Getting the gang back together: Jeremy Corbyn (L), Barry Gardiner (C), and John McDonnell at Labour Conference. Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty
At the Young Labour rally, in bright lipstick and with shiny hair, they thrill to protest. I think it is Oedipal, and more an emotional than a political imperative, but I am a Social Democrat. The room — called The Empress but no matter — is alive with protest; protest for its own sake. Beyond it there is nothing: certainly not power. Here, at the Empress, they would rather lead the party than have the party lead the country. That is clear. They speak to the voters, but they do not listen to them. Their voters are theoretical. Their analysis of the 2019 defeat is: not enough Corbynism, plus sabotage. The reason for their problems now is: purge.
They fete themselves, and attack the Labour leadership, which they treat like a pantomime villain, with boos and hisses. Starmer is obviously Sylvia Plath’s Daddy: “Daddy, I have had to kill you”. The leadership named this event “Cancelled” on the conference app, but changed their minds, and this is their revenge. I can hear their narcissism in their cadences, and their applause. It is their Conference. They are Labour. When a trade union leader says her union is not affiliated to the Labour Party, they cheer. The obvious question: so why are they?
We hear Richard Burgon MP, and John McDonnell MP, then Corbyn comes, still denied the Labour whip. I marvel at the vanity of this supposedly humble man, but I never believed in his humility, any more than I believed in his anti-racism. Anti-racism is only meaningful when you extend it to your political enemies, and he never did. He ignored the abuse of live female Jewish MPs but stands in solidarity with dead Jews, who need nothing from him, can’t attack him, and are as theoretical to him as voters. The humble change their minds, and he never does: his humility is performative, in a shy glance at the youthful supporters, in a tender bowing of the head. He looks sorrowful — he lost — then happy: I still have you. To be fair, he does sound like the most sensible man in the room. But that is his job: to sound sane and vexed — Magic Grandpa — while his supporters bully and scream. “In the last leadership election, our members and unions were promised unity, but instead we are given division,” he mourns. He will spend the whole of Conference inciting division, and haunting Conference with his vanity.
He pleads for organisation: “If we want the Labour Party to be a vehicle to win elections to confront the climate emergency and redistribute wealth and power to the many from the few, then we need to come together” for policies “the majority of people actually want, not what the establishment and its media mouthpieces insist they should want. If our leadership won’t champion that path, our movement must and will.”
He speaks for a long time. I watch them as they get bored and shuffle about. I am not surprised by their boredom. Corbyn is a drug to them, and it is preferable to meet your drug on your own terms. Like the Queen, he is more magnificent in their heads. I think they treat him as he treats the voters: as theoretical.
The drama is in opposition here, the fun: and I am guilty of it too. I ignore the real Conference, in which Starmer wins most of the votes, glumly and determinedly securing the machinery of the party, and patiently being stalked by broadcast journalists who copy Paxman but have none of his gifts and so mostly sound like angry shoppers demanding a refund. I look at the edges: for the far-Left in flight. They are, I decide, very like chickens in nature and behaviour: when they feel threatened, they flock together, and they make a lot of noise.
I find Piers Corbyn standing outside Conference, talking into a megaphone. He does not speak to an audience because there isn’t one, beside me. He is talking to the megaphone, to which he seems surgically attached: to himself. “There were massive pterodactyls,” he says. There was a context, but the megaphone failed both of us.
I go to Jewish Voice for Labour [JVL], Corbyn’s ancient Pretorian guard of Jewish anti-Zionists, picketing Conference with a banner showing every one of their leadership scolded, or warned. It fills the page. You would think they might be ashamed, but they aren’t, because, like Corbyn, nothing is ever their fault. They are not as mad as the man with the painting of Keir Starmer segueing into Joseph Stalin, who killed 50 million people, standing just outside the Conference centre. “It is more his attitude to democracy,” he says, when I point out that Starmer has not killed 50 million people, or even one. But they are close behind.
