Just a few days before the ballot papers are sent out, Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan has come out for Owen Smith.
Khan presented himself today as a Corbyn supporter who has reluctantly come to the conclusion that Owen Smith will be best for the Labour Party.
Fortunately these things are easy to check: Khan has always been strongly anti-Corbyn. Yes, he nominated Corbyn for leader along with a lot of other Blairites and Progress members, but admits he did not vote for the person he nominated.
In fact Khan appeared in the March 2016 leaked core list as "Hostile ", the most anti-Corbyn of the 5 categories of Labour MPs. Khan undoubtedly voted against Corbyn in the secret no confidence vote that began the coup.
Also in the "Hostile" group are Progress members Caroline Flint, Chuka Umunna, Yvette Cooper and Simon Danczuk. Even the coup ring leader Hilary Benn only made it as far as the "Core Group Negative", one level below "Hostile".
So it's no surprise that on the eve of the ballot Khan shows his true colours, with a carefully constructed and planned speech. What is shocking is his blatant misrepresentation of the position he has always held. How can we ever trust politicians like this?
Owen Smith has become the willing dupe of the Labour right
No
matter how hard you listen it’s impossible to hear the Blairite wing of
Labour. They have shut up shop. The Progress website looks like it’s
being maintained by interns, while there are no official Progress events
being held until the day after the leadership election (Angela Eagle and a venture capitalist, since you ask).
During their attempt to stop Corbyn getting on the ballot paper, the right launched Saving Labour
— there’s no information about where it gets its money, who its officers
are, what it’s statues are. It organised a day of street stalls, issued
three press releases and went quiet on 28 July.
It’s
been superseded by “Labour Tomorrow” — a private company with a
reported £250,000 war chest to fight Jeremy Corbyn once he wins. This
money will be distributed only to “moderate centre left organisations”.
No other other information provided on its website apart from a single blog post
by David Blunkett and Cold War union rightwinger Brenda Dean. No
explanation of what “centre left” means, again no indication of where
the money’s coming from.
The
purpose of this Blairite* dumb-show is to foist the entire job of
keeping Labour under the control of the neoliberal elite onto the soft
left around Owen Smith.
The
aim, clearly, is to reduce the ballot to: which face would you like to
see at PMQs? Perky, untested, bland, technocratic Owen, or gnarled,
unpredictable Jeremy? The massive differences in policy, strategy and
class orientation signalled by the emergence of Labour Tomorrow are not
to be allowed to surface in the actual election itself.
Thus,
Smith’s campaign has been designed as Jeremy Lite. Nearly as left wing
as Corbyn, only competent at playing the parliamentary game. Close to
Corbyn, but a bit “more patriotic” and less “metropolitan”.
To
facilitate the illusion that this is about two left wingers with
marginal disagreements, something else had to go quiet: the tabloid
media. There has been almost no right-wing criticism of Smith’s
faux-left programme in the papers.
Normally,
if a Labour figure stood up and, from thin air, plucked a £200bn
spending pledge based on a wealth tax, the Sun, the Mail and the
Telegraph would have reporters going through his bin-bags.
It’s
the same 0ver Smith’s call for a second referendum. The pr0-Brexit
tabloids would normally be eviscerating any Labour figure who called,
effectively, for people to be made to “vote until they vote the right
way”. But they’re silent over this.
Revealingly,
the second referendum call is the kind of gestural trick that you can
only pull off if you’ve no chance of winning. What if people vote for
Brexit again? — Smith has no answer and is never asked. But coping with
the actual Brexit process, as actual Leader of the Opposition, is the
practical question Corbyn has to deal with now. It involves
consultation, juggling the various Labour interest groups: Scotland, the
unions, northern MPs etc.
Smith
has named no putative shadow cabinet. He has made no attempt to define
his future relationship with the Blairites, or the Brown-era veterans
such as Yvette Cooper who stood down last Summer. There’s no plan
because the Owen campaign does not believe Owen himself would ever be
allowed to call the shots. If Corbyn is defeated it will be Peter
Mandelson, Brenda Dean and David Blunkett calling the shots. And behind
them millionaires like Michael Foster who called Corbyn’s supporters
“sturm abteilung”.
This
summer of Labour right omertà reached its nadir yesterday when Smith
inadvertently blurted out that he wanted Britain to negotiate “round the
table” with ISIS.
