More humble pie for the 'moderates'

They were wrong and we were right. The same faces, given a platform on the BBC week after week, didn't give Jeremy Corbyn a chance: repeatedly criticising his inability to lead when they refused to follow. Politicians, pundits and columnists were almost all on the same page: socialist policies will kill off the Labour party and he must be stopped at all costs. They came close but they failed, and look what happened.

Corbyn and his small, loyal team had to battle the following:

Most of the PLP
The Conservative Party
The Liberal Democrats
UKIP
All of the mainstream media (more or less: a couple of Guardian columnists supported him but as a whole, the paper did not)

Word has it that inside Labour Party HQ, those with contacts in the media were either wilfully obstructing the party messages or undermining them at every opportunity. This blog I wrote at the time explains the repeated failures by the self-proclaimed 'moderates' which left the Labour Party looking an utter shambles and therefore, completely unelectable. It is a blessing that this stuff probably evaded the notice of enough of the electorate to stop the Tories getting another majority: imagine what Labour could have achieved with that manifesto and the backing of the majority of the PLP.

Why didn't they back him? Given that he is invariably described as "a good man", "a principled politician" etc, I think the truth is that many of those Labour MPs didn't want policies that would fundamentally tear up Thatcherism; they wanted, broadly, to keep the status quo. This article by Diane Abbott from 2014 came a while after I cancelled my Labour party membership having become sick of Labour failing to challenge the idea that the last Labour government were at fault for the global financial crash and more or less backing the economically illiterate austerity policies of the Coalition government. As a Unite member, I voted for Jeremy Corbyn and when he became leader, I re-joined the party as a full member. You see (and I'm still a little smug), I KNEW that austerity didn't work. I KNEW that Labour needed to support the many and not the few and I KNEW a strong left-wing Labour party could win - and we would have if the PLP hadn't been so desperate to cling to Thatcherism.

A few in the PLP who didn't support Corbyn may have felt that socialist policies would not appeal to the electorate. Either way, they were wrong and should be big enough to say so. Sadly, since the results came in, most have been very quiet indeed.