Unbelievable

Gordon Brown spoke for forty-nine minutes without mentioning Jeremy Corbyn by name, although the subtext beneath every single utterance was the latest New Labour mantra “Anyone but Corbyn”. If you could bear to listen to Gordo’s sanctimonious drivel about the ‘pain and suffering’ of Labour’s fictional beleaguered poor you could almost hear the rhythm: “abc, abc, abc, abc...” as he paced back and forth like the novelty weirdo on Strictly. The other theme was power. Labour must not become a party of opposition. We must have power. Only in power can we make the changes we want to make. To gain power we must present a credible alternative to the cruel and heartless Tories, he said. It has nothing to do with principle, it’s all about the power.

It seems such a shame then, that when Gordon himself had that power he managed to turn a healthy economy into a struggling one, then created a record breaking deficit of such magnitude that all the ‘austerity’ the hated Tories could muster has only managed to slow the rate of increase of the overall debt. Labour in power is a dangerous thing, especially to their own constituents, who they turn into dribbling unemployable morons; a client state, fit only to consume, recycling the fake money churned out by the relentless state printing presses generating not wealth but ‘quantitative easing’. This is what Labour does, it distorts everything; the economy, the perceptions of worth, the meaning of words. So it is risible yet entirely appropriate that their latest buzzword is ‘credibility’.

Everybody is using it, seemingly oblivious that Tony Blair’s soundbite soundtrack has been robustly rejected by every true died-in-the-wool socialist of the old school. For them it was never about the power of the party elites but about doing the good things that people working together, for each other can achieve. We used to call it community but once appropriated by the state its good intentions always become corrupted. “But ‘real’ socialism has never been tried!” they wail, while in fact it has. Real socialism was the manageable sub-150 settlement of the early agrarians. It just doesn’t scale up to include the millions of faceless strangers who can easily hide their failure to fully engage in the project except as permanent recipients.

Credible? What is credible is that Labour’s leaders are so focused on the gaining of power that they have no regard for the misery they cause every time they have it. To socialist ‘intellectuals’ the proletariat cannot possibly order their affairs for the greater good and must be pummelled, coerced, prodded and cajoled into behaving in the proper manner, no matter how much it hurts. What is credible is that power is more important to them than potency and facing a man like Jeremy Corbyn who can actually speak to Labour’s target electorate they would rather destroy him than join him because he appears to put principles before power and that is just ‘not credible’. Andy Burnham is the only one offering an olive branch but he has previous as an opportunistic shape-shifter.

Yes you! Do as you're damn well told!

For all their fine rhetoric about equality, liberty, fraternity all of those things will become worse under Labour. Everybody will be equally poor and be free to do just as the government tells them. As for fraternity, socialism has spent over a century trying to break down the natural ties that bind families and communities together and create instead a free-for-all society where nobody, however manifestly evil can be criticised, let alone sanctioned. Credibility? I’ll only believe Labour’s treacherous top table are conviction politicians when I see the rap sheet.