Tony Blair wonders whats gone wrong with politics. How sad he cant see it

[Ken Burch]

13. I could live with McDonnell, too.

My guess is that Corbyn would stand down(he has said he'd do so if he thought he was dragging the party down)if it weren't for the fact that the PLP wasn't just insisting on Corbyn's departure from the leadership but also on trying to either drive away or silence all of Corbyn's supporters, while erasing anything those supporters want from the party's policy offer.

Why couldn't they have left it at just getting Corbyn himself to go? Why did they have to make it a war against everyone who supports him?

All they were offering was to give Jeremy a meaningless post as "party president"-in which capacity he would have no say over policy and no way to protect his supporters from expulsion, but would be expected to unquestioningly defend every rightward tack and every undemocratic internal party structure, being reduced to telling people that "it's enough to get 'a Labour government'-that's ALL that matters".

How could they ever have expected Corbyn to have agreed to betray the people who elected him leader like that?

And why, as you see it, does the PLP refuse to change?

They are still adamant about making sure that Corbyn is replaced and replaced by a right-winger(that's what "moderate" means in Labour Party parlance, for the benefit of my fellow Yanks-it means, in particular an unquestioning defender of Blair's imperial-militarist foreign policy and an enforcer of Blair's vindictively anti-socialist economic policies), and that no change at all be made in how the party is run.

Why, as you see it, does the PLP refuse to take any real lessons in what has happened to the party since 2015? Why doesn't it matter to them that the people THEY wanted in the leadership have twice now been overwhelmingly rejected?

And why do they insist on believing that Corbyn's supporters are all "Trots"? We're talking Trotskyism, the most divided, despised, and hopelessly ineffective sector of the British left. Why on earth do they think THAT lot could suddenly just take over a party the "moderates" had run as a virtual fiefdom since 1994?

It's the blind stubbornness and delusional thinking on their part I can't get my head around.

(btw, I still wish Tony Benn, rather than Michael Foot, had been elected leader in 1981. Their views were identical, but Benn was always brilliantly effective on television and may have been the only Labour figure with the personal charisma to overturn Margaret Thatcher's political dominance. Callaghan would have lost again if he had stayed on and fought the 1983 election as leader, and I think Healey would have, too-too many people hated Healey for negotiating the pointless IMF loan).