The Labour Party is still in a state of denial

Labour’s official report into its worst election defeat in eighty years has decided that Jeremy Corbyn was actually a great leader after all. The manifesto was a success, and the loss was all down to Brexit. Great stuff, no need for the Labour Party to change direction then because now that Brexit is done, they can approach the next election in exactly the same way and will presumably win big time. Period of reflection over.

The co-ordinators of the failed election, Andrew Gwynne and Ian Lavery wrote the report. Although they briefly considered that Corbyn’s leadership and the radical socialist manifesto may have played a part in the defeat, they decided this wasn’t the case. After all, they argue, it wasn’t a problem in the 2017 general election (loss) when the party made gains: “It is unlikely that radicalism per se was the problem in a country looking for change.” Hmm.

The report states that Britain’s exit from the EU entirely dominated the political life of the country between June 2017 and December 2019. “Labour’s campaign made strenuous efforts to direct the debate towards other pressing economic and social question, but with only limited success.”

This completely disregards the fact that Labour’s policy announcements all received significant media attention and gathered major social media traction. This is an inconvenient fact they ignore because otherwise they’d have to confront the truth, which is that the public unequivocally rejected the socialist policy package. Polling on individual policies is irrelevant, the British people did not think the Labour manifesto was credible. It’s further evidence that a Far-Left agenda cannot win an election in this country.

As for the great man himself, he is completely exonerated. He wasn’t a bad leader nor a divisive and weak figure, no it was all the media. The report states: “There is also little doubt that four years of unrelenting attacks on the character of the party leader, an assault without precedent in modern politics, had a degree of negative impact.”

As for his utter failure on anti-Semitism, the authors said: ”it is deeply regrettable that the party was unable to convince the public that we were dealing effectively with the deplorable incidence of anti-Semitic views among a small section of the membership.” So, not actually sorry for the racism, just sorry the public didn’t realise they were handling it brilliantly, and anyway it was only a few bad eggs.

This is a total whitewash and tells us all we need to know about the far left’s ‘period of reflection’. They have not even begun to realise how profoundly they have weakened the Labour Party. They are not ready for the severe disillusionment that will set in as they come to terms with Labour’s newfound irrelevance. Soon all eyes will turn to the statements, actions and policies of a Tory government that can govern as it wishes while Labour scrambles for attention.

To recap. Labour had 262 seats before the 2019 general election. It now has 202. That’s nearly one in four seats lost. The Conservatives have 163 more seats than Labour. The scale of their defeat has not truly set in and won’t until their leadership race is over and media interest in Labour on a day to day basis fades.

The far left has taken the Labour Party to the brink and may yet push it over into the abyss. The preferred candidates of the radical left are the dribbling imbecile Richard Burgon and Corbynite sycophant Rebecca Long Bailey. These are two breathtakingly low calibre individuals who look as if they hatched too early. They are living proof that Labour could actually do worse than Corbyn, believe it or not.

The report talks about Brexit as if it was just something that was inflicted on Labour, rather than being an issue that has been handled badly for three years. The eternal ditherer Corbyn offered no serious leadership on the matter because he’s a Eurosceptic pretending to be a remainer. Instead they tried to game Brexit until the Tories completely outfoxed them. They dithered on their Brexit policy to the point of confusion, repelling leavers and remainers alike. When Boris became PM he showed a sense of conviction, leadership and optimism that showed them up.

As for their manifesto, the public decisively rejected the radical socialist agenda and the left just cannot accept that. They have convinced themselves that the public loved it but were merely distracted or fooled by other things such as Brexit. No. Labour offered a complete overhaul of Britain’s economic model as well as a complete shift in its foreign policy, the public did not like it. That’s why they didn’t vote for it.

The far left believes voters have fallen for a con but the truth is they refused to be conned by socialist fantasies. They say the manifesto was popular because they want to believe that a socialist transformation of the economy is popular, otherwise their whole worldview caves in. The Labour manifesto was a cynical hodge podge of bribes to various electoral groups which misinterpreted a desire for change as a readiness for communists and cranks to enter Downing Street. If the manifesto was popular, they wouldn’t have slumped to a historic defeat.

Newsflash, the Conservative manifesto was popular and contained policy ideas that polled very well. They then won by a huge margin campaigning on it.

As for Jeremy Corbyn, their verdict is the most laughable of all. Forget the 2017 election in which the Tories ran on their worst manifesto ever, with a leader unable to communicate and a disastrously incompetent campaign and still stayed in government. Jeremy Corbyn had historically bad poll ratings and the public didn’t think he was credible as a potential PM.

As for the media campaign against him, it was relatively tame considering his morally warped worldview, his facilitation of racism, his chequered past of disgraceful associations, his proclivity for supporting any and every anti-British  and anti-West cause and his utter incompetence as an opposition leader. The media reported the truth about that man, and the truth hurts. He was never credible and it’s the far left’s fault for creating a cult that has decimated the party they took over.

Labour is the first party since the BNP to be investigated for racism and was the subject to a Channel Four Dispatches investigation in which whistle-blowers gave harrowing accounts of their suffering in a Party that has become institutionally racist under the leadership of conspiratorial cranks. Social media is awash with the rank racism of Corbyn supporters. Saint Jeremy has not only enabled racism, there are numerous examples of his own anti-Semitism and he is totally unapologetic.

When we look back on the Labour leadership campaign and this “period of reflection”, it will be clearer how much the debate has been about Labour and within Labour, rather than being about and with the country. The best hope now is for Lisa Nandy or Keir Starmer to start a clear up so that the next election defeat is on a smaller scale and the grip of the far left is loosened.

The era of fragile government is over and the Labour Party failed to take advantage when the Tories were on the ropes because it has been led by the most deluded, self-indulgent, morally warped and dogmatic political movement ever to hit the mainstream in this country. Let us hope that this report is their last hurrah