Labour needs a good look at itself

Guest Post by Caroline Watson

Like many others, including such as Alan Johnson, I believe that the election results show that the cult that currently holds the Labour Party in its grip has been well and truly rejected by traditional Labour voters, particularly in the North and Midlands.

I think that isn’t because of Brexit, but that it was happening before Brexit, which is why people voted for it. I also think that to write off Brexit voters as racists is simplistic; one of the reasons why people in the former coalfields voted for it was because of the EU’s green agenda, which they see as having no concern for their jobs and communities. In Bassetlaw, which returned a Tory with a 14,000 majority, a coal fired power station had closed only weeks earlier.

I agree with Alan Johnson, Lisa Nandy, Jess Phillips and others that the only way that Labour can save itself is to ditch the Corbyn cult once and for all, along with Momentum, the middle class social justice warriors and identity politics, and go back to being a party of the working class, led and run by the working class. That is what Labour was set up to be and this devastating loss is because it has moved away from its roots in Northern and Midlands towns. It is the Labour Party. The clue’s in the name. It must stop patronising working people and telling them what to think.

What I don’t understand, is why so many people, who apparently want a Labour government, disagree with me. Thursday proved that the current model hasn’t worked. Why do people think more of the same will be different another time?

Perhaps they think that working class people are too stupid to make their own decisions and need to be lectured like children until they believe that men can become women and and all the other ‘woke’ rubbish? That the Labour Party needs them to put the working class right? That, rather than being a vehicle by which the working class can represent itself, and make sure that its members earn enough not to be poor, and not to need benefits or food banks, it should be a means of keeping them helpless and dependent; grateful to the lady bountifuls with PhDs and stoned-sounding Momentum voices who intone mawkishly about ‘the poor and the needy’ and make ‘art installations’ about poverty?

Or, perhaps they think that, if the Labour Party reverts to being led and run by the people by and for whom it was originally created, middle class lefties will no longer have a political home, because the views and policies developed by working class people won’t fit with theirs.

Well, do you know what? They don’t have to. That is the point. That’s why the Labour Party exists. It’s not for the middle class. Perhaps it wouldn’t be for me and I would choose not to vote for it. We all have that right. But I think middle class people who think that the Labour Party shouldn’t change because they might not like it anymore need to have a bloody good look at themselves and wonder why they have ever supported it!