For the good of the country

The local elections for Scotland Wales and the English countryside are due to take place in May and all the commentators seem to agree on one thing. Labour is going to lose more seats. The Liberals are to make gains and even the Tories will be ahead of their starting point but Labour. Definitely down.

This situation is at first understandable given the pathetic performance of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party. Labour has never been so divided, especially at the top with both moderates and left-wingers leaving the Labour Party in droves.

Whilst the party is still very large in paper terms it's clear that this mainly on-line surge from the Corbyn election campaign doesn't have the mettle to stay or get involved so the mainstream live in hope that given more time the false messiah will finally fall on his sword.

Trouble is they will have a long wait..... or will they?

Corbyns organisation on the ground is in trouble. There are now two groups using "Momentum" as a moniker, the other prefixed with "Grassroots". Both have organised conferences which have turned out to be pitifully small. The Weekly Worker reports:

It really is astounding that the best an organisation with 22,000 members and a database of over 250,000 supporters should come up with is such a lame, apolitical and tiny gathering. Who would have thought 18 months ago that the incredible energy, enthusiasm and pure joy created by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party would be so criminally wasted?

Momentum might claim that 600 people attended the event in a freezing former factory a mile from the nearest train station in Birmingham. But unless they counted people twice as they went in and then left again (for quite a few not a great deal of time passed between those two moments), they have clearly applied the creative counting method so beloved by sects like the Socialist Worker Party. No more than 350 people shivered in the graffiti-covered hall with its (literally) shitty toilet facilities.

And as for the "other" Momentum:

Mind you, the ‘opposition’ to Jon Lansman’s autocratic rule is not faring much better, I am afraid to say. The steering committee of Grassroots Momentum has so far not managed to meet and it looks like its first gathering will not happen before April 22 - a whopping six weeks after it was elected. And, although the SC continues to squabble over such weighty issues as how long its lunch break will be, a majority did manage to agree on one thing: not to make an organised intervention on March 25. There might have only been 350 people there, but clearly not all of them were loyal and unthinking Lansman supporters. They could and should have been engaged with, at the very least by handing out a leaflet, intervention from the floor and perhaps at a fringe meeting.

These summaries do not sound like a report of an organisation preparing for power of any sort. In fact the sessions which took place around the conference were all run by previously established protest groups:

A majority of the workshops were run by outside organisations, without being labelled as such. For example, Labour Party Marxists supporters attended workshops that were run by The World Transformed, Talk Socialism and even Hope Not Hate. They were clearly based on ‘training sessions’ that these organisations run on a relatively frequent basis - utterly devoid of any real politics, focusing only on ‘method’ and run by young, overly eager people who reminded me of Duracell bunnies.

In fact having seen the photos from the conference these "duracell bunnies" were about the only young people there. The vast majority of attendees look like and probably are the usual people who turn up on demonstrations to make themselves feel they are still "part of the struggle" when they are nothing of the sort.

In fact these aging old lefties, the small number of Trots and other assorted miscreants that formed the Corbynista movement are part of the problem and definitely not the solution.

The fact is the Tory government should be under intense pressure. From budget back downs over self-employed National Insurance to shenanigans  over Brexit its all been a bit of a mess. Trouble is the electorate seem happier with Theresa May making a few errors to the alternative that Corbyn represents which in most peoples eyes would be even worse. 

Since gaining ascendency in the Labour Party the so-called left around Corbyn has achieved precisely nothing. They can't even organise themselves after 18 months and have a tendency to blame everything that goes wrong on their opponents both inside and outside the Party itself.

And don't even mention those "pesky Zionists" manipulating behind the scenes. 

A survey showed that it was not just incompetence that put people off voting Labour. It was also the presence of anti-Semitism inside the party. Livingstone can revise history as much as he wants but he has succumbed to the Historical revisionism so present on the far right and now entrenched in the far-left.

This political pantomime still has some time to run. McCluskey faces re-election, Livingstone expulsion but the internal conflict is far from over. Whether a sustainable opposition aprty will arise out of the ashes is still not clear.

One thing is quite clear. There is no opposition to the Tories and the blame lies squarely on the far-left and Jeremy Corbyn.

For the good of the country. Please fuck off.