Toynbee on Corbyn
Left writer Polly Toynbee despairs:
Was ever there a more crassly inept politician than Jeremy Corbyn, whose every impulse is to make the wrong call on everything? It’s not excitingly flamboyant red radicalism that has done for Labour, but his sluggish incompetence at the absolute basics of leadership.
How rarely he has had the chance to wield any power, but on Wednesday he had the very real authority to stop certain calamity for his party and call out Theresa May’s game-playing chicanery. The mother of all bombs is about to drop on Labour, but what does he do? He says: “I welcome the prime minister’s decision to give the British people the chance to vote for a government that will put the interests of the majority first.” What?
The Fixed-term Parliaments Act was designed to stop prime ministers dashing opportunistically to the polls when momentarily at the peak of their popularity. May can only gain two-thirds majority in the Commons if Labour agrees to its own annihilation – which he welcomes. Will this be the last disastrous disservice he does to his party?
And May got the votes, helped by Corbyn.
Who knows what other clumsy damage he may inflict during the campaign. And afterwards, he might not go. Remember Tony Benn celebrating the millions of votes for “socialism” under Michael Foot’s 1983 political suicide manifesto, though Labour had crashed to epic defeat? Fantasy politics reign again when Momentum responds to May’s announcement by tweeting about the “path to victory for Labour”.
Among a few of the three-quarters of Labour MPs – 172 – who voted no confidence in Corbyn last year, I hear strange sounds. Thank God! This will put them out of their misery, as if shooting the sick dog Labour party would put it out of its misery. This election could purge the party’s mortal disease, like a toxic dose of mercury. Never mind if the cure is worse than the illness, at least it ends this time of total paralysis. But that’s another kind of fantasy politics.
This is from the leading leftish journalist in the UK!