Labour - Running on Empty

As the spinning story continues, Frank Field gets to the crux of the matter:

Harold Wilson asserted that the Labour party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. The McBride affair has left Labour members looking at nothing. That is the reality check that McBride has wrought on the party.

Exactly. What is the Labour Party for? What are its achievements after so long in office? Inequality is worse than ever, child poverty increases, the economy is wrecked and the party drifts ever rightwards, even into BNP territory, "British jobs for British workers".

The party members are trying to get out of this mess by sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting la la la as loudly as they can.

I've often compared Labour members to battered wives, hoping to change their loved one's behaviour, always making excuses for them and harking back to the good old days that never existed.

A classic example of this is Why the party isn't over by Emma Burnell. Starting off by saying she isn't ashamed. Well what would make her ashamed, one wonders. Then she trots out the old line of disagreeing with pretty much everything the party is and does, then confesses to being an obedient doormat.

Why is Labour the immoral shambles that it is? It's because of members like Emma. It's not just that they are the ones making apologies for the party, the members who have been crapped on by their party for so long, who meekly continue to accept their lot and keep this creaking anachronism going.

Change from within has been the motto of the rank and file of the party for a hundred years. They've not exactly made much change from within have they?

And if that isn't insulting enough, these party members pay, actually pay cash to belong to this shambles. This is where my battered wife metaphor fails, for even victims of domestic violence don't pay to be beaten.

As long as Labour has people like Emma it will carry on just as it has always done. There is a term for the Emmas of the party; useful idiots.