So it is time to say farewell to the Labour leadership campaign of Jess Phillips the MP for Birmingham Yardley. She has pulled out of the race to succeed two time election loser Jeremy Corbyn and the reason for her decision to leave the contest to become Labour’s next leader is said to be the lack of support that she had got from trade unions and local parties. Ms Phillips cannot move through to the next round without significant support from the TU’s and local parties, support that she could not get.
So it’s goodbye to the pro-mass migration, thin-skinned, censorious, hyperbole spouting, arrogant, self-referential, gobby Brummie and hello to the rest of Labour’s deeply unattractive slate of leadership contenders. These contenders are just as enthusiastic about censorship, open borders, being arrogant and the rest of it as Ms Phillips is, so Ms Phillips dropping out of the race neither adds or subtracts from what is available from the rest of the shower of shit that is fighting to lead Labour. What’s left after Ms Phillips’ departure is a snobbish Islington Leftie, a Trot in a suit, a ‘refugee’ encouraging former employee of a children’s charity and a woman who can best be described as being Jeremy Corbyn with a vagina. None of these people appeal to me or those like me, there’s none of this crowd that I would even consider voting for.
I completely agree with Jess Phillips on one thing and that she’s not the person to lead Labour at the moment. As much as I dislike her public persona, her socialism and her hyperbolic whining, Jess Phillips is at least a relatively sane member of the Labour Party. In that respect she’s bound to be the odd one out in today’s Labour, where a sort of Britain hating madness seems to rule. In today’s Labour party sane people should not apply for positions in the party management as there’s probably little chance that they’d get one.
Ms Phillips may in fact be more happy as a backbencher rather than being shackled with the restrictions that come with being leader. The leader is not free to use their office in the party and in Parliament to bang on about their kids and their lives, their socialism and all the me me me emoting that Jess Phillips seems to specialise in. This freedom is not available to those who lead parties, only to backbenchers.
Jess Phillips may not think this at the moment, but in the future she may look back at her campaign to be Labour leader and think that she dodged a bullet. When Labour was sensible, sane and grounded in working class politics of the Methodist rather than the Marxist variety, political titans like Gaitskell, Wilson, Attlee and Henderson dominated the Labour Party, then leader was a powerful position. Then the job was worth having and the party itself enjoyed great support and signifcant support even when in opposition. Now, being leader of Labour is a bit of a poison chalice as Labour is now a party that has turned its back on the working class that created it and is now the party of Muslims, middle class Leftists, migrants and various hate-filled lunatics. The Labour Party as it is currently constituted is dominated by Islamic and middle class Left concerns and has become terribly London-centric and the party was punished for its abandonment of its traditional supporters who live outside London at the last election. I’d like to think that Labour would realise why they lost the last General Election and change their policies, but with the likes of Rebecca Long-Bailey as the front runners along with Sir Keir Starmer the Trot in a suit, it’s doubtful that the Corbynism that has ruined the party will be cleared away.
We might even see, at some time in the future, Labour ceasing to be a serious and well supported political party and instead morph into either a bunch of irrelevant socialist dreamers like the Socialist Party, or into a dangerous, manipulating hard core Left party like the Socialist Workers Party. Either way, unless Labour can dump the lunatics, a difficult thing when Momentum holds so much internal party power, then the future doesn’t look bright for Labour and one day Ms Phillps may quietly celebrate the fact that she is not indelibly linked to a party such as Labour has become. I think that spending some more time with her personal whines about various issues may be a much more productive use of Jess Phillips time and probably more satisfying for her, than leading what is increasingly looking like a doomed and unpopular party.
I agree with your post except when you say the SWP are dangerous. They are just like the Socialist Party, dreamers, too small and weak to harm society. Although they have existed for more than half a century, they have not even a single councillor or any influence in any trade union. They have a small following of middle class students who virtually always leave when they graduate. I doubt if they have more than a thousand members.They are nothing.
Whilst I completely agree with you that the bulk of the membership is wealthy student radicals, some of their activists do have influence on unions at branch / chapel level. I’ve encountered it in two different trade unions. However it is only at the local level that they have influence and don’t control national unions even though they have sympathisers in them. My reason for calling the SWP ‘dangerous’ is because they have so many front groups that drag people in but which are not officially connected to the SWP but which radicalise people especially in the public sector. These groups TU and non TU can have influence but my primary reason for calling the SWP dangerous is related to their (now thankfully defunct) RESPECT Party vehicle which actively built links with radical Islamic groups and encouraged the policy of religious and cultural politics. The leadership of the SWP chucked a whole load of gay and women comrades under the proverbial bus in order to curry favour with Muslims whom some in the party believed that could be used as footsoldiers in the battle to bring about Socialism. I recall pointing out to some Swappies of my accquaintance at the time that firstly promoting religiously motivated politics has a bad history and outcomes and secondly that they should learn the lesson of Iran and look at how the policy of riding on the coat tails of Islamists worked out for socialists there.
As an aside, if you are interested in the history of various far left groupuscules I can heartily recommend a short book (linked here on this site) by the late John Sullivan called ‘As Soon As This Pub Closes’ https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2016/03/18/history-time-tankies-trots-and-true-believers/
The writing was on the wall with Labour as far back ar the 40s. Their government embarked on a ridiculous period of money squandering which set the bar so low it has been difficult to beat.Everyone must search engine the Groundnuts Scheme.
As Trump says, Capitalists create wealth, socialists spend it.