At their event, which is called, hopefully, Labour in Crisis, they talk about the purge with all the self-knowledge of — well, people who don’t know a lot about Russia. I listen to 80 non-Jews enabled in their Jew hate by a clutch of Corbynist Jews. They are paranoiacs. “Maybe we should turn our phones off,” says Leah Levane, who was expelled from the Labour Party the day before, “Who knows who is listening? One of my comrades,” she adds, “suggested that I announce I am taking a big risk by appearing on a platform with myself”. She summarises Conference from the far-Left perspective, and quite well: “This is a shitshow.”
John McDonnell MP is at the back, standing for ease of getaway. He needs it. Because Tony Greenstein, expelled from Labour for anti-Semitism, attacks a journalist from LBC while saying: “I don’t trust you!” He takes his telephone — he says the journalist is recording the vulnerable, meaning himself — and throws it on the floor. The journalist argues, but when he leaves the room, they applaud. Later, when Greenstein speaks — “it was never about anti-Semitism” — he says, meaning mainstream Jewish opposition to JVL, and it was — they cheer again. They love Greenstein because they love failure: he is their dilemma in a man. For them, it is easy to ignore an assault on a journalist if it is a journalist they dislike. It is easy, too, to laugh at Greenstein, who looks more like a child’s scruffy toy than anything else. Except, one day, the Greenstein will be bigger, and the journalist will be smaller.
It goes on all week: the Defend the Left rally, the Tribune rally, Labour against the Witchhunt [LAW], where Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson, both expelled from Labour, appear. At LAW, where Greenstein is again self-appointed security, a speaker says: “We would normally be full, but people are afraid to come.” I hope they don’t tell themselves that about the electorate. But they still believe in false consciousness: in the theoretical voter.
The night before Conference closes, the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs meet in the circus tent at The World Transformed – the parallel far-Left conference. It features many of Corbyn’s allies. It is the shadow Shadow Cabinet. There is a banner in the corner that says, “Take Back Control”. It may be a joke. They stand out into the night in monstrous rain and, because Corbynism is a religion, they chant a creed: “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn.” Corbyn speaks last, but is here from the beginning, which surprises me — does he not have better things to do? Of course not: he only speaks to his supporters, because he is a god in tiny rooms.
Barry Gardiner MP calls the crowd, “the people who give us all hope” and he has never needed hope more. “There is no meat on the shelves,” he cries, as evidence of catastrophe. He stops himself and says, “Sorry about the vegans.” A man shouts: “Fuck Starmer, fuck Starmer!” They veer between defiance and despair: “All the dreams and optimism have been sucked out of us”. I notice someone is playing patience on their iPhone. They will need it.
“Despair will get us nowhere,” says Nadia Whittome MP. “Don’t leave. What would have happened if Jeremy Corbyn had left?” John McDonnell MP agrees: “You cannot win the fight if you are not in the struggle.”
Richard Burgon MP, who depends on repetition for all his oratory, and manages to sound both stupid and convinced, shouts: “The Labour left is alive! The Labour left is winning on the Conference floor! The Labour left is winning in the streets, and it will one day win a leadership election!” Lloyd Russell-Moyle MP makes the mistake of calling Starmer, “a nice man”. There are jeers: “Keir Out!” Then: “Keith, Keith, Keith!” It sounds quite chilling when they shout it in unison; I have never been afraid anywhere as a journalist except with the far-Left. Again, they must not leave: “When the phoenix rises again,” says Russell-Moyle, “we will be here, and we will win the General Election.” But they won’t – not by screaming, “Keith” in circus tents. Do they know that? They go back to shouting, “Keith! Keith! Keith!” which I believe is the real purpose of this rally. I do not know why they think this taunt is so deadly, but it does expose their classism and ageism: taunting the lower-middle class Boomer who really is called Keith.
