The Judge RANTS!

Date: 27/07/21

Why Should Lies All Labour Be?

The ongoing plunge of the Labour Party into ineffectiveness and irrelevance continues apace. Following yet another purge from the party's actual activist base (you know, the folks who actually go out and slog to win elections for it) of anyone deemed to be of dangerously leftist sentiments, we have had yet another vague, empty 'commitment' to something that we know they wouldn't deliver even if they ever had the chance to, viz.:

Leaving aside the fact that, a) we've heard it all before and it has never translated into anything more than token gestures towards equity, and b) that Labour is still wedded to the poisonous notion - one which pre-dates the ideologically-extreme 'austerity' narrative of the last decade or so (and I once again recommend the lectures and talks of Professor Mark Blyth about how economically illiterate that notion actually is) - that only 'working people' actually matter and those who can't work should be shafted six ways from the origin in the name of 'responsible policy-making'; leaving aside that, as I say, I don't think people would be remotely impressed with the 'new deal' if they read what the Labour Party also decided on the same day:

(Funnily enough, unlike the first puff piece above, that bit wasn't reported in the Grundiad at the time, and hasn't been since either; at least, not under its own headline. The screenshot above is from the abuindependentski).

Such desperate cost-cutting might not have been necessary had not so many 'ordinary' members of the party - the ones whose donations, however small, added up to a large chunk of its income - either been witch-hunted out of it or felt obliged by conscience (or a desire to safeguard the contents of their stomachs) to walk away in despair. The 'fire and rehire' policy which the party's mouthpieces have been condemning in others for months is one they seem to have no scruple about adopting themselves.

I suppose it might tide the party over until all those millionaires come back.

Because after an all-too-brief interlude when Labour tried to relocate itself back into the mainstream of European social democratic politics, the party has embraced the past as eagerly as any flag-shagging Br*x*teer and has rapidly and enthusiastically returned to the footling, self-righteous vacuity of the Blair years.

I wonder why that could be (apart from needing the dosh of businessmen, of course)? Ah yes! This is why:

Yes, in addition to the recent re-throning of Lord Mandelbrot The Infinitely Recurring (© Philip Challinor), Sir Clear Stumer has brought one Sam White, quondam bag-carrier and on-message-ensurer to Alistair Darling (Old Tarmac Eyebrows himself) back into New New Wonderfully Inclusive (Except If You're Remotely Socialist) New Honestly Labour.

And so we find ourself spinning (or, perhaps, being spun) back into the endless loop of so-called 'centrist' political dominance, where no real solution to our continuing and escalating problems can be entertained or even aired for fear of causing fits of the vapours to a middle manager in Berkshire, and that great political Circle Jerk Line of private school > Oxbridge PPE > unthink tank > SPAD-ship > safe seat in an area with which you have no personal connection continues to send its empty carriages clanking and screeching around and around to no valid purpose.

This cynicism and dishonesty is not confined to 'HQ', however.

Here in England's First Colony™, there has in the last couple of years been a sizeable upswing of interest in - and support for - the quaint notion that we could and should govern ourselves without outside interference or domination; you know, like so many normal countries do? Around about the time of the 2014 referendum in Scotland, an organisation called YesCymru was established and although its initial growth was minimal, it succeeded in bringing the whole issue of independence to somewhere close to the centre of public political discourse for the first time in generations. So much so that, with every mis-step and mis-statement, every act of incompetence and dishonesty, in fact just about anything emanating from the Johnson régime in London in connection with the pandemic and much else besides, membership of YesCymru grew from scarcely more than two thousand members at the start of 2020 to some eighteen thousand by the year's end.

It couldn't last, of course. For just as the independence movement in Scotland has been frustrated in the last few years by too close an association with one political party, and as that political party has stymied the whole notion of fighting for sovereignty by sedulously turning its attention elsewhere, so YesCymru - a self-described 'non-partisan' organisation - has been sidetracked by individuals and groups who have sought to place - and to a worrying degree succeded in placing - their own ideological obsessions ahead of the need for any pro-indy group to have as broad a support base as possible. That these fanatics are entirely from the political Left (or what passes for same nowadays) is not merely a claim; it is borne out by even the briefest of readings of their public statements, be they on social media or elsewhere. Like other such infiltrative groups in other political movements where the widest possible support must be procured to achieve their aims, they may be small in number but loud in voice and cunningly determined in tactics.

It all culminated in a virtual Annual General Meeting back in May, where a new central committee was elected in a process where only some three per cent of the membership was permitted to vote and where the insurgents had put up a slate of its trusties to take advantage of this. The results have included the new central committee being dominated by those who do not put independence front and centre of their actions and statements; where the long-serving chairman stood down in order to protect his mental health; where other founding and long-term members found themselves being forced out by pressure from the entryists (where they weren't being removed by suspensions imposed pending 'disciplinary' proceedings prompted by spurious complaints). All this accompanied by social media campaigns by the usurpers and their supporters in which anyone who was not supportive of the new agenda (through, for instance, insisting on such inconvenient facts that trans women are not and cannot be women, however much they may 'identify' as such; or that the people of this land are not overwhelmingly 'socialist', however that term may be defined; or that maintaining a scrupulous distance from all political parties is the only way in which the stone may be put in the wall, as we say here) was howled down as a "Transphobe!" or a "Fascist!", thus encapsulating the student-politics nature of the new order. That those so targeted included committed feminists and people who have worked for independence since before these extremists (or even their parents) were born displays the essentially cult-like nature of the clique.

