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.
