The thing about Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters is they’d be funny if they weren’t so pathetic. Or is it the other way round? I can never remember. Last night something called the #JC4PM Tour rolled in to Edinburgh. Featuring the likes of Jeremy Hardy, Mark Steel, Charlotte Church and sundry other artists who are not necessarily household names in even their own households, this was supposed, I think, to be a Red Wedge for our times. But since they only sold 350 or so tickets for a 2,000 seat theatre it was more of a Red Splinter.
Obviously I did not attend myself. But Buzzfeed’s estimable Jamie Ross did sacrifice his evening for the greater glory of the revolution and, in the tradition of old media spongeing off new media, his excellent report forms the basis of this analysis.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that a Labour rally in Scotland two months before the Scottish parliamentary elections would focus attention and fire upon Labour’s enemy in Scotland. It would be angry about the government’s failures and it would reiterate the case for voting for the erstwhile people’s party. Obviously if you thought that you’d be mistaken.
Because it appears not to have occurred to clowns such as Hardy and Steel that Labour’s problems in Scotland stem from the SNP, not the Conservatives. The nationalists, not the hated Tories, are the enemy. The government Labour must fight in Scotland is an SNP government, not a Conservative ministry.
I suppose that’s hard to appreciate when you live in a leftist bubble in London. So there’s Jeremy Hardy saying he’d have voted for independence (thanks!) because that was ‘about getting shot of Blairism and nuclear weapons and the Tories’ and that’s all that matters (even though independence wouldn’t get rid of a single nuclear weapon anywhere in the world). And so there’s Mark Steel babbling that ‘I know it’s a Labour event but I’m very impressed with the SNP’ and praising their ‘very brilliant’ MPs who do ‘lots of brilliant things’. Thanks again!
Clearly the road to Labour’s recovery begins with annihilation. Last May’s disaster – when, you may recall, Scottish Labour lost 40 of its 41 Westminster seats – was not enough. Labour must be gubbed again. So, yes, let’s up-big the people giving Labour such a thorough kicking. Let’s remind our remaining supporters at a rally designed to rally said supporters to the red flag that, actually, the SNP are pretty nifty. So nifty in fact that left-on London ‘comics’ prefer them to the party they’re rallying to support at this rally. That should do the trick.
Then again, you cannot understand Corbyn’s Labour party unless you remember Robert Conquest’s Second Law: ‘The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies’. It is not so much that Corbyn and his supporters are wrong about (almost) everything (though they are) but that they are so thoroughly, irredeemably, head-in-hands, stupid about (almost) everything. They are even wrong for the wrong reasons.
I remember that when Corbyn was elected all the usual numbskulls predicted this would be good news for the Scottish Labour party. There was never, ever, any evidence for this notion and it seemed notable even at the time that it was an argument more likely to be held by people who knew nothing about Scotland than by people who, you know, do. An argument from London, not Glasgow.
Not least because – and here Messrs Hardy and Steel are illuminating dimwits – most of the people who like Jeremy Corbyn backed independence in September 2014. And having backed independence they then backed the SNP in May 2015. Why wouldn’t they? It’s easier to imagine a socialist revolution in little old Scotland than in Britain as a whole (damn those Tory shires). That Scotland actually has little enthusiasm for socialist revolution is a minor detail. Independence allowed for the imagining of any number of fictional future Scotlands and that proved more than enough. In the future even the unicorns will be Spartists.
Of course, in theory, Labour could win back some of this lost support by the simple expedient of backing independence itself. Certain commentators who wish the party no good have suggested it do just that. But, awkwardly, most habitual Labour supporters voted No in 2014. What does it profit the party to chase a lost third of its flock if doing so risks losing the remaining two thirds? Some costs are sunk, you know. There is no great advantage in winning an additional vote in Glasgow East if that comes at the price of losing two in Edinburgh South.
The Corbyn coccoon is strong, however. Nothing, not even reality, can penetrate it. As Jamie Ross observes, one person was not mentioned during last night’s three hour circus of leftist onanism: Kezia Dugdale. In the circumstances, that may not be the worst thing for the Scottish Labour leader because with friends like these she has no need for further enemies.
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