I still think there is an imminent election off the back of this, which could be called as soon as May. It is worth remembering that we’ve had hit piece after hit piece on Corbyn for some time now. The faint cries of Stalinism have been there along, as have Trotskyism entryists. Indeed, our own @barry-sanchez was crowning out this very turd on this thread.
We get the Czech spy malarkey, utterly debunked within a couple of weeks, but not before a lot of heat and light painting Corbyn as a collaborator, or in Ben Bradshaw’s case, a traitor who sold secrets to others. Bradshaw had to delete the tweet eventually issuing a grovelling apology.
Then the Skripals, one of the most nonsensical farces I can remember in recent times. For me, this whole episode makes no sense as advertised. The story is falling apart. This was supposed to be a nerve agent 5-8 times deadlier than Sarin, something that had killed many in the Japanese subway system after a home-grown attack there. Two of those affected are out of critical condition and on their way to complete recovery. How deadly could it have been?
Russia wasn’t the only thing they were pointing fingers at. Corbyn was woven into the narrative there, lambasted for asking what any county court would demand in a legal trial, They attempted to cast him as Putin sympathiser, Newsnight even going as far as Photoshopping a picture of him in a Greek fisherman’s hat into a red menace with a Kremlin background.
This latest round of media stories are overblown, and come context-free. They say that Labour isn’t taking the problem seriously, except Labour has 70 investigations on the go. Social media posts are being used to target people that did not make them. Art is being wilfully misinterpreted, as in the case of the Brick Lane mural.
There has been an internal struggle going on within the Labour Party since Corbyn became leader. At that time, many of the party’s governing institutions were in the hands of Blairites, despite the massive shift jn party membership. They did terrible things with that power, such as issue baseless suspensions before important elections, tried to keep their own leader off the ballot in a leadership and disenfranchised of hundreds of thousands of Labour voters, including yours truly.
Today, those internal struggles are largely over with. The NEC has a pro-Corbyn majority, The intake of new MPs in the 2017 election has weakened the dominance of the Blairites in the Parliamentary Labour Party. There is talk of deselecting the members that have been most disloyal, something that we’ll get to do with time.
The only way those MPs keep their jobs is if Labour gets no time to reselect. This is the last throw of the dice for both them and the Tories. I would be entirely unsurprised if there weren’t cross party coordination on these lines. The enemy of my enemy.
Theresa May is not going to want a long campaign. She’ll want a short one that won’t get the time to unravel the way her last one did.
As someone that has my head in a lot of war books recently, this all feels like political artillery, pounding Labour’s credibility with the electorate through a constant stream of propaganda. These barrages cannot be sustained for long, and the ordnance we’ve seen exploding this week has been pretty poisonous. I don’t think it can get much worse without going unpredicably nuclear. That’s why I reckon an election has got to be marching over the horizon.
