In order to become a ‘registered supporter’ of the Labour party, you first have to disclose whether you’re a member of an organisation opposed to the Labour party. Such as, I suppose, the Labour party. You also have to affirm that you agree with the party’s ‘aims and values’, which must be the hardest bit, because who alive now knows what those are?
If the leader of the Labour party — to pick an example not wholly at random — agrees with the aims of the Labour party, then how come he just voted against the party’s own manifesto in order to oppose Trident? Or is the idea supposed to be that Labour was only pretending to have those aims and values, in order to get the electorate into bed? Was it perhaps a bit like a dating profile where you pretend to have a GSOH but, in truth, only really laugh at Mrs Brown’s Boys and The Vicar Of Dibley? If so, somebody should write down the true aims and values, sharpish. Maybe on a large gravestone.
You also have to pay £25, which is a stroke of absolute genius. As the country becomes ever more polarised, and people grow ever more alarmed at the directions in which we may be headed, it’s bloody clever of Labour to have found a way to directly profit. Perhaps, as union funding falls away, the Parliamentary Labour Party could nominate a series of ever-more implausible and damaging figures — George Galloway, Julian Assange, Bianca Jagger, maybe even Nigel Farage — and hold Britain’s terrified floating voters to ransom. Give us your money, or the centre-left gets it.
This is the fault of Labour’s National Executive Committee, which may have even thought they were helping.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in