The Rebecca trap

Momentum is a faction inside the British Labour Party, with its own officers and policy lines which it works to get the whole of Labour to adopt.

It has just issued a document to all its members, to ‘consult’ them on which candidates to back in the forthcoming elections for Labour leader and deputy leader. It did have a recommendation to make, so essentially the invitation was to make a completely free choice from among the available candidates, just so long as they choose Rebecca Long-Bailey for leader and Angela Rayner for deputy.

Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Corbyn continuity candidate for Labour leader

There was little surprise in Momentum’s ‘recommendations’, the euphemism we like to use for instructions. Long-Bailey is the continuity candidate, the one who can be most counted on to follow in the steps of the current leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Momentum was essentially set up to back Corbyn as leader of Labour.

Just in case you haven’t been following British politics closely in recent months, Mr Corbyn is the man who took Labour to defeat in a general election in 2017, and to disastrous defeat in 2019. With the full support of Momentum and its members on both occasions. Support which shows no sign of flagging, it should be added, as they scrabble around finding others to blame for the loss.

One of the major scapegoats Momentum has identified is the Media. Mostly Tory, it’s true that the media generally gave him a torrid time. It has to be said that Corbyn fed the media plenty of ammunition to use against him. Probably the most serious was his failure to take a clear position on the question that has most troubled Britain for the last four years, Brexit. He has equivocated, trying to appeal to each side and losing the trust of both, as the election results showed.

This kind of behaviour has allowed the media outlets ill-disposed towards him to run story after story alleging that he was unprincipled, gutless and untrustworthy.

The last thing we need is a continuity candidate who continues that kind of performance. So it’s sad to discover that even before she became a candidate for the leadership, Rebecca Long-Bailey has been engaging in what, at best, we can only call a little embellishing of her track record. Embellishment it has proved frighteningly easy to trash.

In 2014, she claimed that she had “been working as a solicitor with the NHS in Manchester for 10 years” when she had only been qualified for just over six years.

In her leaflet for the 2015 election, she stated that, “I studied law and became a solicitor for the NHS to help defend our health service”. Now, the words don’t actually say that she was employed by the NHS, but don’t they seem to suggest that? And when she claimed to have been helping to “defend our health service”, doesn’t that sound as though she had been going into battle to keep our hospitals and doctors’ surgeries going and public?

The reality is that she was working for a legal firm in Manchester and did some commercial work for the NHS as client. She was drawing up documents for NHS contracts and NHS estates. A courtroom champion of our great national institution? That she wasn’t.

To some extent I don’t particularly care about her distortions. MPs are as capable of being petty and grasping as all the rest of us. In business, I’ve dealt with people who lied on their CVs. It’s reprehensible but not that unusual.

I suppose it’s rather harder to stomach from members of the Corbyn faction who are always claiming to be so much more honest than the rest of us. Frankly, though, the hypocrisy may be unattractive, but I can live with it too.

No, the real problem is that these falsifications were so easy to disprove. And the right-wing press is moving in already. The Sunday Times has already run an exposé. Imagine if Long-Bailey actually became leader. What a meal they’d make of her!

Besides, if she engages in such shallow and easily discovered deceptions now, what would she do as leader? Would she, like Corbyn, keep feeding the Tory press the material they want? Would she too forfeit any trust the electorate might feel towards her and go down to yet another massive loss, pointing to bad press as her excuse?

And what of Momentum? What are they up to?

• Have they not yet had enough of backing losers?
• Have they developed a taste for seeing Labour routed and the Tories running the show?
• Have they decided they prefer having someone they can control in the top job than to win an election and have to deliver the socialist policies they’re happier just to talk about?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. All I can see is that they’re cheerfully trying to walk their followers into the Rebecca trap, eyes wide shut. And I just hope that there are enough Labour members with their feet on the ground to say, “no thanks, not that trap, not again”.