Tag Archives: Alastair Campbell

Will Jeremy Corbyn really step down as leader if Labour loses a general election?

Jeremy Corbyn: He’ll win the next election or quit as Labour leader, according to the shadow chancellor in a new interview.

The Independent is running a disturbing report that claims Jeremy Corbyn will quit as Labour leader if the party loses at the expected general election later this year.

The claim is from an interview between former New Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell and shadow chancellor John McDonnell, in GQ magazine.

Mr McDonnell is quoted as follows, after being asked if Mr Corbyn would “stay on”: “I can’t see so. What we’d do is as the tradition, which is have an election for a new leader.”

He added: “I think it is the same for my own personal position.”

This is unfortunate as it gives every troublemaker in the UK a reason to campaign hard against Labour – to end the hope of a government that serves the majority, rather than a greedy few.

This Writer certainly expects Mr Campbell to try to capitalise on this as, being a staunch ally of the neoliberal Blairite project, he’ll want to see the reinstallation of an anonymous suit as Labour leader with a brief to make it as close to the Conservative Party as possible, in order to deny us any real choice in a general election.

The Liberal Democrats and the Tories, under the unspeakable Jo Swinson and the abominable Boris Johnson, will be much worse.

The forthcoming election is therefore shaping up to be a battle for the soul of the nation.

Will Mr Corbyn’s supporters fight to win?

Or do we hand the United Kingdom to the forces of darkness?

Source: Corbyn to step down as leader if Labour doesn’t win general election, McDonnell says | The Independent

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‘Spiteful’? Watson’s comment on Campbell expulsion shows he’s unfit to be Labour deputy leader

He’s got his coat: Tom Watson’s support for Blairites who voted for other parties means he should be ejected from his position as Labour deputy leader – and preferably from the party altogether.

Tom Watson could not have given Labour Party members a better reason to remove him. He is a hypocrite – and a low one at that.

Mr Watson was quiet as a mouse when Labour members who supported Jeremy Corbyn were expelled by the thousand for the heinous crime of – for example – voting Green before they had even joined his party.

Labour’s deputy leader, who has a famous taste for pop music, had nothing to say when one member was kicked out for voicing her enjoyment of the Foo Fighters in Anglo-Saxon terms.

But when Alastair Campbell gets the boot for voting Liberal Democrat in the EU elections, up he squeaks.

Not good enough. If that’s what he thinks, he should be quitting the party of his own volition.

If he won’t (and I think he is himself too spiteful and vain to do the honourable thing), then it is time he was challenged for his position as Labour’s deputy leader. He disgraces it.

I note that The Guardian lists three other Blairite Labour members who voted for other parties and look forward to seeing reports of their expulsion as well.

Rules are rules. Mr Watson liked them well enough when he could use them to get his way.

Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, has said the decision to expel Alastair Campbell for voting Lib Dem was spiteful and members who voted for other parties in the European elections should be given an amnesty.

In a rebuke to Labour’s HQ, Watson said members who voted for other parties should be listened to rather than punished. Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor and a leading advocate for a people’s vote, admitted after polls had closed that he had voted Liberal Democrat.

The former Labour home secretary and party chairman Charles Clarke said he had also voted Liberal Democrat in the election, while the ex-defence secretary Bob Ainsworth said he voted Green.

Fiona Mactaggart, a former Labour minister, admitted she also voted Lib Dem and said it was “time for us all to declare: ‘I am Spartacus.’”

Watson said members who had voted elsewhere to send a message to Labour had been right about the party’s lack of clarity on the issue of a second referendum, compared with parties such as the Greens, Lib Dems and the SNP.

Source: Tom Watson calls Alastair Campbell’s expulsion ‘spiteful’ | Politics | The Guardian

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Alastair Campbell expelled from Labour – but he thinks HE has been mistreated

Alastair Campbell: He thinks he has been mistreated.

Sour grapes from the man who tweets as @campbellclaret – after being expelled from Labour for supporting another party, he intends to appeal.

But it’s an open-and-shut case: He has admitted voting for the Liberal Democrats and as a Labour Party member he knows that is an automatic-expulsion offence.

