Paul Mason on the silence of the Blairites
There’ll be no Blairite support for Owen Smith – they’re already lining up another ‘coup’.
Broadcast political journalist Paul Mason asks why the Blairites aren’t getting behind Owen Smith.
Is it because they’re already planning to stab him in the back and replace him with David Miliband?
(If so – from Mr Miliband’s own comments – it’s a forlorn hope!)
No matter how hard you listen it’s impossible to hear the Blairite wing of Labour. They have shut up shop.
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.
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.
At the Gateshead hustings, and even more so at the Nottingham one televised by the BBC, something that should have been obvious about Smith finally emerged. He doesn’t seem to believe in anything.
With Owen Smith it is never clear where, on the road from BBC Wales, via Pfizer, via the years as a special adviser in Belfast surrounded by all those nice members of MI5, via losing Blaenau Gwent to an independent because he was too identified with Blair… at what point did Owen become converted to Jeremy Lite left radical socialism?
This combination — of high personal ambition and the lack of a permanent belief system — is exactly the right attribute for someone whose purpose is to be a placeholder for the Blairite counter-revolution. Who can forget, after all, that Angela Eagle — the original placeholder — launched her campaign without a single policy.
Smith is there to remove the grip of Corbyn, and Corbynism on those few parts of the Labour machine it controls. After that the money amassed by Saving Labour, Progress and Labour Tomorrow will be used to fund the party’s re-conversion to a safe tool of the global elite.
Every signal from the Labour right appears to point towards a second coup against Corbyn, once he wins the leadership election, which will make Owen Smith’s current effort look like a sideshow.
Source: The sound of Blairite silence — Mosquito Ridge — Medium
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Isn’t it funny, the “Blairites” are not used to people telling them “No” as they have done here, so they just gear up to try again, knowing full well the damage it does to the labour party overall and the damage it does to the people, who lose the only viable opposition against the merciless tories.
What can the right wing of Labour say? Yes we uphold whole heartedly every lie Owen Smith is gulling you with and as soon as he is leader, we will ride rough shod over every policy HE promised you and ignore the membership? To say he represents them is to admit that Corbyn’s policies were never the problem in the first place, it was his huge support which they wanted to break. Hence the “leftist – sometimes” Owen Smith choice.
PS. Alex above is right. The next phase of Labour right will be fiercely vicious as we have never seen so far.
BEWARE LABOUR TOMORROW
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE
DEMORALIZATION:
The objective is to erode your opponents morale. That encourages them to retreat, surrender or defect rather than defeating them in combat….
DO NOT LEAVE THE LABOUR PARTY
This is exactlu what ‘they’ want you to do.
DO NOT FALL FOR IT
It’s what Corbyn loyalist Richard Burgon was warning against when he wrote the following on June 26, and he was right.
“Outrageous? Anti-democratic? Offensive to ordinary Party members? That’s exactly the point. I’ve seen quite a few Labour activists on social media declaring that if a ‘coup’ takes place, they will leave the Labour Party in disgust.
That’s exactly what those plotting to scrub out the Party’s democratic decision last summer want to happen. For some, a much smaller and less active Labour Party is a price worth paying for a return to the status quo that they’re comfortable with – a status quo which lost Labour 5 million votes between 1997 and 2010, saw Labour decimated in Scotltand and saw Labour end up as being viewed as part of a political establishment that’s not to be trusted.
For some, the plan is to reconfigure the Labour Party’s membership to one at ease with their Blair-inspired politics through the tactic of disrespecting members and the democratic process to such an extent that members resign in droves.
For the sake of democracy, let’s not give them what they want.