by Rob Marchant
It was always going to happen that – as former MP and party stalwart Tom Blenkinsop would likely have it – the entryists would ultimately exit, once they could see the battle for the soul of the Labour party had been lost.
The only question was to where. Would it be the SWP? The Lib Dems? The perhaps ironically-titled “Peace and Justice Project” of the man himself, a man who has famously apologised for numerous dictators and terrorists over his long career?
As a result of some admittedly anecdotal and yet still quite convincing evidence, we can now see.
Last Wednesday my admittedly flippant tweet, the gist of which was that a vote for the Greens was ultimately a gift to the Tories, triggered a deluge of responses from hundreds of piqued keyboard warriors over the next forty-eight hours.
“By voting Green, you are sending a very clear signal to the Conservatives.”
Quite. It’s “we want you to stay in government.” pic.twitter.com/roxBd4lpMP
— Rob Marchant (@rob_marchant) September 6, 2023
As you can see in the comments, a few were polite; most were not; a few quite unpleasant and a small, unhinged minority – using anonymous or fake names, of course – had clearly been trawling through my historic Twitter feed, trying to dig up dirt, and then accusing me of various misdemeanours ranging from bigotry to much worse.
I had seen this pattern before, of course, but not for some time – my path had not crossed with the Corbynite Twittersphere in recent months. Of course: Labour’s generous poll lead against the Tories was taking all the wind out of their sails. The argument that Corbyn had in 2019 “won the argument”, after the party’s crushing defeat to Boris Johnson and his crew in that year’s general election, had been farcical at the time; it now seems like an invitation to outright derision. Starmer is unarguably doing far better in the country than his predecessor.
So what for the Owen Joneses and the Aaron Bastanis, now looking for another party with “radical” left-wing politics to cheerlead? Step forward, the party which has in recent years gone from a not unattractive, hippyish naiveté to a full-on political meltdown into crankery and extremism. That last sentence is not without evidence.
First, Caroline Lucas, the Party’s only MP, has announced she is stepping down from Parliament against a background of poll evidence that she would probably have lost anyway. This is not a good sign to start with, but it gets a lot worse.
Another defining moment was the Aimee Challenor debacle in 2018, where a candidate for the the party’s deputy leadership had to drop out of the race, once it transpired that their father had been co-opted as general election agent while on bail for child rape and torture, a horrific crime for which he is now serving a 22-year sentence. Apart from the serious moral questions it raises about what kind of activities the Greens might tolerate close to them, this hardly the tight management of a serious political party.
Next there is the current hounding of former deputy leader Shahrar Ali, whose modestly gender-critical views led him to be pushed out by a party dogmatically committed to seeing them as bigotry, and who has recently announced he is suing the party, an action the Byline Times reports as putting it “at risk of going bust”. There are two other legal actions pending, in a similar vein. As we have argued here at Uncut before, it would not be the first party to be broken on the wheel of gender ideology.
While its policy on Ukraine, to be fair, does support the country’s right to defend itself and condemns Russia, at the same time it talks inconsistently about “diplomacy…to end this awful war”, which can have only one outcome: abject surrender by the Ukrainians to the taking of at least some of their territory.
Finally, as Labour cleans up its act, the Times of Israel reports that it looks like the Green party is “looking like next hub of antisemitism in UK politics”. It is not difficult to join the dots.
It seems likely that an awful lot of well-meaning Green members and supporters may be blissfully unaware of some or all of the above points, or the swelling of their ranks by refugees from Labour.
However, it also seems likely that others, perhaps the entryists themselves, fresh in from the attempted destruction of a much larger political party, either do not care, or see the as fabrications of a corrupted “Main Stream Media” or “MSM”, as crankier voices tend to call it. Why get your news from sources subject to some kind of control and regulation with regard to facts, whatever their known editorial stance, when you can get it from some kind of conspiracy dot com, which will tell you exactly what you want to hear?
But we digress. And if party membership has decreased a little over recent years, we should not look at this as a bad thing. More will come in from the centre and, indeed, membership reached a peak under our most electorally unsuccessful period in decades; one in which the Labour Party – lest we forget – ended up being the second-ever under investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. After the far-right British National Party. Numbers do not equal electoral success, and often correlate with its exact opposite.
The voices of the extremists are becoming fainter within Labour, as they find another host to feed on. One almost feels sorry for the Greens. Almost.
Rob Marchant is an activist and former Labour party manager who blogs at The Centre Left
Tags: antisemitism, Corbynite, Greens, hard left, Rob Marchant