Corbyn
immediately and clearly rejected the idea. If Corbyn had said it
though, the right would have screamed blue murder. It was quietly put to
bed by Fleet Street, with a retraction. Instead the headlines were
about Corbyn failing to recognise a picture of B-list celebrities Ant
and Dec, with the New Statesman rushing out an immediate condemnation of Corbyn’s alleged “disrespect for popular culture”.
Smith
is part of a whole generation of Labour MPs who sounded left wing, but
you could never quite place what was left about them. They have
willingly shouldered the task of keeping Labour under the influence of
big pharma, big finance and big war. And they are losing.......
Note the biased question - not who do you want to lead the Labour Party but who [are the media telling you] is best placed to win a general electionand serve as Prime Minister.
In the 2015 Queen's Birthday Honours, Sir Paul Kenny was knighted 'for services to trades unions'.
All six pro-Corbyn supporters won the 6 seats up for election to the Labour Party National Executive:
BLACK, Ann 100,999 Elected
Eddie Izzard, Lost
SHAWCROFT, Christine 97,510 Elected
WEBBE, Claudia 92,377 Elected
WILLIAMS, Darren 87,003 Elected
WOLFSON, Rhea 85,687 Elected
WILLSMAN, Peter 81,863 Elected
REEVES, Ellie 72,514
IZZARD, Eddie 70,993
BAILEY, Bex 67,205
BAXTER, Johanna 60,367
DHANDA, Parmjit 53,838
AKEHURST, Luke 48,632
WHEELER, Peter 44,062
GALLAGHER, John 22,678
GUL, Amanat 14,693
A superb article by Paul Mason, ex economics editor of Channel 4 News and Newsnight, and author of 'Postcapitalism — A Guide to Our Future':
Paul Mason
In the war movie The Way Ahead,
David Niven is in charge of a platoon of working class conscripts, who
skive their way through basic training. In their first real battle
they’re forced to launch an attack on the elite Afrika Korps. As they go
over the top Niven quips: “This is for the day on the training ground
we missed”.
For
the Labour left, the last five weeks have seen the same kind of
payback. Last year’s victory was too easy: it felt like a bloodless
revolution. But they’re never bloodless.
Corbyn
won the leadership election in 2015 almost by accident. He wasted
months trying to operate a “collegiate” shadow cabinet, half of whom
turned out to be leaking and sabotaging everything he did, and preparing
to overthrow him. The movement that brought him to power got shunted
off into local ward meetings, got bored and demobilised. His own
leadership operation was, at times, shambolic.
But
the revolt of 170 Labour MPs following the Brexit referendum has now
forced the left, unwillingly, to wage the fight that was always coming.
With Corbyn assured of a place on the ballot paper, winning again will
still be a challenge — but not the main one.
The
real challenge is to make this leadership campaign the springboard for
winning a general election. That, in turn, demands we spell out an
alternative political strategy to the one inherited from Blair, Brown
and Ed Miliband.
To do this involves facing the following facts squarely:
A hard-core of Labour coup plotters intend to destroy Labour as an effective opposition between now and 2020.
Corbyn to become prime minister means Labour will have to win as an insurrection or not at all (For the sake of clarity, this is a metaphor not an actual call for armed insurrection).
Labour
has suddenly become a mass party. It can become, as Corbyn says, a
social movement. But this would be something new in Labour politics and
therefore difficult to achieve and hold together.
The
route to power also involves Labour itself becoming a more formal
alliance and, in turn, being prepared to make political alliances across
party lines.
Understanding the coup
Day
after day, the tactics of the coup plotters have evolved. It began with
veteran Blairites, quickly spilled over into a disorientated group of
soft-left young MPs and was organised in the background by the Blairite
apparatus. The sole aim was to remove Corbyn: lest we forget, Angela
Eagle launched her doomed campaign with not a single policy.
Then a pattern of
political coercion emerged: create a spurious victim narrative so that
the Labour membership, whose democratic decision was being stolen from
them, could be portrayed as a bunch of mysogynist thugs.
Then
Corbyn’s enemies on the NEC suspended the entire local apparatus of the
party and excluded 130,000 recent joiners from the vote. They used
millionaire money to attempt to get a court to exclude Corbyn from the
ballot. They used the Sun and to encourage non-Labour voters to join the
party defeat Corbyn. They dragged Labour’s reputation through the mud
of tabloid journalism with slanders, willingly repeated in the broadcast
media.....(continued here)