And what does he mean by “hard not to point out difference in the way antisemitism cases have been handled”?

He knows – or should know – that all cases are investigated by the so-called Compliance Unit. People have their memberships suspended while investigations take place – except in his case, where he admitted the offence, none was necessary.

I didn’t see him complaining when my Leftie colleague Kerry-Ann Mendoza revealed she had been booted out for voting Green, before she even joined the Labour Party. That was scandalous – not his own treatment.

And anti-Semitism? I know from personal experience that people accused of anti-Semitism have their memberships suspended while investigations take place. Then the matter can go one of three ways:

Rank-and-file members may receive a semblance of justice, according to whether or not they have behaved in an anti-Semitic way, the circumstances informing that behaviour and the severity of any offence.

If the accused is a member of the party hierarchy, an excuse will be found to ensure that no investigation takes place and the Compliance Unit will refuse to engage in any correspondence on the subject.

If the accused is a high-profile supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, an excuse will be found to expel them. Any excuse will do. The party’s reasons for expelling me bear absolutely no resemblance to the charges under which I was suspended.

And I don’t have any right of appeal, Mr Campbell!

Perhaps he’s right and we should be looking at the difference between Mr Campbell’s treatment and that of people accused of anti-Semitism.

But let’s not for a moment entertain the possibility that he is the one who has been mistreated.

Source: Labour expels Alastair Campbell from party | Politics | The Guardian

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Reality check: John McDonnell argued strongly for Labour on Question Time

John McDonnell presented a very solid case for the current Labour leadership, despite loud but misguided opposition from other Question Time panellists, and even chairman David Dimbleby himself [Image: BBC].

John McDonnell presented a very solid case for the current Labour leadership, despite loud but misguided opposition from other Question Time panellists, and even chairman David Dimbleby himself [Image: BBC].

Media coverage of the BBC’s Question Time on Thursday seems to have reached a consensus that Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, and Tony Blair’s former press secretary Alastair Campbell dragged it down to the level of a slanging match. They didn’t.

In fact, if you watch the programme critically, it shows Mr McDonnell defending himself against attacks from all four other panellists – and David Dimbleby to boot! – and coming out of it extremely well.

Yes, criticisms were aired. But they are old arguments, long since defeated in dedicated political forums such as This Blog.

Alastair Campbell said he was worried Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour appeals to a narrow base – it doesn’t. Labour’s membership is now the largest in Europe and they don’t all come from the same background, no matter how many times New Labour holdouts try to suggest it.

Mr Campbell said Labour needs a policy agenda that will allow it to win elections – but both current leadership candidates agree on almost every policy point (at least, they do if Owen Smith means what he says) so it isn’t an argument with which Mr Corbyn can be beaten. He followed this up with a warning that Labour couldn’t win on a “hard left” platform – but of course Mr Corbyn is a centre-left politician and would not propose hard-left policies.

He said Momentum, the organisation set up to support Mr Corbyn’s policies, is divisive. This is a point that can be argued about Progress, or Labour First which is currently trying to ‘rig’ Labour’s national conference, if secretary Luke Akehurst is to be believed. Much misbehaviour has been laid at Momentum’s door without the slightest scrap of evidence, and claims of anti-Semitism have been grossly overblown; accusations against individuals have been dismissed while the organisation supported Labour’s only Jewish candidate in the recent elections to the National Executive Committee.

He said Labour was slipping back into the politics of the 1980s, with a “nastiness” not seen since then – which is easy to say when nobody requests clarification of what it means. This Writer has seen no such slippage by the leadership, and any “nastiness” seems to have been initiated by the part of the party that Mr Campbell supports – anti-Corbyn MPs. There is far more to be said about this, though, and I hope to produce a useful article in the near future.

Mr Campbell said there is “an element that prefers power in the party to power in the country”. True – but I would argue that this element is the remnant of New Labour, rather than Jeremy Corbyn, his shadow cabinet and supporters. Look at the so-called ‘chicken coup’ of late June/early July. That was triggered by New Labour hangers-on who realised that Mr Corbyn was moving Labour in a direction away from their preferred policies – policies that had lost two general elections in a row. And (again) look at the antics of Mr Akehurst and Labour First – working to disenfranchise the vast majority of Labour members by arranging support for anti-Corbyn resolutions in the conference.

