'Em Out!

Thank God we're only a couple of days away from polling day and the Tories finally getting the electoral kicking they've so richly deserved for the part fourteen years - if the polls are reliable, that is.  Hopefully we'll see hundreds of Tory MPs suddenly unemployed.  Personally, I'd like to the bastards chased out of their former constituencies by mobs with whips, baseball bats and the like, shouting that 'we don't want your sort round here' as they pursue them to the boundaries of the constituency.  Maybe pelt them with eggs and rotten fruit, too.  Yeah, that's right, I'm a petty minded vindictive bastard.  Fourteen years of Tory corruption can do that to you.  If the polling is to be believed, it looks like Corbyn will be kicked out of his constituency by Labour as well - so much for the Cult of Corbyn's claims that he was such a good MP and so popular that, as an independent, he could defeat the official Labour candidate.  Hah!  Where's your fucking messiah now, eh?  Maybe they should have nailed him to a cross and carted him around Islington telling people that he was such a saint he was even prepared to suffer for their sins.  Because that seems to be their whole schtick - that as Labour leader, Corbyn was uniquely attacked by the right and is therefore a martyr to the cause.  Which is absolute bollocks.  Some of us have been Labour supporters long enough to remember the absolute onslaughts of personal attacks that the likes of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock had to endure as Labour leaders.  They were far worse than anything Corbyn had to take - not to mention that a lot of his bad press was self inflicted as the result of his extremely poor political judgement.

Whilst I'd hope that Corbyn's defeat would signal a withering of the Cult of Corbyn, I'm sure that his hardcore fanatics will simply see it as a another stage of his journey to martyrdom.  They've been out in force on social media not, as you might expect, trashing the Tories, but instead busily attacking Labour.  Just yesterday I came across one of their number trying to turn the possible Labour landslide on Thursday into some kind of defeat for Keir Starmer.  This was based on the fact that his victory would be based upon gaining only 40% of the vote, marginally less than his hero Corbyn had achieved in 2017, (neatly ignoring the fact that he still didn't win).  As ever, this is comparing apples and pears - no two elections are ever exactly alike in their dynamics.  At the moment, this election is projected to have a low turnout (also Starmer's fault, apparently), whereas 2017 had a higher than usual turnout.  It is highly possible that, this time around, many Tory voters, feeling alienated by what their party has become, will simply not vote at all, which, combined with Reform splitting the extreme right vote, will mean that Labour will need a lower proportion of the total vote to achieve a majority.  By contrast, back in 2017, Brexit was still an open wound, with both sides in the debate mobilised to support whoever they thought might be more likely to back their side of the argument.  Labour ended up being the beneficiary of the anti-Brexit protest vote, (something the Cult of Corbyn still refuse to grasp), despite being led by a leaver and not being committed to remaining in the EU.  But hey, since when have the Cult of Corbyn ever worried about logical analysis and facts?

It isn't that I think that the Labour Party doesn't need to be bolder and more left-wing than it currently is - it is just that I'm a realist and accept that, in order to change anything, you have first to actually gain power.  Which was something we were never going to do under the shambolic leadership of Corbyn.  The electorate didn't trust him and weren't going to accept many of the policies Labour was proposing under him.  If you try to go too far, too fast, radical policy wise, you are likely to scare the electorate.  So, you start moderate and once you've gained power and shown the electorate that your kind of policies are beneficial to them, you can start to push the envelope and get more radical.  If the Cult of Corbyn were true socialists (as they claim), then their immediate priority should be to start giving ordinary working class people hope by seeing that this Tory government is voted out of power and replaced by a Labour government, any Labour government, which is far more likely to do some good.  But that would mean that they would have to start taking some responsibility for decisions made while in power - which is something they'd rather not do, instead preferring to posture on the sidelines, eternally criticising others for not being ideologically pure (the pursuit of which is apparently more important than the pursuit of meaningful power) and reveling in what they see as their positions of moral superiority.  Thankfully, the rest of us live in the real world and understand the compromises we sometimes have to make in order to secure at least some progress.