Starmer’s strategy is to ignore them, while taunting them with policy: during his speech to Conference — calm, appropriate, and thrillingly Blairite — he speaks through them. Still, they heckle and hold red cards up — it’s a football metaphor, which they planned: Show Starmer the Red Card. Except they aren’t the referee, not this time. They shout, “It was your fault!” during a Brexit section and “£15 an hour!” — which is the minimum wage they seek. One holds up a sign that says, “No purge”. Another shouts, “Free Julian Assange,” as if Starmer has Assange in his possession, and can hand him over. Mostly they seem confused: when another shouts, “Where is Peter Mandelson?” he sounds as if he genuinely wants to know.
Then — calmly, appropriately, thrillingly – Starmer says words to give them pain, all of which are a warm bath to the Red Wall voters Corbyn lost: police; patriots: NATO; patriots; NATO; police. I wished he had kissed a model of a nuclear submarine; or put a judge’s black cap on his head; or toasted The Queen.
The far-Left hated it. But the far-Left has lost. When it recovers, perhaps it will come to love it. Because the struggle is everything, and the struggle lives on.
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SubscribeMany Tories involved in politics range from cynical, to greedy, to venal, to plain not upto the job – but in all cases their behaviour can be viewed as understandable (if undesirable) at a human level. That Labour conference has just shone a searchlight on the fact that there is a largish set of Labour MPs (MPs, not activists) – Whittome, Rayner, Lammy, Sultana, Gardiner, Burgon, Butler and several others, who are, in all honesty, plain gaga. It is not clear why they believe what they believe, or what their motivations are caused by, but what they say is completely unmoored from any kind of reality anywhere, and bears all the hallmarks of somewhat batso randoms you find on twitter who believe in assorted conspiracy theories. In normal circumstances such people can be viewed as harmless cranks, briefly entertaining in passing. The trouble is, there is now an unusually large number of them around, they are mostly on the Labour Party, but several in the LibDems, the SNP, etc, and they are asking millions to put a cross against their names at the ballot box. If they ever get to wield real power, which can happen in the chances of the world… oh brother.
That’s an interesting point. It is often observed of the internet that it allows out-there whack jobs to coalesce into online echo chambers and imagine themselves to be right about [fill in wacky cause].
It is less often observed but nonetheless similarly true that the Labour Party provides moral justification for malicious envy.
If you look at someone raised in a better family than yours, because the parents (and grandparents etc) made wiser choices early and sacrifices later to give that someone a better start; if that makes you bitter and angry, you represent a gap in the political market. There’s an electoral franchise for a party that panders to your baseness and resentment by telling you you’re right to hate that someone, that they’re the ones in the wrong with their work ethic and their family values and their determination to hand something on of value. There is in short a market for a party that gives you permission to hate people.
This is why there’ll always be something like Labour.
Too true
Their motivation is the same as all politicians, power over us.
That’s it isn’t it? There’s some oddballs among the Tories for sure, indeed most politicians are strange. But the core Labour types are on another level entirely.
Labour should be really really worried that the voting public see more potential in the Ress-Moggs and Bojos of the world than the angry and unhinged Rayners and Fergusons, despite superficially being from more “normal” backgrounds.
I listened to David Lammy on radio 4 yesterday, who went on about “labour needing to change” because “quite frankly, we lost”, and insightfully finished with, “the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result”,
Of course, the very next moment, he went on to say all the same things over and over again, expecting a different result.
Showing, of course, that Labour are not only unable to change, but that they are unable to even identify this to be the case.
The breathtaking lack of self awareness means that they’re going to yell “thicko” and “racist” a little louder this time because, obviously, the thickos and racists out there are bound to start voting for them once they see how thick and racist they are.
You might not be able to go to an asylum anymore to watch the nutters bouncing off the walls but this sounds like the next best thing.
We are all in the asylum.
Reminds me of my trade union’s annual conference in 1990, six months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was an obvious embarrassment for the old school fans of the Soviet Union, but they were unashamed.
One retired member of the National Executive Council turned up to receive his Distinguished Life Membership medal. He graciously thanked Conference for the honour and declared that he would display it alongside his Soviet peace medal. He went on a hilarious propaganda rant, winding up with: “Let us never forget the economic achievements of East Germany!”
