This new year lavishes us Brits with a laugh-riot. The Labour Party’s leadership election offers more exotic fruits than a Los Angeles farmers’ market. It is most comforting viewing. If one enjoys that kind of thing.
Jeremy Corbyn remains medically alive. Yet he more resembles a cadaver milling around Parliament muttering progressive pieties—the same pieties mangling his party.
The race to replace the disgrace abounds. Labour, as I might have mentioned, last month suffered its worst election result since 1935—the same year a reformed drinker named Bill Wilson formed Alcoholics Anonymous.
Abstinence is not a virtue common to those running this race, however. What they need is a 12-step program to wean themselves off the Absinthean reverie of Jeremy Corbyn.
Perhaps they should first shakily daub their particulars onto name tags and sit semi-circled.
“My name is …., and I’m addicted to Jeremy Corbyn.” Rejoice!
Their fellow political dipsos could clap like medicated seals. As the adage goes, admitting one has a problem is the first step to recovery.
Addiction is a disease. And Corbynism is a brutal habit to kick.
Labour’s Terrible Dilemma
Those running fawn themselves to the Dear Leader, and his traumatized base.
Sir Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long Bailey helm the depleted ranks. The frontrunners now compete for the attentions of the Jeremy-obsessed membership.
A helpless feat. Having collapsed their red wall, the Labour hopefuls must now appeal both to the working-class deserters, and the leaf-crunching London Left.
Sir Keir, a London lawyer and Remainiac, peacocked his salt-of-the-earth credentials. He hopes nobody notices his knighthood. He’s even scrubbed “millionaire” from his Wikipedia page. How Grapes of Wrath.
His claim stretches the definition of tenuous with a demonic deception. A working-class man like the benighted Sir Keir would call the fable “bollocks.”
Sir Keir once gave free legal advice to striking miners, dockers, printers, and poll tax protesters—an anecdote so desperately delicious I’m half convinced I’ve made it up.
He’s spent his life “fighting for justice, standing up for the powerless” from his $2.3 million Kentish Town home—just a few leafy streets over from where Karl Marx groused during his London years.
Kentish Town is “hip and edgy,” meaning it teems with tiresome typewriter collectors blogging about how almond milk is “deeply problematic.”
Far from Kentish Town is Labour’s now rubbled Red Wall. Half of those seats, many for the first time ever, fell to the Conservatives. Each now a new brick in an impregnable 80-strong wall of Red Tory.
If Labour is to have any future, candidates know they must win back those voters, or “gammons,” as they’re defined under the whispers of the woke.
But these denizens of wokedom are still juiced on Jeremy. His protégé this week marked Jeremy a “ten out of ten.” Rebecca Long Bailey—the continuity Corbyn candidate—called the magic grandpa a “visionary.”
Despite, you know, leading Labour to its worst election result since the dawn of Swing.
Those two now mud-wrestle for the Mao cap. The next Labour leader will be either Jeremy Corbyn without batteries, or a salt-of-the-earth Sir.
It’s rather swell, if you don’t vote Labour. If you don’t possess preferred pronouns. If you don’t utter “deeply problematic.”
This is the final scene of a grand parody. The best £3 I ever spent.
Back in 2015, the Labour leadership election opened up to anyone with £3.
Yes, in the interests of hilarity, I paid the price of a pint to vote for Corbyn and assure disaster. And I was far from alone!
It’s was like voting for your ex-girlfriend’s next boyfriend. That ex-girlfriend recently set your apartment ablaze, and scratched unspeakables across your BMW. You’d wish her well, too.
For just £3, we degraded a once-great party into an intellectually famished husk, and ushered in a Red Tory revolution with at least 10 years to do its thing.
The Woke is now broke. Its Conquistador occupies its former lands.
Boris has learned much from President Trump. Both men know the Workington Man and the Trump Democrat fled their ancestral parties with reluctant despair. Those emigrés expect a return on their trust.
Those Red Wallers and Rust Belters answered calls to “Get Brexit Done” and to “Make America Great Again.”
Brexit, as it today glides its final hurdle, will be done by January 31. We are finally out.
Those voters also called time on the globalization consensus which outsourced their jobs, and left them to rot. While both Boris and Trump called time on their respective party’s economic creeds.
Both realized that the 21st century must work, to borrow a Corbynism, for the many, and not just the few.
Solving the puzzle plaguing the postindustrial West is a mammoth task. But given the state of both Labour and the Democrats, Boris and Trump might get just enough time to see it through.