Mr Campbell also repeated the mantra that Labour needs to get Conservative voters to support the party. John McDonnell countered that, later in the programme, by pointing out that New Labour haemorrhaged five million votes between 1997 and 2010. This is a point that Mr Campbell hotly disputed – and wrongly. In the 1997 general election, 31.3 million people voted and Labour took 13.5 million votes. By 2010, Labour’s vote had fallen to 8.6 million – a drop of 4.9 million, which is five million when rounded-up. Mr Campbell cannot even argue that all those voters went to the Conservatives because the Tory vote was only 1.1 million greater than in 1997 and the number of people who voted in the 2010 election was 29.7 million – 1.6 million fewer than in 1997.

Mr Campbell also said the following: “The first line in our constitution is that we exist to be a force in Parliament. That’s why the MPs, the PLP, are so important and they are being sidelined.”

Give him his due: it’s the first decent argument I’ve heard for us to give extra weight to the support of the Parliamentary Labour Party for the leader. But there’s a fairly huge snag.

What is the point of having any Labour MPs at all if they are not following the wishes of the vast majority of their party – a party of more than half a million people – but have instead decided to pursue an agenda of their own, as the 171 or more rebels against Mr Corbyn’s leadership have done?

The very next line in the constitution states: “The Party shall bring together members and supporters who share its values to develop policies, make communities stronger through collective action and support, and promote the election of Labour Party representatives at all levels of the democratic process.”

Clearly, this means representatives – which means MPs among others – are elected to enact the policies developed by Labour Party members and supporters – not to ignore the wishes of their party and engage in egotistical and wasteful acts of rebellion.

So, according to the party’s own constitution, the Labour rebels have broken their own rules and will need to account for their behaviour in the future.

Now look at John McDonnell’s comments – most of which were made in response to attacks by other panellists.

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn has won every Parliamentary by-election that has taken place. It has won all the mayoral elections. It equalled Ed Miliband’s Labour, at its highest, in council elections, and overtook the Conservatives in the polls. The last point was, again, hotly disputed – but is up for debate. Polls are weighted, and the current weighting is based on voters’ choices in the 2015 general election. Those choices are unlikely to be repeated now as the UK’s political landscape has undergone an upheaval of seismic proportions since. The raw figures are the best indicator of current feeling, rather than any weightings. This is why I say the matter is up for debate: I haven’t seen the polls that were released around the end of June, when Mr McDonnell claims Labour edged into the lead. If anybody can provide the information – weighted and unweighted, please – then the results could be illuminating.

It is certainly possible to argue that Mr Corbyn’s leadership was “laying the foundations for electoral victory in due course”, as Mr McDonnell stated.

He continued: “People will not vote for a divided party… A group of, unfortunately, people within the party weren’t willing to accept Jeremy’s mandate, they launched what is effectively a coup and we’ve gone through a couple of months of, I think, absolute distraction.” Right again – can anybody argue against Labour having lost the whole summer, when it seems clear Mr Corbyn will win the current leader election with a larger mandate?

David Dimbleby, in the chair, then tried to derail Mr McDonnell by asking him about his self-description as a Marxist, revealed in a 26-second video clip from an event in 2013. The other panellists and the QT audience found this hugely amusing, by Mr McDonnell explained that he was a socialist but had been putting himself in the position of being a Marxist to describe the 2008 crash – or at least, that’s how I interpreted it. In the clip, he said: “I’m a Marxist; this is a classic… capitalist crisis. I’ve been waiting for this for a generation!” He got a laugh then, as well – before going on to make his main point that a system based on greed does not work. Considering he was discussing the crash that could have destroyed the global economy, he made a good point!

Anna Soubry, the Conservative representative on the panel, then had her go: “There are a number of Labour MPs who are good and honourable. Decent people, who believe in things I don’t agree with, but they add value and they are… there to do a job… hold my government to account, and to represent those of you who are not Conservative and make sure that your voice is heard and democracy prevails, and many of those people are frightened – so frightened, humiliated, almost terrorised, by Mr McDonnell and his gang. They will leave politics, and that’s bad for politics… As a democracy, we need good, strong oppositions who are credible, who test government… That’s why we’re in the position of relying on the SNP to do the job of opposition. Shameful.