Come 1991 conference, the official minutes of the 1990 Conference were circulated and approved. The acceptance speech was mentioned, but the excstatic East German propaganda was filleted. And it is that sort of “official” record that historians love and draw on as a source.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened by people who weren’t there. George Santayana.
Not entirely true but on the few occasions I’ve been close to reported events I’ve been interested to see how completely wrong the official record is from what I observed.
An obvious example is the demise of Princess Diana in 1997. The UK media spent a whole week wailing over this supreme tragedy and implied that most of the UK population (if not the population of the whole world) were similarly grief stricken. The only place I saw anyone shedding tears was on the box. My colleagues and I were laughing our heads off at Diana jokes in the pub three days after the accident. One woman at my church declared that she had rushed to London to lay flowers on the huge pile outside Kensington Palace. Most of her acquaintances thought she was unhinged.
I met plenty of people who were saddened by Diana’s death and absolutely no one who joked about it. I think the question was about a more direct experience of an event. An example is an anti-Vietnam war demonstration outside the US embassy in 1966 which I witnessed and was largely peaceful. The BBC’s report focussed entirely on a very small part of it that had some violence which was totally unrepresentative.
I did enjoy the article which clearly depicted how unhinged this mob is. Sound like a fun outing too with full value for money.
Still reading, but bravo! Very accurate.
Me too and Beff sounds like an angry shoplifter caught in the act.
I enjoyed this read. What a bunch of loons… they should be a total joke but there is always a tiny niggle that their corrosive ideologies might one day climb out of the primeval slime and ooze along corridors or power… I am joking there is more chance of plaiting fog !!
Heard this joke in my local a few days ago after someone mindlessly mentioned the Labour Party Conference before being politely told to clam up and get the next round in !
A man asked his friend’s little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be Prime Minister.
Her parents, Lefties, were standing there, the man asked her, “If you were Prime Minister what would be the first thing you would do?”
The little girl said, “I’d give food and houses to all the homeless .”Her parents beamed, and said, “Welcome to the Labour Party!”
“What a worthwhile thing to do ”, the man told the girl, and continued, “But you don’t have to wait until you’re Labour Prime Minister to do that. You can come over to my house, mow the lawn, wash my car, take my dog for a walk and I’ll pay you £25. Then we`ll go over to the Supermarket where the local homeless bloke hangs out and you can give him the £25 to use towards his food.”
The girl who was highly intelligent and thought things over for a second, then she looked the man straight in the eye and asked, “Why doesn’t the homeless bloke come over and do the work and you can just pay him the £25?”
The man smiled and said: “Welcome to the Conservative Party.”
Or what used to be the Conservative Party.
yes
Skewers him perfectly. Corbyn is only concerned about racism where it’s helpful to be. Labour racism is ignored because it’s different; it’s kinder, gentler racism.
The performative humility is also well described although perhaps common in politicians. It takes a special kind of arrogance to get two Es in your A Levels from a grammar school, think yourself qualified to be PM, and then insincerely project the impression that you’re the opposite of arrogant; but it’s probably an essential character defect in all would-be PMs.
Pride perceiving humility honourable often borrows it’s cloak…
You sent me off down a rabbit hole of Thomas Fuller quotes – many of which marvellous. Thanks
Labour, silent on the mass r4pe of young white women by the sort of immigrants Labour imported in huge numbers into the UK.
Loony Labour activists shouting about how bad the Blues are, whilst Labour’s favourite immigrant group drives a teacher into hiding when the teacher showed a picture of paedophile creator of an violent, misogynistic, totalitarian philosophy.
The Blues are s45te but the Reds are even worse.
Thank you, Tanya, for this article. It is Bedlam you describe and as hilarious a picture it is, it is also deeply disturbing. Corbyn has always been a slimy little so and so but unfortunately there are plenty more lining up around him.
Good article!
