A number of my friends, acquaintances, those I interact with and those I banter with, connected to the Labour Party, have a common shared complaint about the Corbyn leadership. This often spills over into a complaint about the media and how they approach Jeremy.
The first complaint is one of professionalism and focus. Why on earth does he keep blathering about Trident, and Syria, and so forth. The Tories are easy to take on domestic issues. A bunch of incompetents. Osborne has missed every target he aimed for. They’ve driven the doctors to strike. The economic recovery, such as it is, is patchy and shallow. The attempt to cut Tax Credits was a debacle. And so on and so forth.
Then, if their critique spills over to the media, they will ask why Marr or the like keep asking him these questions on peripheral subjects. Why can’t these journalists bring the subject back to bread and butter matters, to what really counts, to the man in the street?
It is, on the face of it, a rational query. I, too, have a jaundiced view of Cameron and Osborne’s abilities as managers of the state (but far less so, I quietly, and regretfully note, of their political acumen, which seems rather frightening the more I observe it). The Tories are weaker than their position implies. This is not a preternaturally efficient or competent government. They’ve had some decent results, some good fortune, made some reasonable decisions and made an utter hash of others. They often pursue chimeras, blinded by ideology (step forward, IDS, who I have no doubt believes he is doing good – not here will I portray him as a cartoon villain – but who is trying to simplify a somewhat arcane benefits system which provides for the less well off of the country with their vastly different, varied, complex lives for what? What precisely is the goal of Universal Credit? I’ve never got it. “It’ll be simpler” appears the only justification I can find. Good luck with that, Iain. The benefits system isn’t arcane for perverse reasons, you see. It’s that way because Life ain’t simple, and the lives of however many millions of people on benefits are not simple either).
But, on the other hand, and this is a big other hand, this is a delusion. Labour in its current form, under its current leadership, will never concentrate on those issues or be allowed to.
One of my favourite moments in the West Wing comes around the point that President Bartlett meets his Republican rival before the annual Al Smith dinner. A bodyguard has just been shot in an unconnected incident and Bartlett, shocked, tells his opponent this. His opponent, a somewhat dim small state conservative (to be fair, The West Wing could be nuanced in its portrayal of the other side, as Alan Alda’s Arnie Vinick showed, but this wasn’t one of those parts), sucks in his breath and says “Crime, boy, I just don’t know”.
The conversation continues for a while and there is some back and forth, some barely disguised ill-feeling breaking out into outright argument and bickering until Bartlett gets up, and, leaving, turns to say “In case in the future you ever wonder, ‘Crime, boy, I just don’t know’ was when I decided to kick your ass”.
The 2020 election was never going to be easy for Labour. We had 13 years in government and the Blair/Brown schism at the heart of the party drowned out a generation of talent. Come 2010, the Big Beasts were a deal thinner on the ground than they should have been, and we were tired. Jaded. The big names who could lead us back to the promised land of office were few and far between and they’d been through the mill. And 5 years of opposition and an emotionally crushing defeat in May hasn’t – to put it mildly – helped that situation. This was always going to be an uphill struggle. This was always going to be difficult. Not quite Sisyphean, but close.
2020 is lost. Wake up to that fact. And wake up to what that means.
You can focus on domestic issues until the metaphorical cows come home from where metaphorical cows spend their time, nothing is going to change that.
But, if in future, you ever look back and wonder? Electing the flag-bearer for every anti-imperialist cause, the man who the mantle of “hates this country” could be hung on and it not look to your average schmoe in the street like an ill-fit, the “friend” of Sinn Fein and Hezbollah and Hamas, the man whose past associations meant he could be a justifiable target for every – in your designation – “smear” from the right wing press, the walking, talking piñata of Westminster, electing him? That was when the electorate decided to kick our ass.