The new central committee has lost (if indeed it ever had) the support of the many dozens of local YesCymru groups which have sprung up all around the country in the last five or six years and - allied with the new régime's refusal to provide members with the minutes of its official deliberations and a general culture of secrecy and obstructionism - the campaign faces a monumental split. An Extraordinary General Meeting has been demanded by the local groups which would almost certainly be the last chance to wrest control of the movement back into the hands of those groups and individual members who should be the engine of the campaign. If that chance is lost, then so will YesCymru itself be as most of its membership will withdraw from it, and so may be the whole possibility of independence itself.

To bring this back to my starting point, one of the numerous groupuscules which are allied with the hard left and 'wokist' (for want of a better description; I am all too aware of the unwanted company I may be keeping simply by using that term) cult is one calling itself 'Labour for an Independent Wales'. This seems to comprise two men called Bob and Ben and a dozen or so other Labour Party members who claim (and 'claim' is the word which must be used here; read on...) that they support our nation's sovereign autonomy.

This in itself is odd in a number of respects: for starters, if you were supportive of independence, what possible reason could you have for staying in, and even advocating voting for, a party which is - for all the mutterings by First Minister Drakeford and some of the other ambulating vacuums around him of late - determinedly, avowedly colonialist (*) in its outlook? Furthermore, given that - as I have remarked previously on this subject - there is, publicity material notwithstanding, no such political party as 'Welsh Labour', and so what the Wales Branch of the Labour Party does is constrained by what the party's actual leadership in London is willing to permit them to do (and as we know, that leadership is always liable to outbursts of banner bonking without any provocation), what possible influence on the Wales Branch could such a tiny group ever have?

Doubts therefore arose about 'Lab4IndyWales' from the outset, the primary suspicion being that they were part of that demographic I habitually refer to as 'The Denzils'. These are people - in those Fabled Valleys and elsewhere - who would vote Labour even if the candidate was a pile of horse-shit (and this can be confirmed by the election and re-election of such dollops of donkey dung as Ann Clwyd, Peter Hain and the Kinnocks père and fils). The people who sit there and say, "Evrythin'll be olright wunce we get a Labour gummint back in Westminster, aye!".

Yesterday morning, in response to a request on Twitter from a hack asking people who were sympathetic to independence what would need to happen for them to resile from their support, Bob (or Ben) tweeted the following:

Hey, cat? Would you like to take a dump in that bag before we let you out of it?

Yes, Ben (or Bob) and their unseen dozens of 'members' are yet another branch of those interlopers who have, as serious political analysts would put it, Missed The Fucking Point. To them and others like them, the question of independence is not a strong adherence to the profound principle of self-determination, but simply a means to an ideological end, be it a socialist republic (although I'm sure Bob - and Ben - would be happy with a 'socialist' government in London under a Germano-English monarchy) or a country where chapel-going was compulsory. The idea of placing sovereignty entirely in the hands of The People, arguing your cause before them and then accepting their democractic verdict is something which gives these soi-disant 'socialists' the willies; after all, The People might get it 'wrong'! Let us remember that the British Parliamentary Road To Socialism has always been far more about the 'British' and the 'Parliamentary' than it has ever been about the 'Socialism'.

This, allied with a lot of frothing about 'enhanced devolution', 'home rule', 'federalism' and even 'radical federalism' (†) which has featured regularly in the past couple of years on the website of the self-styled 'Institute for Welsh Affairs' (or as I prefer more accurately to call it, 'The Institute for Crachach With Safe Opinions'), shows up the attempts of Labour's Wales Branch to make itself relevant for what they are; a con.

And yet we continue to be mis-ruled by these people; people who are in favour of self-determination for every country except the one they're sitting in; people who can still be seduced by imperial power into shitting on the heads of those who have supported them for so long and with so little to show for it; those whose commitment to their own people will always be over-ridden by the lure of ermine and gold and the fœtid smell of the Butcher's Apron. How better to seek to cement that in place than by pretending to be 'radical' and 'progressive' while cementing a tombstone over the grave of our nation?

In both the sets of circumstances I have described in this piece, these charlatans are beginning to be found out. One can only hope that they are smelt out and marginalised before they destroy the movements which are - because of demographic shifts and constitutional jiggery-pokery - our last best chance to survive as a nation in any meaningful form.

**********

I have to confess to a great creative frustration at this point; I have spent much of the last twenty-four hours pummelling what is left of my brain trying to come up with a parody of The Red Flag to suit the subjects covered here (if it wasn't the ultimate parody that a song with such sentiments could be sung - apparently with straight faces - by anyone in or associated with the Labour Party), but have been forced to desist, at least for now. There is too much to cover and there are too few syllables in which to cover them while respecting the metre of the original.

* I use the word 'colonialist' rather than 'unionist' as it is factually a far more accurate description of the beast in question for a variety of reasons. I may come back to this at some point in the future.

† Another subject to which I hope to return shortly.

File under: Politics