“There are colleagues of mine in the House of Commons, Labour MPs who are at the point of being terrorised by McDonnell and his cronies. There are women MPs who suffer day in and day out from misogynist unpleasant sexist abuse on Twitter, on Facebook, from people who apparently are within their own party. There is a Jewish Labour MP, a woman, who is living in a safe house. The levels of anti-Semitism she has to bear, it is a disgrace, it must stop, and you, sir, can stop it.”

The first point I would make in response to this is that any Labour MP who lives up to the description Anna Soubry gave them in that little speech should seriously consider their political allegiance. But what kind of Labour MP was she really mentioning? The kind that held David Cameron’s government “to account” over Libya, perhaps, when 557 MPs voted to support military action and only 13 voted against it? How many of those 557 were Labour MPs? I don’t know but I can name two Labour MPs who opposed it: Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. And now we know that they were right to do so.

Secondly, there is absolutely no evidence that any intimidating behaviour whatsoever is the responsibility of Mr McDonnell or anybody connected with him. None at all. Claims have been made but we have yet to see any solid evidence to support them. Meanwhile, Mr McDonnell – and Mr Corbyn – strongly oppose any and all abuse, both within the Labour Party and beyond.

That’s what he said: “We’ve made it clear time and time again: We will not tolerate abuse within the Labour Party. We have condemned it time and time again. Every time there has been a level of abuse… if we have identified the individual, they will be out of the party and suspended, simple as that.”

Nobody can argue against this; Labour is currently undergoing what has been labelled a “purge” of members – largely seen as an excuse to eliminate Corbyn supporters from the leadership election, admittedly, but while it is taking place, nobody can say Labour is not taking action.

Mr McDonnell continued: “We’re not accepting this smear campaign that’s going on, from the Tories and others as well.

“We have been working over the last year, to unite the party, and we were winning electorally and in the polls. Yes, a coup was launched by a small minority who could not accept Jeremy’s mandate – Jeremy was elected on the basis of 59.5 per cent of our members. We are now going through a democratic election. Once that election is over, whoever is the leader… we will unite behind.

“And we have been an effective opposition – in terms of defeating the Tories on tax credits, on PIP – the cuts for disabled people – and a range of others.”

The SNP’s representative on the panel, Joanna Cherry, then decided to chip in, saying: “We’ve just seen the Labour Party tearing itself apart on this programme.”

She was wrong. We had just witnessed John McDonnell defending himself eloquently against a Conservative and a former Labour Party employee, both of whom had their own reasons for attacking the current representative of Labour.

It fell to an audience member to put the errant panellists in their place. Asked to comment by Dimbles, the young woman said: “Young people see these politicians and won’t go and vote because they aren’t inspired by them and don’t believe in them.

“Young people are inspired – I, personally, am inspired by Jeremy Corbyn, because he is honest, he goes into Parliament in a suit which doesn’t cost … thousands, and he didn’t claim that [back from] taxpayers’ money. And he tells the truth. I find that totally inspiring.”

For someone to believe that, after the other panellists and Mr Dimbleby himself had spent most of the programme trying to destroy Mr McDonnell’s credibility, he must have had a pretty good argument.

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Brown’s speech – unintentionally in support of Corbyn?

Gordon Brown during his speech at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Image: John Stillwell/PA

Gordon Brown during his speech at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Image: John Stillwell/PA

At first, it seemed that Gorden Brown had agreed with Tony Blair for the first time in more than a decade – over the threat to neoliberal New Labour Blairites posed by Jeremy Corbyn.

Big deal.

Of course the other architect of New Labour was going to speak up against Jeremy Corbyn’s candidature to lead the Labour Party. Brown is almost as right-wing as Blair.

It doesn’t stop them both being on the wrong side of history.

The joy of Brown’s speech is that much of it was non-specific. He didn’t refer to any of the candidates by name, and advised that Labour must be “credible, radical, sustainable and electable to help people out of poverty, and that anger was not enough” (according to The Guardian).

