The unrepentant Corbynite

There’s a story that US President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk, “the buck stops here”. It seems it isn’t entirely true. A friend gave him the sign and he put it up for a while, but later removed it. 

I don’t know whether getting rid of it was symbolic of anything.

The notion’s a good one, though. It says that ultimate responsibility for what an organisation does, in this case the US government, lies with the person at the top. They can claim credit for much that goes right but the counterpart is that they have to take the blame for most of what goes wrong.

Not so, it seems, within the Jeremy Corbyn faction of the Labour Party.

Corbyn facing his electoral debacle: getting ready to move into denial mode

You know those doomsday cults that regularly announce the ending of the world? They usually give a date for when it’s going to happen and even a time of day. Then it doesn’t happen (so far, at least) and they usually come up with some excuse for why it didn’t: another reading is possible of the relevant Biblical text, or maybe more than one date is possible and we’ve simply moved on from one of them to the next, or whatever.

Anything, at any rate, rather than admit they were talking cattle excrement.

What’s true of a religious cult is true, apparently, of this political one as well.

Corbynists have been assuring us for years that Corbyn was set for a win in the forthcoming general election, possibly even a big win, and the consequence would be a radical transformation of British society in a socialist direction. Those of us who were a little more sceptical were invited to go forth and multiply, and courteously described as red Tories or even – and I’m told by one of them that this is the most damning political insult available today – Blairites.

This is curious because, if the mission of the Labour Party is to speak for the voiceless in British society, to protect the interest of workers, of the unemployed, of the sick, the very young, the very old, the poorest and neediest, then Tony Blair actually did them some good. He did so by simple dint of actually getting into office, where he could lead a government that hugely improved the health service, for instance, and took a lot of children out of poverty.

Corbyn, on the other hand, by failing twice to win an election, has done no good for any of those people. Indeed, by gifting the Conservatives a victory in an election that was eminently winnable, positively helped to inflict more damage on them.

I say this, by the way, as a Labour Party member who did not back Blair to be leader and would certainly not back him now. I simply state facts: Blair achieved more for those Labour is intended to protect than Corbyn ever did or, now, ever will.

Still, facts apparently don’t need to stand in the way of a good argument. And Corbyn has assured us that he won the argument in the election campaign. Just not the election itself.

Make of that what you can.

Ah, well. There’s some satisfaction, I suppose, when things turn out as you expect. That’s true even if people live down to expectations rather than up to them.

I’ve listened to and read Corbynists for four years now. I’ve been told again and again that he’s hugely popular, as can be seen from the young people chanting “oh, Jeremy” at his rallies. I’ve seen carefully constructed arguments for optimism whose authors point to the numbers of young people, supposedly pro-Corbyn, registering to vote, while old people, often anti-Corbyn, leave the electoral register (for the cemetery); they point to the number of women who have seen their pension entitlement pushed back and can therefore be counted to rally to the Guru; they point to the popularity in the polls of individual policies proposed by Corbyn and ignore his massive unpopularity in those same polls.

Why, I’ve seen analyses even in the last few months, showing that all these factors point to an electoral win for Labour, even perhaps a landslide.

The fervour of Corbynists’ beliefs left me fully dreading their reaction to the long-predicted electoral debacle of 12 December. I sadly expected the worst of them: denial of any responsibility and a feverish pursuit of scapegoats to blame instead. 

Unfortunately, the unrepentant Corbynites have entirely lived down to my expectations of them. The buck, for them, certainly didn’t stop with the man at the top. It might have been more decent of them to show a little humility now that their doomed project has failed so dismally. They might have admitted their errors, if only to ensure that they don’t repeat them. They might have stopped talking down to the rest of us, as though events had fully vindicated their baseless beliefs instead of refuting them so comprehensively.

It would have been more decent. But it isn’t going to happen.