Does Momentum do requests? If so, any chance they could deselect Yvette Cooper as a priority? Her dull, maudlin tones are bad enough when she’s lamenting a no-deal Brexit, a prospect she has done more than most to aid, but when the subject is the Labour party her funereal strains bear some of the most trite, vacant analysis around.
Eeyore MP was on the Today programme this morning and said: ‘The Labour party only succeeds if it’s a broad church. There is a real concern that we don’t look enough of a broad church at the moment and we have to be so.’
Yvette, your leader invited a bloke who said Jews eat children’s blood to tea on the Commons terrace. Your party is broad enough as it is.
Labour does not succeed when it is a broad church, other than in a rhetorical sense. If by ‘broad church’ you mean the right of the party runs the show while the soft-left addresses Compass panels on the latest buzzword passing for a philosophy and the far-left hangs about outside the Israeli embassy, then fine, it’s a broad church. But if you intend anything more substantive than that, you only need look around you to refute your cliche. Membership may be down on the Early Corbyn surges but the party is still bursting at the seams. Diversity of viewpoint is undeniably broader, now running the gamut from those who think Isis isn’t real to those who think it’s Israel.
The fact that Corbyn-enablers like Cooper still trot out the ‘broad church’ line is telling. Even after all that has happened, she still sees a place in Labour for the far-left. As such, she is illustrative of ‘moderate’ MPs who, even now, don’t comprehend the enormity of what has happened to their party. They think the issue can be solved by wresting back control of the leadership, taking a stance on Brexit and kicking out a few token Jew-haters. They would think nothing of allowing the frontbench cranks to return to the backbenches, and might even let a few of them stay put.
That’s the other problem with those who say Labour needs to be a broad church to succeed: they still want it to succeed. But Labour must not succeed; it must pay the price for Corbyn and for how his party has treated British Jews. That price ought to be the end of the Labour party and of the political career of MPs like Yvette Cooper, who by their sentimentality, their cowardice and their inaction have been scant more than Corbyn’s little helpers.
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