Nobody would disagree with that, and Corbyn supporters would argue that the only candidate endorsed by such a statement was theirs; Burnham, Cooper and Kendall – by embracing the nonsense of austerity economics – will only make poverty worse while enriching those who already have enough.

The Guardian article continues: “In a clear reference to Corbyn, he said there was one camp whose own supporters even did not believe their candidate would win the next election” – but this is hardly a ringing endorsement of the others, whose policies (along with Brown’s own) have already lost not just one election but two.

“Brown said he was heartbroken and the party grieving after the general election defeat in May, but that it would be ‘even worse if we leave ourselves powerless to do anything about it’” – powerless as the party would be under a Burnham, a Cooper or a Kendall, whose policies would be so close to those of the Conservatives that the electorate would give up on any possibility of opposition and leave the Tories to it?

“Analysing some of the reasons people may have turned to Corbyn’s left-wing politics, he said people were feeling insecure about globalisation, which had left people ‘uncertain and unmoored’ and turned people to nationalism in countries from Greece to Scotland”. This was a clear miss. People aren’t insecure about globalisation; they know for a fact that it represents an attack on their wealth, security and well-being.

Globalisation helps the rich to get richer and pushes the poor down – the behaviour of the European Union over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership tells us all we need to know about it.

Attacking Corbyn’s foreign policy, Brown said: “Don’t tell me that we can do much for the poor of the world if the alliances we favour most are with Hezbollah, Hamas, Chávez’s successor in Venezuela and Putin’s totalitarian Russia.”

This is a deliberate attempt at disinformation. Corbyn has not indicated agreement with the views of any of those people or organisations. Instead, Corbyn is far more likely to put forward policy agreeing with Brown’s claim that Labour should form progressive alliances, especially within Europe, against “illiberalism, totalitarianism, antisemitism, racism and the extremisms of prejudice”.

Brown’s claim that it is “not an abandonment of principles to seek power” and that Labour members should see their vote not as a protest but a “public duty and sacred trust” also chimes with the Corbyn campaign.

It is only Corbyn’s opponents who paint him and his policies as unelectable. The wider Labour Party clearly sees his policies as preferable by far to the watered-down Conservatism that people like Brown, Blair, and their supporters like Alastair Campbell, Simon Danczuk and John Mann have been peddling for the last 20 years.

Indeed, the idea that a Labour vote is a “public duty and sacred trust” merely highlights the growing belief among the Labour Party and the electorate at large that New Labour, and Labour under Ed Miliband, betrayed that trust, abandoning their sacred duty to the people in order to embrace the profanity that is neoliberalism.

“The best way of realising our high ideals is to show that we have an alternative in government that is credible, that is radical and is electable – is neither a pale imitation of what the Tories offer nor is it the route to being a party of permanent protest, rather than a party of government,” said Brown, not realising that he had just written off the chances of Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall in one sentence.

For those who do not understand: The three non-Corbyns don’t have any high ideals. Their alternative is not credible – otherwise Labour would not have lost the 2010 and 2015 elections. It is a pale imitation of the Conservatives and it has led Labour into the twilight of being a party of protest, rather than government.

Actually – are we sure Brown wasn’t supporting Corbyn? The Guardian continues: “People must vote not for the candidate they ‘like’ as they would on Facebook, but for the candidate who can make a difference, he added.” That’s resounding support for Corbyn.

In support of the policies Corbyn opposes, Brown quoted, among others, Gandhi asking: “Is what I am about to do going to help”, and Nelson Mandela saying the yardstick by which he would be measured was the ability to better the lives of all people. Against this, we need set only one of Brown’s policies: Employment and Support Allowance and its accompanying ‘work capability assessment’.

This single policy, begun by New Labour and continued by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition and now the Conservative Government, has led to more than 10,000 known deaths and possibly many tens of thousands that have been hidden from the public. Perhaps Mr Brown should be asking how that single policy was ever intended to help anybody in need.

In the end, Brown will probably be seen as having done more harm to the three stooges other candidates than to Jeremy Corbyn.

Brace yourself for a further surge in support – for the people’s candidate.

