Rache- Part 1

Do not count me among those who revel at opposition retreat, to regroup and rise again, You spare me at your peril.

Hear that scratching sound? It’s moderate rats scrambling back aboard the good ship Corbyn
By Dan Hodges, The Mail
19:49 EST, 24 September 2016

What we witnessed yesterday was billed as the result of the Labour leadership contest. But instead it had the feeling of a surrender ceremony. The final, formal capitulation of moderate, progressive socialism.

‘It’s already starting,’ one Labour MP told me. ‘I’ve had people emailing me saying, “I don’t want to go back, but I’ve got a wife and kids to think about”.’

By ‘going back’ they mean returning to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Two months ago the instigators of Labour’s Summer of Discontent were desperately struggling to restrain people from resigning to help manage the insurrection in an orderly manner. Today they’re fighting to prevent those same MPs scrambling back aboard the sinking ship.
…
(Deputy Leader Tom) Watson (the face of the Parliamentary Labour Party Quislings) knows full well the rebellion is teetering on the point of collapse. His move is simply an attempt to provide a way of giving a route back into the shadow cabinet that allows Labour moderates to save face.

‘Tom’s priority is just trying to protect the MPs and the party staff from the coming backlash’, an ally told me.

But there can be no dignified return. No peace with honour.

Whether people go back to the shadow cabinet via elections or via the munificence of their leader is utterly irrelevant. They will – to borrow the words of one former Labour Minister – have ‘done a Burnham’, a reference to the newly anointed Marshall Petain of Manchester, who refused to back the coup against Corbyn in order to secure his party’s mayoral nomination.

Once again, Labour’s moderates are preparing to reinforce every negative caricature painted by Corbyn and his acolytes. That they are governed solely by personal ambition. That they have no courage or conviction. That they exist only to secure for themselves the closest proximity to power.

And if they bow the knee to Corbyn now, that caricature will become a self-portrait.

A portrait of Dorian Gray, so to say.

Jeremy Corbyn’s victory was crushing. There is simply nothing else to call it, 62 – 38 is a 24 point margin. In raw votes it was 119,980, almost as many as the 130,000 votes suppressed (in Britain they call it “gerrymandering” and are quite wrong to do so, it’s an entirely different thing all together- “it’s an entirely different thing”). 77% of the Party voted, you can hardly call it undemocratic unless, as the straw grasping Tory-lite Quisling Blairites do, you posit a “silent majority” of people who feel too intimidated to express publicly their ‘I got mine’ selfishness in the face of moral disapproval (and please, call it ‘bullying’ so you demean people who actually suffer persecution not privilege).

The reaction is not unexpected or unpredictable, legacy media is howling Dolchstoßlegende conspiracy theories about why they are no longer respected or trusted (duh), they and the PLP (nice blokes you’d share a pint with at the pub, not stinking radical entryist Trots) are consoling themselves with fantasies of redemption (unfortunately likely, we’ll see, more later in any event)- in the words of The Mirror bowing the knee, or schism (good luck with that, Britain already has a “Center-Left” Neoliberal Party- the Liberal Democrats who by virtue of licking Tory boots now have a whopping 8 seats in Parliament, exactly the same as the Democratic Unionist Party, you know, Ian Paisley’s Northern Irish sectarian thugs and terrorists).

Humiliated in fact if not in attitude the PLP lurches zombie-like chanting “reconciliation” instead of “brains” which if they had any would have stopped them from starting this coup in the first place. They live in existential fear that they’ll be “deselected” and have to face what we would call a primary challenge from their constituency whom they’ve given no reason to support them.

‘But the Media Guys still like us at the Pub!”, they whine. Yeah, but your voters don’t.

This is a distinct and pivotal defeat for Neoliberalism’s sense of inevitability. To compare it with Moscow (1815 or 1941, pick ’em) or Midway it represents a distinct change in Momentum and a guide for activism.