All Bunched Up

Emboldened by the accidental election of an unreconstructed cold war social justice warrior to keep the leader’s seat warm until somebody suited to the twenty-first century can be found, Labour’s left have been doing their level best to bring Her Majesty’s Opposition thoroughly into disrepute. Jeremy Corbyn is a one-man parody of communism; quite why he needs ‘Ronnell’ McDonnell to drive home the point is not fully understood. Anyway, they got what they voted for and now it’s all the Tories can do to keep from laughing their socks off at every PMQs. Yesterday was a case in point.

Things have come to a pretty pass when the best the left can do is howl in protest at the use of a perfectly reasonable collective noun. A bunch of tourists, a bunch of schoolkids, a bunch of journalists, a bunch of MPs, even; all are fine. But refer to a bunch of migrants – even if they are very much bunched together – and you get howled down by a bellend of back-benchers. It can only be a matter of time before the representatives of Fyffes descend on parliament en-masse and demand protected status for the term and its application to bananas. Bunchgate, they called it, inevitably.

The war on words gets ever more desperate and its warriors get ever more pathetic as they search for meaning where none exists; or else they fall into traps set by those who know how to push their buttons. By most measures the traditional average Labour supporter is a knee-jerk man, quick to anger and unrepentant. But New Labour changed much of that as slick Willy’s sidekick Tony ‘Blur’ adopted the spin and finessing traditionally associated with oily PR types and began weaving an enchantment of ignorance over the land. His work, it appears, is done.

Unite Against Fascism – ironically the unthinking stormtrooper thugs, the Schutzstaffel  of the offence whore brigade – even organised an impromptu ‘emergency protest’ outside Downing Street. Presumably they intended to protest at the correct use of English because it oppresses those not born to the mother tongue? It would be no less fabricated than their other crusades against perfectly normal, well-adjusted people expressing their views. What a bunch of morons; or is it a clutch of cunts? It’s hard to know what’s acceptable any more.

While it is obviously hilarious, seeing the faux fury whipped up by the impotent, right-on morons of the politically correct, professional offence-takers, it is a sad indictment of our infantile opposition that, in the absence of anything resembling coherent policy, they stoop so low that the targets on their oh-so-hurt butts are almost irresistible. When their trigger threshold is set so sensitively it’s hard to know what will be next. Ban youth ‘clubs’ because it might encourage child abuse? None of this semantic bullshit offers any hope for solutions; typical leftism, to tinker with the terminology while ignoring the threat.

Corbyn names his new bunch of front-benchers...

In a sane world this latest cartoon version of Labour would be laughed out of court but it appears there are still plenty of infantile perpetual-student activists willing to explore the zanier regions of identity politics and other such distractions, presumably because they have yet to earn their living by working in identifiably worthwhile professions. I don’t need to imagine an Orwellian dystopia of totalitarian misrule; I can see it crystallised in every attempt by the Corbynites to do anything but engage in grown-up politics. What a bunch of losers.