Cuckoo in the Nest (06/07/16)

The author Robert Harris is a long-time Labour supporter and is running a campaign to save the party from the disastrous leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.

Harris set out his case in a recent article in The Times which contained this damning assessment as to why Corbyn is a 'dud', politically speaking:

"The issue is not Corbyn’s policies, in so far as he has any. I am afraid it is Corbyn himself (“a sociopathic narcissist”, as one Labour MP politely described him to me last week). He simply cannot do the basic job of leading the opposition in the Commons. He cannot argue or debate. He possesses no spark of originality or wit. His ideas were fossilised more than 30 years ago. He cannot manage his shadow cabinet or parliamentary party. He can only mouth the same old platitudes to audiences who already agree with him. He is surrounded by a coterie of advisers, some of whom are merely incompetent, others downright sinister."

If you ask me the comment about advisers is especially apt, because Corbyn has chosen to surround himself with people who are 'revolutionary socialists' and hostile to the Labour Party's social democratic traditions.

Arrogant tossers like Seumas Milne, for example, who's a real cuckoo in the nest if you ask me and deserves to be shown the door along with his boss. 

  

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/join-labour-now-to-help-topple-corbyn-8z58g7z37

Join Labour now to help topple Corbyn

By Robert Harris - The Times


Late one night in 1917, at the height of the First World War, Winston Churchill beckoned to a fellow Liberal MP to join him for a final look inside the deserted Commons chamber. Everyone else had gone home. “All was darkness,” wrote the MP in his diary. “We could dimly see the table, but walls and roof were invisible. ‘Look at it,’ he said. ‘This little place is what makes the difference between us and Germany. It is in virtue of this that we shall muddle through to success & for lack of this Germany’s brilliant efficiency leads her to final disaster. This little room is the shrine of the world’s liberties.’”

Smile at the romantic rhetoric if you wish, but Churchill was correct. That “little room” has served us well. It can be noisy, trivial, dishonest. Like the jury system, it makes plenty of mistakes. But also like the jury system it has at its heart the inestimable gift of human perception. MPs work in close proximity to one another. They learn to spot a wrong ’un. And in the past, when emergencies have arisen, the parliamentary system has shown itself capable of removing failing leaders with breathtaking speed — Herbert Asquith in 1916, replaced by David Lloyd George; Neville Chamberlain in 1940, replaced by Churchill.

Much of what is going wrong in the UK politically at the moment stems from the same cause. Power, without most of us even noticing, has been transferred outside the little room. Three-quarters of MPs don’t want Britain to leave the European Union but have been mandated to vote for it by the referendum. Four-fifths of Labour MPs never wanted Jeremy Corbyn as their leader but have had him foisted upon them by thousands of recent recruits to the party’s membership.

Arrogant Tosser (25/10/15)

I've long regarded Seumas Milne as an 'arrogant tosser' and my enmity towards Labour's new 'spinmeister' goes back to the days when he was the comment editor at The Guardian.

In wrote an opinion piece for the newspaper, in September 2000 if I recall correctly, which argued that the trade unions, particularly in Scotland, were becoming increasingly out of touch with ordinary union members through their continued love affair with the Labour Party.

I was in favour of breaking the institutional links between the unions and Labour on the basis that Britain's union bosses (the Bubs) invariably put their own pro-Labour views and interests above those of rank and file union members.

I said so in a similar article I had written for The Herald newspaper in Scotland I was was pleased to hear from the deputy comment editor (a woman) that my piece for the Guardian would be published in the run up to that year's TUC annual congress which had previously presented me with the TUC's Youth Award in 1983.

But soon afterwards the deputy editor contacted me to say that her editor (one Seamus Milne) had come back from holiday and decided to 'spike' my column, presumably because he disagreed with the politics involved rather than the quality of the writing.

At the time I had no idea that Seamus was an arch-Stalinist and the former editor of a peculiar 'left-wing' journal called Straight Left which was used as an organising vehicle by a small sect of ridiculously pro-Soviet members of Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).

Now I had some experience of dealing with these Straight Left comrades who, in my experience, were politically sectarian and firmly stuck in the past, obsessed by notions of class war and using the trade unions as a 'vanguard' movement to promote social and political change.

The concept of vanguardism is well-known in political circles and involves small groups of unrepresentative individuals working together, in an highly organised and ideological way, with the aim of influencing and controlling much larger groups or organisations - trade unions, normally.

The fact that Jeremy Corbyn has appointed such a person to be his 'spinmeister' in chief just goes to show the extent to which the Labour Party has lost its way.