It’s actually really tragic seeing the Labour party at the moment. They are torn between the sheer toxic lunacy of the Corbyn fanatics that have infected the party itself and the lukewarm but stale Blairites who hold out clinging onto their last bastion of success – seemingly unaware how far Britain has moved on from Blair and his style of politics.
–
At the Labour Comrade Canteen we have two offerings ready to be reheated in the microwave:
Corbyn’s Peach Cobblers. its only been sent back to the kitchen by two previous customers and contains no peaches as our comrade chefs couldn’t agree on the definition of what a biological peach is.
or:
Chicken Blair Salad. Very popular 20 years ago, although no one has ordered one since and we haven’t actually been able to source fresh ingredients so instead you will be served a mangled bacon sandwich
Underrated comment
No out of date bananas?
Thank you for such an entertaining article. It sounds hilarious and I wish I was there. And it has made my day to learn that being a lower-middle class boomer called Keith disgusts them so much.
” I never believed in his humility, any more than I believed in his anti-racism” (referring to Corbyn).
And nor do believe in his pacifism. It seems virtuous, when applied to his own nation’s defence, or to the defence of another democracy, but we know very well what his attitude is to the violence of the IRA, or Hamas, or Maduro, or Soviet Russia.
“Because he is a god in tiny rooms”. So perceptive. This very well-written piece made me laugh aloud. Who said satire was dead?
if you this article, i think you’ll like this one too
https://thecritic.co.uk/born-left/
Why haven’t I come across this writer before? Utterly hilarious article, and the best sort of humour, making a serious point while reducing one to semi-hysterical laughter throughout. Thanks, George.
Although before congratulating Labour on finally allowing the adults to take charge, it should be remembered that Starmer disagrees with the Duffield’s blindingly obvious statement that “only women have a cervix”.
He also made no mention of the fact that Ms Duffield was unable to attend the conference due to genuine fears about her safety.
Fun piece, though.
Let’s be honest, it cuts both ways: the centrist wing of the party also willed it to fail when Corbyn was in charge.
Indeed and Gold’s failure to acknowledge that Starmer’s Brexit policy was sabotage suggests she’s hardly more objective than her targets.
It is time to wake up to the failure of political parties to represent us. During the conference season and every day in parliament we witness groups of people arguing about what is best for us. What is best for us are politicians who represent us and work together to determine the appropriate policies.
Democracy is a complete sham. The politicians use it to gain and retain power. They have no interest in us, except as fools willing to believe their propaganda and promises. During Brexit the £350m a week for the NHS was constantly in news as a lie. Where is the media now to hold Boris to account? The media is no better than the politicians.
If we value our future the political parties have to go. We need politicians that represent us. We don’t want proportional representation which is another scam the use to gain power by minorities. We must retain first past the post with nobody elected unless the gain at least 50% of the votes based on the registered electorate. Perhaps we should have an election every year to elect a quarter of the House. That will keep them alert to our true opinions and not those from pointless opinion polls.
Sad isn’t it.
The left are authoritarian in nature and have no time for views they don’t like. They are also childish as the chanting and heckling proves. The article didn’t get to the heart of the matter though, apart from in one section about the left being religious- they are.
They are utterly convinced that most people are blank slates that will support all their policies if they just get them in the manifesto. They are not anti Semitic in their minds but are obsessed with Israel because their blank slate view believes an Arab Socialist revolution will usher in world socialism. This view is nonsensical but many believe it.
“The far-Left spent conference praying for the party to fail”
But it was the moderate right which put it into effect.
Test
The usual dishonest journalism from Gold. Here’s an alternative perspective from Owen Jones I actually agree with https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/30/breaking-promises-keir-starmer-power-new-labour-political-strategists?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium=&utm_source=Twitter&__twitter_impression=true&s=09
Jones champions just about every policy that has been tried and failed time and again. Another utopian socialist with absolutely no idea how anything actually works. Employed on the absurd Grauniad, where he belongs.