 

There’s no place in politics for Blairites who are disgruntled by their abrupt loss of influence

Telling it as it is: Michael Meacher has more to say about the current Labour Party than yesterday's man, Tony Blair.

Telling it as it is: Michael Meacher has more to say about the current Labour Party than yesterday’s man, Tony Blair.

Michael Meacher has it right (as usual). In the same Guardian article that publicises Tony Blair’s latest attack on Jeremy Corbyn, he explained why the former Prime Minister and his followers are so disgruntled by the return to real Labour Party values he represents:

“Understandably,” he said, “the Blairite faction is disconcerted by their abrupt loss of power.”

That is the meaning of everything that has been said by these people – by Tony Blair, by Alastair Campbell, by Simon Danczuk, by John Mann, and by all the others who are bleating that the democratic system of electing a new leader – that they all supported – should be halted because it might mean they’ll have to follow a real socialist instead of a Tory in a red tie.

Blair’s comments aren’t worth repeating because they contain nothing of substance at all. “The party is walking eyes shut, arms outstretched over the cliff’s edge to the jagged rocks below,” is it, Tony? What makes you say that? What particular policies of Corbyn’s will cause the catastrophe you have made up inside your mind? You don’t say, so we shouldn’t pay any attention.

Blair appears to support calls for New Labour hangers-on to split from the party in the event of a Corbyn win: “This is not a moment to refrain from disturbing the serenity of the walk on the basis it causes ‘disunity’.”

This, of course, runs against party discipline and Mr Meacher was right to counter it: “They have a duty to remain loyal to the Labour party as the left has always done.”

Again, Meacher is right; Blair is wrong.

Let’s have a bit more of Meacher. Referring to the rise of Corbyn, he said: “It is the biggest non-revolutionary upturning of the social order in modern British politics.

“The Blairite coup of the mid-1990s hijacked the party to the Tory ideology of ‘leave it all to the markets and let the state get out of the way’, and when asked what was her greatest achievement, Mrs Thatcher triumphantly replied, ‘New Labour.’

“After 20 years of swashbuckling capitalism, the people of Britain have said enough, and Labour is finally regaining its real principles and values.”

Blairites in the Parliamentary Labour Party have a stark choice, if Corbyn is elected by the party membership they claim to serve: They can knuckle under and toe the party’s new line, as the left-wingers have been forced to do – in the name of party unity, Tony Blair – for the last 20 years…

Or they can sling their hook.

That doesn’t mean resigning the Labour whip and sloping off to the Liberal Democrats (or wherever), as Shirley Williams has suggested.

It means resigning their position as MPs and making way for the election of somebody who will support Labour’s new direction.

The behaviour of men like Danczuk and Mann is nothing less than treachery against their party – meaning the people who voted them into Parliament, a majority of whom – it seems – want Jeremy Corbyn to be the new Labour leader.

The people are speaking. They want the New Labour dinosaur to go into extinction. Let us hope the hangers-on get the message.

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Here’s why Alastair Campbell’s intervention is ridiculous

Here's a man of the Labour Left who Alistair Campbell could support: Tony Benn. He passed away last year, meaning the new generation of spin doctors that has replaced Campbell could make his past words mean whatever they wanted.

Here’s a man of the Labour Left who Alastair Campbell could support: Tony Benn. He passed away last year, meaning the new generation of spin doctors that has replaced Campbell could make his past words mean whatever they wanted.

Yesterday’s men are popping out of the woodwork, desperate to slow Jeremy Corbyn’s momentum in the Labour leadership race – the latest being Alastair Campbell.

It’s a shame because, while enjoyable on chat shows, Campbell can hardly be described as a socialist – therefore his desire to counsel Labour members against supporting a return to the ideals for which they probably joined up in the first place should be a lost cause and he’ll suffer a backlash.

As a sufferer of depression, Campbell should also know better than to try to blot out other people’s hope; apparently that hasn’t occurred to him.

It’s an even greater shame that, it seems, Mr Campbell has nothing new to say. His article claims that “Corbyn will be a leader of the hard left, for the hard left”, even though that position has already been disproved. Corbyn is left-wing, yes – but he’s not “hard left”.

