May 24, 2016
NOTHING IS MORE GALLING TO IDEOLOGUES...:
Tony Blair was Labour's most successful leader. No wonder Jeremy Corbyn wants to destroy him (John McTernan 23 MAY 2016, Telegraph)
...than having their party be elected and govern successfully. By definition, the mass appeal is a demonstration that the ideology of the cult has not been enunciated and applied hard enough."If" does a lot of the heavy lifting in the Corbynverse. Actually "if" and its friend "only" do almost all the work.If only Ed Miliband hadn't been a Blairite.If only Labour had stood on a properly left-wing platform in 2015.If only the voters weren't misled by the mainstream media.If only the voters who don't vote came out to vote.The biggest "if only", however, is the unstated one - if only Tony Blair hadn't won three elections in a row and changed Britain for good. That's why Corbyn and McDonnell went out of their way at the weekend to join the Tories in trashing Labour's economic record, echoing almost exactly some of the distortions that George Osborne is particularly fond of.An odd way to win an election, you might think. But that's not the point. It's never been the point. The victory that Corbyn wants is over mainstream Labour members - the ones who know that the only alternative to a Tory government is a Labour one - and over the very notion that Labour needs to appeal to the moderate middle-ground of British voters.
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 24, 2016 6:45 PM