Corbyn’s claim that Labour lost because it wasn’t left-wing enough, deplored by Campbell, is correct; look at the SNP’s victory in Scotland. That party claimed an anti-austerity, pro-investment platform and trounced “austerity-lite, anti-investment” Labour. In England, Labour simply didn’t seem different from the Conservative Party – or at least, not different enough.

And that is a problem that has dogged the party ever since Tony Blair took office in 1997. The party lost votes at every subsequent election as the realities of his sub-Tory policies sank into an electorate that was initially unwilling to accept them. Where Campbell states that the argument that Labour hasn’t been left-wing enough has “been put forward by some in the Party all my political lifetime, and the ultimate beneficiaries have always been the Tories not Labour,” he is mistaken.

Who benefited from New Labour’s attitude to privatisation in the health service? The Conservatives.

Who benefited from New Labour’s failure to restore the rights of trade unions? The Conservatives.

Who benefited from New Labour’s policy on social security, moving towards a privatised, insurance-based system? The Conservatives.

Who benefited from New Labour’s introduction of private ownership into education, with academy schools? The Conservatives.

Who benefited from New Labour’s failure to regulate the banks? The Conservatives.

These are just headline examples of right-wing policies supported by New Labour. The Conservatives took them and ran with them, and we now have a government that slipped into power on a lie that Labour overspent, when the financial crisis was caused by profligacy among rich bankers who should have known better. We have a health service that is slipping into the hands of greedy privateers, a social security system that pushes genuine claimants off-benefit and into destitution, despair and death, and wages are diminishing rapidly with unions unable to stand up for their members.

That is only part of the legacy of New Labour, but Alastair Campbell wants you to believe that left-wingers are responsible for Tory success.

Yes, New Labour were better for working people than the Cameron-led Coalition, or the current Conservative Government seems likely to be – but that’s like comparing influenza with ebola.

Campbell even admits that Labour lost partly because of the “catastrophic misjudgement” of failing to rebut the idea that Labour caused the crash – a misjudgement of Blairite New Labour hangers-on, not left-wingers who have spent the last five years screaming for their front bench to get a clue. Just look at Michael Meacher’s blogs if you don’t believe it.

Note also that Campbell discusses the country’s desire not to have a Labour/SNP government, without every admitting that Ed Miliband had ruled it out; it was never going to happen, no matter what the result of the election.

Campbell resorts to the (now-familiar) suggestion that Corbyn is a dream for the Conservatives. This is not true. The Tories have put forward a bluff that they want Corbyn because he is unelectable, and like-minded members of New Labour, such as Campbell, have swallowed it without question – like good little Tory-lite boys and girls.

In fact, the Tories – and Blairite New Labour – are terrified because Corbyn represents a huge shift in the thinking of the general public. They will do anything to block that movement because it will throw both sets of politicians off the gravy train they currently occupy.

Neil Kinnock spent a lot of time dealing with left-wingers in his party (not the “hard left” of Campbell’s article, although there were certainly more in the Labour Party at that time because it was more representative of the country than it is now) because they knew he was a right-winger who wanted to drag the party away from its ideals and, ultimately, into the same neoliberalism as the Conservative Party.

There is no mention of particular policies in Campbell’s article. He writes things like, “Some of the positions winning him the loudest applause in his packed meetings are those that will be met with the most deafening silence when campaigners get out on the doorsteps of the undecided come election time.” What positions? Perhaps Campbell is silent because his choices will be exactly the policies that are winning Corbyn the most votes.

Worst still – for Campbell’s argument – is the fact that he cannot say anything in support of any of the other three leadership candidates. He can’t see them winning either. And that means he can’t address their worst obstacle at the moment, which is the fact that the general public currently sees the leadership race as being between Corbyn and the others, with no distinction between them. They are already also-rans.

So let’s put a cap on Campbell’s outburst, with a demonstration of how ridiculous his viewpoint really is.

If Alastair Campbell is so unhappy with Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy, but the party’s grassroots are determined to have a left-wing leader, let’s propose an alternative: The late Tony Benn.

Yes, I’m well aware that Mr Benn has passed on. This makes him perfect for right-wing Labour. Whenever a new issue is raised, the party would have to look to pronouncements made by the great man when he was still among us.

And then, no doubt spin doctors in the mould of Mr Campbell could twist those words to make them seem to support whatever they want instead.

The voters would have their left-wing leader, and the neoliberals would still have power. It’s the best of both worlds.

That’s about the size of it, wouldn’t you say, Mr Campbell?

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Let’s kill the myth that right-wingers merely think those on the left are ‘misguided’

Dominic Lawson: He thinks left-wingers are "driven by hate" while "most Tories... regard the Left as just misguided". He's wondering how else he can patronise you today.

Dominic Lawson: He thinks left-wingers are “driven by hate” while “most Tories… regard the Left as just misguided”. He’s wondering how else he can patronise you today. [Picture: BBC]

Dominic Lawson, writing in the Daily Mail (yes, we’re still having fun at the Rothermere Rag’s expense – any objections? I thought not), has told us: “The tribal left is driven by hate.”

Paraphrasing an article he wrote previously in the Sunday Times, he continued: “It is one of the factors tending to distinguish the left in politics from the right, that the former frequently regard the latter as actually wicked, if not evil; whereas most Tories tend to regard the Left as just misguided.”

That is not my experience.

I have found that right-wingers and Conservatives (who tend to claim the middle ground in politics, while still claiming to differentiate themselves from “you lefties”) tend to fall into insults, invective and profanity – hate speech, if you like, with extreme rapidity. It is they who are driven by hate – in my experience – and not those of us on the left who enjoy a reasoned debate. So nobody in the Conservative Party, the right-wing press, or even offering right-of-centre views on Facebook pages should claim any moral superiority over the rest of us on those grounds.

I have an example to illustrate my case. It developed from the earlier Vox Political post on the Mail‘s attacks against Ralph Miliband and Mehdi Hasan. Those of you who are familiar with it will know it quoted the fact that Mr Miliband Senior – who the Mail claimed was The man who hated Britain – served in the Royal Navy during World War II, while the proprietor of the Daily Mail, Viscount Rothermere, had been a supporter of Adolf Hitler, and the father of the Mail’s current editor, Peter Dacre, had been a fashion reporter at the age of 19, when he should have been doing National Service and fighting the Nazis.

I received the following, from a commenter called Raymond Northgreaves (quoted verbatim): “should he have served in any of HM Forces he would have been given a service number and then can be identified”.

Several possibilities were available as to who “he” might be. I wasn’t willing to make an inaccurate guess – nobody was disputing that Mr Miliband Senior had seen active service, so there was a presumption that it might be somebody else, but that’s all it was – so I asked: “To whom are you referring – Dacre Senior?”

In reply, I received the following, which I again quote verbatim:

“Mark Sivier, Hi! You know to whom I am referring to, so why play the cretin left wing anti human. many of us who are from working class family’s know what the value of labour and what it stood for. Now its taken away the voice from the many, and given it to the Marxist rich. Fact, which you and your left wing friends will never understand, you attend Uni and had to slum it in some dose house, which was beneath your middle class upbringing, and you all took on the “we the working class” are fighting to be??? something that you have never dreamed could happen to GB subjects(sovereignty is in the many and not the one), ‘yes’ subjects, before you jump through a window, screeching your left wing head off, British citizens are the one’s going around bombing and murdering people! My age group know all about DS, from the second world war; the mistake that Winston Churchill made was putting people like him in prison, when he should have executed them all. In my life time, I have never knowingly put my hand in shit, and I am not going to start writing to it The rest of us center of the road people know that the left and right are the one. When you all stand up and defend my homeland, then come back and communicate with me, until then, do what you left do, and renumber, it was Blair, Campbell, Prescott and Reed, that sold us all out to the USA, and made us all murderers to 1.5 million people; they also condoned the murder of 2514 British soldiers by the Roman Catholics, and some 30,000 civilians, of which many of their bodies have never found as yet? You and yours are no better then Hitler or your Icon Starling. pro patria!”

I was going to try to analyse this but, look at it; do I really have to?

Point made, I think.